i’m going in for an in person application for an office job today! it’s not an interview but i was invited to come fill out an application and i’m big nervous

but if i get this job i won’t be working 50 hour weeks on my feet and i might be able to get out of pain!!!

splayed across the floor- stomach sleeper- arms outstretched like superman- red blanket draped across shoulders; a cape, marking her a defender: defending what?

emily ambrose (about @c-ambrosewrites)

A piece of wisdom I found on Twitter today, worth more than you can know right now. Believe in yourself, you are what succeeds.

Saturday morning purr sesh (make sure to turn on the sound)

The main reason I’m ending up uninterested in books

is, I think, excessive streamlining and/or efficiency. 

By this i mean the first chapter gets the plot going immediately and the book zips on from event to event, smoothly progressing the plot without a paragraph out of place. The irony is that books like this, despite being very fast-paced, tend to bore me to death. “Cut out what doesn’t progress the plot” seems like good advice, but I feel like it makes it actually very difficult to care. 

A story needs downtime. Having characters constantly be in life-threatening situations and just never letting up from beginning to end sounds like it would cause nail-biting suspense, but it does exactly the opposite. I find I can’t bond with characters if I don’t see them just hanging out, goofing off, or being themselves in a situation where they are relaxed enough to do that. I’ve read a lot of books where every single second someone is in danger and they have to run again or fight again and the relationships never capture me because the characters have not been given time to develop the relationships or even be themselves because they are constantly in survival mode. 

When a character is trying to run from death, their priority is going to be that. You can shoehorn in information drops of supposedly emotional backstory all you want, but if no one ever gets to genuinely kick back, we don’t get to see what they’re like when they’re fully themselves. We don’t get to see what kinds of things they say when they feel safe, what might spill out of them when they are relaxed. We don’t get to see what makes them smile and laugh and the mundane details of who they are, because they don’t spend more than a few paragraphs trying to not die. 

Downtime is not just important to allow room for character development, it’s important to establish a status quo or at least a “what could be.” What is at stake? What has the antagonist/problem taken away from the characters? What will they lose if they don’t succeed in their fight? What do they have to lose? 

Many of these action-packed books I read try to make the reader care by dropping in references to a past or a future in which characters were able to do things like bake cakes or sit in the windowsill and watch the rain and not have to worry about things and being told about those things never has the same impact as experiencing them. If a character thinks “hmm, what if someday we could hang out and have fun together like friends,” that’s sad, I guess. If we get to see the characters hanging out and having fun together like friends, and then a disaster happens and that is brutally ripped away, that’s WAY more effective. If a character comes home to their house burned down or their dad murdered, that’s…supposed to be upsetting, I guess. If you first wrote about the character sitting on a porch swing with their dad identifying bird calls and eating partially burnt banana bread that dad could never make quite like mom used to…and then murdered the dad…now we’re talking. 

Repeat after me: if you don’t give it to your readers in the first place, you can’t cruelly rip it from their arms!! 

I’ve found it a lot better to alternate downtime and more “actiony”/high tension scenes instead of trying to maintain the latter all the way through. Quiet, relationship building scenes and fast-paced, suspenseful scenes are not antagonists, they are sisters and perfect complements of one another. I exploited this fact to the max on my last WIP. I let my characters have fun and joke and laugh. Then I hit them with some scary event that reinforced the overhanging tension again. Then let them relax a bit, developed them as people and the mundane facts about them. Then out of nowhere, things get worse. They try to pull themselves together. I add in a little bit of fluffy goodness but before my characters can contemplate what this means for their relationship–BAM. Shit goes down. And more things fall apart. And more. And now some more fluff, you deserve it ‘kay? But all of a sudden…

The “down” periods didn’t make the book boring, they seem to have made it nigh unputdownable (one of my readers had to go to work on like three hours of sleep after staying up half the night finishing) because they made my readers really, really, really, REALLY want to see my characters safe for good. I was able to develop the relationships just enough to whet appetites for more, and cause immense frustration when I broke up the good stuff with serious bad stuff. Do you want your betas to curse at you and threaten you? This is how you do it, it seems. 

I read YA novels that give the main couple like 2 pages of breathing room so they can kiss. And then their noses are back to the grindstone. Do I know these people, or care? No idea, because they’ve been too busy running from laser sharks to have much by way of a conversation. But letting them sit down for a chapter or so is “”””boring.”””” 

Give your characters downtime. Keep the tension going in the background, but give them a bit to rest here and there. Do it right and it’ll make things hurt so, so much worse. 

“Some people say write what you know—I say write what you feel. After all, if there’s one thing we all know, it’s how we feel. […] Your emotions are your strongest writing allies. And when you write from a place of real feelings, your reader will feel it, too.”

—Kat Yeh is the award-winning author of middle grade novels, The Way to Bea and The Truth About Twinkie Pie (an NPR Best Book of 2015 written during NaNoWriMo!) from Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, and picture book, The Friend Ship, from Disney-Hyperion—as well as others. Kat currently lives with her family in Philadelphia, PA. Learn more at katyeh.com or follow @yehface on Twitter.

P.S. You pronounce her last name YAY!  

Your Camp Care Package is brought to you by Camp NaNoWriMo. Sign up to receive more Camp Care Packages at campnanowrimo.org.

Text added over original image by Debby Hudson on Unsplash.

The Library at the End of the World

GENRE: post apocalypse, coming of age

THEMES: found family, the value of sharing knowledge, relearning to trust

SUMMARY: 

She lost her name years ago and she doesn’t want a new one. Names are for people to use when talking to other people, and she doesn’t talk to anyone often enough to feel like she needs one anymore. 

Fern disagrees. If she’s gonna spend weeks with this lady while she shows her to this Gate City place, she’s gonna need to call her something other than just ‘lady’. 

And then, after an altercation with a marauder, she’s stuck in Gate City for months, and she has to decide what’s really important: keeping her peaceful solitude, or bringing her newly discovered friends to safety?

EXCERPT:

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T H E   I N F E R N A L   A P O C R Y P H A — WORMWOOD’S FALL WRITING EXCERPT: THE JUDECCA ROUND

“Look there, between the black rocks, under the surface of the ice,” Lucifer ordered, his voice soft, pointing towards the direction he spoke with one hand, the other holding his cloak shut to keep the cold away. “Judas Iscariot, frozen forever within my lake.”

Judas’ figure appeared almost as if on display, and he was unmoving although not completely immobile. His eyes met Abdiel’s, and Abdiel was overcome with a deep sense of betrayal and regret, vengeance and pity, and other sensations making him feel just as frozen due to their presence. He felt as though he looked upon something never meant for him to see.

“I flayed his spine myself, you know, and no, not by choice.”

[full scene available for all patrons]

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special thanks & tag list—

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This is so cool! Thank you so so much!!!!!!!!!

hey! i’m not officially participating in the @writeblrsummerfest swap, but one of our members for it dropped out at the last minute, so i’m putting together the swap gift for @emilymustwrite! I loved learning about your story, and I hope you like this!

In Walled City, trauma recovery, found family, and religion are huge themes!

what theme’s are most present in your story? reblog this post and let us know!

The Library at the End of the World

GENRE: post apocalypse, coming of age

THEMES: found family, the value of sharing knowledge, relearning to trust

SUMMARY: 

She lost her name years ago and she doesn’t want a new one. Names are for people to use when talking to other people, and she doesn’t talk to anyone often enough to feel like she needs one anymore. 

Fern disagrees. If she’s gonna spend weeks with this lady while she shows her to this Gate City place, she’s gonna need to call her something other than just ‘lady’. 

And then, after an altercation with a marauder, she’s stuck in Gate City for months, and she has to decide what’s really important: keeping her peaceful solitude, or bringing her newly discovered friends to safety?

EXCERPT:

Keep reading

I love hopepunk.

It is action of the gentlest, sweetest and toughest kind and it takes all of that pain, all of that suffering, and forces it into something better.

No sacrifice. No dashing yourself to pieces because the world is dark and cruel and hard. Instead you scream back at the world and demand that hope also exist.

So then you have it, this thing that hopepunk has made. And it’s battered and patched and frayed but it’s also something good, something fought for. Something bright.

And this thing moves you to dream, to stare into the darkness, to say “I see you and I acknowledge you and I have felt you, but I am making my own light now.”

don’t ever dumb yourself down for people. don’t end long thought processes with a dismissive “if that made any sense haha..” or an “i guess” or a “but idk!” speak your mind, truth, and heart and don’t water yourself down for anyone. your message will be received and understood by those it is meant for, and if not, people who truly care will ask for clarification. you are allowed to have complex thoughts. you dont need to earn your right to speak

I see so many authors bagging on themselves like “why can’t I ever finish anything, I’m a terrible artist and a terrible writer”, and what I want to say based on my professional assessment of their work and where it tends to fall apart is “your art and writing are fine, your real problem is that you’re a shitty project manager” – but of course you can’t actually say that, because while it’s true, it’s almost never helpful to tell someone out of the blue that their real issue is that they entirely lack a critical skill-set they didn’t even know existed.