taz-writes
fairies are better than mermaids
taz, 26, she/her; lover of music, fantasy, and well-earned happy endings. welcome to my writeblr! notes come from @sayaratyriea. feilan and nymia are on partial hiatus for personal & law school reasons, but i'm still out here! find more about my works at taz-writes.tumblr.com/wips !
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Yay, unsolicited advice time! Or, not really advice, more like miscellaneous tips and tricks, because if there's one thing eight years of martial arts has equipped me to write, it's fight scenes.
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Fun things to add to a fight scene (hand to hand edition)
It's not uncommon for two people to kick at the same time and smack their shins together, or for one person to block a kick with their shin. This is called a shin lock and it HURTS like a BITCH. You can be limping for the rest of the fight if you do it hard enough.
If your character is mean and short, they can block kicks with the tip of their elbow, which hurts the other guy a lot more and them a lot less
Headbutts are a quick way to give yourself a concussion
If a character has had many concussions, they will be easier to knock out. This is called glass jaw.
Bad places to get hit that aren't the groin: solar plexus, liver, back of the head, side of the thigh (a lot of leg kicks aim for this because if it connects, your opponent will be limping)
Give your character a fighting style. It helps establish their personality and physicality. Are they a grappler? Do they prefer kicks or fighting up close? How well trained are they?
Your scalp bleeds a lot and this can get in your eyes, blinding you
If you get hit in the nose, your eyes water
Adrenaline's a hell of a drug. Most of the time, you're not going to know how badly you've been hurt until after the fact
Even with good technique, it's really easy to break toes and fingers
Blocking hurts, dodging doesn't
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Just thought these might be useful! If you want a more comprehensive guide or a weapons edition, feel free to ask. If you want, write how your characters fight in the comments!
Have a bitchin day <3
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overcome with the desire to make my ocs hold hands
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Sometimes it's useful to look at your dialogue and ask yourself, "would a real human being talk like that?" But it's also good to ask the follow-up questions of "would the way a real human being talks sound good here" and "does this character actually talk like a real human being or are they weird about it."
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current mood: i wish i had the patience and consistency to learn basic animation bc i’m thinking way too much about Body Language As Characterization and i want to draw walk cycles for my ocs
but alas… my art is many things, but reliable enough for animation it is NOT
#taz talks#i am a pretty good artist these days tbh#but i am good at expressions and goofs#i shitpost and i do fancy lighting paintings#i do NOT reliably draw the same character with the same proportions multiple times
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if you've never engaged with a creative art on a regular basis you need to understand that it requires concerted effort to get into "the groove" to make something and every second that it takes to get into that groove causes physical pain, but the only thing worse than doing it is not doing it.
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reminder to worldbuilders: don't get caught up in things that aren't important to the story you're writing, like plot and characters! instead, try to focus on what readers actually care about: detailed plate tectonics
#i like to annoy people by making nonsense land masses and then inventing stupid magic reasons for things to be where they shouldn’t be#if you have magic that can terraform miles of landscape the parameters change#feilan’s desert is in a very fucking weird location though ngl
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the problem with having an evil mastermind manipulator oc is that i am not particularly good at being any of those things
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More on pre-electricity lighting.
Interesting to see this one pop up again after nearly two years - courtesy of @dduane, too! :->
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After experiencing a couple more storm-related power cuts since my original post, as well as a couple of after-dark garden BBQs, I've come to the conclusion that C.J. Cherryh puts far too much emphasis on "how dark things were pre-electric light".
For one thing eyes adjust, dilating in dim light to gather whatever illumination is available. Okay, if there's none, there's none - but if there's some, human eyes can make use of it, some better or just faster than others. They're the ones with "good night vision".
Think, for instance, of how little you can see of your unlit bedroom just after you've turned off the lights, and how much more of it you can see if you wake up a couple of hours later.
There's also that business of feeling your way around, risking breaking your neck etc. People get used to their surroundings and, after a while, can feel their way around a familiar location even in total darkness with a fair amount of confidence.
Problems arise when Things Aren't Where They Should Be (or when New Things Arrive) and is when most trips, stumbles, hacked shins and stubbed toes happen, but usually - Lego bricks and upturned UK plugs aside - non-light domestic navigation is incident-free.
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Here are a couple of pics from one of those BBQs: one candle and a firepit early on, then the candle, firepit and an oil lamp much later, all much more obvious than DD's iPad screen.
Though I remain surprised at how well my phonecam was handling this low light, my own unassisted eyes were doing far better. For instance, that area between the table and the firepit wasn't such an impenetrable pool of darkness as it appears in the photo.
I see (hah!) no reason why those same Accustomed Eyes would have any more difficulty with candles or oil lamps as interior lighting, even without the mirrors or reflectors in my previous post.
With those, and with white interior walls, things would be even brighter. There's a reason why so many reconstructed period buildings in Folk Museums etc. are (authentically) whitewashed not just outside but inside as well. It was cheap, had disinfectant qualities, and was a reflective surface. Win, win and win.
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All right, there were no switches to turn on a light. But there was no need for what C.J. describes as stumbling about to reach the fire, because there were tinderboxes and, for many centuries before them, flint and steel. Since "firesteels" have been heraldic charges since the 1100s, the actual tool must have been in use for even longer.
Tinderboxes were fire-starter sets with flint, steel and "tinder" all packed into (surprise!) a box. The tinder was easily lit ignition material, often "charcloth", fabric baked in an airtight jar or tin which would now start to glow just from a spark.
They're mentioned in both "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings". Oddly enough, "Hobbit" mentions matches in a couple of places, but I suspect that's a carry-over from when it was just a children's story, not part of the main Legendarium.
Tinderboxes could be simple, just a basic flint-and-steel kit with some tinder for the sparks to fall on...
...or elaborate like this one, with a fancy striker, charcloth, kindling material and even wooden "spills" (long splinters) to transfer flame to a candle or the kindling...
This tinderbox even doubles as a candlestick, complete with a snuffer which would have been inside along with everything else.
Here's a close-up of the striker box with its inner and outer lids open:
What looks like a short pencil with an eraser is actually the striker. A bit of tinder or charcloth would have been pulled through that small hole in the outer lid, which was then closed.
There was a rough steel surface on the lid, and the striker was scraped along it, like so:
This was done for a TV show or film, so the tinder was probably made more flammable with, possibly, lighter fuel. That would be thoroughly appropriate, since a Zippo or similar lighter works on exactly the same principle.
A real-life version of any tinderbox would usually just produce glowing embers needing blown on to make a flame, which is shown sometimes in movies - especially as a will-it-light-or-won't-it? tension build - but is usually a bit slow and non-visual for screen work.
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There were even flintlock tinderboxes which worked with the same mechanism as those on firearms. Here's a pocket version:
Here are a couple of bedside versions, once again complete with a candlestick:
And here are three (for home defence?) with a spotlight candle lantern on one side and a double-trigger pistol on the other.
Pull one trigger to light the candle, pull the other trigger to fire the gun.
What could possibly go wrong? :-P
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Those pistol lanterns, magnified by lenses, weren't just to let their owner see what they were shooting at: they would also have dazzled whatever miscreant was sneaking around in the dark, irises dilated to make best use of available glimmer.
Swordsmen both good and bad knew this trick too, and various fight manuals taught how to manage a thumb-shuttered lamp encountered suddenly in a dark alley.
There's a sword-and-lantern combat in the 1973 "Three Musketeers" between Michael York (D'Artagnan) and Christopher Lee (Rochefort), which was a great idea.
Unfortunately it failed in execution because the "Hollywood Darkness" which let viewers see the action, wasn't dark enough to emphasise the hazards / advantages of snapping the lamps open and shut.
This TV screencap (can't get a better one, the DVD won't run in a computer drive) shows what I mean.
In fact, like the photos of the BBQ, this image - and entire fight - looks even brighter through "real eyes" than with the phonecam. Just as there can be too much dark in a night scene, there can also be too much light.
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One last thing I found when assembling pics for the post were Folding Candle-lanterns.
They were used from about the mid-1700s to the later 20th century (Swiss Army ca. 1978) as travel accessories and emergency equipment, and IMO - I've Made A Note - they'd fit right into a fantasy world whose tech level was able to make them.
The first and last are reproductions: this one is real, from about 1830.
The clear part was mica - a transparent mineral which can be split into thin flexible sheets - while others use horn / parchment, though both of these are translucent rather than transparent. Regardless, all were far less likely to break than glass.
One or two inner surfaces were usually tin, giving the lantern its own built-in reflector, and tech-level-wise, tin as a shiny or decorative finish has been used since Roman times.
I'm pretty sure that top-of-the-line models could also have been finished with their own matching, maybe even built-in, tinderboxes.
And if real ones didn't, fictional ones certainly could. :->
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as both a fanfic writer and an original content writer i struggle so much with wording the fact that they ARE different and while you’re practicing and growing as a writer when writing fanfic, it is not the same as original writing and fanfic serves a different purpose than original content a lot of the time which is why fanfic “hits differently” and fanfic authors are able to focus on things that the canon might not and neither are inherently bad or lesser they’re just different and saying there’s no need for books when you have fanfic is oversimplifying a million things because of that
but there’s really no good way to word it without people getting really mad at me because 1. it’s kind of complicated and more nuanced than you’d think and 2. this is tumblr
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Honestly? My main piece of advice for writing well-rounded characters is to make them a little bit lame. No real living person is 100% cool and suave 100% of the time. Everyone's a little awkward sometimes, or gets too excited about something goofy, or has a silly fear, or laughs about stupid things. Being a bit of a loser is an incurable part of the human condition. Utilize that in your writing.
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Hear me out
That ship dynamic meme but poly
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I want to write a book called “your character dies in the woods” that details all the pitfalls and dangers of being out on the road & in the wild for people without outdoors/wilderness experience bc I cannot keep reading narratives brush over life threatening conditions like nothing is happening.
I just read a book by one of my favorite authors whose plots are essentially airtight, but the MC was walking on a country road on a cold winter night and she was knocked down and fell into a drainage ditch covered in ice, broke through and got covered in icy mud and water.
Then she had a “miserable” 3 more miles to walk to the inn.
Babes she would not MAKE it to that inn.
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be proud of your original characters. it's no easy task to create a character from scratch, to make them believable and real and human. it takes time. it takes dedication. so what if they aren't perfect right away? so what if there are still things you're only now figuring out after time? characters evolve, they go through changes and arcs and stories just like real people do. and it's okay if your character develops over time, you don't need to have it all figured out right away. there are some things that will only ever clear up after writing them for a while, finding their voice, and seeing the way they interact with other characters. but this is your character, your creation, and you deserve to feel proud about it no matter what.
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“he would not fucking say that!” then put him in a situation that makes him say it, we wanna see him squirm
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When your own OC becomes your blorbo it is both glorious and torturous
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