Front cover from The lady of the lake, by Walter Scott, illustrated by Charles Edmund Brock. London, 1904.

(Source: archive.org)

13k words, and I think I have figured out what the plot is? Still hoping to bring it in under 20k but... I think there's gonna be politics.

Alpacapoofer 👀 Insta

Ink Artwork by Endre Penovác

reblog this and tell me in the notes which book you've reread most in your life, pretty please!

Research when writing is vital, but also I just love that M.R. James wrote a golfing scene in Oh Whistle And I’ll Come To You, My Lad where he literally says ‘the golfing reader will have to imagine appropriate digressions at the proper intervals’.

Local trash nothing group just listed "landlord." Was intrigued, sad to find it was a typo for "lawnmower."

this is purely for fun and I've certainly been guilty of a few of these things myself in my years of fic writing. don't be weird in the notes and don't use this as an excuse to insult someone's writing.

Employees at one of my local indies are trying to negotiate a living wage, give them some support if you’re able

Wait is Lio ambidextrous?

From the Neil Gaiman: Dream Dangerously :) (you can watch it here in US or with US vpn :) <3)

Terry Pratchett: One day he rang me up and said, "I've started a book and, I think it's good, but I haven't the faintest idea where it goes." So, I said, "All right, well, send me the pages." And I read it and wrote him back and said, "I don't know where it goes either, but I do know what happens next."

Neil Gaiman: I was pretty much nocturnal then, so I would write my chunk of Good Omens before I went to bed, and I'd go to sleep about five o'clock in the morning and I'd get up about one o'clock in the afternoon and my answering machine would be flashing on, and I'd press the button and a voice would say, "Get up, get up you lazy bastard, I've just written a good bit."

Terry Pratchett: We did it as a kind of holiday, because if it crashed and burned, nobody would notice.

i cannot emphasise enough how much you need to create something. anything. it doesn't matter if you suck. you don't need to monetise it, or make it your career. you can restart an old hobby; you can start from scratch. it doesn't matter. you just need to hold something and be able to say "i did that". baking, drawing, painting, writing, coding, crafts, whatever. make something ! you cannot have all your hobbies be a form of consumption. it's fun, it's great in its own right. but the single best action to make yourself feel better, to calm your mind, to gain self esteem, is to Create

I had a very interesting discussion about theater and film the other day. My parents and I were talking about Little Shop of Horrors and, specifically, about the ending of the musical versus the ending of the (1986) movie. In the musical, the story ends with the main characters getting eaten by the plant and everybody dying. The movie was originally going to end the same way, but audience reactions were so negative that they were forced to shoot a happy ending where the plant is destroyed and the main characters survive. Frank Oz, who directed the movie, later said something I think is very interesting:

I learned a lesson: in a stage play, you kill the leads and they come out for a bow — in a movie, they don’t come out for a bow, they’re dead. They’re gone and so the audience lost the people they loved, as opposed to the theater audience where they knew the two people who played Audrey and Seymour were still alive. They loved those people, and they hated us for it.

That’s a real gem of a thought in and of itself, a really interesting consequence of the fact that theater is alive in a way that film isn’t. A stage play always ends with a tangible reminder that it’s all just fiction, just a performance, and this serves to gently return the audience to the real world. Movies don’t have that, which really changes the way you’re affected by the story’s conclusion. Neat!

But here’s what’s really cool: I asked my dad (who is a dramaturge) what he had to say about it, and he pointed out that there is actually an equivalent technique in film: the blooper reel. When a movie plays bloopers while the credits are rolling, it’s accomplishing the exact same thing: it reminds you that the characters are actually just played by actors, who are alive and well and probably having a lot of fun, even if the fictional characters suffered. How cool is that!?

Now I’m really fascinated by the possibility of using bloopers to lessen the impact of a tragic ending in a tragicomedy…

Derwent Edge, Derbyshire, England by andymapp

Well, she may wander into my dreams. Wouldn’t it be nice, if I could call her by name and pretend we’ve met before? I’ve waited a long time for such a lady. 

Ladyhawke (1985) dir. Richard Donner

I feel like you might enjoy this very round cycladic cow from the cycladic art museum in Athens

he is shaped like a potato. im going to cry