Latest Posts by ealdwineoldfriend - Page 3

I am constantly dragging my sister into long-ass phone calls and cornering her at family dinners.

She is the wall at which I throw things to see what sticks or, even better, what bounces back with improvements made

the most powerful writing tool is actually Brainstorming With The Girls

Putting books on hold at the library has the same thrill of ordering books online, but with the added benefit of not losing any money over titles I might not enjoy.

10/10 would recommend.

Between Cait Corrain and James Somerton, I’m becoming really fucking sick of people using neurodiversity and mental health struggles as excuses to do shitty things.

Autism didn’t make you racist and adhd didn’t make you plagiarize.

You’re just a shitty person.

i hate when ppl act like the only reason to not like a "sad" ending is because you can't take it or whatever. personally as a tragedy enjoyer, i hate a poorly written ending. i hate an ending that is just kind of a bummer. i hate an ending that feels mean-spirited to the audience. i hate an ending that's redundant. i love a sad ending that is thematically consistent, poignant, and bespoke to the rest of its narrative.

I'm re-reading this story I wrote back in 2022 and... foone, do you think you get your "one phone call" even if you're in a medieval fantasyworld jail? because I don't think that's how it works

thinking non-stop about the Terry Pratchett Method of Deconstruction (TM) and how it works

[...] the wages of sin is death, but so is the salary of virtue, and at least the evil get to go home early on Fridays. (Witches Abroad)

Take a common concept, metaphor, idiom, trope etc. "The wages of sin is death."

Invert, reverse or subvert it to highlight the inconsistency or issue. "But so is the salary of virtue." (Well, actually, everybody dies, right?)

While everybody's contemplating the philosophy revealed, overextend the metaphor and whack them in the back of the head with the joke like a comedic quintain while they aren't expecting it. "At least the evil get to go home early on Fridays."

He does it quite often and I love it every time.

rudolph the red nosed reindeer

Another commission from last year, this time a teastained pair of Nanny Ogg and Granny Weatherwax from Terry Pratchett's Discworld series.

I love the witches as my first Pratchett book was Wee Free Men, so these were a joy to paint!

how jingo went

close ups on his face, bc i like when hes holding on by a thread

seeing a cover i drew at the library is so wild lmao

WAIT 3 PEOPLE IN LINE??? Feeling a lot of pressure ;0_0 sorry to the people in the queue behind me. im reading so slowly rn

I had a dream about angels last night. Or like this morning depending on your view because I woke up at 3am to give Leeloo her inhaler and this dream happened after that.

So this group of angels had descended to earth on a mission and ended up in a living situation with a bunch of humans. Like they were just roommates with angels. The angels were attempting to carry out inscrutable divine plans but were handicapped by the fact that the world was too much for them.

Every sensory experience was a massive overload to them. One tasted garlic and burst into tears. They could barely function let alone fulfill their purpose on the mortal plane. So one of the roommates came up with a sensory acclimation program for the angels.

Each angel was paired off with a human to attempt some experiences. The humans job was to help them through it. One angel was going to brave the movies. Buttered popcorn was an overwhelming cacophony of sensation. Another wanted to attempt a short walk on the beach. Like, their goals were very modest normal guy stuff.

There was just one problem. All of the human buddies. Desperately. Wanted to fuck their angel. They all wanted the angels to be down with sex acts so bad, they had the major angel hornies and there was no cure. One person successfully seduced their angel and all the other humans lost their shit trying to up their seduction game on these sheltered divine ding dongs who could barely handle the taste of popcorn.

So most of the dream was spent watching people engineer elaborate situations in which they might go to ethereal pound town while the angels blundered around licking frogs and sticking their hands in garbage.

Everytime I read Frankenstein, the same line makes me put the book down and stare at the wall. It’s my favorite line in the book; it has its own highlighter color in my annotations. The first time I read it, I literally detoured after my last class just to tell my lit teacher how much I liked the line because I couldn’t wait until second period the next day. Here’s the line:

“Life, although it may only be an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me, and I will defend it.”

This is said by the creature. He wanted to live. He wanted to live life so badly even though he had had such a difficult one. He still loved the song of the birds and the smell of the flowers and the joy in the world even if he never got to truly experience that joy. I just. AHHHH.

He wanted to fight for a life he never got to live.

Well this bell could be tolling for anybody

I can’t find a good app to make a private world building wiki. All of them are either specifically tailored to roleplaying games to an annoying degree or force you to make your wiki public or put all the decent features behind a paywall or something. I’m broke and just want the ability to write little articles for myself with links so I can remember what I was doing.

Lake Superior , Canada 🇨🇦 / USA 🇺🇸

thinking about how the world would be better if more people understood the differences between 'the author failed to tell the story they wanted to tell' and 'the author told the story they wanted to tell, but they told it badly' and 'the author told the story they wanted to, and they told it well, but it wasn't the story I wanted to read'

I am not taking this seriously

Sometimes you need to outline a whole ass fantasy novel in a single day instead of dealing with your feelings

one of my worst writing sins is abusing my power to create compound words. i cannot write the sentence "The sun shone as bright as honey that afternoon." no. that's boring. "The sun was honey-bright that afternoon" however? yes. that sentence is dope as fuck. i do not care if "honey-bright" is a word in the english dictionary. i do not care if the sentence is grammatically correct. i will not change. i will not correct my erred ways. the laws of the english language are mine.

Editing Your Novel Part 2: The Plot Pass

Okay, it's finally time to edit. You've got all your materials sorted, it's time to dive right in. You want to start with the big edits first, aka the plot pass.

Now listen. You're going to want to linger and fix those little bits of grammar or dialogue, and I know it's so hard not to, but letting yourself get off-track might mean wasting hours on a scene you realize later you have to delete. Fix a few spelling errors, leave a note, and stay plot-focused.

Making Sense (Of the Plot)

In the plot pass, you're asking yourself some basic questions:

Do events follow a clear order? - When you're getting everything down on the page for the first time, scenes might get jumbled up or events might not have clear causes. Maybe you have a car crashing into the cafe pages before, but in a writing haze, you wrote your main characters having a casual conversation moments later. If the bad guy beats your heroes to treasure, is it clear how they got there? (Not everyone can be Yzma.)

Do circumstances feel contrived? If there are any problems that can be solved by your characters sitting down and talking to each other, it may be better to lean into their motivation for not speaking to each other, rather than coming up with bad romcom scenarios. If the plot can be resolved by the mcguffin the grandma had the whole time, it might be better to make finding that mcguffin part of the plot instead.

It doesn't have to be perfect, and you don't have to reinvent the wheel. If someone gets bitten by a werewolf, it's perfectly fine to have them turn into one at the worst possible moment. When it comes to contrived, you're looking for problems that seem easy to solve and look for more interesting ways to complicate them.

Are your character motivations consistent to the characters throughout the story? - They can change throughout the story, but character motivations do need to be linked to the actions they take. An out-of-nowhere betrayal is way more satisfying if you lay the groundwork for it ahead of time.

Take a moment to list out the motivations of the characters in a scene you're not quite sure of can help you figure how to fix it. Having an outline helps with this a lot!

Are you following an "if... then" format? - My brain doesn't work like this when I'm writing, because as a writer you know how A got to Z, and it seems (in your head) obvious how it happened. This is where my scene card outline come in handy, because I can look at my overview of what should happen and why, and then compare it to what actually happens in the scene. I've discovered so many threads I forgot to connect that way, like why a character had a certain device (I forgot to have him pick it up two scenes earlier), or adding a few simmering dialogue bits that make the big fight pay off much better.

Can you fix the "Because the Plot Demands It" scenes? - Look, sometimes your character needs to be in that haunted house to see that damn ghost, but your character isn't the type to set foot in such a place. It's really easy, especially in the first draft, to contrive a way in there (she took a wrong turn on her way to grandma's!), but retooling these scenes to connect them to the characters motivations and needs is the way to go. The main character doesn't want to go into that obviously cursed place, but her best friend hasn't shown up for school in three days and now she's crying for help from the second floor window. Your character's strong desire to be there for her friend is a much better way to get her into that house.

This is not always easy - it took me six fricken drafts to realize a critical part of a character's motivation was because his father blamed him for his mother's death - but it is going to be worth putting in the work to hammer down.

Do you have a solid timeline? - This might not seem as important, but it's super easy to accidentally fit two weeks worth of activities in three days. Make sure you have that on reference, even if you don't mention it in the book. Also make sure to gauge your distances if your characters are on a trip, because if you do accidentally say it takes two hours to drive from Seattle to Spokane instead of five, someone will dive down your throat for it. Not me. Just someone.

Okay, maybe me. Slow down, you maniacs.

Next post we'll dive into the structure pass. See you then!

A goblin and an elf have decided to defy tradition and get married. Their ceremony will be held in the magical forest in accordance with elven tradition.

If you are a British/UK citizen, there is currently a petition running (with only 125 signatures) that ends in June 2025. The petition calls for the government to make it so that you do not need a diagnosis of gender dysphoria to change your gender.

If you are a British/UK citizen, and would like to sign:

https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/701159

If you're not a British/ UK citizen it'd be much appreciated if you could share this post !! :)

My little beastie

Encouragment for writers that I know seems discouraging at first but I promise it’s motivational-

• Those emotional scenes you’ve planned will never be as good on page as they are in your head. To YOU. Your audience, however, is eating it up. Just because you can’t articulate the emotion of a scene to your satisfaction doesn’t mean it’s not impacting the reader. 

• Sometimes a sentence, a paragraph, or even a whole scene will not be salvagable. Either it wasn’t necessary to the story to begin with, or you can put it to the side and re-write it later, but for now it’s gotta go. It doesn’t make you a bad writer to have to trim, it makes you a good writer to know to trim.

• There are several stories just like yours. And that’s okay, there’s no story in existence of completely original concepts. What makes your story “original” is that it’s yours. No one else can write your story the way you can.

• You have writing weaknesses. Everyone does. But don’t accept your writing weaknesses as unchanging facts about yourself. Don’t be content with being crap at description, dialogue, world building, etc. Writers that are comfortable being crap at things won’t improve, and that’s not you. It’s going to burn, but work that muscle. I promise you’ll like the outcome.

one of my favorite things to do in limited perspective is write sentences about the things someone doesn't do. he doesn't open his eyes. he doesn't reach out. i LOVE sentences like that. if it's describing the narrator, it's a reflection of their desires, something they're holding themselves back from. there's a tension between urge and action. it makes you ask why they wanted or felt compelled to do that, and also why they ultimately didn't. and if it's describing someone else, it tells you about the narrator's expectations. how they perceive that other person or their relationship. what they thought the other person was going to do, or thought the other person should have done, but failed to. negative action sentences are everything.

Me, writing alone: mwahaha. This is the best plot and greatest prose ever concocted. I’m a genius.

Me as soon as somebody else looks at my writing: please forgive me for assaulting your eyes with this drivel 😭

HA I just got a super positive rejection! I’ll put it under the cut (because it might get long), but this is genuinely helpful writing advice

Keep reading

something I’ve learned from querying: everything has a million subcategories, and it is crucial to actually learn then.

like when I first started, I thought an agent listing ‘speculative fiction’ in their interests was enough to give me a shot! but now it’s like ok. but does that actually mean fantasy (as opposed to science fiction or surrealism)? and if it does, is it constrained to one of the following:

high fantasy

low fantasy

grounded fantasy 

magical realism

etc.

and if fate is smiling on me and it is high fantasy, what sort do they like? because mine starts as a medieval George R R Martin clone before morphing into a post-apocalyptic sci fi, so they have to simultaneously be alright with a) cliched shit and b) experimental weird shit.

and say everything aligns, and that genre works for them - even then, they often accept it only in one or two age categories. there’s mg, ya, na (middle grade, young adult, new adult) and adult. mine is adult, which is a huge strike against it given the genre. 

AND THEN! AND THEN! say everything else is perfect. they love high fantasy with elves and unicorns, they want it for adults, they’re cool with genre bending, but in their profile is a phrase I’ve learned to dread: “HEA (which stands for happily every after) required”. I love my little book, but it is dark and full of terrible people.

and then I also have to hope that they’re into queer romance, on top of everything else! it’s a hard process.

currently I have 45 queries sent, 15 rejections, and 30 unknowns, and I think a good portion of those rejections are because I didn’t initially understand that ‘accepts speculative fiction’ shouldn’t be taken literally.

Bones isn’t xenophobic toward Vulcans, he just roasts Spock, specifically, for being Vulcan the same way my siblings roast me for being gay. They’re both in on the joke, and if Spock asked Bones to stop, he would. Instead, this sassy motherfucker insults humanity as a whole and Bones’s abilities as a doctor in retaliation.