#and makes me think I lost my keys.

[readingwriter92]

Anxiety is cancelled from now on. I’ve had too much of it today

[egophiliac]

still ruminating over Lost In the Book With Spooky Skeletons Part 1, so here's a selection of some of my favorite little bits! (...some more loosely paraphrased than others) (I just feel like Idia has no room to criticize in general, okay)

anyway, I'm sure we're just going to have a fun time celebrating Halloween and nothing bad is going to happen whatsoever! :)

[clouvu]

I love them your honor

[active-mind-15]

Masaomi being too strict of a father with the activities his son did led to him not experiencing the canon dad event of trying to keep your family together at a theme park in this essay I will—

[birlwrites]

WELCOME BACK BIRL!!!!! i've missed seeing you on my dash!! i really love when you answer asks, i feel like it helps make your bcu feel so much more full and i love reading what you have to say <3<3

THANK YOU!!!! yeah i really needed the break afjslghsdkjf, i was stressing myself out so much with trying to grind out fic and stay on top of my inbox and i was also just like, exhausted from work, and tbh i was getting worried that if i kept trying to force myself to Create Content™ i'd burn out and not want to work on any of my stories anymore

so!! took a break from asks, took a break from ttdl (which was actually more just to finish lachrimae, but i do think that having an Unplanned Hiatus was good for me bc it reminded me that this is not my job and i can hit the pause button whenever i want ajfslhkhgkjsdf), got some breathing room, and then today i felt ready to be back so! here i am!

[sn4kebites]

i perceive bkg as demisexual and people are free to write him however but a lot of his character just does not make sense to me unless i view him as primarily gay

[moonofiron]

Sweet sweet sweet children I am sorry I am so sorry you know things you shouldn't and there's no going back I wish we had done better

[bunnyb34r]

Nearing 60 items rn my dudes 🙃

At the very least we're not doing the move until BaldBastard gets back from vacation so yay?

[maddogmp3]

sotd.

[comradecowplant]

i don't want spook the nervous filly that is Maybe This Show Wont Suck by saying anything but after being extremely unimpressed with season two (THE CREEPY OLD MAN CHAINED TO THE WALL WAS LITERALLY ABOUT TO TELL YOU ANSWERS ABOUT WHO PUT HIM THERE BOYD WHY DID YOU SHUSH HIM??????? and then tell no one about it for half the season UGH lack of communication that is of obvious mutual benefit in order to keep characters pointlessly confused/at odds with each other is such a lazy writing pet peeve of mine) I think From is really getting back on track this season. An interesting horror-mystery premise with effective creepy-ass monsters that we're seeing a fascinating escalation of this season. Now just don't drop the ball!!! 🤞🤞

[arolesbianism]

In other news Odile crashed my game during her friend quest. Smiles in pain.

[doubleedgemode]

I want to draw human Paracelsus and upload it here but

The horrors (my intrusive thoughts) :(

[radellama]

Picky but.. when watching a docco/docco style video, while it can be interesting to hear about how you ended up in contact with certain relevant people, or how there were plans to contact people that fell through, or that you couldn't get in contact with them... I hate when the filmmaker harps on and on about their 'investigative' process and try to dramatise it.

Sorry but. I don't really want a 15-20+ min detour of you lamenting over trying to get in contact with certain people when all that's happened is you sent an email and didn't get a reply.

[caterpillarinacave]

Now is not the time for jumping into things rashly. You thank the friendly next worlder for their offer, but decline their couch space for now. Instead you ask them if they mind bringing the books they had mentioned to the door in exchange for the berries of your world. They accept with an air of bemusement and take their leave with a promise to return as soon as they can.

You watch as they walk away, before leaning through the door, slightly, and blowing your whistle on the other side. Nothing happens for a few minutes, so you shut the door. Waiting a moment you open it back up only to find what was once a well lit sky has darkened to night. Confused you close and open the door quickly, the sky is still dark but now a moon rests in the space that had been clear before. Time is definitely in flux between the doorway when closed...the mechanics of how that works is too confusing to parse out right this minute though, so you pack up your things to head home again and close the door.

When you reach the house you greet your friends, they seem pleased to see you, though not as if it's been a great deal of time, rather like they're happy you're back at the end of the day.

You help set up for dinner, each of you chatting about your day. It's nice, comfortable. You check them both discretely during the conversation, they both seem the same as always, not really older than when you met as you had worried what with time alterations now on the table, enjoying themselves and winding down after a day of chores around the house, familiar laugh lines and wrinkles from the older one as they describe some happening in town the other day, quick smiles and careful attention from the younger who glances at you from time to time with amusement at the story being told. It's...calming. Like the air itself is cocooning you in softness.

Before long though, you find yourself heading to bed, that strange atmosphere sticking with you. It's nice, helps you drift off a little faster. You dream of a void with lines of gold leading you to a river, as you follow the water you reach an island and on it a lone figure who sits in front of an open door, you can't tell the color nor can you see where it leads, lightning crackles with a flash inside the doorframe, the figure from before raises it's hand to its mouth, you see its lips move, it mouths without sound over the crackles from the door, the world twists, it's hard to see, with a yank like you're falling, consciousness slams back into you and you awaken with a start, sitting in bed, adrenaline running high. You steady your breathing, heart like a jackhammer dying to burst through your ribs, as you calm the blood stops rushing and you realize you can hear something. You look at the desk across the room where you have your walkie talkie resting, always on and waiting, it crackles to life, but nothing can be deciphered. You don't get back to sleep tonight.

In the morning you head back out, your friends heading in to town, you depart from one another with a wave. As you travel you pick some berries curious to see if they affect the next worlder the same way as your worlds do, when you get to the door you pause to look at your walkie, it hasn't made noise since last night, yet you still check it, opening the door you watch to see if anything happens, but nothing does. When you look through the door your friend on the other side looks up from reading a book.

"How! Wonderful to have caught you! Would you happen to understand the presence of this lovely ren?"

You look to where they gesture to see a large beautiful white deer gazing at you from the other side of the alley. Initially confused, you recall blowing the whistle through the door yesterday. Interesting. You return to your friend who listens intrigued as you explain it may have to do with your whistle. They hum in interest, and as you two talk the deer, or ren as your friend called it, seems to determine your lack of attention as a dismissal and begins wandering away. Once it's gone you both turn your attention to the books.

They show you some of the covers and chat about what they hoped each offered in terms of information, ranging from literal childrens tales to thick books of what's you'd guess is basically this worlds cryptozoology. In exchange you offer a berry from your world to your new friend and they take it mildly apprehensive and try it after a moment, they seem appreciative and note that it made them feel better just as you have observed in yourself, you offer one from this world passing it through the door to your friend, they note that it tastes like the other one you gave them, similar results. You note this and hand over the rest you picked on the way over to your friends delight, then you get started reading.

After a while you figure some things out. Like your friend said before, most stories and retellings of the door and this world, or the Inbetween as they call it, seem to think it a myth. There are written documents on people who have been taken by tall dark haired strange beings that spoke in another tongue and clicked to each other. You think that feels familiar. There's one story about a person who stepped through the Inbetween but when they came back the world had changed and the people spoke oddly and no one knew who they were, but supposedly that person disappeared soon after telling their story.

Honestly, by the end, you're equally more informed and more confused. It's getting late for both of you though so you say your goodbyes, they give you a few books to read on your own, and you head home. When you get there the house is empty, but that's not odd since trips into town can often run late. You put your stuff away and start setting up for dinner, figuring you can make something simple before your friends get home. As you finish washing ingredients you see the younger racing up to the house on one of the horse like creatures. You watch as they hop off as soon as the house is within walking distance, they race through the door. While not panicked, they tell you the other sent them back to the house to let you know there were strange people asking questions about you. From what your friend explains it sounds like the cult the book writer had described. Neither you nor your friends had thought for you to keep a low profile, it's only a matter of time before they find you here.

Do you stick around and see what they want?

Yes*

[steveyockey]

To be aware you might be trans but unwilling to do anything about it is to create endlessly bigger boxes within which to contain yourself. When you are a child, that box might encompass only yourself and your parents. By the time you are a gainfully employed adult, that box will contain multitudes, and the thought of disrupting it will grow ever more unthinkable. So you cease to think of yourself as a person on some level; you think not of what you want but what everybody expects from you. You do your best not to make waves, and you apologize, if only implicitly, for existing. You stop being real and start being a construct, and eventually, you decide the construct is just who you are, and you swaddle yourself up in it, and maybe you die there. There is still time until there isn’t.

This reading of TV Glow’s deliberately anticlimactic, noncathartic ending cuts against the transition narrative you typically see in movies and TV, in which a trans person self-accepts, transitions, and lives a happier life. Owen gets trapped in a space where he knows what he must do to live an authentic life but simply refuses to take those steps because, well, burying yourself alive is a terrifying thing to do. The transition narrative posits a trans existence as, effectively, a binary switch between “man” and “woman” that gets flipped one way or another, but to make our lives so binary is to miss how trans existences possess an inherent liminality.

Humans’ lives unfold in a constant state of becoming until death, but trans people are uniquely keyed in to what this means thanks to the simple fact of our identities. You can get lost in that liminality, too, forever trapped in a midnight realm of your own making, stuck between what you believe is true (I am a nice man with a good family and a good job, and I love my life) and what you know, deep in your most terrified heart of hearts, is real (I am a girl suffocating in a box).

And yet if you want to read the film as being about the dangerous allure of nostalgia, you’re not wrong. I Saw the TV Glow totally supports that interpretation, too! But in tempting you with that reading, the film creates a trap for cis viewers that will be all too familiar to trans viewers. Somewhere in the middle of Maddy’s story about The Pink Opaque being real, you will make a choice between “This kid has lost it!” and “No. Go with her, Owen,” and in asking you to make that choice, TV Glow is simulating the act of self-accepting a trans identity.

See, the grimmer read of the film’s ending truly is a nihilistic one. It leaves no hope, no potential for growth, no exit. Yet you must actively choose to read that ending as nihilistic. If you are cis and the end of I Saw the TV Glow left you with a gnawing sense of dissatisfaction, a weird but hard-to-pin-down feeling that something had broken, and a melancholy bordering on horror — congratulations, this movie gave you contact-high gender dysphoria.

In an infinite number of possible universes, there is at least one where I am still living “as a man,” embracing my fictionality, avoiding looking at how much more raw and real I feel when I “pretend” to be a woman. I think about that guy sometimes. I hope he’s okay.

Consider, then, my cis reader, that TV Glow is for both you and me, but it is maybe most of all for him. I hope he sees it. I hope he breaks down crying in the bathroom afterward. I hope he, after so many years locked inside himself, hears the promise of more life through the hiss of TV static.

Emily St. James, “I Saw the TV Glow’s Ending Is Full of Hope, If You Want It to Be,” Vulture. June 4, 2024.

[burntoutdaydreamer]

Things That May Be Causing Your Writer's Block- and How to Beat Them

I don't like the term 'Writer's Block' - not because it isn't real, but because the term is so vague that it's useless. Hundreds of issues all get lumped together under this one umbrella, making writer's block seem like this all-powerful boogeyman that's impossible to beat. Worse yet, it leaves people giving and receiving advice that is completely ineffective because people often don't realize they're talking about entirely different issues.

In my experience, the key to beating writer's block is figuring out what the block even is, so I put together a list of Actual Reasons why you may be struggling to write:

(note that any case of writer's block is usually a mix of two or more)

Perfectionism (most common)

What it looks like:

You write one sentence and spend the next hour googling "synonyms for ___"

Write. Erase. Write. Rewrite. Erase.

Should I even start writing this scene when I haven't figured out this one specific detail yet?

I hate everything I write

Cringing while writing

My first draft must be perfect, or else I'm a terrible writer

Things that can help:

Give yourself permission to suck

Keep in mind that nothing you write is going to be perfect, especially your first draft

Think of writing your first/early drafts not as writing, but sketching out a loose foundation to build upon later

People write multiple drafts for a reason: write now, edit later

Stop googling synonyms and save that for editing

Write with a pen to reduce temptation to erase

Embrace leaving blank spaces in your writing when you can't think of the right word, name, or detail

It's okay if your writing sucks. We all suck at some point. Embrace the growth mindset, and focus on getting words on a page

Lack of inspiration (easiest to fix)

What it looks like:

Head empty, no ideas

What do I even write about???

I don't have a plot, I just have an image

Want to write but no story to write

Things that can help:

Google writing prompts

If writing prompts aren't your thing, instead try thinking about what kind of tropes/genres/story elements you would like to try out

Instead of thinking about the story you would like to write, think about the story you would like to read, and write that

It's okay if you don't have a fully fleshed out story idea. Even if it's just an image or a line of dialogue, it's okay to write that. A story may or may not come out of it, but at least you got the creative juices flowing

Stop writing. Step away from your desk and let yourself naturally get inspired. Go for a walk, read a book, travel, play video games, research history, etc. Don't force ideas, but do open up your mind to them

If you're like me, world-building may come more naturally than plotting. Design the world first and let the story come later

Boredom/Understimulation (lost the flow)

What it looks like:

I know I should be writing but uugggghhhh I just can'tttttt

Writing words feels like pulling teeth

I started writing, but then I got bored/distracted

I enjoy the idea of writing, but the actual process makes me want to throw my laptop out the window

Things that can help:

Introduce stimulation: snacks, beverages, gum, music such as lo-fi, blankets, decorate your writing space, get a clickity-clackity keyboard, etc.

Add variety: write in a new location, try a new idea/different story for a day or so, switch up how you write (pen and paper vs. computer) or try voice recording or speech-to-text

Gamify writing: create an arbitrary challenge, such as trying to see how many words you can write in a set time and try to beat your high score

Find a writing buddy or join a writer's group

Give yourself a reward for every writing milestone, even if it's just writing a paragraph

Ask yourself whether this project you're working on is something you really want to be doing, and be honest with your answer

Intimidation/Procrastination (often related to perfectionism, but not always)

What it looks like:

I was feeling really motivated to write, but then I opened my laptop

I don't even know where to start

I love writing, but I can never seem to get started

I'll write tomorrow. I mean next week. Next month? Next month, I swear (doesn't write next month)

Can't find the time or energy

Unreasonable expectations (I should be able to write 10,000 words a day, right????)

Feeling discouraged and wondering why I'm even trying

Things that can help:

Follow the 2 min rule (or the 1 paragraph rule, which works better for me): whenever you sit down to write, tell yourself that you are only going to write for 2 minutes. If you feel like continuing once the 2 mins are up, go for it! Otherwise, stop. Force yourself to start but DO NOT force yourself to continue unless you feel like it. The more often you do this, the easier it will be to get started

Make getting started as easy as possible (i.e. minimize barriers: if getting up to get a notebook is stopping you from getting started, then write in the notes app of your phone)

Commit to a routine that will work for you. Baby steps are important here. Go with something that feels reasonable: every day, every other day, once a week, twice a week, and use cues to help you remember to start. If you chose a set time to write, just make sure that it's a time that feels natural to you- i.e. don't force yourself to writing at 9am every morning if you're not a morning person

Find a friend or a writing buddy you can trust and talk it out or share a piece of work you're proud of. Sometimes we just get a bit bogged down by criticism- either internal or external- and need a few words of encouragement

The Problem's Not You, It's Your Story (or Outline (or Process))

What it looks like:

I have no problems writing other scenes, it's just this scene

I started writing, but now I have no idea where I'm going

I don't think I'm doing this right

What's an outline?

Drowning in documents

This. Doesn't. Make. Sense. How do I get from this plot point to this one?!?!?! (this ColeyDoesThings quote lives in my head rent free cause BOY have I been there)

Things That Can Help:

Go back to the drawing board. Really try to get at the root of why a scene or story isn't working

A part of growing as a writer is learning when to kill your darlings. Sometimes you're trying to force an idea or scene that just doesn't work and you need to let it go

If you don't have an outline, write one

If you have an outline and it isn't working, rewrite it, or look up different ways to structure it

You may be trying to write as a pantser when you're really a plotter or vice versa. Experiment with different writing processes and see what feels most natural

Study story structures, starting with the three act structure. Even if you don't use them, you should know them

Check out Ellen Brock on YouTube. She's a professional novel editor who has a lot of advice on writing strategies for different types of writers

Also check out Savage Books on YouTube (another professional story editor) for advice on story structure and dialogue. Seriously, I cannot recommend this guy enough

Executive Dysfunction, Usually From ADHD/Autism

What it looks like:

Everything in boredom/understimulation

Everything in intimidation/procrastination

You have been diagnosed with and/or have symptoms of ADHD/Autism

Things that can help:

If you haven't already, seek a diagnosis or professional treatment

Hire an ADHD coach or other specialist that can help you work with your brain (I use Shimmer; feel free to DM me for a referral)

Seek out neurodiverse communities for advice and support

Try body doubling! There's lot's of free online body doubling websites out there for you to try. If social anxiety is a barrier, start out with writing streams such as katecavanaughwrites on Twitch

Be aware of any sensory barriers that may be getting in the way of you writing (such as an uncomfortable desk chair, harsh lighting, bad sounds)

And Lastly, Burnout, Depression, or Other Mental Illness

What it looks like:

You have symptoms of burnout or depression

Struggling with all things, not just writing

It's more than a lack of inspiration- the spark is just dead

Things that can help:

Forget writing for now. Focus on healing first.

Seek professional help

If you feel like it, use writing as a way to explore your feelings. It can take the form of journaling, poetry, an abstract reflection of your thoughts, narrative essays, or exploring what you're feeling through your fictional characters. The last two helped me rediscover my love of writing after I thought years of depression had killed it for good. Just don't force yourself to do so, and stop if it takes you to a darker place instead of feeling cathartic