#this is also making me much more inspired to keep working on the ACTUAL manuscript i have been fiddling with for these past five years | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

maniculum · 1 month

Text

Bestiaryposting Results: Slagzogg

This is, interestingly, our third consecutive Beaſt that's actually a common everyday animal pretty much all over Europe, including the area where this manuscript was produced. This is interesting to me because the three are handled very differently. First we had the salamander, which I'm pretty sure got mentally separated from the actual animal somewhere, probably because people use different terms for the real-life amphibian in different regions and languages, and not everybody is going to recognize that it's just the Greek word for the same animal. Second we had the deer, which it seemed like the manuscript producers did recognize, because the illustration is clearly a deer... but elements of the entry are just nuts (As @sweetlyfez said, "How do you make up this many wild myths about a guy you live with"). And now we have the [redacted until end of post], which is just given a completely mundane, if engaging, description with the only weird part being the symbolism attached to it.

I think it might also be our first domestic animal -- the entry even talks about the difference between wild and domestic varieties -- which seems like it's worth noting.

Anyway, as usual people who don't know what I'm talking about should check https://maniculum.tumblr.com/bestiaryposting. The entry this week's artists are working from can be found here:

This is another one where I almost didn't put it in because it seemed super obvious what it was, but the artists have done a superb job not drawing that. Excellent work on everyone's part, and it can be found below the cut:

@silverhart-makes-art (link to post here) shows us both a domestic and a wild Slagzogg; the design of the domestic one makes me think of fancy pigeons, which I think is a pretty good direction to take here. The vulture-like faces really improve the design also. Very good birds, and you should go check out the linked post to hear about the design decisions and real-life inspirations behind this one; I think it's pretty interesting.

@pomrania (link to post here) observed that, though the entry mentions beaks and flight, it doesn't actually say "bird", so they can draw a pet dragon and have it fit the description. Fair call, and I think it turned out well. I like the contrast between the fairly dignified-looking creature on the left -- this is a Slagzogg who is on its way to win Best in Show -- and the sketch on the right of someone forcibly preventing it from getting into a fight. If you check out the linked post, you can see Pomrania's progress thread for this design.

@coolest-capybara (link to post here) has made the eminently-understandable decision that if they're going to draw a bird with no specific anatomical details given, it's going to be a potoo. On the left we have three domestic Slagzoggs socializing, and on the right we have a wild one perching alone. I like how this incorporates the symbolism of the entry: we're told that the wild type is meant to signify people who choose a religious life ("those who keep apart from this world wear the modest garb of penitence"), and this wild Slagzogg does look a bit more serious and... monastic? Like, that bird is a nun. (Also, thank you for including alt text.)

@cheapsweets (link to post here) also went with the direction of "well, it doesn't say 'bird'," and so we have this really charming image of a medieval person feeding their domestic... pterosaurs. Love it. Honestly, these alternate visions of the Middle Ages where people have entirely different domestic animals than our timeline are really appealing to me. Too much Dinotopia as a child, perhaps. Anyway, check out the linked post for substantially more detail, it's worth it. In fact, everyone reading this should just go ahead and follow all of the bestiaryposting participants. (Also, thank you for the alt text.)

@strixcattus (link to post here) is clearly thinking of the modern day's feral pigeons, formerly the result of selective breeding by pigeon fanciers. We can see the "fancy" domestic version on the left contrasted with the wild version on the right. (I think it's interesting that everyone who's drawn both has put the domestic Slagzogg on the left and the wild Slagzogg on the right.) Anyway, as is usually the case with Strixcattus, the writing included in the post is absolutely worth your time and you should read it. And again, follow them, as well as everyone who has ever contributed to bestiaryposting. Go do it; you won't regret it.

Now, to the Aberdeen Bestiary.

Beak shape aside, these are clearly geese.

I think the degree to which people guessed that varies somewhat; Strixcattus made a post suggesting they were leaning "pigeon", but Pomrania probably clocked it, because they described two Slagzoggs fighting as a "hissing match" despite hissing not being mentioned in the entry. I have no idea where everyone else landed.

Honestly, what I find interesting about this entry is that it's pulling symbolism while remaining pretty much entirely grounded in reality. Check this out:

The goose marks the watches of the night by its constant cry.

Okay, I don't know to what degree it's useful in marking time, but I don't doubt that geese make noise at night.

No other creature picks up the scent of man as it does.

That one I'm not sure about.

This next bit I cut because if anyone knows Roman history they'd nail it right out of the gate:

It was because of its noise, that the Gauls were detected when they ascended the Capitol. Rabanus says in this context: 'The goose can signify men who are prudent and look out for their own safety.'

Okay, that might be less history and more legend, but still, people know it, I think.

There are two kinds of geese, domestic and wild. Wild geese fly high, in a an orderly fashion, signifying those who, far away from earthly things, preserve a rule of virtuous conduct.

I can absolutely see medieval people looking up at geese flying in that V formation and going, "look how orderly these birds are; clearly they are virtuous creatures."

Domestic geese live together in villages, they cackle together all the time and rend each other with their beaks...

Yeah, that sounds like what geese would do in a village.

All wild geese are grey in colour; I have not seen any that were of mixed colour or white. But among domestic geese, there are not only grey but variegated and white ones. Wild geese are the colour of ashes, that is to say, those who keep apart from this world wear the modest garb of penitence.

This bit falls into the category of "I believe it, but it does not accord with my personal experience." Because if you told me that in Europe they had a variety of different aesthetically-pleasing domestic goose breeds, I'd have no problem believing that. And I'm sure some wild geese are gray. But I live in North America, so to me wild geese look like this:

And domestic geese look like this:

But again, I have no difficulty believing that the experience of the medieval Europeans was different from mine.

What really sticks out to me here is the fact that the characteristic behavior of domestic geese is to make noise and get in fights -- I think the Untitled Goose Game would have made perfect sense to a medieval audience.

(After the Smithfield Decretals)

#maniculum bestiaryposting #slagzogg

53 notes · View notes

honourablejester · 2 years

Text

Watching the Sandman Calliope story, and maybe this is just everyone’s brains being different, but why the fuck do you need inspiration for ideas? Ideas are a dime a dozen! Read two books and watch a nature documentary and there’s at least 15 ideas in there. I just … If we’re talking a premise, a one sentence concept, ‘in the year 5000 there are werewolves on Mars’ or what have you, they are limitless. You don’t need a Greek goddess for that, just go for a walk and read some fiction that weekend.

I can see needing a muse for motivation. For the skill and energy and time and will to turn that premise into an actual story, to make the words flow and the phrases turn good. But the premise, the idea? Do you live in a box? Go outside for a while and read some other stories.

Like, is this just me being weird? Am I blessed by a good relationship to the muses and just think that’s standard? But everything Madoc says in that second presentation, when Dream’s already inflicted inspiration on him, that’s bang on. Ideas are everywhere. Stories are everywhere. Now, taking them and turning them into a printable manuscript that you could then actually show to people, that’s a different, hah, story, but if you just need stories to tell yourself at night to get yourself over the hump into sleep, or daydreams, or a premise to get you started …

I honestly have no idea how someone could run out? Writer’s block, I get, but that’s not having no stories to me, it’s having all my stories feel clumsy or irritating, or just no motivation to put any of them on paper/screen. Like, are my ideas good? Maybe not. But there sure are a lot of them.

I don’t know, maybe this is just my brain, but holy god Richard Madoc seems pathetic to me. I mean, he’s definitely supposed to be pathetic, but like even more so. You can’t even come up with an opening premise? Why do you want to be a writer if you have no stories to tell?

Not that there’d be any good reason to keep a Muse captive, and we’re not going to go into everything else that shows him for an absolute scumbag here. But just taking what he said, that he needs ideas. If it had been the motivation/fluency/translation-into-format problem, I’d at least sympathise a little bit. He still should have just hired a ghost writer like a normal person and just dropped his blurb/outline off with them, but at least he’d have done some of the work. But just. ‘I need her. If I didn’t have her, I wouldn’t be able to write, I wouldn’t have ideas.’ I am one with Dream’s face when those words came out of his mouth. An idea is the basic unit of storytelling. You can’t even reach step one?

I don’t know why this makes me so irrationally angry. But you can pick up ideas on a street corner. Just steal them like a normal hack! Ask 10 people in coffee shops what type of books they’d like to read and shake the results until a basic plot falls out. Read 10 short stories, pick your favourite elements of each of them, and throw them in a blender. Find an online concept generator, there’s loads of them!

And I get it, not every idea you come across is going to be one that you yourself can work with. But I’m just … If you can’t even come up with that much, did you make any effort at all?

And honestly. Saying this to the Lord of Dreams. The personification of the global subconscious. The personification of storytelling. No wonder Dream just downloaded an avalanche of concept fragments into his brain until he went mad. You want ideas? There are 20 million of them. Pick one and let us all get on with our lives, you pathetic sack of shit.

Wow. I’m just. Richard Madoc makes me angry? On a moral level, yes, absolutely, but also just on put some fucking effort in level. An idea? Just read. For fuck’s sake.

Sorry. I have a screaming headache today, and this man just annoys me. The amount of harm caused for the most pathetic reason. I cannot.

#sandman #calliope #richard madoc #writing #rant #sorry i know it could just be me #but that's not even the actual hard part!#just take a year off and read/watch some stuff #omg

155 notes · View notes

funkymbtifiction · 2 years

Note

you're back!! welcome back, you were missed by me and I'm sure everyone 💕 how are you?? 🥺

I'm good, thanks. Way better than when I decided to take a break.

I can't be sure, but I think I contracted the latest covid strain last month -- I spent three weeks feeling weak and sick, with no stamina (which upset me, because I had been working outside most of the summer and developing actual stamina for the first time in my life, and now it's all gone!). I still have very little ability to do physically taxing things without getting out of breath or feeling tired but am getting back on my feet and building myself up.

My new manuscript was giving me trouble, so I took a break from online stuff for a few days to get it sorted out -- and once I thought about it, decided on a different tactic, and started over, now it's flowing perfectly, I am full of great ideas, twists, turns and concepts, and that makes me happy. I had to break out of the "old" and embrace "the new" and then Ne took off like a shot.

I've been able to self-analyze and journal and work through some things and notice things about myself that I wasn't aware of before. I noticed how much I have grown through my 6-ness in the last year. A lot of automatic behaviors I used to do have just... stopped. I've been aware of them and just shut them off. You gotta do the work, realize what's optional, and choose the opposite sometimes. I've also been trying to manage my workaholic tendencies, and not push myself so much. I've forgotten that my life also needs to be fun to keep my 7 wing happy -- so this month I'm going to "have fun." I will write fun things and quit before it's no longer fun, regardless if I wrote two paragraphs or sixteen pages. I will have more variety in my life, and try more things, and see my friends more.

I had one hilarious thing happen where I'd been thinking about social stackings and how they author books. I'm an sp/so, and they are known for being straightforward. Well, someone walked up to me at random in a store the other day, asked if I was who they thought, and then told me how much they love my writing, because "I understand it." They told me their niece wrote stuff like "Dune crossed with LotR, and I can barely read it." (Aww, an so/sp novelist!) So that amused me. Stacking confirmed by someone who knows nothing about it!

So far I've watched a bunch of new stuff, am reading some of the books you all recommended to me, and need to thank Neil Gaiman, because his The Sandman on Netflix gave me so much inspiration, my book has been "happening" quickly ever since. I yanked out all the stops and decided to go full-blown historical fantasy. You are a genius, my dude. A high-concept, abstract genius.

#mod post

17 notes · View notes

rosepehtels · 21 days

Text

10 apps i use as a small content creator

as someone who has a passion for systems and workflows, i'm always look for new tools to try out to make me more productive

so far, these are the 10 tools i use, that has increased my productivity and made my workflow flawless

todoist

i use todoist as my task management system and to capture all my tasks, reminders and ideas i have.

there is both a mobile and web version, so i can use it anywhere at anytime which i LOVE

here's a curated list of posts i've made on todoist:

how a writer uses todoist

restarting my weekly review process

my workflow for content creation using todoist

obsidian

obsidian has become my most valued app and tool as a content creator.

i use obsidian to capture all my ideas, tasks, projects and notes on what i read, write, and listen to as a source of inspiration for me personally, but also for my books and stories.

i started by using it for writing to write my scenes, plot points, and manuscript, however i now use it for more than that, including daily journaling and project management

my other obsidian posts:

obsidian resources

my review on obsidian

5 obsidian plugins for writers

my top 5 obsidian plugins

notion

notion(aff) has been my main tool for everything for the past 8 years until i recently started having trouble with using it.

now, i use it on the side for occasion worldbuilding, and updating. i no longer use it as much as i use to but i still love the app

my other notion posts:

notion tour 2023

a guide to notion

apple books

apple books is where i have a digital collection of all my books in apple books.

when i have the time to read, i firstly check my collection in apple books and try and find a book to read

once i've read the book, my highlights and notes sync to my pkm

these notes then going into my knowledge vault where i can reflect on them and study them

i have a post on my knowledge vault for digital notes if you're interested

spotify

spotify is my favorite app for listening to music, which i do religiously while i work. i recently did a study on listening to music while working and found that it can actually help!

i have a playlist for every occassion including books, scenarios, concepts and even playlists specific for my book throne of shadows. i created a masterpost of all my playlists based on books here, and if you want to listen to playlists for tos you can find that post here as well.

canva

i use canva for creating my graphics for all my social medias.

although i do use photoshop occasionally, i find canva to be much easier and faster to use.

i have created graphic templates if you're interested, you can find that link here.

one drive

one drive is my storage app of choice. i prefer it over google drive and recently made the move to one drive for more storage.

in the past, i use to put everything on googledrive but my storage quickly got full and i found myself having to pay for extra storage.

i made a post on my novel organization system using one drive if you're interested in what that looks like.

figma

figma is the tool i use for creating visual mind maps for my content creation and projects.

it allows me to visually see my projects and what i have planned, as well as make graphics for such posts.

final cut pro

final cut pro is my video editor of choice. although it's $300, it's a one-time purchase and absolutely worth it.

the editor allows me to make my videos condensed so my viewers are able to watch 10-20 minutes of what was 2 hours long.

you can find fcp templates and graphics on the internet that you can add to make your videos pop out more.

apple notes

apple notes is my brain dump app and where i store most of my private notes.

i only use this because it's easily accessible and i have some shared notes with my parents that i need to keep updated.

—

that concludes this post! hope you enjoyed! xoxo

consider buying me a coffee or becoming a member of my patreon. check out my instagram <3

#content creator #content creation #small content creator #streaming #content creator apps #app recommendations #app recs #influencer #fanbase #ig model #social media #social media influencer #mine: resources #mine: app recs #mine: post

0 notes

tdcloud · 1 year

Text

DVerse Lore + Updates - Triarii, Nicciave, and Loremasters (blog#14)

I seriously can’t believe it’s already March. Am I the only one who thinks the months go by faster the older I get? Well, anyway, there’s no time for existentialism—we’ve got a lot to discuss this time and there’s no time like the present to get down to things!

First order of business: I’m freshly back from Anime Crossroads and ecstatic that the first convention of 2023 went so well! I met a lot of fans, new and old, and managed to hawk my wares to a lot of new readers, all without losing my voice! If you’ve ever met me at a convention before, I’m sure you know how amazing that last part is. 90% of my business is gained by talking to people who stop by my table. I have to give summaries, discuss my writing style, and listen to many aspiring writers, casual readers, and overly-effusive porn enthusiasts for three days straight. It’s a lot on the vocal cords, believe me! But ACross was great, the people were phenomenal, and I’m gearing up for Evillecon later this month with full faith that it’ll be just as good if not better than what I just experienced last weekend.

So, here’s your reminder that I’ll be attending Evillecon in Evansville, IN! Mosey on over to my Schedule page for more information on that, and definitely swing by the table to say hello if you’re going, too. I’d love to see some more friendly faces from that neck of the woods!

Second on the docket: Ossuary. Another novella published, and a whole slew of new readers to traumatize with my particular brand of erotic horror! I hope you all managed to snag yourselves a copy, be it physical or ebook, and if you ordered a signed copy from me, rest assured, the books are on their way if they aren’t already in your hands! Please keep in mind that I offer signed copies of all of my work at all times. Merely mosey over to the Books tab and click on the form link at the bottom of the page, and I’ll personalize a copy and mail it to you myself.

And hey, if you’ve already got your book and enjoyed it thoroughly, here’s your regular reminder that the best way you can continue to support me after your purchase is to leave reviews on Amazon and Goodreads. Seriously, there is no better way to help my work read new readers than by leaving a kind review. It helps boost my work in the algorithm, and helps me find new markets I wouldn’t otherwise reach. So… get to writing if you’ve already finished Ossuary! Just a few sentences can really move mountains on those sites!

And lastly, the third topic of discussion: What’s coming next?

Well, a hell of a lot, to be honest with you! With Ossuary wrapped up and freshly off to market, the next title on deck to be published is Infaust, my Pied Piper inspired dark romance. My artist for this book is currently tied up with some other projects at the moment, but the manuscript itself is fully finished and ready whenever she is. Tenuous plans have this book launching sometime this Summer, if not into early Fall. More details to come as we get closer to June, but trust me, I’ll keep you all informed!

I don’t like making promises on for-sure publication dates. Lord knows there are a million little things that can send a project back several months, and at this point, I’ve learned my lesson when it comes to promising things that aren’t set in stone. But, while I wait for Sun’s time to free up for Infaust, I’m also working on preparing the first of the Vigilante novellas, too! We may see Pride/Stray published late this year, but please, don’t hold your breath. Three publications in one year is the dream, but until Infaust comes out, not much else will. Get excited, though! If it doesn’t drop this year, it will drop first thing in 2024.

Anyway, that’s enough preliminary business for the time being. We have an actual topic of the month to discuss, so let’s get to it and delve into the next category of DVerse clans: the Triarii, Nicciave, and Loremasters!

The Triarii are one of my favorite clans to talk about because they don’t seem like they’ve got all that much going on with them at first blush. They’re the “strong” vampires, the big ones, the jocks as Gabriel in Letifer termed them, but they are so much more than that. Boy howdy, are they so much more than that. They’re a very tumultuous bloodline that has seen great rises and great losses in power. For much of the Dark Ages, they actually stood alongside the Luminaries and were, in some ways, far more akin to a ruling class than their landed gentry contemporaries.

The first Triarii isn’t known, but exemplary Triarii stand out in history as the leaders of countries, the winners of wars. Most notable of all the Triarii we’re likely to encounter in the DVerse books is Marcu, a Roman Centurion who single-handedly changed the course of European history after a rampant spree of vampiric over-feedings combined with an intense population growth threatened the human species at large. We’ll get into the specifics fully in the final books of the series, but he essentially saw the writing on the wall, realized that there would be nothing left if someone didn’t do something and soon, and took matters into his own hands. The first great cullings began under his watch. Lesser clans found their numbers purged in droves, and prominent families who had the foresight to place their support behind the winning side (Marcu’s) found themselves elevated in the new world order while the rest were left out to receive a last sunrise.

This was the golden age of the Triarii, and it lasted as long as Marcu did. Marcu lost power in an nebulously understood part of vampiric history known colloquially as The Fall. After he was gone, the Triarii splintered, scrambled, and lost their hard-won supremacy. Luminaries who realized they no longer wished to be puppet rulers behind their muscle-bound pseudo-servants took back control and reinstated the pecking order we see persisting into modern nights.

In modernity, we see most Triarii occupy a tenuous position of power and unimportance. They’re often found in ancillary roles of bodyguards, drivers, hired muscle, and confidants to the high bloods. Nary will you see a Luminary operating in public without a Triarii close behind, and because of this close proximity to power, Triarii enjoy being in the know in ways few are. They seem to be working towards something, accumulating power, contacts, and information, but what, exactly, they’re hoping to accomplish is a secret known only to their ranks, and if there’s one thing Triarii don’t share, it’s secrets that benefit the clan as a whole.

Might makes right to the Triarii. First and foremost, they are a clan built upon the belief that the only way to hold power is through conquest, battle, and proving definitively that you are stronger than the one you’re up against. In a time of constant war, in the time of Empires, it’s easy to see why they would have risen above their intellectual counterparts. Triarii embrace from the ranks of soldiers, generals, hardened veterans, and those who have proven their will is stronger than their foes—stronger than anyone, in fact—and their blood assures that’s true.

Similar to the Cultists, it can be difficult to survive the transformative bite of a Triarii. It’s strong blood. Only the strong can withstand it, and even then, a will of steel is needed as well. Because of this, most Triarii tend to be big and bulky. They were fighters in life, or soldiers, or thugs. Athletes, hired muscle, the sort of humans who led an active life and have the body to prove it—but that’s just one sort of Triarii. The strongest powerlifter could be felled by a Triarii embrace just as easily as the weakest pencil pusher if they don’t have the mindset, the sheer force of will, to overpower the blood before it overpowers them first. So, any Triarii you encounter demands respect outright. There is no such thing as a Triarii pushover. They all fought to survive in ways most can’t comprehend, and because of that, they’re all worth consideration, no matter the package they come in.

My favorite thing about this clan is that they are, as I fondly call them, “team sports.” What makes the most dangerous isn’t their enhanced strength, their ability to channel ungodly strength and bloodlust through blood rages, or their unbreakable willpower. It’s that they all come into the night with an innate sense of loyalty that is nigh on unshatterable. For most, this loyalty is directed to the clan as a whole. There shouldn’t be such a thing as a Triarii who isn’t willing to lend aid to a fellow Triarii. They are all bloodkin, and in this sense, blood is far, far thicker than water. Triarii talk. They share everything. If one works for a Luminary in Chicago and hears some secrets on the job, you can guarantee every Triarii they’ve come into contact with in that city also knows those secrets too. They rarely if ever act in ways that wouldn’t benefit their fellow clanmates at large.

Of course, there are always outliers. Triarii have to be loyal to something. Most are loyal to each other, but that doesn’t have to be the case. Some are hyper-loyal to the groups they were affiliated with in life (a gang leader may remain loyal to his gang as opposed to the Triarii who turned him, for example). The thing is… this is the sort of loyalty that’s meant to be shared. If it isn’t given to a large enough group, or God forbid, is only given to a single person… Well, there are a few freaks in this world—Rience being one of them, as discussed last month—and there is nothing scarier than a Triarii who doesn’t share.

We’ll get into that in the next novel, Philaimatos, and believe me, it’s fucking wild.

Triarii Power breakdown:

Insanely enhanced strength, speed, and physical ability.

When hurt/angered/triggered, can engage in a “Blood Rage” and essentially go full primal instincts. Become a killing machine with no sense of pain or consequences until their blood lust is satisfied.

Enhanced loyalty to the clan/group of influence. Fixations occur if this need for camaraderie/kinship isn’t disseminated to a big enough pool.

But let’s move on to the exact opposite of the Triarii. No more jocks—let’s move onto the nerds, namely my favorite clan, the Nicciave!

I’m not sure who the progenitor of the Nicciave was, but I can guarantee they were a paranoid bastard who probably wasn’t well liked. They were instrumental in the Triarii’s rise to power during the Dark Ages and select Nicciave benefited greatly from sensing which way the wind was blowing during that initial conflict. Many were culled, but those who aligned themselves with Marcu early on saw unprecedented prestige, status, and power placed upon them as they sold out their fellow kin, clanmates and strangers alike, all in the hopes of receiving a good seat in the new world order Marcu built off the bones of the culled. We’ll see a lot of that in the story of Cassius, another key player in the final books of the series. No spoilers here though. Just know it’s a doozy.

When I describe the Nicciave, the best analogy I’ve found is that they are rats fleeing an eternally sinking ship. They are the most Type-A neurotics you can imagine, and they have good reason to be that. Unlike most clans who are gifted with physical abilities, their claim to fame is purely mental. No one in the vampire world has a stronger mind than a Nicciave. They can compel humans and vampires alike without breaking a sweat, mesmerize as easily as breathing, and destroy minds on a whim. On top of that, they’ve got one hell of a self-preservation tactic under their belts: minor precognizance. If there’s a fist being thrown in their direction, they’ll know about it before it happens—or before it could happen.

For better or worse, they are grossly aware of how dangerous the world is. They have the unique ability to know exactly how bad things are about to get just before they happen, and because of that, they are constantly doing everything in their power to better their positions. It’s not paranoia to think the whole world is out to get you when you know that it is, and in a world built on shadowy politics, back alley alliances, and cutthroat bargains, the only true safety is found in power—absolute power.

Nicciave are opportunists. They are shadow brokers, spymasters, kingmakers, and power hungry to a fault. There’s no other way to attain security than to know every single danger out there and have it under lock and key—or better yet, have it owe you so you hold the leash and direct what direction the danger points. Beside every great leader are a dozen Nicciave lurking just behind the seat of power, whispering in the King’s ear to guide him this way or that. They are loyal only to themselves, and even then, that loyalty is a fickle thing when their own minds tell them they’re constantly under threat.

No one trusts a Nicciave: they are a resource to be used carefully, and always at a cost.

Nicciave have a wider pool in which they sire from than most clans. They don’t look at scholars or athletes or royalty—they look at everyone and choose based on their own set of standards. And even after a fledgling is turned, whether or not they live up to their sire’s standards is another matter entirely. Some watch a single individual for years to weigh whether or not they’ve met some arbitrary set of standards, some invisible check-\list that meets their expectations for a good lackey. Others treat it more like a job interview with the human unknowing what, exactly, that job will entail until it’s too late to turn it down. Some employ “tests'' that range from innocuous to utterly inhumane just to see how the prospective fledgling bounces back.

Regardless of how they get there, Nicciave sires are… difficult mentors to impress. It’s hard to tell who has it better, those with micromanaging sires or utterly detached ones.

Despite their typical unsavoryness, Nicciave remain in high demand to those also seeking power, prestige, or a leg up over their rivals. Most Nicciave have a price they’re willing to sell just about anything for, and their loyalty comes at a figure most couldn’t scarcely begin to afford. Anyone who’s anyone has the number to a few prominent Nicciave on their phone, and if you’re smart, you can benefit greatly from a relationship with one. Just be prepared to lose a few secrets in the process, naturally.

What I love most about Nicciave is that while every bloodline has some flaw or facet of their personality cranked up to eleven, these bastards prove to be their own worst enemies 99% of the time. They are self-destructive in their need to climb the ranks, and even those who seem level headed have at least one trigger topic (or person) that will send them spiraling. Anxiety, OCD, unsavory fixations, and paranoia are prevalent, and no Nicciave has the exact same flavor of brain rot. I adore shadow lord type characters, but they’re always so much more fun when they’ve got some kind of Issue that keeps them from fully achieving domination. They don’t seek power for power’s sake—it’s a self-defense mechanism, and the thing that might provide them with true safety, happiness, or satisfaction will always take a back seat to the thing they perceive will keep them ahead of the dangers they see around every single corner. It makes for very interesting characters and dynamics, something you’ll see in our next duology of novels!

Nicciave Power breakdown:

Enhanced mental acuity—compulsion, mesmerism, mental dominance, and control. Can compel humans without effort and almost all vampires with ease. Only Luminaries would present a challenge.

Minor pre-cognizance (mental “vision” of incoming danger/threats).

Exacerbated anxiety/paranoia. Will distrust instinctively.

Our final topic of the month comes in the form of the other nerds of the vampire world, the Loremasters. In some ways, these are the truer form of “nerd.” They seek knowledge for the sake of knowledge and not for some desperate grab for power, dominance, or security the way the Nicciave do. They’ve got their own issues, but they’re far less dramatic, and there can be an argument made that these bastards are the saddest of all the clans. I sure as shit know my editor thinks so XD

For as long as there has been history, there have been those dedicated to recording it. Vampiric history may transpire in longer epochs than most history, but there are still record keepers, or in this case, Loremasters. Built from enclaves of scholars from every order under the sun, the Loremasters navigate the centuries with the marked goal of recording its passage as accurately and unbiasedly as possible. If there is a progenitor of this bloodline, they would know it. They try to know everything they can as quickly as they can because unlike all other bloodlines, the Loremasters do have an expiration date.

Yep, you heard me right. Loremasters are not immortal. The average Loremaster has a lifespan of roughly 900 years, and for every decade they exist as such, they age. It’s slow at first, but persistent, compounding until their bodies fail them while their minds—the lone aspect of their bodies untouched by age—continue on.

It’s common practice for younger Loremasters to mercy kill their elders once they reach the last stages of bodily autonomy—and once they’ve finished conveying the bulk of their own knowledge. No one wants to exist as a sentient brain on the floor, which is what tends to become of them if they’re not dealt with when their bodies begin to break down.

There’s definitely some possibility of some weird sci-fi shit with this clan once technology catches up to the Futurama heads-in-a-jar concept, but I’ll leave that to you guys to postulate on.

These guys don’t solely live just to die though. Some believe that the fact that they do die gives their longevity more meaning. You would be hard pressed to come across a single Loremaster that doesn’t give their duty 100% of their focus, and that duty is vast, varied, and fascinating. While Loremasters tend to all maintain some contact with their order in whatever area they may inhabit, Loremasters have a variety of positions within vampiric society. Their number is few and always has been, but their worth is undeniable to those with the common sense to appreciate it. Luminaries who desire uncontested proof of their claim over an area always have at least one Loremaster under their employ to attest to their historic legacy, and those with fledglings in need of guidance are often assigned younger Luminaries to document their growing deeds as preemptive guarantees that their rises to power go uncontested.

You can view Loremasters as counselors, scribes, and historians all in one. Most remain situated in one area for most of their lives, but others, typically younger Loremasters, travel frequently, gathering new sources of information for the clan as a whole while their bodies are strong enough to facilitate travel. A common coming of age task for young fledglings is to venture away from the enclave alone and bring back the truth regarding long-held folk beliefs, rumors, or events that have gone uninvestigated by frail elders. The acquisition of new knowledge is paramount to the clan, and the best way to prove your worth is to bring back something juicy.

Older-but-still-spry Loremasters oftentimes have ongoing research projects under their belts. Sometimes they’re pet interests, and other times they’re assigned duties they’ve been tasked to delve into. The quintessential Loremaster is an unbiased observer, a witness to the events of history as history is made. Most subscribe to this mentality. Most. It’s uncommon to see a Loremaster engaged in any physical or bloody feat to uncover secrets. It’s even more uncommon to find a Loremaster engaged politically in any capacity other than as an apolitical advisor/historian. But there are exceptions to every rule, and like all exceptions in the DVerse, it’s those individuals who leave the most ripples in their wake.

While writing this series I’ve found that the most fun vampires are the ones who don’t fully fall into their clan bias. All three of this month’s clan spotlights will get that proven true in the next duology, so trust me, y’all are in for a treat.

Loremaster Power breakdown:

Photographic and eidetic memories. They never forget, and no other bloodline can say the same.

Longevity, not immortality—they age roughly a decade every 100 years after they’ve caught up to their physical age (someone turned at twenty will look twenty for two hundred years and age 10 years physically every century after that).

Enhanced strength, speed, and senses are average in terms of most vampires. Nothing to write home about compared to anyone else under the vampiric sun.

That’s enough of all of that for the moment. Let’s open things up to a question! I only got one this month from Twitter, but that’s fine. I’m a bit pressed for time at this point in the month, so I won’t complain.

Do you have a list of character names or words (made up or otherwise) you’ve set aside as title words or scene inspiration that you want to use in future works?

This is a fascinating question! I don’t typically have lists of names stored up—I’m really more of the “picks a name when I absolutely have to because choosing names is like pulling teeth half the time” but I do have a few names I came across while reading this big ass text book on horror cinema history that I decided to store for a rainy day. I think I’m going to use them for a future polyam erotica I want to write. The names are Zattiany, Diodati, and Aloysha.

When it comes to stories set in fantasy spaces where I don’t have any real-world applications or correlations, I tend to make up names based on how they sound phonetically, and those are always in-the-moment type choices I make while looking at my keyboard and Frankensteining syllables until a name emerges. For real-world based things, I usually look up census records from the time period/location for inspiration or I pull up the various family trees my mother has researched and find fun names from there. Some examples of the latter could be seen in the pirate story I want to write sometime: Rook Sinclair, Avery Tremaine, and Olivier d' Aubrecicourt (father’s name)/de Malet (mother’s name). I’ve also got a Lyde and Nikita on deck, a Lucas, Pierce, and Ilya for a spy novella, and a whole range of various vampires (Felix, Jericho, Eden, Blair, Asher, Ricca, Naoya, Nebraska, Charon, etc.)

As for title words, lord, where do I begin? We already know I almost exclusively title my stories with obscure, one-worded things. I usually find words for that kind of thing by using obscure word dictionaries or online resources like the Haggard Hawks twitter (if you don’t follow this twitter you are missing the fuck out). I also keep a running list on a desktop sticky note of words I come across that I’m fond of and might potentially use if I come up with a premise that suits the word. The DVerse novels in particular required a lot of long hours of research and digging to find Ancient Greek/Latin vocabulary that fit the overarching themes of each book without sounding jarring or bad as title words. For those I’ve got things like Thanatoses, Skiamakhia, Aletheia, Nepenthe, Dakethumos, Philaimatos, etc.

Current words on my list I’d like to write stories around/for would be Philamot (the brownish orange of dead leaves) or Aiteall (a fine spell of weather between showers of rain), with that latter one being one of the few reasons I’d ever consider doing a sixth Tempest book, simply because it fits the overarching title theme of that series.

As for words that may inspire scenes, that’s trickier. I do have one example that sticks out in my head. When it comes to the sequel to Ossuary, Reliquary (oh look, another title word teaser), a large part of what made me want to write it came from the idea of “infestation.” I don’t want to go into a ton of detail since Ossuary only just came out and I’d hate to spoil the ending for anyone, but as I was working on the notes for it, that word just stuck in my head and wouldn’t let go. The idea of something inhuman and wrong “infesting” a mundane, domestic space, worrying away at the once-comfortable trappings and existing within its confines in a way that is just patently WRONG wouldn’t leave me, and it’s become a large feature of what makes that sequel so horrifying. In Ossuary, the horror of Thierry’s surroundings was obvious. He’s in a crypt. He’s surrounded by the dead and dying; it’s simply human nature to recoil from dead things. Domestic horror, though, and the idea of the once-comforting domestic setting becoming “infested” with something that shouldn’t be there…

Well, that’s a hallmark of lots of horror, and it helped me define what sort of terror I want the audience to feel as they read it.

I think that’s the only concrete word I’ve currently got influencing any specific scenes or themes in a story right now. Typically, I’m more guided by “feelings” or specific energies I want to convey to a reader, and a lot of that isn’t so easily captured in just one word.

Only one question, which means we’re going to wrap things up a little shorter than usual this month. There’s plenty to make up for it though in terms of upcoming events and projects, and on that note, I hope I get to see some of you guys at some conventions this year—lord knows I’m going to be attending and tabling at a lot of them—and that you’re enjoying Ossuary. We’ll finish up the last of our clan deep dives next month and move on to some more fun things come April, and not just in our blog rotation! But more on that later. I’ve rambled on long enough here, and I’d hate to spoil the surprise.

Until next time,

T.D. Cloud

#author blog #blog #dverse #the dark vagaries #vampires

0 notes

risingshards · 2 years

Text

#9 5/21/22: Balancing Two Projects (Via Whiteboard)

I had a bit of an issue between my two main projects; not a huge thing but one was going very smoothly—Rising Shards is so fun to write and the words are just flowing lately and the characters (I'm not as depressed as I was a few weeks ago but the writing is still going well which is really great!), in the best way possible, just will not shut up lately, it's so rewarding and MMMM I'm so happy with RS right now—the "problem" there was whenever I was working on my other current main project (currently called ZERO or Project Zero, something I've mainly been working on for my writing workshop friends), I kept just thinking "Man I should be doing Rising Shards right now, I wanna do Rising Shards" to which the characters all joyously start rambling at me. So the positive is Rising Shards is going SO well and is so fulfilling and I'm just really feeling good about where it's at and my progress towards The Big Goals™.

My solution right now to get some early work done and continue with my other? I bought a white board (I'm a very cool person I know). I moved one of my desks to it and made a zone JUST for Zero (and for freelance editing work when I really want to focus) as I brainstorm more and really figure out what I want this other project to be.

As of now, my hope is that I can write a concise, "less precious" marketable manuscript that I can more freely shop around with agents and not get completely devastated at rejections, something I wouldn't be as sad to let editors and publishers handle outside of my control. Does that sound cynical? That's something I have to wrestle with and have frequently wrestled with for non-RS projects. With RS being my like main "This is me on the page, I can be in complete control of it and release it as I like" series, Zero is the more like "OK I'll play by the rules more" one. I'm sure I've written about that part before. I'm not sure if it's gonna be MG, YA, or adult but I would guess YA? IDK. I have a prologue chapter I think I also mentioned that my workshop group really liked so I should continue along that way. So far it's been really tough, but a challenge I want to tackle. Another step I have to take for this: as noted on the board, expand my horizons. I have all these influences that go into RS that have worked to help me figure out how to make a webnovel, but my actual print book influences are more lacking. I read a lot...of stuff that tickles the Rising Shards part of my brain (which let's be real is probably most of my creative side) but I really want to challenge myself to find things outside of that. A question I keep asking myself for this is "what else am I capable of?" The answer may be "not this" but I want to try!

So my hope is to find influences that can help me more here. I study games, manga, movies, tv shows, webcomics, webnovels, etc. a lot for inspiration, but I feel like (get ready for a major NO DUH statement) if I'm trying to write a trad pub manuscript, I should probably read more trad pub manuscripts. I'm really picky though so I have to figure out stuff I wanna read, or ways to muscle through For the Research™. I want to read lots more YA, fantasy, scifi, that sort of thing. I don't know how much I'll blog on the reading part of this, but it is part of my ongoing journey writing this manuscript and my attempts to balance it and Rising Shards.

#writing #writeblr #creative writing #webnovels #rising shards

0 notes

nanowrimo · 3 years

Text

3 Most Common Worldbuilding Mistakes for Writers and How to Fix Them

Every year, we’re lucky to have great sponsors for our nonprofit events. World Anvil, a 2021 NaNoWriMo sponsor, helps you develop and organize your characters, plot, and world setting. Today, World Anvil founder Janet Forbes is here to share some pro tips for worldbuilding. Don’t forget to check out the offer to NaNoWriMo writers for 30% off a World Anvil membership!

I talk to hundreds of writers every week, in our World Anvil Q&A live streams, our World Anvil writing challenges, and meetings with our professional authors. And mostly, they’re encountering the same few worldbuilding problems! Here are the 3 most common worldbuilding mistakes, and how you can fix them:

1. Mary-Sue Worldbuilding

You’re probably familiar with the Mary-Sue—a flawless, artificial-feeling main character. Mary Sue Worldbuilding follows in the same vein. If everything in your setting is directly related to your main character, it feels like the world revolves around them. It’s too convenient and artificial. That’s Mary-Sue worldbuilding.

Mary-Sue worldbuilding is usually caused by worldbuilding exclusively around your plot. Introducing larger-scale conflict in the backdrop of your setting, current affairs like civil or religious movements, war, disasters, or technological breakthroughs, can help expand the world beyond just your main character.

Your main character might interact with these elements, or more usually, with problems caused by them. For example, they might help some refugees from “that war over there”. But your character should not be at the core of everything—they’re not the cause of the war. Other things are happening outside of your story, in the background. (Pro-tip: this is a great way to reinforce your genre and themes, and make your world feel alive and expansive, too!).

Fixing Mary-Sue Worldbuilding Of course you’ll need a series bible like World Anvil to help you keep these current affairs organized, connect them together, and make sure you don’t lose your notes! Use World Anvil’s worldbuilding templates to get inspired for your big conflicts, and remember - you only need to write a few bullet points to start with! You can always expand more later (we’ll talk more about that in a moment).

World Anvil’s Worldbuilding Templates are custom-made by experts to help inspire and guide your creativity—and you can customize your own templates too!

2. Mosaic Worldbuilding

You know those computer game worlds where each area feels like a self-contained zone? Where the “desert” region and the “forest” region have no trade, communication, or overlap between them? That, in a nutshell, is Mosaic worldbuilding. It ruins suspension of disbelief, makes your novel setting feel false, and can pull your readers out of your story!

Fixing Mosaic Worldbuilding

The best way to avoid Mosaic Worldbuilding is to make sure that you have a clear overview of your world early on, with each major region and concept penned out in just a sentence or two. That way, each region will feel like a connected aspect of your seamless setting, not a tile shoved on the side.

On World Anvil, each world setting has a “Worldbuilding Meta” section to help you detail the 10,000 foot overview—the big stuff. And not just your physical world and its people, but your genre, your motivations, and your themes. This invaluable reference tool helps you expand your setting and add more detail, and will also help you sense-check what you’re adding!

Once you have a clear picture of your meta, and know the overview of your world, it’ll be easy to make use of cultural aspects like imports and travellers, cultural diasporas and geographical transition zones to make your world seem more connected and less artificially divided! And you’ll be able to do it without spending too much extra time worldbuilding. Which brings me to my final common worldbuilding mistake…

World Anvil’s Worldbuilding Meta tool helps you focus, streamline and sense-check your world setting! It’s full of guides to create an excellent overview for your worldbuilding project. This is the view mode of Manifold Sky by B.C.G. Wurth.

3. Worldbuilder’s Disease

Sounds nasty, right? Well, Worldbuilder’s Disease is a very common problem—a compulsion to continue worldbuilding things which aren’t actually useful. Here’s my favorite example—the “elven shoes”:

In your world you have elves. They wear shoes. So far, so good. Maybe there’s a plot-point where an imposter’s revealed because they’re wearing the wrong shoes. So you fill in a few details on your series bible. But if you find yourself writing a 5,000 word treatise on elven shoes through the ages… honey, you have worldbuilder’s disease.

I use shoes as an example, but it could be anything. It might be detailing three centuries of monarchy, or expanding unvisited areas in excruciating detail. Sure, it can be fun, but all that time spent on unnecessary parts of your setting isn’t helping you polish the core parts—or get your novel written! It’s distracting you from your primary goal.

Curing Worldbuilder’s Disease

There are three major causes of worldbuilders disease:

Lack of perspective

Lovers of prose

Fear of losing your ideas

1. Lack of perspective

Lack of perspective can often lead down a worldbuilding rabbit hole. Keep clarity on what’s important in your setting with tools like World Anvil’s Worldbuilding Meta. This helps you define your active worldbuilding area - not just geographical but thematic areas—which helps streamline your world and your project, so you can be sure you’re spending your time where it counts!

Also, be clear with yourself WHY you’re worldbuilding the element you’re working on. Keep clear notes in your series bible about how this new element fits into your novel. If it’s little more than set dressing, you only need a few words. For a core concept, you might need more.

2. Lovers of Prose

As writers, we love to write (duh)! But for most of us, writing in prose in our series bible can cause serious problems. Not only does it mean that you write MORE than we should (your get in flow, words happen!), it’s also harder to reference your ideas quickly later on. Stick to short, organized articles in note form. Make sure the salient information is there, and link in anything relevant. You can always expand to prose later if you need to.

Keep your series bible in brief notes with clear headers! This character article took 5 minutes using World Anvil’s character template which automatically adds the headers. The linked articles help me easily reference related people and places as I’m writing.

3. Fear of losing our ideas

Fear of losing our ideas is actually one of the most common reasons for worldbuilder’s disease—that we’ll forget or lose our notes if we don’t write them out in vast detail. To combat this, make sure you have somewhere to keep your world details safe, organized, tagged and searchable. Then you can reassure yourself that you can go back and develop more later if you need it.

Obviously, World Anvil is custom made for this, backing up everything in one place and linking everything together, so you can easily search, reference and update your series bible whilst writing your manuscript and not have to worry about losing things!

Anything here ring true for you? Or maybe you’re struggling with another worldbuilding mistake or problem? You can always hop into our live streamed Q&A sessions on our Twitch channel and ask us directly! We go live three times a week to answer questions about writing and worldbuilding, as well as helping our community with World Anvil queries too! Maybe we’ll see you there. And happy worldbuilding :)

Janet Forbes is a published fantasy author and RPG writer, whose recent credits include the Dark Crystal RPG with the Henson Company (coming 2021). In 2017, she and her husband created World Anvil, the ultimate worldbuilding and novel writing platform. World Anvil helps you organize, store and develop your worldbuilding and series bible privately, and market your books to the world too! The inbuilt novel writing software, accessible from anywhere, integrates seamlessly with your worldbuilding. And when it’s time to publish, you can export, or publish directly on the World Anvil platform and monetize YOUR way! Check it out at World Anvil.

#nanowrimo #camp nanowrimo #writing #amwriting #worldbuilding #writing advice #by nano sponsor #world anvil #janet forbes

563 notes · View notes

maraudererasmut · 3 years

Text

Life Update and All That

Hey all!

It’s T here!

I know it’s been a very long while since I’ve been around, and I figured I’m finally at the point where I can pop by and give a bit of an update, in case anyone was curious.

I left Tumblr and Discord for a bit to get my bearings and re-evaluate things. I needed some time to myself to sort through my mental health, figure some stuff out, and get to the point where I was finally at a better place to be able to come back.

A few things have happened since I’ve left that are actually kind of neat!

I published a book and wrote another manuscript!

I’m not going to share too much information about my book here, because I still do want to keep my smut-writing-pseudonym separate from my professional life, but suffice it to say that I published a novella, which got me started on the strange journey that is publishing!

I’m currently in the process of querying my first full-length manuscript, with the intention of getting an agent and publishing it. Hopefully that will be able to go somewhere, but if not, at least I have learned a lot while on my journey!

I realized that I am trans!

To the shock and surprise of absolutely nobody, the person who wrote gay romance and focused on a storyline that predominantly featured a transmasc character is actually, in fact, gay and trans. Shocking, I know!

It took a bit of thinking and talking and self analyzing that mostly occured during the many, many hours of alone time provided by a global pandemic for me to realize that wanting to be a boy does, in fact, make you probably a boy. Who would have guessed.

Anyway, I’m going by he/they pronouns these days. And uh... I guess my descriptions of dysphoria in all of my fics were a bit closer to home than I was ever willing to admit. Funny how these things work.

I bought a house!

I finally did something that I never thought would be possible in my entire life: I actually purchased a house in my city, which is notoriously expensive. It’s the perfect home for me: a large backyard; my very own shop space, which will soon be filled with tools; a sunroom with tons of windows for writing; a roof that I can climb up to and sit on... It’s really such a great home, and I am so excited to start this new chapter of my life here.

One door closed and another opened!

When I first left, there was a job opportunity that was a bit up in the air that would’ve involved me uprooting my life. While it didn’t end up panning out, I was ended up stumbling upon a different job in my field. I almost forgot how much I love what I do, and I am so glad to be back into the thick of it!

I figured that I should probably also try to pre-emptively answer any questions that you may have while I’m here and typing this all out. So... here goes!

Will you be continuing *insert fanfiction*?

I’m honestly not sure. The best answer that I can give right now is: Maybe?

I definitely want to try to continue some of my storylines, tie up some loose ends, and actually put together those plots that I had swirling around my mind.

That being said, I also have other projects that are currently on the go that might take precidence. Most importantly, I have several original stories that I plan to eventually query (or even publish, if I can!).

If I find that I am inspired to go back and write more Wolfstar, rest assured, I absolutely WILL. These boys will always hold a special place in my heart, and I honestly don’t know if I will ever be truly rid of them, even if I tried.

Will you still be making art for the fandom?

Again, I’m not sure.

I’ve been doing a LOT of fanart, on a different account, just to keep up my skills while I was away. There are quite a few fandoms that I have been making art for, and I don’t know yet if I want to merge these two accounts.

That’s a decision for the future. :P

But you can always try to pop into my ask box and send a request, and if I can get to it, I will try my absolute best.

You and I have unfinished business!! Will you be getting to that?!

Ah, yes. I remember now. I left the fandom while I was in a very BAD place, and most things fell by the wayside while I worked on my mental health. I’m sorry.

If we do have any kind of unfinished business at all that you need to talk to me about, please do! I want to try to resolve things and make sure that everyone is satisfied with whatever solution we can come to. Feel free to reach out, and I will try my absolute best to respond and rectify.

Rest assured, if we have had any kind of negative interraction in the past, I have absolutely spent the past year and a half allowing that to eat away at me. I’ve been feeling guilt up the wazoo, a ball of anxiety so tight, you could probably play baseball with it.

I’m trying not to let these kinds of things bother me anymore. I’m trying to learn to let things go, and focus on the present and the future. I am truly sorry for things that I have done in the past, but I am finally at the point where I am ready to put my effort into making things better instead of dwelling on what was.

Will you be active on this blog now? Are you back for good?

I think you already know the answer to that question...

I don’t know.

I haven’t made any decisions yet about whether or not I’m here to lurk and like and reblog or if I’m going to be actually producing content again. I have no idea yet how active I will be here. That really depends on how I’m feeling, how I’m doing mentally, and what the reception to this post looks like.

So... Maybe?

DID YOU MISS ME WHEN YOU WERE GONE?

Yes. Yes, I did.

If you are actually asking me this question, chances are that I did miss you. Yes, you specifically. Yes, I thought about you a lot. Yes, I wished that I had the courage to go back and just say “HI, I MISSED YOU, PLEASE CAN WE BE FRIENDS AGAIN!”

I am not great at reaching out, though. I’m not great at handling my emotions period. Hopefully, if you’re wondering if I missed you, you’d be interested in reconnecting, knowing that I did, in fact, miss you a lot.

Are you okay now?

I will be.

Even when I’m not okay these days, I at least have the wherewithall to be able to say “while I might not be doing great right now, I know that I will be okay.”

And isn’t that what we all want? :P

Anyway, if you made it this far, thanks for reading. I hope this was interesting and/or informative.

And... I’m glad that I wrote this. It helped.

With love,

#maraudererasmut #writing my thoughts out #T Talks

79 notes · View notes

celestewritestoomuch · 2 years

Text

In order to actually kickstart my will to write, I’ve decided to compile a couple of my favourite writing tips, which are the sole reason that I’ve ever finished a draft in my whole life. If I suddenly come up/find more ideas, I might make this a series but I’m not going to get ahead of myself.

Anyway, everybody welcome:

Celeste’s (not quite) exhaustive list of fun writing tricks AKA the reason I will die before showing anyone a first draft, with examples!

Don’t wanna write the upcoming scene/line/dialogue? Don’t do it!

The best this I ever did for myself involves these little darlings: [ ]

If there’s a line, or scene that I simply just don’t want to write, I do this.

“[insert sarcastic and unnecessary comment here that will make the readers lol]”

95% of the time, I try to make them mildly entertaining like this example so that future me knows exactly what past me was on about. The other 5% of the time, future me will look at something that looks like this: [something happens idk figure it out future me] and just give up and look for the next entertaining one, so do be careful with this trick.

Start writing from the scene you wanna write the most.

Seriously, trust me on this one. Write whatever you feel inspired to write, alongside the chronological draft. I have a section at the bottom of the document I write on called “random scenes for shits and giggles”.

I name each scene (usually looks something like this: they did the thing whee they argue but actually wanna jump each other so there’s that) and then when I look at the contents, I know which one of the mini fanfics I write are going into the main draft.

Fun fact, in my current WIP the chapter my beta readers have liked the best was a little mini fanfic I write for my own personal joy and liked so much that I forced into the manuscript. They say it helps to pace the novel, I say it helps to make me happy, which is basically the same thing, when you really think about it.

Leave comments for yourself on your document

I mean, firstly they’re like little love letters, but they involve potential plot points and things I need to research, and it keeps it all in one place. I love leaving little sarcastic notes for myself so I can be motivated to prove past me wrong. Also so that I can laugh a little at the expense of my poor characters. No, I am not a sadist, I’m an author, get it right.

Write in comic sans/change your font regularly.

Any time I come back to a novel after a long period of time, the first thing I do is change the font. I always have to pick fonts that are dyslexia friendly even if I don’t like the aesthetics, and I always recommend it to my writer friends who aren’t dyslexic. I can’t see why it wouldn’t help.

I generally switch between Times New Roman (which according to google is, and I find it easy to read so….) and Comic Sans since they’re the only ones I can use without getting overloaded, but I always say, the more fonts you can change, the easier it will be to find mistakes and spelling errors.

Have two WIPs going at once

You will have to take this one with a pinch of salt, but I have my main WIP which I’m hoping to query very soon!!! And the next one I wanna publish going at the same time. Why? Because I have the attention span of a peanut, that’s why, and when I wanna write, I wanna write. But I get bored of writing. So, my second WIP is what I call my procrastination project. It allows me to use my imagination more, compared to the one I’m currently fine tuning. All the examples I’ve provided so far are from my secondary WIP, which is a completely different genre from my main WIP. We won’t discuss my tertiary one for now. I don’t wanna confuse you all.

That’s it for today, since all of a sudden I really wanna get back to working on my main WIP. Hopefully this has helped you! And if you want more tips from your neighbourhood capital letter hating writer be sure to let me know. :)

#teen author #teen writer #writer #author #beta reader #writer problems #writing #writerslife #writing tips #writing hacks #I seriously don’t know what to tag this so that it gets to the people who need it icl #are you procrastinating writing? me too? pls read this so I feel less bad!

10 notes · View notes

kiingocreative · 3 years

Text

The Structure of Story is now available! Check it out on Amazon, via the link in our bio, or at https://kiingo.co/book

I often feel that it took me thirty years to write my first book, No Pain, No Game. Not because I was physically writing it for that long, but because finally publishing my first novel felt like the culmination of three decades of bad writing, half-finished novels, random short-stories and a million mundane diary entries. It took that long to experiment with my craft, hone my skills, and master the fear of putting my work out there for all to see.

Exaggerations aside, it actually took me three years to write No Pain, No Game, from typing the first word on an otherwise blank page to having a fully-fledged, ready-to-publish novel. Those three years consisted of mostly undisciplined writing, sitting down to work on the story as and when the urge arose, sometimes not looking at it for weeks on end, and only getting back to it when inspiration hit. Only when I got serious about publishing did I put in the hours consistently, whether or not I was in the mood for it. The whole experience felt like not so much like long distance running, but more like a slow, often sluggish stop-start stroll, with a heart-pumping sprint at the very end.

I came out of having published the book revved up from adrenaline, soaking in the momentum, fretting for more and ready to do it all again. Out came the laptop again, the rush to get the first draft over and done with and the mad rush into editing-land.

It’s a Marathon, Not a Sprint (and not interval running, and not a slow leisurely walk)

The thing with sprinting, however, is that if you do it for too long, you quickly run out of breath and I soon learnt that maintaining that level of effort over time was unsustainable. Somewhere in the middle of editing my first draft, I hit a wall.

A big, fat, hundred feet high brick and mortar monster of a wall. I never saw it coming, and I face-planted right into it. For weeks after that I couldn’t look at my manuscript or social media, and I had to take a proper break from it all to restore.

The break gave me a chance to introspect and take stock of what had happened. It felt to me that, if I wanted to keep on writing more books (which I did) I had to pivot from my disorganised style of writing to a more committed endeavour. There’s nothing wrong with a leisurely walk, or random bouts of interval running, but I realised it wouldn’t give me the kind of results I was truly after. I had to look at writing as a marathon, and build the sort of stamina and endurance I needed to do this many times over without burning out.

From Dilettante to Disciplined Writer

When I think back to writing my first book, I wonder if there’s some truth in the saying that ignorance is bliss. Because I was less focused on the outcome at the time, I was better able to enjoy the ups and downs of the process, especially because I only sat to work at it when I felt like it. I was also mostly unaware of the mountain of logistics that come with writing and publishing a book, so I’d be able to see the distance I’d covered, without worrying about the miles that still stretched ahead of me. Yes, ignorance was, most definitely, a little bit like bliss.

Reminiscing on her own experience, author Shamika Lindsay says that, with her first book, ‘the process felt so different and [she] almost felt the pen gliding across the paper but with [the sequel], it was like pulling teeth’. In fact, she adds, starting to write her second book from scratch felt like ‘such a chore and [she] was just so eager to complete it because [she] felt like it took so much from [her] to write than the first book’.

For R. G. Tully, author of the Ardamin series, who put greater emphasis on the editing stage when working on his second book, the process also took longer and wasn’t always enjoyable. ‘The editing grind was exactly that, a grind’, he confesses.

But you have to do it whether you like it or not, because the only way out is through. There are, fortunately or unfortunately, no shortcuts. Fortunately, because it’s the very act of going through that arduous journey that makes you a better writer in the end. And unfortunately, because there can be times it’s just not all that pleasant.

You’ll be surprised the amount of distractions that manifest themselves when you desperately need a reason not to work on your manuscript — it’s actually quite spooky. Treating writing with discipline, organisation and professionalism is exactly what will prevent you falling off tracks, and what ultimately gets the work done. And that’s the difference between a published book and one that’ll sit indeterminately unfinished somewhere in your archives.

A Tough Act to Follow

Unfortunately, there’s still a little bit more to writing your second book than just great discipline. Even when you’re able to get yourself to follow through and show up for your craft, giving your first book a literary sibling can come with its own challenges, especially because you have something to compare it to.

And it’s not only you, but your readers too, who will be expecting certain standards from your writing, especially if it’s a series. Though it shouldn’t come in the way of writing the book you want to write, the relationship of trust you’ve built with your readership through your first book still needs to be honoured, and this can cause certain amounts of pressure.

‘I felt a little pressure to keep the same feel about the story’, R. G. Tully says, ‘and to include more from my secondary characters, give them a little more depth’.

Stormi Lewis, author of the Sophie Lee trilogy, puts it simply: ‘It was a little hard to decide how to exactly start [with the second book]. At first I was worried and became overwhelmed because so many loved the first one. I didn’t want to let anyone down. I had to step back and come to terms that they loved it for being unique. And the only way I could stay true to the story and give them what they really wanted was to focus on the story and not so much about what I thought they wanted for the second.’

For others, the comparison can be more inward-facing, like author Tara Lake, who admits that writing the second book in her series has been a challenge, because she’s ‘struggled with comparison of the self: past Tara had a lot more time to devote to writing, present Tara has much less time with [her] kids being home full time from school during much of the pandemic’.

For others still, some of that pressure can be self-imposed. When writing her second book, Freya McMillan shares that ‘[she] put a huge amount of pressure on [herself] as [she] wanted it to be meaningful in a particular way to honour [her] dad, who died a few years ago. Once [she] stopped doing that, it was much less challenging to write’.

It Ain’t All Bad.

I do want to pause here and add that not everyone faces such challenges. There are authors out there who launched into writing their second book with more ease than the first.

Sabrina Voerman tells me that ‘[her] second book came a lot easier to [her] than [her] first book. The idea hit [her] so hard and fast that it took [her] aback, and [she] could do nothing but write it’, and the entire novel was written in a matter of weeks, whilst her first book took years to finish.

Same for Trevor Wiltzen, who says that writing the sequel to his first book went smoothly, greatly helped by the fact that ‘[he] wrote the second book immediately after the first, [so he] knew the characters really well’. He admits he ‘found it very freeing and really enjoyed the process’.

Even Stormi Lewis, who struggled at first, adds that ‘once [she] got started, [she] was fine’ and that ‘[she] felt the writing was solid and [her] best book yet, simply because [she] really got to develop more of the characters and the story’.

As with everything, we must then conclude, there will be as many types of experiences as there are writers out there. So how can we best prepare for what’s to come?

A Chance to Grow

Performance coach Tony Robbins says that the quality of our lives is intricately linked to the quality of the questions we ask ourselves on a daily basis. So if we need to face something that’s outside our comfort zone — starting again from scratch on your second book for instance — is it a punishment or is it a gift? Is it a curse or an opportunity?

I’m tempted to think that the level of discomfort that can come with writing your second book is a gift, because it gives us a chance to grow.

It’s a chance to take everything we’ve learnt from doing it the first time around and take our learnings for a spin to see if it makes the process easier. It’s an opportunity to improve, to work at our craft in new and wonderful ways.

It’s both daunting and incredibly exciting to face a brand new story — or a different side to the same story for those writing series — and to dare to plunge into the unknown of where it’s fated to take you. It’ll see you grow and evolve as a writer and, in turn, you’ll get to watch your writing morph into something more mature than it was before.

I say look at your writing like you do the passing of seasons: different times will have different qualities, different characteristics, different feels to them. You live and learn through each of them, and gather a wealth of experiences that eventually inform who you become. Maintaining the discipline to write through every single one of them is what will ultimately give your work all its depth and substance.

All it takes is that first word on the page.

And the second.

And the third.

And all the words beyond that.

#writingtips #screenwriting #creative writing #writers on tumblr #writers #writing #writerblr #writing advice #writing community #writing resources

40 notes · View notes

shintorikhazumi · 3 years

Text

“Daydream.”

A/N: I have NOT written in a while. Or posted rather. It’s been.... a month??? I’m sorry. It’s been.. hard. I also have summer classes which are slowly choking me. Yey.

Anyway, I hope... you all enjoy? I think I’m rusty. There are a lotta plotholes and some... hhrnnghh characterization that i feel iffy about. I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

Anywhooooo. Thank you to my lovely platonic crushie @tanuki-pyon hihi for allowing me to use your drawing for inspiration ;-;. Thank youuu <3 Hope you like this.

Enjoy?

~Shintori Khazumi

It is a bustling city, full of life and vivid color. The songs of the late afternoon played- their notes produced by that independent street musician, backed by the passing cars beneath the balcony, the rhythmic dripping of a loose faucet in the bath, and the rustle of leaves caused by a passing breeze that caresses her cheek.

Life, color, music, and a touch.

They all paint a particular picture- one of wine-red eyes, and a charming smile; brown locks that she had tucked behind a heated ear, adorned with exotic jewelry she had purchased for her.

As she draws the cup away from her lips, she sighs in contentment, the distinctive taste of Boldo tea and the dimming rays of light blanketing the expanse of what she could see making her smile bittersweet.

It's getting late.

She knows she has to finish her packing. After all, this fleeting vacation is a dream she'd have to wake up from, come the morning rays of tomorrow. It was short-lived, but she'd like to think these few moments in the city or Buenos Aires are moments worth remembering forever.

Even if there was a possibility that they were but a daydream.

That she is her daydream.

Her phone rings, and she sighs a different sigh. It's one of disappointment and reluctance as walks into the room, swiping the blinking gadget off the table. She taps the green icon, placing the device by her ear, eyes dulling as she listens to the speaker on the other end with poorly-veiled disinterest.

["-Are you listening?! Do you understand? The moment you step off that plane, your fiance will be there to greet you. Then he will drive you to work, and you will-"]

Her face contorts in disgust at the statement. "He's not my fiance." She says, voice cold and adamant.

["Diana! How could you say that- about Andrew Hanbridge, no less! The man who has not once given up on you, unlike all the other low-life suitors out there. He's rich, intelligent, charming, and well-mannered."]

Diana scoffs at the very first descriptor of the man she was to marry supposedly. 'Rich'. Of course he had to be.

"Listen here, and listen well. You've been off on these silly trips, writing god knows what for well over ten years. It's time you grew up and got married, and inherited the corporation!"

Diana grits her teeth, hands crumpling a few papers on the table. She immediately regrets that action as she realizes her manuscripts now have ugly creases in them, much like her own plans for life. Not that those were any easier to iron out.

["Then dinner at the Hanbridges will be at seven-thirty. Sharp. I have a dress prepared for you in your room. We will be discussing your wedding with And-"]

And she hangs up.

Turning her phone off, she throws it onto her mattress, the silken covers causing the device to slide right off and onto the floor with a thud.

Diana curses as she rushes over, checking for any cracks or damage. She hasn't turned the lights on, and her open balcony does not give her much light, so she opts to run her fingers over the screen, praying she hadn't broken anything. As able as she was to afford a phone, that doesn't mean she wanted a change at any time.

...also, her number was saved here. Diana isn’t good enough with phones to know how to retrieve that.

Diana sighs again. This time it is of relief. She leans back with a plop against the side of the bed, staring blankly at her wall.

Tomorrow... she leaves.

Tomorrow, she never sees her again.

Tomorrow, she talks of marriage plans with two families who couldn't care less about what she actually desires in life.

Tomorrow... she's gone. She may as well be dead if she wouldn't even be 'living' in the first place.

Tomorrow...

What would she be doing?

Where would she be at?

Would she still have the same smile on her face as she greeted the passersby who would freeze in place, stand in awe as time stilled for them as they become entranced in the magic that was her dance?

Diana frowns.

Would someone else fall in love with her?

Like Diana has?

...Would she... fall in love with them back...?

Diana feels a pang in her heart as she slumps to the floor, now lying against the hard wood. If she were back in the UK, she wouldn't be caught *dead* in this position. Her aunt would have her head.

She blinks, staring at the ceiling.

Oh? It's quite comfortable, she thinks, consciousness slipping into nothingness.

-It's a slap to her cheek that has her sitting up in haste, body moving in a trained way of self-defense as she arrests the perpetrator in a hold face-down onto the floors.

"Diana! Diana! Fu- shit! Waitwaitwaitwait-owowowowow it huuurtsss, it hurtsssss!!!"

And it’s a familiar voice that cuts through her panic, and makes her let go rather clumsily, resulting in more hurt for Diana’s victim.

“Akko!” She exclaims, happiness and concern in her voice.

“Well, you sure look happy. Are you into this sort of play?” The girl chuckles wryly, rubbing at her joints as she fixes herself into a seated position on the floor as Diana kneels in front of her, confused at the words.

“Play?”

“Yeah. BDSM, that kind of stuff.”

Diana flushes at the bold remark, floundering helplessly as her mind ceases to produce a coherent response.

Akko watches her with open amusement, head resting against her one propped up knee. She hugs the limb, keeping her steady as she stares at Diana unabashedly.

Diana stares back.

“Wh-what.”

“You’re beautiful.”

“I-! Ah-uh, nnggh?!” Diana doesn’t know if she’s going into a seizure. Maybe she is. Maybe she should have gone to med school after all, to confirm-

“Pff-” Akko begins giggling, then cackling, then just falling onto her back, hollering in laughter on the floor.

“Wh-what! What… why are you laughing? I- Did i do something silly?”

Akko wipes a tear from her eyes, laying on her stomach and propping her head up on both hands as she faces Diana. “You’re silly.” She teases, tongue poking out, eyes crinkled moons.

Diana can’t help herself, biting onto the bait.

It’s a deep kiss, and Diana didn’t know she knew how to do it.

What do people call it? French kissing?

They pull apart and Akko presses her sweaty forehead to Diana’s, chuckling breathlessly against her lips.

“Many types of attacks today, Miss Cavendish. You are one powerful woman with a vast arsenal.” She jests, a hand reaching to cup Diana’s face and pull her back in for a chaster peck on the lips that turns into two, then three.

“I like to have many options at my disposal.” Diana sighs into every brush of their lips, returning a few of her own, nipping at Akko’s bottom lip as she leads her into a submissive position, lying on her back with Diana hovering over her.

“Boy, am I glad you do…” Akko whispers, eyes glued to Diana’s glistening mouth, the pair leaning closer and closer and- “OHMYGOSH-WAIT. THIS. This is not what I came here to do!” Akko yelps, pushing Diana’s face away and accidentally spraining her neck.

Diana groans as she rubs at her nape, cursing quietly.

“SHIT SORRY”

Diana waves her concern away as she offers a crooked grin.

“Sorry, sorry, sorry. I’m sorry, Diana. Sorry, I-”

“Akko.” Diana giggles, carefully nearing the girl once again. She leans in slowly this time- just in case-, and plants a kiss on her cheek. “How and why did you come find me?” She asks, tone joyful, yet pained.

“Because I know you’re leaving tomorrow.”

Diana hears a record scratch, and the city’s music comes to a pause. It’s deathly silent, and her breath catches in her lungs, heart painful.

Diana’s smile falls, as she places distance between them, sitting formally in front of Akko.

“You…”

“You told me in your sleep…” Akko murmurs, her words playing flashbacks in Diana’s mind- memories of a night that was not supposed to exist.

“No- I… I… Akko…”

Voices in her head play back all her duties, her realities that tell her that the woman in front of her is not a part of them. She’s a daydream, and she’s- as all daydreams are- a fleeting one.

Diana has to wake up tomorrow morning. She has to go back tomorrow.

She has to be ‘the real Diana Cavendish’ again. Not because she wants to be. But because she is.

“Diana, I need to say that-”

“Then- then…” Diana cuts Akko off before she can deal more damage to her mental state. “Then you must know… that being here… makes it harder for me not to leave.” Diana replied with a crack in her voice. “I can’t stay, Akko. I can’t. Even if I wanted to…” She whispered, unable to project her voice.

“Diana, that’s not what this is abou-”

“I can’t stay here, Akko! I’m supposed to go home and get married!”

Her eyes widen, and so do Akko’s. Diana… doesn’t know what to say. Neither does Akko. They both remain frozen in time and in place.

“I can’t… stay here… with you…” She feels a tear slip past her cheek… then another, and another, until they dribble down her chin and onto the back of her hands that are clenched on her lap. “You’re a daydream… and… and…”

“A reality you won’t face?” Akko asks, voice surprisingly steady and clear. “I’m not a daydream, Diana Cavendish. I’m not a figment of your imagination.” She speaks, voice bolder as she gets up and walks up to Diana, making the girl crawl backwards as she hits her back against the foot of the bed.

Diana gasps as Akko grips her collar, pulling her closer to her. She instinctively closes her eyes, awaiting a hit- a punch, a slap, whatever it was.

And she gasps again as the soft caress, much like the gentle winds soothe her skin and her pounding heart.

“I’m not your summer getaway, or your escape from real life. I’m not a fairytale to lull you to bedtime that you forget once the sun rises.” Akko explains with a crooked smile, tears staining her cheeks as she buries her face into the crook of Diana’s neck. Her breaths tickle Diana there, and her tears pain Diana’s heart.

Diana moves to wrap her arms around Akko, but stops midway. She… doesn’t deserve to do that.

“...hold me…”

But Akko deserves to be listened to.

And so, Diana holds her. She holds her tight, and she doesn’t let go. Not until Akko wants her to.

“I’m not asking you to stay.” Akko murmurs against Diana’s skin as the latter runs her fingers through smooth strands of hair.

Diana admits that hearing that statement hurts as much as it relieves her.

Her sense of duty tells her she has to go back to her home in England and run her company, and yet her heart told her that Akko was her home, and that not staying would mean losing something that she might never be able to earn back again.

As much as it pained her to know more, she needs to. For both their sakes. “Then what must I do? What can I- we… what do you want me to do? What do you want us to do?”

Akko pulls back slightly, grinning sheepishly as she presses her feelings into a kiss against Diana’s lips, before pulling her up with her to head towards the door.

Upon opening it, Diana sees a few bags lined up against the wall, ready for a trip to god-knows-where.

Her mind wasn’t registering this at all-

“Bloody fuck.”

“Took you long enough to figure that one out, huh?” Akko laughs, bringing their joined hands to her lips, and kissing Diana’s palm. “Weren’t you supposed to be the smart one?”

“Well… I… holy shit…”

“I had no idea you could curse like that.”

“Mother of… my… arse…”

“Mother of your arse? Really?”

“Akko.”

“Yes?”

“Akko.”

“Yes, Diana.” Akko rolls her eyes, as she pats Diana’s cheek with her free hand. “You’re supposed to take me with you.”

“Bloody hell…” Diana murmurs. “Just marry me.”

“...”

“EH?! Really?!”

Bonus :>

“So why were you in my room that night in the first place?” Diana laughs, running her fingers along Akko’s cool arm, holding her close as they snuggled together in a hammock, reminiscing a daydream so long ago.

“Ehh... are you really asking me this right now? Diana, it’s been years since that happened.”

“And yet, I know you remember it as well as I do.” Diana laughs, knowing that Akko was rolling her eyes as she scoffs against her neck. “I’m right, aren’t I.”

“Cheeky.” Diana chuckles as Akko pokes her cheek in annoyance, but explains anyway. “I was knocking on the door, but you weren’t answering. I rang, and spoke through the intercom too. Then room service came by and I said I just forgot my key and they let me in.”

Diana feels slightly concerned about the security of that hotel. But wait, there are better questions that need answering.

“... then why did you slap me?”

“...”

“Akko?”

“Because you were asleep.”

Diana guffaws, disbelieving. There was no way she was that hard to awaken. She pulls back slightly, looking Akko in the eyes.

“You couldn’t have woken me up other ways?”

Akko looks away momentarily, feet already swung off to the side, as if she is about to step out. Which she did.

“...no?”

Diana watches her skeptically, now also sitting up.

“Akko?”

“Well, you know. It was nice chatting and all, but maybe I should get back to my practice for my road show and...”

“Akko? Akko… Akko why are you walking away? Akko- hey! Come back here- AKKO!-”

And she was gone, bolting like the wind, leaving Diana stunned and comically livid.

“ATSUKO KAGARI-CAVENDISH, YOU COME BACK HERE RIGHT. THIS. INSTANT!”

#diakko #diana cavendish #atsuko kagari #lwa #little witch academia #fanfic

39 notes · View notes

silvanable · 3 years

Note

If request are open, could I ask for Theo, Vincent, Leo, Arthur and Dazai finding out that MC is a manga artist/writer? Thank you so much!!

this is such a cute idea. as an artist and writer myself i take enormous pleasure it writing this and their reactions.

i switched these up a little bit, where the mc is an artist for one, a writer for another, and maybe both for yet another! i hope you enjoy~

↪ GUIDELINES

ー ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE

arthur just happens to find out on accident.

he knew that they had their hobbies and never really pried into that, it was something they did in their pastime just like how he was with his writing.

it just so happened to be that he was passing by the parlor when he noticed them inside with... was that his manuscript? and what were those other papers there?

nosiness curiosity got the best of him as he slips into the room to see what the mansion’s little visitor is up to.

he is, for once in his life, quite surprised to find the dear hunched over a pad of paper with a pencil in their hand.

he was quiet for a moment, examining what they were doing— which was clearly not writing— as their instrument moved over the page.

they shifted to look up at his manuscript, flipped a page, and was about to go back to their work when the noticed something from the corner of their eye.

arthur had leaned over the each of the seat, gaze fixed on the drawings in their lap and strewn about the table and seat.

the poor dear practically jumped out of their skin.

“arthur! don’t scare me like that!” they scolded him, face flush as they quickly tried to scramble and cover up their work.

“ah, was just curious to what you were doing, love,” he would flash them a grin and snatch up one of their papers before they could grab it.

“arthur, give it back!” they yelled in protest but he was far too quick for them.

his eyes scanned over the page, taking in the delicate lines of each character’s face and their expression, the texture and the design of the scenery and then his eyes fell to the dialogue...

“is this... holmes?” the genuine curiosity in his voice as he holds the paper out to them.

they try to snatch the page back but he jerks it up out of their reach before they can.

“yes okay! i’m sorry— i just saw your manuscript and i started reading it and... well, i just got inspired.”

now it has him curious and when arthur sets his mind to something, whether it be to unravel a mystery or get his questions answered, he’s going to get those answers.

after some encouragement, they finally admit to being a manga artist from their time— which as arthur understood was a unique artist who creates art to tell a story instead of words.

he is actually quite proud about the fact that his story is what motivated and drew out this creativity in them to the point they wanted to draw a ‘manga’ of his stories.

he absolutely keeps the page and a few other of their drawings he snatched up, every now and then when he’s working he finds himself drifting off to stare at it with a small smile.

ー DAZAI OSAMU

dazai was a writer and it seemed that the newest guest at the mansion was too.

of course, he never seemed to bring that up, as it seemed the writers of the mansion kept to themselves and wrote privately.

that was until the little darling had come stumbling up the stairs with an armful of paper.

of course they had not been looking where they were going, being rather preoccupied with trying to scribble down god-knows-what onto one of the pages, and walked straight into dazai as he was coming down.

he had acted fast, grabbing their wrist before they could tumble down the stairs, but the paper in their arms was less fortunate and thrown into the air.

“if you wanted to see me, ume-san, you could have just said so,” he greeted with his usual light and teasing voice.

the poor dear was flustered and apologizing profusely as they ducked around him, desperately trying to collect all of their paperwork.

well he was not just about to leave them like that, so dazai stooped to help them, only to find when he tried to reach for something they were quick to snatch it away.

the two made eye contact, both a look of surprise, as they stuttered out, “you don’t have to help— i dropped them.”

the reaction was rather cute but also he felt partially responsible, and because of this it became a game of who could snatch up what before the other.

“i— just— thanks, i’ll take those now!” the dear tried to take the papers from his hands once they were all collected, but the vampire danced around them breezily.

“why is toshiko-san so eager to get these back, hm?” he teased, flitting through what he had collected.

at first it was merely to poke fun, as he and arthur were known to do to people like poor isaac, but as he glanced over the notes and what looked like crude drawings he became intrigued.

those piercing golden eyes came up to a rather flustered person across from him, clearly embarrassed at having their work looked at.

“these are quite interesting,” his tone took on a strange seriousness as he handed them back, “what are they?”

even as flustered as the dear is, they take back their papers and shuffle them protectively in their arms, mutter a, “manga scripts and design ideas...”

of course the term was somewhat familiar to him, briefly recalling it being a rising trend before he died.

would become rather curious and invested in hearing about what the dear did in their time, finding it quite interesting that not only were they a writer but worked with artists to translate their stories visually.

ー LEONARDO DA VINCI

leonardo found it quite cute when he came across their little guest in their free time, seemingly distracted by whatever papers they had in their lap and strewn about them.

it was a reoccurring thing to find them like this as he wandered through the mansion on his way to his next nap.

this time though, that building curiosity of what they were doing finally seemed to reach the max and flood over as he approached them.

they did not seem to notice him from their seat on the floor until he was about a hairsbreadth from the side of their face.

“cara mia?” curse love languages not having gender neutral terms in their ear, causing the poor dear to jump out of their skin.

it was a wonder they didn’t headbutt in him the process and they all but threw themself across the floor to create some distance.

leonardo’s laughter was rather helpful to quell their panic, only for it to swift to a soft rage.

“leo— don’t ever do that again!” they scolded but by now the man had been distracted by the papers that had been haphazardly thrown in the dear’s attempt to flee danger.

golden eyes flickered over the pages as he gathered them up, some written over while other seemed to have sketches of what looked like persons.

they were quick to scramble back up to their feet and snatch the papers from leonardo, their face an uncharacteristically bright shade of red as they mumbled out, “they’re not ready yet...”

though their reaction and expression only seemed to encourage the vampire, after all, things that intrigued him he always pursued to understand investigate.

a soft hum escaped his lips as he looked down at them, only to snatch up another set up papers, ignoring the squeaks and protests to ‘don’t read it yet!’.

there was no getting them back at this point, as he used his height to his advantage against them, holding the pages high as he examined him.

and it suddenly made sense, it looked like a script and these little doodles were scenes from the scripts.

“quite creative, your story here,” leonardo handed back the pages to their flustered creator, “what is it?”

they hesitated as them shuffled the papers, hesitating for a moment before quietly, “a manga idea, something from my time, like a visual story.”

if he had not been intrigued before leonardo most certainly was now and he wanted to know exactly what sort of story they were making.

of course, he doesn’t push but he is more than willing to lend an ear for them to listen to the passionate and eager descriptions of their characters and, if needed, offer a suggest or two when they’re stuck.

ー THEODORUS VAN GOGH

having the lost pup new guest at the mansion following him while he worked was just a way to keep them out of trouble and help him out.

of course, he had never expected them to take such an interest in art as they had, marveling at every little detail, asking questions when they weren’t with a customer, and practically hanging onto every detail theo would spare.

he would never have guessed that everything they had picked up and learned from him on the job they were translating into their own work.

theo was never one particularly nosy and whatever they did in their spare time was their business as long as it didn’t mess with anything or anyone.

so imagine his irritation when they are late for breakfast and sebastian asks for him to go get them?

he walks in, ready to grab them by the arm and drag them out of their room so he might get the chance to enjoy his pancakes for a few moments of peace.

instead, he waltzes into their room finding them pouring over their desk with numerous pages scattered over the surface and stuck against the wall... and most any available space it seemed.

at first he was ready to ask them what sort of mess they were making but stopped as he began to draw closer and examine what they were doing.

it looked like they were... drawing? not that he would judge their strange style, as he was a promoter of the arts that were outside of the norm.

“oi, hondje,” he calls out to them, placing a hand on their head in a familiar way.

the squeak they make is almost laughable but he doesn’t have the chance before they recover and looking up at him quizzically.

“why are you awake so late?” it was a genuine question.

“late? it’s morning already, did you stay up all night?” theo is quick to shoot back, only to receive an even more confused expression.

that answered his question.

“what are you even working on that you would forget to sleep? i can’t have you dozing off at work you know,” he leans down over their desk and they suddenly get shy.

they are subtle, or at least try to be, as they shuffle papers and cross their arms over them, mumbling a soft ‘nothing’.

theo doesn’t take it though and instead turns his gaze up to the art displayed literally all over the room.

before they can even think to snatch drawings away he’s already asking questions, “did you draw these?”

it takes a moment for them to respond, as they mull over a way to answer, but finally cave in to an explanation.

“yeah, i did,” they paused, expectantly staring but theo only waved his hand for them to continue.

“for a manga—something from my time, they, um, tell stories through pictures,” they explained, spreading out the papers on the desk again, “and i got an idea last night so...”

theo is thoroughly impressed, of course they have to explain further about the detailing and techniques— he’s going to ask after all.

there are times where theo will actually watch them draw, he likes to see artists in their element and this is something entirely new he wants to learn more of.

expect that he will have a sketch or two from them, would deny it, but he keeps it in the breast pocket of his coat.

ー VINCENT VAN GOGH

vincent found it quite enjoyable having another person at the mansion, especially with how they spent time with him.

of course he knew they were an artist too, it had come up one day when they were together, while he was painting and they seemed to be doing something in their notebook.

he had asked about their work and if they would let him see but they seemed to get flustered, so he let it rest, after all he wasn’t going to force them.

but still they came around to spend afternoons together, drawing or painting, in silence with the occasional conversation.

one day that they had stayed out rather late in the garden, vincent hadn’t noticed the time passing until it was too dark to continue.

as he packed up his things, he was talking, but got no response back from his friend, and when he turned around to check if they were gone, he found them asleep on the ground.

he felt rather back for not noticing earlier, seeing as the ground probably wasn’t all that comfort and that they hadn’t said how tired they were— he wouldn’t have asked them to spend time outside if they needed rest!

vincent was quiet as he approached their sleeping form, ready to gently rouse them as he outstretched his hand, but stopped as something caught his eye.

in the evening sun, the pages from their notebook were illuminated by the fading sun.

he didn’t mean to pry, truly, but he couldn’t help curiously picking up the book and examining the pages.

some were full of notes, others these beautiful drawings, and more still with a combination of both.

one drawing in particular had caught his eye, a series of scenes it seemed, of someone who looked a lot like him making his way to the gardens and painting...

“mhmm... vincent?” they peeked an eye open groggily, rubbing their face as they looked up at him sitting beside them.

“is it dark already? i’m sorry i didn’t mean to fall asleep—” they sat up, stretching, only to stop halfway through the motion when they saw their notebook in his hand.

they flushed red but vincent only smiled sweetly as he offered them the book back.

“i like your drawings,” he said softly, “they’re very beautiful.”

they were hesitant but took back their notebook, redder if it were possible, as they mumbled a ‘thank you’.

“who were the other people in your drawings?” vincent asked as he stood, holding out a hand towards them.

“uh, well,” they accepted and were pulled to their feet as they explained, “they’re fictional—not real—for a story i was doing...”

vincent cocked his head cutely to the side as he listened, “what kind of story?”

“a visual on, a manga from my time,” they explained as the both of them began to gather up their supplies.

on the way back to the mansion, vincent listened as they explained, he found it quite interesting that someone would paint out a story, but enjoyed the idea.

vincent finds the whole idea quite fascinating and often asks them about their stories afterwards.

they are still flustered to show him many of their drawings, but vincent is sweet about it each time, and has invited them to try painting their ideas on a canvas saying he would love to see how their style reflects.

definitely adores all their drawings, his favorite ones are when they do simple doodles of the members of the mansion, often claiming they’re not great, but he loves them.

absolutely reads their manga stories, whatever they’re willing to let vincent read and he is enthralled by the stories and characters.

158 notes · View notes

oigimi · 3 years

Text

. inspiration .

. arthur x reader . 1.5k words . inspired by @/delicateikemenmemes’ arthur abcs prompts! pls go check it out!! . NSFW!! MINORS DNI .

“Coffee and monte cristo…” you mused, setting down a tray for Arthur, tracing his jawline and kissing his cheek. Your boyfriend had been at work for a while now, diligently writing his latest manuscript while you cooked and cleaned with Sebastian. It was difficult being away from Arthur while the both of you worked, especially when you knew that he was just a small walk away, in the very same house as you at any given time.

So that’s why he decided on a little game to lift the both of your spirits.

He took the food off the tray and smirked. “Thank you, my delightful little secretary. This almost looks as delicious as you.”

“Of course. Now get back to work.” Your face was growing warmer and warmer as you stared down at Arthur. He’d been growing a bit bored as of late and decided that a little roleplay was exactly what you’d needed to spice things up between the two of you. And what was quite as exciting as getting frisky during work hours? You, his gorgeous, sexy secretary coming in and ordering him around, teasing him and keeping him on his toes. It made his heart race, and it got him motivated in more ways than one.

But what really committed him to the fantasy you two had created was the clothes you wore. A tight little miniskirt and a white blouse, partially buttoned to leave little to his imagination. God, you were ravishing, and he wanted to let you know. But he had to focus on work, and that was part of the fun. Restraint, with only a few moments where he could express his passions throughout the day.

You turned around on your heel, sauntering away from Arthur and making sure he got a nice view of your ass. You got a rush from the fantasy too, relishing in the power you had over Arthur during work hours, and counting down in your head to the moment when he could tear your tight little clothes off and release all the pent-up passions he felt into you. A symbiotic relationship, it was, and you and Arthur loved it.

“You have to finish this draft by the end of the week, Arthur. And if you want to take the weekend off you have to have at least the plot of your next one mapped out.”

“Thank you, love.”

“And you can’t get distracted!”

“I won’t get distracted!” Arthur turned back to his desk and continued to work on the manuscript, stealing glances of you out of the corner of his eyes. You just looked so adorable, no matter what you were doing. Whether you were helping him with tasks or ordering him around, or even just telling him about how your day was going, he found you irresistible, and just couldn’t help but want a piece of you while he was working.

“Darling, come here for a moment, will you?”

You looked up and made your way over to Arthur. “What is it?”

“Does this make sense to you?” He pointed to a line of dialogue in his story and looked up at you. You read it and shrugged.

“Looks like a standard line to me. Why?”

“Well, I think I’m having a few problems deciding what comes after.”

“Are you?” You turned and looked at Arthur, who had a completely serious look on his face. He took his glasses off and reached up for you, gently rubbing your sides.

“I am. I need to take a break, my little dove. I apologize if this thwarts your schedule, but I simply don’t think I’ll be able to make any meaningful advancements in the story without some… stimulation. Care to assist me?”

His rubs and squeezes sent little jolts through your body, and you couldn’t help but elicit a little groan. “Arthur…” You sat down in his lap, looking up into his deep blue eyes. “You’d better be stimulated quickly, and then get back to the manuscript. You know what happens to good boys who get their work done?” You leaned forward, pushing your breasts against him, and kissed his neck. “They get treats.”

“And what about naughty boys?” Arthur whispered, nibbling on your earlobe. He pulled you even closer to him, feeling your soft breasts against him. He rubbed your back and trailed his hands down your figure, massaging you and giving your ass a few squeezes.

“Arthur-!” you whispered, trying to suppress how much pleasure you were actually getting from the few touches the author gave. He went in and pressed his lips to yours, hungrily pushing his tongue in your mouth and exploring the soft, wet territory that he’d grown to know so well. Arthur’s kisses were versatile. They could be soft, but they could also be rough and passionate. They could be short smacks or long, sexy makeout sessions. His lips treated yours so well, and before you knew it, your fingers were tangled in his hair to keep you clinging onto him. He was absolutely gaining power, switching from long, messy kisses to many quick kisses, one after the other. You moaned a little bit, arching your back and loosening up.

He stood up and carried you with him, supporting you with his hands firmly below your ass. “Careful there, love. Your little mind is spinning faster than you realize.” Arthur laid you down on his bed and slid his hands up your legs, sticking his fingers around your panties and up your sweet spot in just a few quick motions. He rubbed and massaged your clit, wetting you more and more with every moment.

“Arthur!” you gasped, feeling your legs go weak as he rubbed and pleasured you with those pale, long fingers. “Ar- mmf!” He leaned on top of you and kissed you again, smirking in satisfaction at the ease with which he made your mouth open for him. You two kissed, growing louder and louder, and craving one another more and more. Eventually, he pulled away, his breath getting heavier.

“The way you make me feel… it’s unlike anything anyone else can do. I need you, sweet dove. Please, let me have you…”

You nodded, not a single doubt in your mind. Arthur undid his pants and tossed them aside before giving your skirt and panties the same treatment. He grabbed your hips and pulled you close to him, leaning down and giving your lips one last sweet kiss. “I love you.”

“I love you too.” With a single motion, Arthur slid into you and elicited from you a little whimper. You were tight, and you were wetter than he’d left you moments ago. He thrusted in and out of you as quickly as he possibly could, his large member leaving you gasping and reaching up for him. Your breasts bounced with every push and pull you felt, and Arthur reached out to feel one with one hand. He stuck his hand underneath your shirt and rubbed your nipple with his thumb, satisfied with the intensity with which your face flushed.

You groaned and gasped with every last breath you had. Your walls were stretching and wettening, every part of your body crying out in desire for Arthur. He met your gaze, absolutely enamored with every part of you. With your gorgeous, longing eyes and your flushed, perky breasts, and everything else you had to offer. He couldn’t help himself. He released inside of you and pulled out, leaving you trembling in pleasure and catching your breath.

“Did you like it?” Arthur asked, laying down beside you and pulling you in for a hug.

“Of course I did! You know you always treat me well.”

“That’s good. I try my best to, anyway.” He smiled and smoothed out your hair. “You’re just so beautiful I can’t help myself when I see you sometimes.”

“That means a lot coming from the most handsome man in the world.”

“You know it!” Arthur kissed your lips and laughed, rubbing your noses together. “Oh dear. My little dove, you said earlier that good boys get treats. You never answered… What do naughty boys get? I do believe I’ve just proven myself to be quite naughty indeed, wouldn’t you agree?”

You smiled and sat up, cradling Arthur’s head in your arms. “What do naughty boys get? Hmm. I’d say with how today’s going that naughty boys…” You kissed his temples, forehead, and the corners of his eyes. “I’d say they get naughty girls.”

“How lovely! Now I’d say it was worth it skipping out on a few moments of work today.”

“Well no more!” you laughed, hugging Arthur tighter. “Back to work, mystery author!”

“Oh, come on! Lay with me a little longer? Grant me just a few more moments of inspiration, lovely secretary of mine?” He looked up at you with eyes reminiscent of his beloved dog, and grinned when you were unable to stifle your laugh.

“Alright. Just a little while longer.”

Arthur smiled wide, thanking you with hugs and kisses. The two of you lied in bed together, staring into one another’s eyes, rubbing each other’s noses, and thanking one another for your time and love, promising to always inspire one another as long as the both of you were together.

#minors dni #ikevamp arthur #ikemen vampire arthur #ikevamp arthur x reader #ikemen vampire arthur x reader #ikevamp headcanons #ikevamp scenarios #ikemen arthur

48 notes · View notes

weaverofthreads · 3 years

Text

On the process of writing a novel...

Ok, so this began as a DM to a very dear friend who had said they were super excited to work on a novel of theirs that they'd abandoned for years, but they felt a bit lost when looking at the project again. They had "too many characters, too many intrigues" and they didn't "know how to create order" for all their ideas. They didn't know "what to keep, what to remove, what to change" and wanted to know if I had any tips.

I began to reply in messages and then realised I needed to make a whole post out of it, so here it is! All 3k words of it. This is for you, darling! I hope it helps.

Things I found extremely helpful when planning my novel for NaNoWriMo this year, after also taking some time off from it.

Most of this comes from Alicia Lidwina’s Four-Part article on her NaNoWriMo prep process, and setting up a writer’s notebook, for 2018. You can find the link to the first part here and I highly recommend you check out the whole series of articles for a more in-depth read.

Content of this ‘essay’:

Preparation, Groundwork, and Materials

Project 'Stats' & Overview

Mood, Moodboards, and Key Imagery

Things to Consider, and Important Bullet Points

Get to Know Your Characters

Chronological Order

Tangential and Preceding Events

Basic Premise, Plot Definition, Sub Plot Ideas

List of Locations

Scenes

Chapter Outline

NaNo Plan

Additional Notes and Tips for Writing

Ok. Let's begin.

First of all, I'm not saying that this is the only way to write or organise a novel. It can be tackled in as many ways as there are writers in the universe. This is just the method I used to get my ideas crystallised and organised.

Preparation, Groundwork, and Materials.

Take your preparation seriously. I bought a cheap but still nice A4 sketchbook with blank paper for maybe £2 at the local hobby store, and used it solely for the purposes of being my Novel Notebook. It doesn’t have to be a pretty, perfect, Aesthetic(TM) journal at all. Its function is to act as a route-guide through the process.

I bought a cute sticker from Etsy and used it as the front cover design so that I liked the book and that it felt a little bit special, without being too intimidating to put a mark in. Then I left the very first page blank, and opened it to the first double page. On the left, I wrote ‘Contents’ and then moved on to the right and wrote ‘Project Stats and Overview’.

I used a pen that was comfortable to write with, which for me was important. I’m a very tactile person, and having nice paper and pens (not necessarily fancy), made the process feel good.

Project Stats and Overview

This is the bare bones of the book, and includes details such as:

Project Working Title: (in my case it’s Weaver of Threads)

Targeted Wordcount: (to give yourself an idea of the scope, but it’s not necessary. For me it’s 50-100k)

Genre: (for me, fantasy)

Series: (will it be one book or more? For me, probably more than one, and at least two).

Inspiration: (here you can jot down all sorts of things which inspire your world and your writing, and it can be anything. In my case, I began with “density and lore, and feeling of being grounded in a real world from LOTR and Tolkien.” And I went on to include other writers and novels in the fantasy genre, as well as elements from our own world, such as Mongolian herding communities and way of life, the history of the Persian Empire, and Renaissance Florence!).

Project Timeline: Give yourself a structure, and be realistic. If you know you’re a slow writer who’s prone to distractions, be generous, but if you’re someone who responds well to short deadlines, tighten the time frame up a bit. I said “November 2020 - November 2021 for the whole manuscript” because I know I’m a procrastinator who gets dejected if they shoot past intense deadlines….

Editing Deadline: December 2021-January 2022. I know I can edit fairly quickly, so I made this one much shorter.

Main Requirements Prior to Starting: What do you need to get sorted before you can get going? It could be purchasing a laptop or figuring out a magic system. In my case, it was the latter.

What Happens in your novel?: This is not ‘what do your characters do?’, but what, in one sentence, actually happens in the book. For Fellowship of the Ring, you could say ‘a diverse group of people assemble and set off together with the goal of destroying the Ring’. LOADS more stuff actually takes place, obviously, but that’s probably the key thing that happens in that book. So, write the same thing for yours. I’m not going to tell you what happens in mine, because that would spoil it :).

That took up the first A4 page of my writer’s notebook, and after that, I moved on to Mood and Key Imagery.

Mood, Moodboards, and Key Imagery

On the left hand side of the page, I wrote down the words and concepts that sprang to mind when I thought of the novel itself. These were in no particular order or placement — just a random cloud of ideas in a rough column on the left hand side of the page — and they included: history, mystery, love, friendship, betrayal, nostalgic, homesick, sense of belonging, sense of place, searching, closeness, secrets… etc. etc.

Then on the right hand side, I wrote down five key words that I wanted to associate with the novel. These would form the ‘visual aesthetic’ in the background of my mind, and could be very easily expressed with a moodboard.

This same process (writing down words and creating a moodboard) could be achieved on a website like Pinterest. Take your time with it, find the right visual clues that really match the essence of your story, and create a final mood board with a limited number of panels that will be your novel’s ‘true north’ when it comes to feelings. If you're artistically inclined too, you could draw sketches of things relevant to your world too.

While this stage is really important for solidifying the feeling and mood of the novel, don’t get stuck here and spend forever procrastinating on Pinterest or whatever. Once you’ve crystallised that ambiance, it’s time to move on. It’s also perfectly fine to come back to this at a later stage if you find yourself running out of inspiration or drifting a bit. Daydreaming, drawing, mood-board-ing are all great ways to work on your novel on days when you don’t feel like writing.

Things to Consider:

Alicia Lidwina asked herself some questions which helped me get past the ‘block’ that I’d created when thinking about the novel, and those were:

What scares me about this story? (in my case it was the scope of it - it was easy for me to get lost in over-thinking tiny details and get too overwhelmed to handle the big picture)

What will readers take away from it? (in my case, I hoped that it was a sense of friendship, people from desperate cultures finding common ground, and a sense of being grounded in a real, tangible world.

What is its selling point? (essentially, why would an agent/publisher choose yours over the next one in the pile?). Don’t be bashful about this. This is your notebook, so if you’re proud of a feature or aspect of the story, write it down. In my case, there is no ‘Big Bad come to destroy the world’, no Chosen One who is the only one who can stop it. There is an antagonist, but it’s on a personal scale, and that’s the selling point. It’s about two people going on a personal journey to uncover a lost piece of knowledge that’s arguably not all that world-changing on its own, but which means the world to them.

What will be the three biggest issues in writing the first draft? Identify the three biggest roadblocks, and then take a bulldozer to them. For me, it was time management, getting mentally stuck, and the sheer darned effort of it becoming overwhelming!

Important Bullet Points

These are five key facts about your novel, distilled from the sections above. They include: What’s at the heart of the story? How long is the story? What’s the narrative focus of the story? What are the maximum number of main characters? And the maximum number of supporting characters (this obviously doesn’t mean you can’t have other, less important characters too!)?

Relationship between the two main characters is forefront

50-100k words

The novel’s focus is on the characters’ main goal (had to be more vague here so I didn't give it away)

2 main characters

3 supporting characters

If you find you’ve got too many main characters (not necessarily a bad thing to have a lot of characters - look at A Song of Ice and Fire after all!), then figure out whose story you want to tell here. You can always write another story with other characters in a connected novel, or a sequel. You don’t have to tell everything all at the same time.

Speaking of characters…

…Get to Know Your Main Characters:

Here you can write character sheets for each of your main characters and cast. There are hundreds of these templates available on the internet, asking questions like ‘how would your character react to [insert event]?’ etc. to get to know your character. If this isn’t your thing (it isn’t mine) then at least write down some useful information about them. Rough height and weight, hair, eye and skin colour, general temperament, and any other defining physical or mental traits.

Next came the Chronological Order

This does not have to represent the final order of the novel’s structure, nor the order in which you write the manuscript, but you need to know what happened within the timeline, and when, in order to be really clear when you’re telling the story. You can write the manuscript out of order, and you can tell the story with flashbacks or in a different order, but you need to have the underlying chronology securely in place so that your writing makes sense and so that you don’t confuse yourself or the readers in the process.

Preceding and Tangential Events

These don’t need to be in the novel itself, but it may be important to define the sequence of events that also led up to the moment where we pick up your story, and what is happening elsewhere so that you can be sure of these too. In my case, I defined the events that concerned one of the supporting characters’ lives so that I knew how and why they were at the point they are in the story. It relates directly to - and heavily influences - the events of the novel, so I needed to have this person’s history nailed down as well, even though I don't tell it all explicitly in the book (because that would be unnecessary and a bit dull).

Basic Premise, Plot Definition, and Sub-Plot Ideas (plus writing a synopsis)

Alicia Lidwina defined the story premise helpfully with the following formula:

Story Premise = Main Character + Desire + Obstacle

Pick a different colour for each of these components, and write a short paragraph to explain them in the context of the novel. Alicia Lidwina used the following:

[Main Character] “Harry, an orphan who didn’t know that he’s a wizard, [Desire] got invited into Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry and wanted to live his school life to its fullest, [Obstacle] but a certain Dark Lord who killed his parents is trying to rise into powers again and kill him in revenge.

Do this for your novel, and keep it really short.

Plot Definition: This is even shorter than that! It’s a single sentence!! It’s most closely tied to the desire of the character, and lies at the heart of the story. It’s most likely a distilled version of the ‘what happens in the story’ from the Project Stats page, so check that to see what you wrote there.

Sub Plot Ideas

Five bullet points (no more) for things that are happening concurrently and which are related in some way to the main story. For me, Kae and Tomas are doing their research, so that’s the main theme, but beneath that there are a few other related incidents.

Writing a Synopsis - developed out of the points in this section, and includes:

Who the main character is

What the stakes are (the story premise is your guideline)

What the main plot line is

How the MC resolves the problem in the main plot line

How the book ends.

List of Locations

Start with the main ones and add to it as you go on. Write a little bit of information about them so that you have something to refer back to. I also drew a big old map which I found very helpful and also really fun to do.

List of Scenes

It’s very important to map out every single scene that happens in the novel. Use your timeline to help with this, but remember a scene is not necessarily a chapter. You can have more than one scene within a chapter, but try not to have too many.

I used small post-it notes (sticky notes) and wrote down things like “M joins K’s clan at the fire and K learns about magic” and “K studies at Citadel, intro to Citadel, magic, and characters” as separate scenes. Once you’ve written down everything that is going to happen (this will take some time! Get a drink and some snacks ready, and go slow), you can stick them into your notebook in the order you’d like to tell the story. Some chapters may have just one scene, while others may have two or three. I didn’t have more than two in any of my chapters, and actually ended up splitting some scenes that I’d made too vague in this section into more chapters. It doesn’t have to be set in stone, but it will form a road map.

Additions and Notes:

I left a section of the Scene Outline bit of the notebook blank for things to add in as I went along. I haven’t used it yet, but I might.

Chapter Outline

I arranged the scenes into the chapters already by sticking them in order, but you could do a chapter outline separately after this. It’s up to you.

NaNoWriMo plan:

I did this back in October, and wrote down the main goal for nanoprep, which was to finish the background info. Breaking that down further, I listed - magic (how does it work exactly), geography, and politics.

After that, it was just a case of writing the 1667 words a day. *spoilers, I got distracted and didn’t do NaNo this year* . What I should have done, was break it up into chunks and write down my goals so that I had something tangible to use as a road map, and I will be doing that now for the novel as I take it up again outside of NaNo. Having check boxes and manageable goals really works for me. Find what will work for you, and if it turns out not to, adapt!

Some final pointers and tips:

Set regular goals for yourself. Whether you work by saying ‘I’ll write 1000 words a day’ or ‘I’ll write something every day’, make a structure for yourself. If you slip and miss a day, week, or month (I didn’t meet NaNo this year because I chose to work on another project instead *slaps forehead*), don’t beat yourself up. Writing is a craft and it takes a long time and a lot of discipline to master a craft.

Your first draft does not have to be good. At all. Your first draft is just words on paper. A first draft is the block of marble taken from the quarry, and subsequent edits and reworking is the process of carving the sculpture itself. The editing that is done by the publisher or the professional you employ to edit it for you later, is the final polishing. Don’t be demoralised if the block of marble seems very rough when it first lands in your studio. That’s ok!

Take regular breaks. Writing is hard work, and most people can’t concentrate on something successfully for longer than 55 min's, and if you’re doing that, you’re already doing really well. Personally, I’m at 15-20 on a good day. Write in little sprints of ten minutes or so, and then get up and stretch, look out the window, maybe leave the room, come back in with a fresh approach.

Stretch your hands, and wear wrist braces when you work. Seriously. I gave myself tendinitis on my first major project, and couldn’t use either hand properly for weeks. The ones I have are these, and they allow me to work safely for much longer.

Keep hydrated. Have a bottle of water on the desk in front of you between your arms as you type and sip it, otherwise you’ll forget. 2 litres a day is usually recommended, but know your body and drink accordingly.

Treat yourself. Whether that’s something as simple as a decadent hot chocolate after your first chapter/chunk/sprint is done, or a new notebook or a pen or that sticker set you wanted on Etsy or literally anything nice, reward yourself for the hard work you’ve put in, with tangible things you can look at or experience and say ‘I have that because I did the work’. It’ll help with your sense of achievement, especially if the project is a long one.

Join a local writer’s group for feedback. With the current Covid-19 chaos, this is probably not possible right now, but getting constructive feedback on your work from someone who hasn’t been cocooned in the project in the way you are, but who respects you as a writer and wants to help you grow, will be invaluable. It’s too easy to exist in a little isolated bubble and think you’re doing ok, when in reality you could be creating bad habits which will be difficult to break later. By these, I mean things like ‘filler words’ you don’t realise you use, or other pit-falls it’s easy to tumble into when you can’t see the wood for the trees…It’s intimidating, and it might take some courage to work up and do, but I promise it’ll help you grow. You don’t have to do what the people suggest, but it’s great to get outside opinions all the same.

Submit work to writing competitions. This will help with showing agents and publishers later down the line that you’re not only committed, but hopefully talented, and will help you to push yourself. Use the world of your novel for the setting, and get to know it by writing short stories on the competition’s theme set there.

Read. Read the writers you admire, and read them ‘actively’ - figure out exactly what it is about ‘that’ sentence that made you shiver, and use the same techniques in your own work (don’t plagiarise, obviously, but if it was alliteration that made the sentence work so well, use it yourself! Perhaps it was the metre of the line? Great, now you know a rhythm that will drive a sentence forward or slow it down etc.)

Enjoy it. If you’re not enjoying what you’re doing, it’ll show in the work. Take a step back if you start floundering, and ‘interview’ yourself about why it’s not fun any more. Refer back to the sections in the notebook that helped to clarify the plot/process, and see if you’ve wandered away from them. Make yourself answer questions like: ‘What is the main reason I don’t want to do this?’ ‘What is the character’s motivation?’ ‘Should I scrap this section?’ (don’t delete it, but cut and paste it into another ‘scraps’ document, and then start afresh from the last place you were happy with. Nothing is wasted - it all goes into building the world and getting to know the characters, even if it doesn’t get explicitly told in the finished product, so don’t be afraid to do that last bit).

Good luck!

I hope you found this helpful, and if you have any questions or things you’d like to add to this, please feel free to send me an ask here on Tumblr.

If you’re a new writer hoping to get an agent or publisher, you might also find this post on ‘talking to a published author’ helpful or interesting.

If you would like to keep up to date with my own novel’s progress, you can follow me here on Tumblr, as well as on my writing Instagram @rnpeacock

#writing #writeblr #writing process #how to write a novel #novel writing #nanowrimo #national novel writing month #writing a book #writing advice #author #authors on tumblr #how to structure a book #long post

136 notes · View notes

murasaki-murasame · 3 years

Text

Thoughts on Higurashi Sotsu Ep11

Studio Passione: “We paid good money to animate Rika’s festival dance, and by god you’re gonna ENJOY IT!”

Anyway, thoughts under the cut, plus Umineko spoilers.

I know I talked about my theories for how this episode would be paced out last week, but I’m genuinely amazed that they managed to stretch the rest of this loop out into the entire episode, lol. It’s almost impressive how they managed to pad out half an episode or less worth of content into a full episode.

It kinda doesn’t even give me that much to talk about, yet again, which is kinda awkward, but either way this basically proves that I was totally right about my interpretation of the whole Keiichi scene, so I feel kinda pleased about that.

Long story short, the scene we saw in Gou was just an illusion depicting the story that Satoko told Ooishi about what happened, after she set the crime scene up to make it fit her version of events. I guess there’s still a non-zero chance that there’s some extra layer of mystery going on there, but at this point I really doubt it. I think that’s basically all that was going on.

I think this is going to be one of the more polarizing parts of Sotsu for people, depending on how they feel about the way that this is tying itself in to Umineko. This is the sort of storytelling device that’s basically never been used before in Higurashi, but is integral to how Umineko is set up, so it’s one of those times where it becomes undeniable that this is meant to bridge the two series, and is drawing inspiration and ideas from both of them, instead of this just staying within the boundaries of Higurashi alone.

With how this arc feels like a point of no return in the transition between the two stories, I really like how the first thing Satoko does when she accepts that she’s a witch is to start bringing Umineko-style narrative trickery into Higurashi for the first time. I think it’s a neat way to show how she’s starting to ascend beyond the game-board itself and is operating with a different set of rules. Obviously people aren’t gonna like that if they don’t like the idea of this being tied to Umineko, but I think that ship has long since sailed at this point, lol.

And honestly, even without relying on knowledge from Umineko, I think they did a fine job of having that scene in Gou seem weird and suspicious right from the get-go. For one thing, we were also told in Gou that Keiichi had no memory of what happened, and everyone else in that scene was dead, so it’s not that hard to start guessing that we were shown a false version of events.

I think I said this last week, but the confirmation that this is literally just Umineko Logic 101 really makes me wonder if Ryukishi is doing it this way in part to ‘prepare’ people for what to expect from Umineko. There’s still the possibility that we’ll get a full on remake after this, but even if it’s as simple as this basically ending on the note of ‘go back and read the Umineko VN’, he might still be trying to give people an idea of what to expect from it so they don’t get turned off by ep2.

This is getting more into theory territory, but if we keep going down this rabbit hole of transitioning into Umineko logic and narrative structure, I wonder if the entirety of Gou/Sotsu is going to end up being contextualized as a set of forgeries, in the same way as it worked in Umineko. Something along the lines of Satoko ‘seeing Rika’s loops’ being a metaphor for her being given manuscripts to read by Featherine based on Rika’s account of events, and then the Gou/Sotsu loops being forgeries made in collaboration between Featherine and Satoko, and presented to Rika as a new mystery to read and solve. At the very least, this could arguably justify stuff like how everything seems to go in the way Satoko wants, regardless of how reckless she gets.

I’m not 100% confident in that, but it’d definitely continue the trend of this being a blend of Higurashi and Umineko’s writing styles. I think it’d also provide a more comprehensive non-magical interpretation for what’s going on than just ‘Satoko fell asleep in the shrine and just dreamed all of this’, or whatever.

I also don’t really think that’d contradict the whole idea of Satoko being Lambda, though. Looking at it through this whole lens, it’d be sorta like how Ange goes through her own whole character arc in the process of reading Featherine’s forgeries, and basically ends up becoming a witch by the end of it. So the whole narrative arc of Satoko venting out her anger at Rika by trapping her in a new set of loops and slowly becoming a witch would still be intact, and still for all intents and purposes lead to her becoming Lambda.

There’s also various ways this could be tied into the whole deal with Lambda being Takano’s benefactor in Higurashi. Considering how Lambda never actually plays a part in Higurashi itself and is never mentioned by Takano, it could be as simple as ‘Satoko reads Featherine’s manuscript version of Higurashi and ends up relating a lot to Takano and wants her to succeed’, which gets morphed into her granting Takano her blessing of certainty. Either way I think that the whole timeline of events is weird and nebulous and isn’t really intended to make logical sense.

Anyway, probably the most surprising part of the episode was the reveal at the very end that the next arc won’t be called something like Nekoakashi, but instead it’ll be Kagurashi. I’m not really sure how much to read into that, though. It could just be as simple as them speeding through the Nekodamashi stuff, and most of Kagurashi will be the aftermath of that, so they gave it a unique name. Or it could be a completely new arc that does something totally different. Lots of people have suggested the idea of it being an arc all about Eua and Hanyuu and their backstory, which would be one way of doing something entirely different to a Nekodamashi answer arc, but who knows. I don’t think the final scene of this episode necessarily proves that the next arc will be about those two, though.

But on the topic of those two, at this point I think it’s probably safe to say that Hanyuu is effectively meant to be Eua’s piece in this game, and that they probably have a similar relationship to Bern and Erika, going by how much Eua seems to look down on Hanyuu. Although it’s not exactly clear if this Hanyuu is the same person as the Hanyuu from the VN, or if she’s like a clone of her that Eua created after Hanyuu disappeared or whatever after Matsuribayashi.

Either way, I’m not entirely sure how they’d even approach an arc focused on those two. It’s not like Umineko really explained Featherine’s backstory, unless Sotsu is going to straight up introduce Ikuko/Tohya, which I guess could tie into my above theory about this being a forgery. On the other hand, I guess they could maybe do something like the Hanyuu backstory arc from the Higurashi console ports, but that wouldn’t really feel relevant to Sotsu’s story at this point.

Really the big question is just if the entire story will wrap up in four more episodes, or if there’ll be some sort of third season or whatever to wrap things up. Considering that this entire episode was just about wrapping up this loop, and we haven’t even gotten into anything from Nekodamashi, it at least feels like we’re running out of ways they could pull off an ending with just the next arc. But it’s not impossible. The simplest way to handle it would be to spend one episode at most on skimming through the next set of loops so we can get back to the cliffhanger from Gou, and then continuing from there, but if my theory about the overarching structure of the story is correct, then there might not even be that much to show after the cliffhanger, and the continuation of it might just happen in the meta world [or the ‘real world’], not the world of that loop itself. It’s also possible that, if this does lead into some kind of Umineko remake, the ending won’t even be particularly conclusive, and will just be continued in that series instead.

Even with how the pacing has gone thus far, I’m not really sure how confident I am in the idea that we might get another entire season out of this. Maybe we might get another nine episodes to fill Sotsu out to 24 episodes total, but I don’t know if we really need another full cour or two after the next arc. At the very least it’d feel kinda agonizing to have to wait even longer for ANOTHER full season to see how things actually end, lol.

There’s still the whole question mark of how the OP and the key visual for Sotsu depict Rika and Satoko as teenagers, and the other club members in different outfits to the ones from Satokowashi, but who even knows how that all might play into the story at this point. I still think we might get a Saikoroshi-style arc where Satoko loses her game and is banished to a world where Rika doesn’t exist and her relationship with the club members is totally different, but I’m not even sure what the whole point of that kinda development might be, or how long it’d take to get through.

At this point I think the best thing to do would be to just go all in with the Umineko stuff and have this end with the birth of Bern and Lambda and their whole love-hate relationship of mutual torture, even if it means leaving things kind of inconclusive, and without Satoko getting much punishment for her crimes. I think it’d be much worse if they just drag this out for even longer only to end it on the note of this whole conflict being neatly resolved and everything looping back to square one like nothing ever happened.

I guess we’ll just have to see how the next few episodes go, lol.

#murasaki rambles #higurashi #higurashi sotsu #petition to replace the OP and ED with Rika's festival dance

11 notes · View notes