some photos from hayden’s story <3

Prairie Church

source: https://flic.kr/p/4WWnva

On westward we go toward the last buffalo To the high plains of sturdy short grass Where the great southern herd’s still a sight beyond words As it covers the prairie so vast On to Plum Creek and Turkey Creek, Smoky Hill, too Our ponies and families walk To the campgrounds we know of our grandfathers’ ghosts From the past glory days of the Kaw We follow the trail, our ancestors’ trail Over hillside and river and vale Beside sunflowers high ‘neath an indigo sky We’ll journey along the Kaw Trail Our gardens are trampled by white squatters’ cows We gave up our corn and our beans While we hunt in the west they are stealing the rest And we come back to places stripped clean In the year that the whites call eighteen-fifty-five Nearly one out of four of us died The smallpox and hunger took loved ones away Breaking hearts of the ones who survived    

Now we follow the trail, our ancestors’ trail Over hillside and river and vale Beside sunflowers high 'neath an indigo sky We’ll journey along the Kaw Trail The trader he tries to divide us with lies And turn some of us back on the others But when we go west, we are back to our best Where each Kaw is the other one’s brother    

So we follow the trail, our ancestors’ trail Over hillside and river and vale Beside sunflowers high 'neath an indigo sky We’ll journey along the Kaw Trail

Not So Secret - Nightmare Romance

Sponsored by HISA

HISA - Greyside Mansion @Cupid, Inc. Novel Events

Just absolute wow, I genuinely can't stop looking at this house. Hisa has once again created the most detailed, high quality home on the grid. There’s no better store for homes with the most stunning intricate detailing and elaborate designs. You can feel the creators passion and love for each of the homes created. I couldn't not go Gothic with this landscape using some boulders from the new Fundati trees now at FaMESHed, and my all time favourite fir trees from Little Branch. Its all our top horror movies in one. A Gothic romance. Its exceptional.

Fundati - Boulder A Fundati - Dead Tree Spooky Apple Fall - Bushmead Railing Apple Fall - Old Church Gate Apple Fall - Orsett Double Lantern Botanical - Douglas Fir Heart - Wild Grasses - Fescue Little Branch - Douglas Fir Tree Harshlands - Woodcutter's Trunk VALR - Prarie Grass Green

tonight I would like to sit and muse a little about two things I have been thinking about in regards to stories, and all the variables that go into writing one.

stories, of course, have characters and plots and themes and settings, but I have also found that stories can also have two other things - though not every book has them, and not every story needs them - but I believe that the best children’s books require them.  and for this purpose, I will call these concepts The Process and The Experience.

The Experience is probably the easier to explain.  stories have settings, we learn that in english class.  but The Experience is the difference between a story set in a generic american college, and pamela dean’s tam lin, which takes place at the gloriously esoteric and haunted blackstock college (based on real-life carleton college).  The Experience is the difference between a story about gardening and The Secret Garden: in this book, the experience is more than just the setting.  any story could have been writing about a vaguely gothic castle.  but the secret garden’s setting is MORE than that isolated castle: it is an isolated castle in YORKSHIRE, and when you read the story you are also getting the whole experience of early 1900s yorkshire, england - with the dialect in your ears and your eyes seeing the purple of the moor and your face feeling the bleak wind wurthering around the house.  it’s the details, all the hundred tiny details that must be just right, to really show how it would feel to live in that world.  and the story must DEPEND on the experience.  the secret garden simply wouldn’t be the secret garden if it took place anywhere else. 

more than just where the story takes place, the Experience is being able to fully immerse yourself in a world.  it’s more than just sensory details.  it’s a kind of magic.  when you get the itch to reread a book that has an Experience, you are wanting to jump right back into that world and live there again. some books that are an Experience are howl’s moving castle, the anne of green gables books, little women, i capture the castle, harry potter, the attolia books, little house on the prarie.  

and the other concept I think good children’s books require is The Process.  this is more difficult to explain, because it can be both an internal and an external thing, and sometimes a book will have both internal and external processes, that sometimes merge together and become a Theme.  the Process looks like: a character’s slow inner thoughts as they learn something new about themselves.  it also looks like an outcast-in-the-community character becoming a valued member of society.  it also looks like a book about house training an unruly dog, or a story about building a house.  this is hard to explain.  but The Process has to take place through the whole book, and it can be part of the Experience too.  and like the Experience, the Process is essential to the story: it wouldn’t be the story it is without it.

here are some inner Processes: in eloise jarvis mcgraw’s Greensleeves, Shan’s despairing, hilarious struggle to figure out what she wants in life while going undercover in a small seattle neighborhood.  another process: sophie in howl’s moving castle and her transformation into an old woman and into her own beautiful terrifying self, anne shirley getting the town of avonlea to fall in love with her. 

some outer Process examples: fern raising a baby pig in charlotte’s web, or willy wonka selecting his protege with a trip to the factory, or muggie maggie learning how to write cursive, or harry potter going to school at a wizarding school.  outer processes give a certain structure to a story: harry going to wizarding school is essential to the story; it wouldn’t be the same if it was a story about a boy going on vacation, and that Process gives shape even to the number of books in the series, because each one revolves around a year harry spends at school.   and fern raising wilbur must take place on a farm: raising a piglet in the city would be an entirely different story, because wilbur would have to have wanted as a pet all along, and never in any danger of dying.

most of the books I really, truly love have these two things - I want to figure out how to use them to write stories of my own.

okay so there’s like prarie gothic and midwest gothic and middle-of-nowhere-quebec gothic

so like what would anime convention gothic be?

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over and over and over

source: https://flic.kr/p/dJSUo

enter to the boob void

writing the hunter