#fiction in real life

[insanelyadd]

ANOTHER BIRTHDAY GIFT! This one is for @regular-gnome whose birthday was new years eve. I opened my cake container and found this gnome eating my cake.

[aesethewitch]

When I was a kid, we moved into a house that had a huge lilac tree out front. It was mostly rotten, and it needed to be taken down before it fell. It took a while, but eventually, it was gone.

Mostly. A couple years later, little lilac babies popped out of the ground in its place. My mom was determined to get rid of them, because she'd planted a beautiful flower garden there, and the lilac trees would overshadow and kill the whole garden. I insisted on saving at least a few saplings. She said fine, but I had to dig them out and put them in pots myself.

So, I did. I spent days digging little lilac bushes out of the ground and putting them into pots. Some couldn't be saved, but some could. When all was said and done, I had five brand-new lilac saplings. Seven or eight years old, and it was my absolute pride and joy.

Three died due to sun scorching, severe drought that no amount of watering could save, and perhaps just being moved from their place in the ground. But two survived, and I was awfully proud of them! I'd go out and talk to them every single day. I watered them by hand and made sure they were fertilized properly. I learned all about their favored environments, and I was determined to make sure they lived.

One of my mom's friends saw what I was doing with the lilacs. She asked if she could have one to put in her backyard, and I agreed on the condition that she take very, very good care of it.

It's now fucking enormous. I'm talking ten feet tall and bursting with beautiful purple flowers every spring. My mom still gets updates each year as they start to bloom, which she forwards to me. And all I can think is, "That's my friend! Thriving some twenty years on, there it is."

The other tree nearly died, too. It lived in a pot for far, far too long. I wanted to plant it somewhere in my parents' yard, but my mom was reluctant. Eventually, we agreed to put it in the far back garden. It grew okay for many years, despite the shade, but in all these years, it's never bloomed.

Last year, the massive tree casting massive shadows over the lilac and the garden cracked in half and fell. It tumbled into the garden, crushing part of the nearby shed and destroying a few plants beneath it.

It missed my lilac by inches.

The clean-up is long done. The rest of the tree has been cut down, and my lilac has full sunlight for the first time in fifteen years. It won't bloom this year, I know. But it's got new shoots up. It's taller than ever. I spent half an hour a few weeks ago praising it for surviving all this time, dreaming about its future and telling it how I believe it'll become the tall beauty it's always been meant to be.

I think next year, I'll see flowers.

[daisywords]

One of my biggest nitpicks in fiction concerns the feeding of babies. Mothers dying during/shortly after childbirth or the baby being separated form the mother shortly after birth is pretty common in fiction. It is/was also common enough in real life, which is why I think a lot of writers/readers don't think too hard about this. however. Historically, the only reason the vast majority of babies survived being separated from their mother was because there was at least one other woman around to breastfeed them. Before modern formula, yes, people did use other substitutes, but they were rarely, if ever, nutritionally sufficient.

Newborns can't eat adult food. They can't really survive on animal milk. If your story takes place in a world before/without formula, a baby separated from its mother is going to either be nursed by someone else, or starve.

It doesn't have to be a huge plot point, but idk at least don't explicitly describe the situation as excluding the possibility of a wetnurse. "The father or the great grandmother or the neighbor man or the older sibling took and raised the baby completely alone in a cave for a year." Nope. That baby is dead I'm sorry. "The baby was kidnapped shortly after birth by a wizard and hidden away in a secret tower" um quick question was the wizard lactating? "The mother refused to see or touch her child after birth so the baby was left to the care of the ailing grandfather" the grandfather who made the necessary arrangements with women in the neighborhood, right? right? OR THAT GREAT OFFENDER "A newborn baby was left on the doorstep and they brought it in and took care of it no issues" What Are You Going to Feed That Baby. Hello?

Like. It's not impossible, but arrangements are going to have to be made. There are some logistics.

[olegianote]

Do you ever feel the urge to get stuck in the conversation forever, even if you have nothing else to say, because speaking with a person brings you so much joy? Yeah..............

[malinaa]

if i think about the hunger games in peeta's perspective i WILL start sobbing

[nondelphic]

the writing process is basically this:

think of a great idea.

convince yourself it’s terrible.

write it anyway because what else are you going to do with your life?

[ferocioustrout]

(person who physically cannot care about a character unless theyre hot and can be shipped yaoi style voice) no you don’t understand it’s not that I don’t like women it’s just that all of them in every piece of media are horribly written mary sues who are evil and bad. not my epic male blorbo who I ship with some guy he interacted with once and has every superpower, committed war crimes, and had 3 lines though. he’s awesome and well written and if you really think about it he’s the best character in the series

[valtsv]

trying to save someone whose throat has been cut is such a fantastic catch-22 of helplessness honestly. you either do nothing and watch them bleed out because of your inaction, or attempt to staunch the bleeding by putting pressure on the wound and watch them asphyxiate with your hands around their neck. either way they'll drown, and your only choice is whether you're going to watch it happen, or help to push them under.

[macrolit]

I wish we could sometimes love the characters in real life as we love the characters in romances. There are a great many human souls whom we should accept more kindly, and even appreciate more clearly, if we simply thought of them as people in a story. - G.K. Chesterton

[spicyraeman]

Northern Hick!Lae’zel, Manhattanite!Sheart

Thoughts?

110% down, im such a sucker for country boy x city girl pairings, Shearts gonna get drawn in by the hick rizz and then they're gonna fall in love washing each other off with a hose after Lae takes her mudding

[screwpinecaprice]

Just a silly guy, with silly silly thoughts.

@glowweek Day 2

Casual | Surprise

A casual surprise?😬😬😬

[insanelyadd]

If you're interested send me a DM. If you want a normal commission my normal commission page is RIGHT HERE part of the goal of these commissions is for me to be able to get my ass a HAIRCUT. I need one so bad. It's like $20

[aquarines]

lestat de lioncourt being cancelled by taylor swift fans on twitter only 24 hours after he debuted...can you name a more iconic vampire? absolutely not!

[shot-by-cupid]

There’s nothing wrong with wanting unconditional love from your f/o, there’s nothing wrong with being ‘the exception’ there’s nothing wrong with making ur self ship super lovey dovey- there is nothing wrong with making your f/o love you in the way you want to be loved!!!!! It’s your ship do whatever you want

proship/variants + neutrals and RPF DNI

[annabelle--cane]

in isolation I think it's fine as a writing move for sasha and melanie to misattribute people weird to them at their Spooky Jobs as being because of misogyny, that is a reasonable conclusion for those characters to make when they are unaware of the Spooky Reasons that people don't want them involved, but alas it leads to this weird thing I see sometimes where fans get boiling mad at these characters and start saying "this stupid bitch thinks she's experiencing discrimination in the workplace when akshually she's being iced out for completely logical reasons due to her lack of skills, something she might realize if she weren't so self-centered with such a massive victim complex." like guys. you don't actually need to say this.

[etirabys]

a frustrating thing about battle royale stories is that they take place in a world where there's a massive popular appetite to see torture and death, the existence of this appetite is the main moral evil of the story (so far so fine), and the author tends to pretend this is also a huge problem in our world so that their work can stand as a Commentary On Real Evil. when the world their actual readership lives in has the opposite problem – too squeamish about seeing torture and death and coercion and collectively agrees to sequester it out of view so that nice things can keep being available for under five dollars at the grocery store