little bit from @avelera ‘s Giving Sanctuary
One Nice Bug Per Day
almost home
todays bird
Peter Solarz

@theartofmadeline

Origami Around
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year

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#extradirty
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda
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PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
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@writersgym
little bit from @avelera ‘s Giving Sanctuary
someone take my computer away from meeee aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
Ever since they included it as a thing you could say in the first draft epilogue pre-patch 5 the concept of Astarion going to help with the vampire spawn in the Underdark has struck me as terribly funny, and I'm pleased that in the expanded epilogue he does not do that indepedently - he goes off to become a roving adventurer if unromanced as spawn.
The reason it's funny is because: fucking look at him. With affection, I would not trust Astarion to organize a trip to a Cheesecake Factory alone.
I don't know if this was a bug or what but in my first run as Dark Urge, I made it to the ending after rejecting Bhaal and helping off Cazador without letting Astarion ascend. We'd had some chats about how power corrupts and destroys. There had been growth. And to my absolute delight, right at the brain, just before I pulled the final toggle to destroy or control it, Astarion leaned in to say "okay fantastic LET'S CONTROL IT AND TAKE OVER THE CULT >:3" and I was entranced. Everything wrong with him. Yeah the last two mad grabs for power we were involved in went tits up but this time we're doing something even more disastrous so it'll definitely work out. Astarion once more actively accidentally lobbying for the worst case scenario for him personally, by mistake, because one of his primary qualities is planning in the "Step 1: drastic decision > Step 2: ??? > Step 3: victory party!!" format.
Man walked into Baldur's Gate to kill a master vampire with the plan of 'find a backdoor to my own house, where I have lived for 200 years, and kill the vampire'. That's not a plan. That's an intent. Great intent and happy to help but all actual planning was conducted by Tav/Dark Urge/other Origin character.
Astarion is not providing structure down there in the Underdark. Astarion is filling the vital community role of being a jaded flaneur dispensing advice that straddles 'unexpectedly thoughtful', 'worst idea you've ever heard', and 'just straight up nightmare toxicity' at random intervals. He is giving the small vampire children knives. He is getting annoyed at the whole thing and fucking off to sulk for hours. Every society needs this service and it's very important, but whoever convinced him to show up there is the one in the admin position. As it should be.
Dreamling Show x comic swap ✨
When writing couples, I like to use the Kiss Rule:
If they have to kiss for you to know they’re in love, you’re not writing a romance right.
damn tho
Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.
Ira Glass (via staypozitive)
I was wondering if you do a lot of pre writing for your fics, if any? Before I never did, and ended up never finishing the stories, so I think that I should probably start doing that. x) Also do you have any tips on writing a dance scene? Thank you! c:
Oh, this is so cool! I don’t get asked about the mechanics of writing very often, and it’s one of my favorite subjects to talk about (at length).
As to your question, I’m going to assume that by pre-writing you mean outlining. Generally speaking, I do not pre-write much at all. However, I tend to think a lot about the story and have a pretty strong idea of the shape of it before I start, with room to be surprised along the way. However, every writer is different. In my case, the motivation to write a story is like a steam engine. If I let the steam out by talking about the story, or psyching myself up about it to the point where I’m so invested that nothing I write will ever match my image of it, it’ll never happen. This can also happen if I write too detailed an outline, too much about what a story will be without actually just writing the story. If you feel stuck, sometimes a good idea is to start from your favorite scene and branch from there, rather than from the “beginning”. Also you should always try to start a story as “late” as possible. We don’t need the whole character biography, we just need the actions that immediately kickstarted the plot (“They stood across from one another, weapons drawn. This is how they got there.” rather than “Once upon a time.”)
So if you’re like me I’d say your rules are: don’t talk to anyone about the story until you’ve already written the part you want to talk to them about. Do not over-anticipate your story and over-outline it to the point where you’ve let all the steam out. Be excited about it, and write the scenes you’re excited about while you’re excited about them. Everything will start to fall into place the more content you have on the page, and you’ll see the difference immediately between the nebulous dream of a story you had, and the story as it exists in reality. And let me just say, from experience, the story in my head was never as good as the story that actually made it to the page, because it wasn’t real. There was no one else to hear it. Even the crappiest story you’ve ever written is better than the one you never wrote.
As for dance scenes, I’ve written one story centered around dancing for the Babylon 5 fandom here. Up to you if it’s any good, I am not a dancer. However, I personally operate under the assumption that very physical-description heavy stories like dance scenes, fight scenes, and sex scenes operate under similar rules. You do not want to get overly technical, especially if you’re an expert in that field and it has a lot of technical language. For example, when describing a fight scene I wouldn’t say “She went from Fool stance into a swinging obdurate, before bring her sword back up into the Ox stance,” because I wouldn’t my reader to have to have a German longsword handbook in front of them while reading. You also don’t want to give play-by-play, like in a sex scene, “He shifted two inches to the left, tried again by raising his dick at a 45 degree angle and…” (oh my god laughing too hard sorry bad example) unless that’s the point of the story of course. Really you want to ideally be a bit soft core about physical stuff. Focus on surrounding details of the dance. How does the character feel? Where do they put their hand? Are they sweating, are they looking into their partner’s eyes? Do they spin so that the room blurs around them, do they glory in the feeling of their limbs, in the power and practice it took to achieve this level of grace? A little technical language can be good but instead of leaving it to the reader say, “The ballet dancer performed a plie, her body bowing gracefully before rising again,” so that anyone who lacks the knowledge of what a plie is can guess by context.
Okay so what if you completed the writers Gym but your story is not over?
That's absolutely fine! I'm seeing the Writer's Gym increasingly as an ongoing writer's group that's here for support, if that's of interest to others?
Feb 3rd
*dramatic sigh* After messing around on tumblr for 3 hours I finally managed to get my butt into gear and write a little bit. I guess I could press on and write more than I did but I hit the goal and I’m tired and calling it quits early.
Feb 3rd/ Day 3
Daily Word Goal: 222
Daily Word Written: 472
Total Words/Monthly Goal: 916/30000
Man, if you didn’t like this painting you won’t like the painting Thorin did you for you Bilbo.
So, now that's February, what's going on with The Writer's Gym? Are you still running it?
I am, I’m sorry I have not been more active, this month had a major disruption for me right in the middle that stole a great deal of my public-facing motivation. May I ask, how would you like to proceed?
It’s okay. I’m sure everyone following understands other obligations getting in the way. I know you mentioned at one point on the FB page about starting a chat or something? I would love that. I know you’re not big on NaNo and stuff, but I think one of the great things about it is the community. My region started a group skype chat last year that carried over to this year and the support and encouragement to sit down and at least write a little bit everyday was so wonderful. I really do contribute both of my wins to that chat. It seems counterproductive, I know, but talking to others while I write helps me focus on writing. And, if you’re busy with other things, a chat can run without you.
So, now that's February, what's going on with The Writer's Gym? Are you still running it?
I am, I'm sorry I have not been more active, this month had a major disruption for me right in the middle that stole a great deal of my public-facing motivation. May I ask, how would you like to proceed?
The thing all writers do best is find ways to avoid writing.
Alan Dean Foster (via maxkirin)
First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you’re inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won’t. Habit is persistence in practice.
Octavia E. Butler (via maxkirin)
Imagination is like a muscle. I found out that the more I wrote, the bigger it got.
Philip José Farmer (via maxkirin)
It's probably a question that a lot of people have asked you, but what advice would you give to young people who would like to become writers?
Write.
Seriously, I know that sounds simplistic. But it’s the only way.
Here’s the deal. If you want to become a writer (I’m assuming here that you mean “someone who writes as a career”: otherwise feel free to ignore what follows this), there are some things that simply starting to write will begin to reveal to you (and that nothing else can). These include:
What you’re interested in writing about
Whether you have anything interesting to say / worth saying about it
Whether you’re capable of writing well enough to hold your own interest
Whether you’re capable of writing well enough to hold anybody else’s
Whether you’re capable of doing the work of being a writer (which pretty much means either writing every day, or at the very least thinking about writing every day, for the rest of your life on this planet)
Whether (assuming that you discover you are capable) you really want to spend the rest of your life doing this. (Because though you may at some point decide to stop writing and do something else, it’s by no means certain that you’ll be able to stop. Even if you do stop writing, you may never be able to stop thinking about writing. And depending on your personality, this may be either an occasional mild annoyance, or your very own personal hell.)
It’s worth pausing here to say that wanting to be a career writer is not necessarily a wholly positive thing. It can be considered, as I’ve said elsewhere, as rather like a career in sewer maintenance. It’s difficult work, often unpleasant, usually lonely, often ineffective no matter how hard you work at it, frequently disruptive to family life, usually poorly paid for many years, hard to explain rationally to other human beings whether you’re enjoying it or not, almost always misunderstood by them, and even at the best of times, equivocal as to results. In these ways, writing as a career is missing almost all of the things most people seem to look for in their work.
But you won’t get to grips with any of this until you start writing and find out what it does to / for you. And additionally, until you find out:
Whether it’s enough fun to keep on doing it
Because at the (figurative) end of the day, it’s your enjoyment of and pleasure in what you create that will spur other people’s enjoyment of it. Suffering for your art is no particular virtue.* Yes, there’ll be hard work, lots of it, and some suffering — that’s kind of unavoidable in the long term — but at the (literal) end of the day, you should usually be able to walk away from the writing pad or the computer feeling good, feeling that you had fun, that it was worthwhile. The most misunderstood truth about writing, the one that career writers are always looking for the right way to phrase so that it doesn’t sound arrogant or exclusionary, is this: I didn’t do it for you. I did it for me.
I live in here: I have to live with this creation. You can always put the book down, walk away and forget about it. I don’t have that luxury. So I write to make me happy. If what I write makes you happy too, happy enough to keep buying my books, that’s gravy. But if I’m not enjoying what I do at least some of the time — enough to drown out the difficulties and annoyances at least in retrospect — there’s no point. If I didn’t enjoy the work, the odds are that you won’t either… and when it’s all over, neither of us will have anything worthwhile. Therefore I will tend to my own creative enjoyment first, and trust it to take care of yours.
…Anyway, if you just start writing, that’s half the battle. Sooner or later you’ll start working out where your heart lies, what kind of writing works best for you, what bits of your writing work best for other people (the latter two not always congruent, so beware…), and so forth. Sooner or later you’ll start developing a voice that’s identifiably yours and not a welded-together chorus of your favorites (and this takes a while: a lot of good writing, in the early stages anyway, is based on imitation of the writers you love).
That’s the point where you start thinking about how to propagate, foster and market what you’ve got: by submission to publishers, by self-publishing, by hunting down an agent, whatever. There’s a ton of advice on that out there in the online world: seek it out.
Meanwhile: why are you still reading this? Go write.
*Echoes here of the Monty Python line in all its lovely irony: “I suffered for my art. Now it’s your turn.”
✐ Daily Weird Prompt ✐
Before The Fall
Write about a character who once lived in an utopia, just before it fell into chaos. The catch? This character survived the destruction, and has now found a home in an unlikely place. Double catch? One day, one of their new friends asks to hear the full story of this ‘perfect city.’
Any work you create based off this prompt belongs to you, no sourcing is necessary though it would be really appreciated! And don’t forget to tag maxkirin (or tweet @MistreKirin), so that I can check-out your stories!
Want more writer inspiration, advice, and prompts? Follow my blog: maxkirin.tumblr.com!