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Agates carved into orange slices by wutong_crystal_carvings.

Source: x

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“Do you need me here to take notes when you wake up?” Nat asked eagerly, holding her journal with both hands. The colorful hand-painted dragons on the cover—all done by her, of course—stood out against her gray hands. Ambrose sighed and pocketed the bottle. “No, I’ll be all right. Please, go have dinner. Is the apprentice house—?” Nat nodded, her bag already over her shoulder. “It’s chicken and dumpling night!” Eli looked up. “Can I be an apprentice for the day?” Ambrose gave him a sideways glance. “And here I thought you enjoyed my cold, leftover noodles.” “I…” Eli patted him on the shoulder. “I love them because you made them.” “Okay, gross.” Nat rolled her eyes and pushed past them both. “I’ll see you tomorrow! Don’t forget to take notes!”

(meme voice) gee Nat, how come you get two dads?

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Can I just say that I am SO FREAKING HAPPY that my publisher decided hot pink is the colour they're going to use for Of Monsters and Mainframes. It's such a vibe.

Anyway. There is indeed a sale at B&N. The noblest of barns. The barnest of nobles. 25% off if you preorder with the code PREORDER25.

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I JUST FINISHED A CAPTURED CAULDRON AND I READ IT IN ONE SITTING AND I AM STILL REELING FROM HOW MUCH I LOVE IT SO IGNORE THE ALL CAPS BUT I LOVE IT SO SO MUCH AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!

So glad you enjoyed it!!!! 🥰🥰🥰

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[ID: screenshots of two book pages on e-readers. One says "Chapter Three: Aspen" at the top and has a black-and-white flower crown chapter icon. The other says "Chapter One: Emry" at the top and has a black-and-white lute chapter icon. The lute is tangled up in thorny vines. end ID]

The Spirit's Curse Chapter Icons!

Continuing in the tradition of The Stray Spirit and The Spirit Well, the chapter icons for The Spirit's Curse have been updated!

Both icons are in a digital charcoal style, to better match the interior illustrations done by @vinzred. Emry still has his lute (though the vines surrounding it are a bit spikier now 👀) and Aspen gets a flower crown!

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Marcille relearning her native language takes a turn

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trans women, i love you.

you were a woman yesterday. you're a woman today. you're a woman tomorrow. you're a woman forever.

trans women have existed long before those stuffy bigots sitting in a court room have. trans women will continue to exist long after they're dead and rotting in the earth.

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get to know the author!

been a while since i've posted anything about myself, haha. these are my favorite books, shows, movies, and no skip albums! i believe i have the best taste of anyone ever personally /j if any of these are your favs too let me know

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THE SPIRIT'S CURSE IS DONE

COMING IN AT 74,751 WORDS

I AM DONE WRITING IT

OH MY GOD

THE SERIES IS DONE

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i overheard someone talking about how their high school had a program where you had to review other schools' theatre productions and i've never been more jealous

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confusing Odysseus and Orpheus is like confusing a liar and a lyre. send post

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Do you have any advice on how to get funnier? Do you bounce jokes/plots/etc. off other people to see what hits? Do you just write what you find funny? I feel like I'm funny enough in real life, but it's hard to translate that to the page.

Oh gosh, this is a toughie. HOW TO FUNNY.

Well, for one thing, being funny in writing is a lot harder than being funny in person, because in person you're generally talking to people that you've built a rapport with (friends, acquaintances, coworkers). Humor is one of those instinctive evolutionary tools that we developed in order to help form social bonds. Like how our brains register babies as cute because or evolutionary development requires us to be really invested in caretaking. That's how an adult bonds to an infant, yes? But then there is also an evolutionary advantage in adults forming bonds with other adults. Sometimes this happens with physical traits like cuteness or hotness (romantic/sexual attraction is one type of bond), sometimes with vulnerability and "this person needs me" (caretaking is another type of bond)... There are lots of bonds. Leadership. Respect. Solidarity. Community.

But then humor is a REALLY effective form of bonding -- arguably the MOST effective, because it can trump any other of the other bonds any day of the week, and twice on Tuesdays. We have all met someone who was physically not that spectacular to look at, just sort of a Normal Looking Human, but then you find out that they are SO FUNNY and suddenly they are the "hottest" person in the room. We have all heard of a situation where someone was the leader of a clique and had managed to get everyone to worship them... Until a new jokester entered the social circle and suddenly the leadership-bond is not nearly so compelling as THIS GUY WHO MAKES EVERYONE LAUGH (and the leader gets huffy and grouchy about it, and suddenly everyone notices that the emperor has no clothes and that the leader were faking it the whole time. And then the local jester has won the day).

So how to GET FUNNIER? And how do I advise you, when comedy is so individual and what you find funny might be different than what I find funny?

First, study funny shit. Study it like a bug. Read funny books or watch comedy shows with an eye of "How are these jokes constructed? What is making it funny?" Frequently you will notice that some comedians aren't actually all that funny, they're just snarky and good at building rapport with the audience, so the audience laughs as an expression of the social bond, not because the joke was legitimately hilarious. (Here is my "this made me Actually Laugh out loud" tag if you want some insight into my comedy style and possible raw material to study)

Second, a lot of writers like Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams have written about the art of writing comedy, and I'm sure that there are how-to books for comedians as well.

There are a couple main things that make something funny: The juxtaposition of things, the element of surprise, anticipation that pays off, repetition of an established joke, and comedic timing. (Notice that surprise and anticipation are OPPOSITES -- sometimes a thing can be funny when we see it coming a mile away. Sometimes a thing is funny when it is unexpected.)

Examples: In this video, the comedy is coming from the juxtaposition of the background song against the long shot of the Oreos. We see the punchline coming from a mile away (the oreo package says "MOST STUF" and yet he takes the oreos apart to increase the stuf, thereby disproving the package's claim), and so it reasserts something that many people already know and have experienced for themselves. It's the "we've all been there" effect. This would probably not be a funny to people who did not grow up eating Oreos, or who for some reason did not go through the spontaneous phenomenon of "take them apart for MORE SUGAR".

Comedic timing is, of course, the king of comedy techniques, and it is the hardest to pull off in writing. Or, well, people say that it is the hardest. It's not actually the hardest, because it's just a subcategory of the technique of Pacing, both on a story level and on a sentence level. If you can figure out how to take control of the reader's mind and ride them like they're a jaeger and you're the pilot, then you can make them laugh. This is done by controlling the SPEED that they're reading at and the rhythm -- control their speed and rhythm and you control comedic timing. Controlling a reader's speed is done with relatively simple techniques, of which there are two big ones:

Sentence length. Really short sentences read fast. Use a lot of short sentences. Your readers will read quickly. This style is easy to skim. Unfortunately, it can also get boring. See what I'm doing here? Lots of short sentences. On the other hand, as everyone knows and as you have probably experienced for yourself, longer sentences give the impression of a longer and more complex and nuanced thought, even if not as much information is being conveyed; it's a simple matter of hanging a lot of dependent clauses off of one main thing and seeing how long you can go before you hit that final full stop. Varying your sentence length varies your timing and starts to unlock some of the timing control necessary to generate comedy. You can put something in a joke rhythm with this and then it will read like a joke.

Forcing a pause. A pause is the alpha and the omega of comedy. Thus, do not underestimate the comedic potential of a strategic paragraph break. The human brain works so quickly that even the NANOSECONDS it takes for your eyes to physically move from one line, through the strategic paragraph break, to the punchline -- that alone is enough time for the brain to register a pause and for the reader to then feel "surprised". Strategic paragraph break is perhaps the king of comedic writing techniques, IMO. (Careful not to overuse it!)

There are other mechanical techniques involved, but these are the big ones for timing. With these, you can take an otherwise unfunny scene and adjust it through nothing but timing alone to suddenly be funny.

Finally, a fun fact: When I am writing comedy, I am writing with a dead straight face. I am a cold and ruthless joke-engineering machine. I nearly never laugh at my own jokes. There is ONE (1) joke that got me to crack when I was writing Running Close to the Wind, and that was someone talking about Avra "scuttling up a tree like a little rat that's got something badly wrong with it". Still makes me grin to this day. Idk man.

Anyway I hope that helped!! wow this got long

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whenever you take too much time to write something know it is because stephen king has been stealing your life force

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Tumblr friends! Do you like decorating games? Would you be open to play-testing the functionality of an extremely simple (no limits, no objectives) potion shop decorating game? If so, DM me!

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line editing pass of TSC is DONE! now onto the weak-word removal pass, the read-aloud proofread pass...and that's it!!

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“No sign of Yarrow near here, right?” [Damir] called to the spirits. “If you tell me yes, tree kid, I swear to Hara, I’m getting Nik’s gun and shooting at the rotting flowers myself. No, I know that’s not how it works—”

Damir Nedrov has had it with these motherfucking spirits in this motherfucking forest