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Total July Word Count: 56,455

January: 39,307

February: 41,524

March: 56,146

April: 55,552

May: 41,367

June: 40,034

Total: 330,385

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Approval, Touch, Lonely

Last prompt for this round! Finally got through all of them! Another one courtesy of my friend @cee-grice! This one I got to write the first draft of a scene that I hope to use in the real book :) Nate gets to adopt a dragon!

Word Count: 440

(scene under the cut)

Skip, skip, plop!

Nate sighed. He was running out of flat stones — the kind that are especially good for skipping. He looked into the forest, waiting for his friend to emerge, but Reese never showed.

Must have got caught up working.

Nate flicked his coin into the air and caught the sword and shield that materialized from it. The weight was comforting. Familiar. He went through some of his basic steps — drills that Reese had taught him to work on his form.

It was a lot more boring without Reese around.

A pained screech ripped through the air, scattering the birds. Nate stopped and surveyed the area. Maybe activating his weapon had attracted a Mythic to him. He held his position.

Nothing appeared. A weak whimper echoed through the trees. Nate approached the forest, his shield up, sword ready.

Soon, he found it. The source of the cries.

A glistening dragon with ember scales laid prone in the grass. Nate approached it with caution. It's golden reptilian eyes caught sight of him. It lifted it's head and sent a weak blast of fire his way.

"Whoa," Nate held his ground, letting the fire dissipate on his shield. "We're cool, it's cool." He pressed the imprint of his coin on the hilt of his sword, causing his weapon and protection to disappear. He lifted his hands in surrender. "See? I'm unarmed."

The dragon huffed and grunted like it didn't believe him. But if it perceived Nate as a threat, why wasn't it flying away?

"What are you doing out here, all alone?"

Nate scanned the dragon's body. It tried to lift itself up, but it collapsed on the weight of its back leg. A crimson liquid spilled from a large gash in its thy, searing the ground as it met with the grass.

"You're hurt."

The dragon sighed. "Thanks for that news flash," it seemed to say. Nate laughed.

"If you let me, I might be able to help."

The dragon laid still, like it lost the energy to continue communicating. Nate lit his hands aflame, fire warmed his skin and surrounded his hands in a glowing aura.

The dragon's eyes lit up with intrigue.

"Yeah, you and I are a lot alike, huh?" Nate said. Slowly, he approached the dragon's head. His hand outstretched, he gently stroked it's snout. The Mythic closed it's eyes and purred, like a happy house cat. Nate let out another laugh.

"Let's see if we can get you patched up."

The dragon became alert, ready. "You can do that?" he asked with one look.

"It's just dragon first-aid," Nate smiled. "How hard can it be?"

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An observation

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Discussion for the Table

How do you approach worldbuilding? What resources or tools do you use? What do you focus on and how do you develop your ideas? What's your favorite part of worldbuilding or your favorite specific idea you've come up with?

Feel free to answer one, some, or all of these questions! Don't forget to respond to your fellow writers!

Writer's Roundtable Taglist (ask to be +/-): @himbos-hotline, @hallowed-nebulae, @mixing-bowl-of-stories, @scriptrix-eclectica, @darkluminosity

@houndsofcorduff, @kingragnarok-writes, @thearchivistsletterbox, @willtheweaver, @inadequatecowboy

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annahilja

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The Death of U.S. Science

The President's budget request for FY2026 came out yesterday, and it includes catastrophic funding cuts to NASA, NIH, NSF, NOAA, USGS, and more.

I cannot begin to express how much of our daily lives have been enabled by the work that these agencies carry out, from big things like cancer treatments and hurricane predictions to things we take for granted like the ability to take a photo with our cell phone and post it to the internet.

Funding for science in other countries is already barely enough to support their own scientists; this is not a situation where other countries are able to step up and take over the work.

If you are in the US, PLEASE CALL your Congressional representatives and tell them to reverse these cuts. Call after hours to leave a voicemail if you don't want to speak to a human. Every representative has multiple phone lines; keep calling until you get a person or are able to leave a voicemail. The U.S. Capitol Switchboard is (202) 224-3121, but if you look up your reps' websites you can find numbers for all their local offices as well.

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This might actually end up being a real, usable, comprehensive draft of this story. Truly that would be a fucking miracle. But I'm excited!

I wrote today 🎖

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You need to move off of Google Docs!

I know some people have seen the news recently and may be doubtful of it. To the uninformed, Google Docs has started using AI to find "inappropriate" and "problematic" content, scraping your documents and deleting it. I know some people are unsure if this is real or think this is not going to affect them.

I regret to inform you that this is real.

As I was on a call with some writers and we were moving our documents as a precautionary measure, one person discovered entire pages missing that they did not delete themselves. This is happening to us, it's not a hoax or a rumor, it's happening right now. You need to move everything if you want to preserve it.

If you're a writer with writer mutuals, please reblog this so they know. I rarely write on Google Docs anymore, but I started my fanfics on there, and I would be devastated if I lost works more than ten years old because people decided marketing appeal is more important than creative freedom.

EDIT READ THIS: https://www.tumblr.com/bravehyde/790422701153157120/hi-can-we-have-any-sort-of-source-about-the

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Discussion for the Table

How do you approach worldbuilding? What resources or tools do you use? What do you focus on and how do you develop your ideas? What's your favorite part of worldbuilding or your favorite specific idea you've come up with?

Feel free to answer one, some, or all of these questions! Don't forget to respond to your fellow writers!

Writer's Roundtable Taglist (ask to be +/-): @himbos-hotline, @hallowed-nebulae, @mixing-bowl-of-stories, @scriptrix-eclectica, @darkluminosity

@houndsofcorduff, @kingragnarok-writes, @thearchivistsletterbox, @willtheweaver, @inadequatecowboy

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Close Encounters

(c) gifs by riverwindphotography, July 2025

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I know we are all used to hear bad news from the USA or UK when it comes to trans rights but this time Germany wants to play in the same league.

Our idiots at home ministry came up with the fucking idea to start a register for all transgender and nonbinary people which would mean every person working at some public position could always at any given time see your assigned gender at birth, your deadname, your address and who knows what else.

We had been there in the past. Hitler Germany called it the "Travestite Law" back then. Our politicians didn't learn.

We all know this is unacceptable.

Please, if you are German, sign it. If you are not, spread it wide and far.

This had been stopped once a few years ago. It needs to be stopped again.

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Five Things to Expect Tag

Thank you for the tag @willtheweaver!

Rules: List five things that readers can expect when they read your WIP! Then tag a few people to keep the game going!

This tag game seemed fun and simple so I thought I would join in (for once). It's been months since I did one of these, lol. I'm going to do this one for the WIP I am working on now, book one of me Paragon series, Fire in My Veins.

You can expect to see...

Friendships and sibling relationships highlighted as deep and meaningful

Elemental magic

Tragedy and angst

Found family

Betrayal of the highest form

Tagging: @tc-doherty, @bloodlessheirbyjacques, @cee-grice, @thegoddesswater, @tryingtimi, @thearchivistsletterbox (if you guys want, no pressure of course)

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Heya TC!

I'm not quite ready yet, but I'm meandering in the direction of trying to finish, polish, and get work (writing) out. I was thinking about maybe going through self-publishing rather than trying the game to get published, do you have any recommendations or thoughts to pass along? What does the self-publishing pipeline look like for you!

Thanks in advance, always a pleasure.

Hey, thanks for reaching out! This may be a bit scattered, sorry LOL

My biggest advice is to delegate as much as possible. Pay an editor, pay an illustrator, pay a formatter. (Most especially the last one, formatting shit for publishing is SO annoying, and a lot of the best programs to do it are too expensive to bother with if you aren't doing it full-time). This does get expensive of course, so I save up money in advance. If you're interested in a breakdown of how much I've spent/how much I've made I can talk about that.

I fully admit that mine tend to be expensive because I like to produce illustrated novels, but you should set aside at least several hundred dollars each for cover, editing, formatting, and marketing(?). Copyright was $65 the last time I had to apply. I'm not sure if they all do it, but the website that I go through does want you to have copyright. I don't remember whether it was a period of 60 or 90 days, but the best window to apply for copyright is somewhere to that effect on either side of the publishing date.

My second biggest advice is to buy your own ISBN (or equivalent)! I cannot tell you how much trouble this caused me at first. If you are in the US, you will buy them from Bowker. You can buy them one at a time, or get a discount and buy a set of 10 which is what I did. You do not need to buy a barcode. That's just them trying to squeeze money out of you. I purchased mine in September of last year and it was $295 for 10.

You'll need an ISBN for every version of your book that exists, and if you use a free one from your publishing service and that service Happens to go out of business, then you'll lose all of your reviews and sales data associated with the book (I'm not bitter).

You'll want to carefully examine your options as far as publishers go, although I would recommend not going through Amazon KDP even though the vast majority of your sales will probably come through them. It would be better to go through a sort of middleman service that distributes your book to a lot of different sales venues and doesn't lock you into any exclusives.

I use Draft2Digital which is a bit on the simple side but has served me well, and they recently added print books which is great! They also have options for things like audiobooks if you want to do that. Previously they didn't offer print so I had to do the paperback through Amazon.

Every service you can publish through has its own pros and cons though, so do your research and find one that works for you. However, avoid anything that requires you to pay upfront, you'll want something that does print on demand. The only thing you should need to pay for from the publisher is a proof copy if you want one (definitely get a proof copy).

…

As for my personal pipeline, I use Patreon so it does end up being a little bit different but basically: 1) write the book 2) hire editor 3) hire illustrator 4) continue editing while posting on Patreon 5) edit again after everything is on Patreon 6) hire a formatter 7) set a publishing date (I've generally ended up having to push my publication dates back a few times, so you may want to pick one several months in the future just to give yourself wiggle room) 8) publish 9) apply for copyright (this is just less annoying to do afterwards than ahead of time imo)

You should probably hire some kind of marketer too, if you aren't willing to work yourself to the bone for it. I can't offer much financial insight here because I currently haven't done this...and I'm also unwilling to do marketing on my own so I just rely on this blog to gain attention for me. Once I have a larger catalog, I will probably purchase some short campaigns though ^^

Please let me know if I can expand on anything for you!

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How to get access to queer lit for freeeee

Our Summer Reading Challenge fundraiser for LGBTQ+ youth is ON - you can see our full queer summer reading list here.

"But It Gets Better, how do I get access to all these amazing queer books without having to buy them all?" you ask?

🟣 First, check your school’s library, or your town/county’s local public library. Many have an LGBTQ+ specific section! Ask them how to apply for a free library card, and how to access their digital collection - they may require proof of address, like a school I.D., driver's license, or piece of mail addressed to you.

🟣 Many public libraries give you access to platforms like Libby and Hoopla for free with your library card, which allow you to download even more books that may not be physically on your library’s shelves!

🟣 If your town has an LGBTQ+ center, ask if they have an LGBTQ+ library with books that you can borrow. You can find your closest center with the directory from Center Link.

🟣 BooksUnbanned.com can help get you free e-cards from multiple libraries around the country, so you can access their online collections even if you don’t live in the area. Most cards are available for people ages 13-26! It was started by Brooklyn Public Library, and you can also get free cards for Boston Public Library, LA County Library, Seattle Public Library, and San Diego Public Library.

Once you’ve got your books, you can join the challenge here!