my soul will not be able until beatrice is recognised as the brown girl she was meant to be on the world stage

Hi! I am an ardent fan of your writing, and I hope to be as sorted and planned as you some day in my own writing journey.

My question is: you have a keen eye when it comes to planning character personality, dynamics, and such. I've also been wading through your ask replies, and your insights into how you write people and how you make them play off of each other is so wonderful to read. If it's not too personal a q, how did you learn how to write like this? Did you go to school for writing, does it come from years of observing people, do you have reading list recs for "how to write real people and real interactions"?

Thanks! This is a really flattering question. I'll try to answer it honestly, because I wish someone had been brutally honest about this with me when I was a young writer.

I didn't go to school for writing. I started doing it when I was about nine years old. It sucked very badly. I kept writing throughout high school, and it still mostly sucked, but some of it was occasionally interesting. ("Interesting" here does not mean "good," by the way.) I took a break in college, and then came back. I've been writing ever since. Sometimes, I feel good about it. A lot of the time, I don't!

I hate giving this advice, because I remember how it feels to get it, and it's the most uninspiring, boring-ass, dog shit advice you can get, but it's also the only advice that is 100% unequivocally true: you have to write, and specifically, you have to write things that suck.

I do not mean that you should make things that suck on purpose. I mean that you have to sit down and try your absolute hardest to make something good. You have to put in the hours, the elbow grease, the blood, sweat, and tears, and then you have to read it over and accept that it just totally sucks. There is no way around this, and you should be wary of people who tell you there is. There is no trick, no rule, no book you can buy or article you can read, that will make your writing not suck. The best someone else can do is tell you what good writing looks like, and chances are, you knew that anyway — after all, you love to read. You wouldn't be trying to do this if you didn't. And anyone who says they can teach you to write so good it doesn't suck at first is either lying to you, or they have forgotten how they learned to write in the first place.

So the trick is to sit there in the miserable doldrums of Suck, write a ton, and learn to like it. Because this is the phase of your path as an artist when you find what it is you love about writing, and it cannot be the chance to make "good writing." This will be the thing that bears you through and compels you to keep going when your writing is shit, i.e., the very thing that makes you a writer in the first place. So find that, and you've got a good start.

Some people know this, but assume that perseverance as a writer is about trying to get to the point where you don't suck anymore. This is not true, and it is an actively dangerous lie to tell young writers. You are not aiming to feel like your writing doesn't suck. You are aiming to write. You are aiming to have written. Everything else is dust and rust. And of course, you'll find things you like about your pieces, you'll find things you're proud of, you'll learn to love the things you've made. But that little itch of self-criticism, in the back of your brain — the one that cringes when you read a clunky line, or thinks of a better character beat right after it's far too late to change — that's never going away. That's the Writer part of you. Read Kafka, read Dickens, read Tolstoy, you will find diary entries where they lament how absolutely fucking atrocious their writing was, and how angry they are that they can't do better. A good writer hates their sentences because they can always imagine better ones. And the ability to imagine a better sentence is what's going to make you pick up the pen again tomorrow. And the day after that. And the day after that.

Which is what I mean, and probably what all those other annoying, preachy advice-givers mean, when we say: a good writer is just someone who writes every day. It's that easy, and that hard.

SKYSTAR DOES WHAT TO ARC

Man send this guy to cat hell let his dark forest edition be one eye eating him

HE MAULS HIM

Arc goes into his territory and Skystar RIPS! THAT! BOY! UP!!!

And then later Skystar uses the will of StarClan to justify his invasion of RiverClan, which BTW is 10000% consistent with A Forest Divided (a post redemption arc book) where he completely misinterprets Fluttering Bird in a way that would get him more power.

So if you just ignore the fact they tried to write him as being so scared :( he doesn't know what he's doing :( for the 400th time, it totally tracks. That's Skystar. That's who he is.

RTD is so in love with David Tennant that it makes him look stupid, huh.

[just venting a bit into the void you understand you understand 😌] Lately I've been feeling very caught between "I have a lot of thoughts on Sparrow and Normal and all that with the ending and teen talk and feel like I need to get them out and voice them for my own piece of mind and resolution" and "I am lacking the strength and energy to actually sit down and write it all out and kind of really just want to fully move on to other things (AUs, fics, anything else)" but my brain can't seem to commit to either and that's quite frustrating cause it's just left me very restless. *Sigh*. Idk! Just needed to complain about that a bit ig, it's silly but this is what has been ailing me as of late.

how do cats make themselves look so comfy while sleeping?? they always look like they're having the best sleep

feeling weird mixed feelings atm and I can't really logic them away, ig? on the one hand I'm completely apathetic about it. on the other hand there's a part of me that's absolutely horrified that I could do something like that. the fact that it's still a consistent low-level pain the whole time also doesn't help. anyway those kinds of thoughts are then making me want to harm again to cope with them but also a) it's manageable and b) I currently have a deep horror of self-inflicted pain after the last few days apparently.

1. Do this uquiz

2. Do this picrew

3. Tag people

The quiz result looks like that bc i did this at like 2 am on my phone and my screen dimmer was on so don't mind that

Anyway i was tagged by @whumpshaped and the og chain by @headlinesdontsellpapes was becoming too long so i decided to put it into a separate post :)

Random tags: @spookyboywhump @pigeonwhumps @whump-galaxy @whumblr @ziptiesnfries everyone who sees this yes you you are tagged now live with the consequences of glancing upon my blog

(for the drawing reqs) i recently finished toh s1 ;-; can you draw eda and lilith? also hiiii i hope youre having a good day :)

[ID: Two images featuring Eda and Lilith from the owl house. The first image shows the two at the end of season 1 embracing on a white background. Eda looks at Lilith, who's crying, with tears in her eyes, smiling. her hair pushed to the side to make room for Lilith's face on her shoulder. Words written above the two read "I just miss how it felt".

The second image has a black background and shows a glowing yellow silhouette of the sisters embracing in the first image. Inside the sillouhette is young Eda and Lilith- Eda is dragging Lilith along while leaves flit about them. Words above them read "standing next to you". End ID]

wearing matching dresses/ before the world was big

YESSSSS CLAWTHORNE SISTERS BRAINROT ALWAYS LETS GOOOOOO!!!!!!

Its uni season and im once again debating online courses i cannot afford

i think a big plus of having Guz be so tall and just in general bigger than me is that I could sit in front of him with my back to his chest and have his arms wrapped around me and he could just hide me away from the world for a little while. he is my own personal brick wall fsdjkl a weighted blanket perhaps too,,

after taking the longest break ever from it (between book 2 & 3, for at least a couple years) I have finally finished the Thornchapel series. I reread 1 and 2 and then *demolished* 3&4 in two days. furious that there seems to be zero fanfics of it on AO3, this feels like a crime and I am being robbed

This paper is actually going quite well.

Too bad it's complete bullshit.

yukihiro takahashi died?? in janurary?? and i only find this out tonight? talk about a reality check... :-(

It's so hard being insane on main but also trying to maintain a certain air of professionalism for my work but since a lot of my field depends on networking and reputation built up from previous jobs I'm less worried about it than I would be in another job. I can be horny on main AND a professional. These two things can, do, and will always co-exist. Also there's the thing of self-employment where I don't have a boss to impress with my perfectly clean and neat social media, although I do have a prospective client base and will likely move elsewhere to advertise when I get a little more experience under my belt so that I can present a cleaner image fully focused on my work on other sites. Anyway, please reblog my pinned post <3 it means a lot to me and I feel like this is the only job for me that I can see myself possibly making good enough money off to live in the future after some success.

I enjoy using my abilities to help people put out good writing that compels and excites readers and despite the at times frustrating mental labor I feel that this kind of work focusing around literature can really make me feel a sense of purpose and pride in what I do. Because I believe reading is one of the most valuable things a person can spend their free time on, and I want to be able to contribute to that in as many ways as I can.

me in the Olli/Allu delelu land trying to explain how Olli acting weird and Aleksi suddenly smoking and them secretly glancing at each other must be all connected somehow

because they ARE!! 😭 we may be yet to connect the dots, but we're getting there okay, we're not crazy 😤

(don't forget the sunglasses!! I haven't figured out how but I just know they're somehow relevant in all this as well 😤 he just seems weirdly attached to them (and the bandana around his neck which he's been wearing in literally every picture we've seen of him for almost two weeks now?? not counting the pictures taken in the pool) like, did he pay and arm an a leg for them (I'm not sure if he's worn that exact pair before? I may be wrong though lol I often am with stuff like this) and justified the purchase to himself by swearing he'd wear them every chance he gets for the rest of the year lol