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if you’re white and wanna write a poc character and feel awkward about it i implore you to ignore any twitblr stuff treating it as a massive ethical burden and instead come in more with the same mindset you’d have if you wanted to write about idk firefighters but didn’t know anything about firefighters so you do... research. Like fuck off with the weird kinda creepy calls for spiritual introspection you’re not writing about god damn space aliens you’re writing about humans and if you think you need more perspective of different life experiences just read?

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Henry: I am trying to save your life!

Allegra: and you can pay me for the privilege. 30 silvers.

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I made this a couple of months ago but. hack your 3ds. do it right now.

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Want to learn something new in 2022??

Absolute beginner adult ballet series (fabulous beginning teacher)

40 piano lessons for beginners (some of the best explanations for piano I’ve ever seen)

Excellent basic crochet video series

Basic knitting (probably the best how to knit video out there)

Pre-Free Figure Skate Levels A-D guides and practice activities (each video builds up with exercises to the actual moves!)

How to draw character faces video (very funny, surprisingly instructive?)

Another drawing character faces video

Literally my favorite art pose hack

Tutorial of how to make a whole ass Stardew Valley esque farming game in Gamemaker Studios 2??

Introduction to flying small aircrafts

French/Dutch/Fishtail braiding

Playing the guitar for beginners (well paced and excellent instructor)

Playing the violin for beginners (really good practical tips mixed in)

Color theory in digital art (not of the children’s hospital variety)

Retake classes you hated but now there’s zero stakes:

Calculus 1 (full semester class)

Learn basic statistics (free textbook)

Introduction to college physics (free textbook)

Introduction to accounting (free textbook)

Learn a language:

Ancient Greek

Latin

Spanish

German

Japanese (grammar guide) (for dummies)

French

Russian (pretty good cyrillic guide!)

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The Signs and Empire:

Aries: An empire of fire and salt water. Fertile island fortresses patrolled by many-armed stone sentinels wielding golden flamberges. Rivers of fire spilling into the sea.

Taurus: An empire of honey and snow. Castles that stand as decadent art. Colossal ghostly spirit foxes watch over forests of cherry trees.

Gemini: An empire of rain and silk. Glittering iridescent cloaks and wide brimmed straw masks. The aqueducts flow ever deeper into the mountains.

Cancer: An empire of time and woodlands. Citadels of fossilized lumber strong as any metal. Old rusted weapons jut from the grass like weeds.

Leo: An empire of roses and bridges. Subtle stonework hewn rough by ages of wear. Stone blossoms wilting as the season passes.

Virgo: An empire of tombs and amber. The spires of the great necropolis are visible over the labyrinth walls, as kongamato patrol the skies.

Libra: An empire of sand and glass. The libraries of a thousand cities stolen, collected in the grand archives. A library of libraries. 

Scorpio: An empire of blood and stars. Nothing is left of this great people, but their decedents know their history well. Spilling blood on the great story-stones that dot the overgrowth brings whispers of the past. 

Ophiuchus: An empire of wind and hooves. Steeds like a thunderstorm, heavy and dark. Leaving only nursing trees and pillars to the dead in their wake.

Sagittarius: A landless empire of wanderers. Cloaks of feathers and ritual smoke. Comfortable boots and hospitality, though they are the guests.

Capricorn: An empire of stories and loss. Ruins buried under ice, unseen for generations.

Aquarius: An empire of brass and coal. The corpses of war machines that now dot the landscape. Rusted green in the autumn rains. 

Pisces: A sunken empire. Pillars of shining black salt break the waves, the deeper recesses of the grand palace lie sodden and unexplored.

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One thing I didn't expect from my new worldbuilding book is the author, roughly my dad's age, including his opinions on furries

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some fucking resources for all ur writing fuckin needs

* body language masterlist

* a translator that doesn’t eat ass like google translate does

* a reverse dictionary for when ur brain freezes

* 550 words to say instead of fuckin said

* 638 character traits for when ur brain freezes again

* some more body language help

(hope this helps some ppl)

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Combo ship things:

When they’re fighting and they’re on equal footing with each other and they’re both powerhouses and you just know they would be such a power couple if they teamed up.

That Moment™ when they fight on the same side for the first time. Maybe it’s pre-planned, maybe it’s spur of the moment. Maybe they get attacked by a mutual enemy and team up. Maybe it’s a tactical advantage and they go into battle together.

Fighting back to back. Not even thinking twice about protecting each other.

Reluctantly realizing they fight well together.

One of them saves the other’s life and they share eye contact and an ‘oh’ moment.

Becoming allies for the convenience but then developing a genuine friendship that leads to Feelings™.

At first disagreeing on fight tactics but eventually learning how the other functions and utilizing each other’s assets. Eventually reaching the point where they understand each other so well that their conversations sound like another language and/or telepathy to other people because it’s all half-formed sentences and inside references.

Everyone assuming they’re married because they sure act like it with the weird combination of constant bickering and vicious protectiveness.

Trying (and failing) not to get distracted by each other on the battlefield, whether that’s because oh wow they’re hot or because if I look away for a single second, they’ll get hurt.

Carefully patching each other up after a fight. Nagging each other for getting hurt but also relentlessly teasing each other.

“Are you gonna kiss it better?”

“Please be more careful next time? For my sanity?”

“You could’ve gotten killed!” “Why do you care!”

“What are we? Rivals? Allies? Friends?” “I think you know exactly what we are. And it’s none of those things.”

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taylor swift music writing prompts. #1

this is from taylor swift's album, speak now.

prompts masterlist.

"tell me how's your family... i haven't seen them in a while."

"this is me swallowing my pride, standing in front of you saying... i'm sorry for that night."

"wish i realized what i had when you were mine."

"if we loved again, i swear i'd love you right."

"maybe this is wishful thinking."

"i'd go back in time and change it, but i can't."

"i guess you really did it this time."

"if you have children someday... when they point to the pictures, please tell them my name."

"i had the time of my life with you."

"i was a flight risk."

"i wonder why we bother with love if it never lasts."

"you're the best thing that has ever been mine."

"i just wanna feel ok again."

"you have pointed out my flaws again as if i don't already see them."

"my choice is you."

"life makes love looks hard."

"take away the pain."

"cause i see sparks fly whenever you smile."

"my mind forgets to remind me you're a bad idea."

"i'm on my guard for the rest of the world, but with you..."

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A bunch of different dialogue prompts #59

"I know you don't mean to, but sometimes you come across as very villainous."

"Do I regret it? Absolutely. Would I do it again? Without a doubt."

"You've got a real attitude problem, kid." "That's just his personality, sir."

"This isn't a competition, dude." "You're right, it's not even close!" "That's not what I meant."

"I want to go home..." "I know, I know. We will, soon, okay?"

"I've decided to be nice." "... Why?"

"Could you please shut up and stop being so annoying?" "Sorry, you're gonna have to pick one, I can't do both."

"Do you recognize this?" "Where did you find that?"

"Here, you're gonna need this." "Is that a machine gun? Who brings a machine gun to lunch??"

"And when I rule the world,-" "Don't you mean 'if'?" "... As I was saying, when I rule the world,"

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101 ways to break your characters' (and readers') hearts

a lot of people may not be aware, but angst is absolutely my FAVORITE thing to read or write. along with my 101 ways to say i love you prompt lists, i'm going to make one that's a bit more angsty and sad! if you enjoy breaking your characters and your readers with what you write like i do (i promise i'm not a sadist), then this is the prompt list for you! also, thank you so much for all of you that have been supporting me!

"I'm not sorry for what I did to you."

"I don't love you anymore."

"Your efforts didn't change anything. It was all useless."

"None of this was real."

"I'm dying. There's nothing you can do to stop it."

"I can't even bear to look at you anymore."

"They're gone. For good this time."

"I wish we had never met."

"I wish you loved me as much as I loved you."

"Don't you ever step foot near me again."

"You can't save me."

"Why can't I just be loved?"

"There's nothing you can say that will make me change my mind."

"I can't deal with this for any longer."

"Why won't you just listen to me?"

"What did they give you that I couldn't? What did they have that I didn't?"

"Everything hurts."

"This can't be you. The real you would never do this!"

"Please, stop!"

"I'm all alone. Again."

"Where are you?!"

"Where were you when I needed you the most?"

"I'm too tired to keep going."

"Please don't leave me!"

"You left me and you didn't even think twice about it."

"I trusted you..."

"I still love you."

"I never loved you."

"I chose them over you and I'd do it again."

"You know I didn't do it!"

"Please, I'm begging you to believe me!"

"I hurt you, and I can't forgive myself for that."

"Get the hell away from me."

"I can't forgive you for what you did."

"How did we drift this far apart?"

"You don't look at me like you used to..."

"Am I not enough?"

"I hate you!"

"You're not them. You're not them and it's just not the same."

"I miss how things used to be."

"Without you, I'll have nothing."

"I don't want to lose you, but I already have, haven't I?"

"It's far too late."

"Every little thing reminds me of them and it's driving me crazy!"

"I know I was just a replacement."

"They hurt me. Really badly."

"I think I'm losing myself."

"Why can't I just be someone's first option?"

"Their blood is on my hands."

"You broke me."

"I was wrong about you."

"This was a mistake."

"How dare you?!"

"I'm such a disappointment."

"You're a monster."

"Can't you see that I'm trying my best?"

"When will it be my turn?"

"This is my last fight."

"You're hurting me."

"I hope they don't hurt you like I did."

"Goodbye."

"You're just clingy and annoying, and I only ever had you around because I felt sorry for you."

"I can't keep pretending that it didn't happen."

"You almost died! And all because you think I don't love you?!"

"If I step out of this door, I won't be back."

"I know I told you to leave, but you should have stayed. You should have stayed because that's what I needed more than anything."

"I don't think I'll ever be the same again."

"I wanted you."

"Did you ever care about me? About us?"

"I just want to fix this..."

"They will never love you, so don't even bother to get your hopes up."

"Why did you even believe in me so much?"

"Everyone would be better off if I were completely gone."

"Stop hurting yourself!"

"I only ever wanted you when I needed something. You should have been smart enough to figure that out by now."

"More than anything, I wish I didn't miss you. I wish I didn't spend every single damn day next to the door, waiting for you to burst through to tell me that you were wrong and that everything would all be fine. I wish I didn't love you, even now."

"I hope your heart breaks every time you remember me and what we did together."

"I can't do this without them."

"Everything is just falling apart."

"I just wish there was someone here."

"I want to blame you for it all, but then again, I bet I asked for too much from you."

"You're the reason that they're gone!"

"They were the best thing that ever happened to me, and I ruined them."

"You make me hate myself even more."

"This is all temporary, I hope you know that."

"You're the only family I have left."

"There isn't enough begging that you could do to bring me back."

"You tried killing me! How am I supposed to get over that?"

"You only tolerated me and I know it."

"You deserve more than me."

"I've given you so many fucking chances, and every single damn time you just hurt me even more."

"So what? I make one small mistake and suddenly that's too much for you?"

"I wish I died back there, because at least then you would have been satisfied."

"Don't act like we're suddenly on speaking terms. This changes nothing."

"There will never be anything between us."

"You want me dead."

"You hurt them, didn't you?"

"You don't even remember me."

"I don't even see the point in arguing with you anymore."

"Don't lie to me. Please stop lying to me."

"Say you're sorry a hundred more times if you'd like, but I know it's not true."

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OTP Prompts - Physical Affection

Peppering kisses on the other's cheeks, nose, forehead, temple, etc.

Pulling them to their chest and squeezing them tight in a hug.

Hand holding. In public, by themselves, or with friends - just the act of a character reaching out to hold their partner's hand is just so good.

Resting their head on their partner's shoulder. Maybe they're tired, they need comfort for some reason, or they're just craving closeness to someone.

Combing their fingers through the other's hair. Maybe they're cuddling in bed, one of them with their face buried against the other's chest, or it could be a quick gesture of appreciation while they're out in public.

Thigh squeezes. These always get me. When one reaches over and gives their outer thigh a squeeze, maybe of reassurance and/or love, depending on the context.

Hugs from behind. Coming up behind their partner and wrapping their arms around their waist, burying their face in their neck or against their shoulder, just to be close to them for a moment.

Resting their chin on the other person's head as they hug/cuddle. They could be lying in bed together, or standing in public. Either way, It's always so cute to watch/read.

Massages. Maybe one of them has had a hard day or are just not feeling the best, or it might be related to a friendly deal they made with each other.

Back rubs. Gently trailing their fingers up and down their partner's spine, or using the palm of their hand to massage their entire back. Maybe they're absentmindedly drawing little patterns with their fingertips.

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Writing romance as an asexual is literally just staring at the various romance novels you’ve pulled up to see if you’re describing sexual attraction right

I don’t know what the allos are talking about and at this point it feels weird to ask

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Linked to this post is a free google slides document I’ve designed for the purposes of character and plot development. You can use this in several ways, including:

Making a copy to your google drive and editing it digitally

Downloading as a Microsoft powerpoint document

Editing in google slides and then downloading as a printable PDF

This document includes technical instructions and guides to the planning models I integrated. The included pages are:

Character/arc design sheet

Secondary characters sheet

Three-act flow chart

Plot story map

[watermark is only present in these screenshots]

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Tag yourself, I'm A minor

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monster theory 101

So anyone who has even glanced at my blog knows that a lot of my work is built around an area of literary theory called ‘monster theory’, which is far from a major theoretical discipline. As such I thought I’d give a little run down on what it is and resources that are good in terms of getting started.

Monster Theory is loosely described as the study of monsters, fictional characters that we (humans) deem monstrous. This is usually rooted in the concept of norm/other, which becomes human/monster. The basis of modern monster theory is built on the work of Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, who published a paper in 1996 titled Monster Culture (Seven Theses) which included seven different and overlapping views on what monsters are, why we create them, what they mean and how they fit into both literary canon and our society. These seven theses are (very quickly and loosely);

The Monster’s Body Is A Cultural Body: a monstrous being “is born only at [a] metaphoric crossroads, as an embodiment of a certain cultural moment.” Meaning a monster created for a work of fiction is generally an embodiment of a certain cultural anxiety or fear occurring in a specific socio-cultural moment. For instance, during the 70s and 80s, during the AIDS crisis in the US, you’ll notice a sharp rise in the number of vampire films (creatures who transmit a kind of ‘death’ through bodily fluids, through a highly sexualised penetrative contact).

The Monster Always Escapes: a monstrous being is, in part, so threatening because it is pervasive. The monster might appear dead, only for the corpse to be missing in the final shots of the film. This builds upon the previous point; a cultural anxiety does not immediately vanish simply because the personified monster of it is slain, issues like disease, poverty, homophobia, racism, ableism will ultimately again rear their ugly heads.

The Monster Is The Harbinger of Category Crisis: monstrous beings refuse “to participate in the classificatory ‘order of things’,” and resist any kind of systematic structure. In a culture so obsessed with binary oppositions and classifications, things that refuse classification are often a threat to that very system of classification. If the system is not all-encompassing, it fails altogether. This can cause monsters to shake established systems of understanding culture, identity and knowledge. 

The Monster Dwells At The Gates of Difference: “…the monster is difference made flesh […] monstrous difference tends to be cultural, political, racial, economic, sexual.” Monstrous beings are, as previously mentioned, a cultural body, which also means generally they take on traits of ostracised members of a culture, and act as stand in’s for fears, phobias and ostracisation of these social groups. For example, in a later work by Cohen, Undead: A Zombie Oriented Ontology, he states of zombies; “…we feel no shame in declaring their bodies repulsive. They eat disgusting food. They possess no coherent language; it all sounds like grunts and moans. They desire everything we possess.” And further notes that the generally accepted method of dispatching them is a gunshot to the head–a war crime against another human being. This same rhetoric could easily be applied to conservative white opinions of immigrants–and in fact, the origin of the word zombie can be traced back to the Haitian slave trade route.

The Monster Polices The Borders Of The Possible: to live in the dynamic the monster is predicated upon (norm/other, human/monster), there must, therefore, be a border between the two. The monster can therefore serve as a warning; transgress the boundaries by which you are human, and become monstrous; “…the monster prevents mobility (intellectual, geographical, sexual).” The most popular examples of this theory comes in the form of a Disney film: Beauty and the Beast. The Prince does not extend hospitalities to the old woman seeking aid, acting outside an accepted code of conduct for their society, and is therefore rendered monstrous as a result. While this is a more direct example, the trope is pervasive even among works and genres not featuring the supernatural.

The Monster Is Really A Kind Of Desire: the monstrous is often associated with a kind of transgressive or forbidden action, like say…the fact that female villains will often take on intense temptress roles, this is usually in an attempt to enforce and normalise the opposite behaviour. “The same creatures who terrify and interdict can also evoke potent escapist fantasies; the linking of monstrosity with the forbidden makes the monster all the more appealing as a temporary egress from constraint.”

The Monster Stands At The Threshold…Of Becoming: This thesis is really only a paragraph and is possibly my favourite piece of writing ever so rather than try and explain it I’ll simply let it stand on it’s own: Monsters are our children. They can be pushed to the farthest margins of geography and discourse, hidden away at the edges of the world and in the forbidden recesses of our mind, but they always return. And when they come back, they bring not just a fuller knowledge of our place in history and the history of knowing our place, but they bear self-knowledge, human knowledge–and a discourse all the more sacred as it arises from the Outside. These monsters ask us how we perceive the world, and how we have misrepresented what we have attempted to place. They ask us to reevaluate our cultural assumptions about race, gender, sexuality, our perception of difference, our tolerance towards its expression. They ask us why we have created them.

It is important to note that while this essay is considered fundamental in the concept of monster theory and it’s study, Cohen’s work is built upon work like Julia Kristeva’s Power of Horror: Essays on Abjection, and Barbara Creed’s Monstrous-Feminine. Additions to the field have been added since then; collected editions like the Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters, Monstrous Children and Childish Monsters, as well as essays in journals, collected editions on other wider topics (like horror, fantasy, sociology in literature). But the field is still relatively small at this point. I’ll be putting together a sort of reading list at some point in a post about where you can really get a good overview of the area, but the central starting point for monster theory is decidedly Cohen’s essay (which is the introductory chapter to an entire book on the subject). 

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Oh my gosh. I just found this website that walks you though creating a believable society. It breaks each facet down into individual questions and makes it so simple! It seems really helpful for worldbuilding!