#how to write better

[emilyoracle]

If you're looking for writing tips

My guides and tip posts are still getting lots of reblogs despite my inactivity, and I'm so glad people are finding them helpful!

However, if you'd like to read the more updated, polished versions of my old tumblr guides and have access to new ones, I have a Substack where I've put them. A lot of points in the old guides have been expanded upon or clarified, so I think it would be beneficial to take a look even if you've already read them!

Lots of people are continuing to follow my tumblr and I assume it's for my writing guides, but I likely won't be posting any more here. Future writing tips will go on my Substack, so please take a look!

Here's my newest guide:

[inbabylontheywept]

bad dating stories time: the shoe incident

so in highschool, my best friend wasnt allowed to go on dates unless there was another couple there to keep an eye on him. part of this was his parents being insane, but also, part of it was him being insane. in a problem with no reasonable parties, there are no reasonable solutions.

at some point in my junior year, my sorta-gf broke up with me, and i just wasnt feeling dating, which was bad for my friend, because he had a good thing going with a girl he met in court.

he kind of hounded me about it. kept pushing me to just put me feet back in the dating pool and i wasnt real thrilled about it, because i knew he was pushing me for his own benefit, not mine, so i kept telling him to fuck off, and after a few weeks of being told that i would date when i was damn well ready, he eventually said: okay. what if i paid for the date AND found you a blind date AND all you had to do was show up?

and i shouldve said no, i know, but i let him wear me down, and i will own my fault in that. a date starting on such a stupid premise could never have gone well.

but he still managed to find a way to make it worse.

i dont know how long he tried to set a blind date up. it couldve been multiple attempts. he couldve stooped to this immediately. but what happened in the end was that he called a girl from the ward he attended - a girl that he knew had a giant, mushy crush on him - and he said: hey! how would you feel about going on a date this weekend?

(you know, implying it was with him, but never actually saying it.)

and she said YES WOW I WOULD LOVE TO and he said great! and then he called me up and said he found me a date.

i did not learn about his crimes until several weeks later. i will die swearing before god almighty that i would never have allowed this travesty to happen if i had known.

that was on a monday. the date of the date rolled around that friday evening, and im sorry to confess, i really phoned the whole thing in. i showed up in my favorite comfy outfit, which was also a fashion crime: basketball shorts and flipflops and a baja hoodie. it was super comfy but it made me look kind of crazy. i picked him up first, and then i picked up his date next, and then we went to pick up my date, and thats where you're gonna get the play by play.

i arrived, walked across the yard, and knocked on the front door. she opened it almost immediately, like shed been waiting right by it, and i could see her expression go from OMG IM SO EXCITED to super disappointed, then disgusted and finally pissed. and because i didn't know about my friends sins, i thought it was from my outfit. which seemed... harsh. like, hey, im allowed to be quirky, fuck you. also its a blind date, i thought the deal was that we were both going to be sad broken sacks of mortality.

anyway, we looked at each other for several seconds before she slammed the door in my face.

i looked back at my friend. he was sweating bullets. i dont know what he expected from this, but there was this big long pause where we both tried to figure out what to do, and then the door opened up, and her dad invited me in, and he said she was gonna need a few minutes to finish getting ready, and that in the meantime we could sit and talk.

we did not talk. we did sit. i sat down on the couch, and he sat down in a chair across the couch, and then instead of talking he cleaned his pistol on the coffee table. i wasnt actually sure if it was a threat, or if it was just a fidget thing for 40+ year old republican men, but when i tried to help he got snappy so i just watched him put a pistol back together.

he was okay at it.

eventually my date came downstairs, still mad as hell for reasons beyond my ken, and i felt pretty guilty for being such a mess because i thought that was why she was so angry. i tried to make up for by walking her to the car and getting the door for her, just generally trying to be extra polite, but before i could make it back to the drivers side, her dad called me back to the door. so i flipped around, went to the door, and immediately regreted my decision.

soon as i was within range, her dad got waaaay too close to me, leaned in, and said "whatever you do to her, i will do to you," and my brain went into overdrive making three consecutive realizations.

realization one was, damn, the pistol thing was a threat. that sucks. what an asshole. realization two was, wait, im autistic and even i know theres a 0% chance me and my date even hold hands, least of all boink. does this guy actually think there's even a 1% chance of anyone in that car getting laid tonight? is he an idiot? and then realization three went through, which was wait, is this guy threatening to fuck me? and unfortunately, with my brain doing so much processing, my mouth was left to run amok, so somewhere between realization 2 and 3, i said:

"i can't get pregnant"

which, i swear, wasn't actually me trying to be a smartass, it was just me pointing out that he couldn't actually follow up on that threat. it just wasn't possible. we do not live in the omegaverse and im not scared of you.

still, it was an insanely catastrophic thing to say, and the moment we both heard it, we bluescreened. that single sentence obliterated both of our momentary streams of consciousness like a saltine in front of a sand blaster. problem was, he'd probably gone his whole life not even realizing someone could say something that stupid, and making that realization was going to cost him a lot of thinking time. me though? i had been saying shit like that for 17 years, i didnt have to rewrite my expectations of human nature, i just had to plan an exit and start striding. so i was already halfway back to the car before i heard "hey. hey come back. Hey. Hey. HEY. HEY WAIT. HEY GET BACK HERE. HEY-"

and then i was in my car, and i drove away.

if this happened today, he'd have called her, and the whole thing wouldve imploded then and there, but back then, there were still a decent number of teenagers without cell phones. especially the teenagers of insane, gun toting parents. so she just said: whoa what was that all about? and i said: dont worry about it, he'll tell you about it when you get home.

and she said: ok and went back to staring daggers at me and my friend.

WHICH SURPRISINGLY isnt even how the story ends.

we went to an improv comedy show, and it was a disaster. it shouldve been like, 7/10 tops, but between my date being mad, and my friend having a good time, and me having the existential terror of knowing that a guy with a pistol was probably waiting outside his house for me to come back, it was easily 11/10. i laughed way too hard at everything. especially the jokes that flopped. id sit there in this mostly silent room and laugh until i dry heaved a little, and my date was absolutely disgusted, and even my friend was a little embarrassed, which would just make me laugh harder. i laughed so hard that night i could barely talk the next day. and then the show ended, and my friend said, you know, that was a good time, but i think we should maybe do something a little chiller? who wants to walk around the park? and his date said yeah, and my date said no, and i finally had mercy on the poor woman so i said, look, im gonna drop you off. and i am so, so sorry about this, but im dropping you off like a block away. super duper sorry.

do talk to your dad about the pistols thing if you dont want this happening more in the future tho.

and she said: okay. so i dropped her off, and she walked a block down, and that was that.

then i drove my friend and his date to a park that was good for wandering. i figured they wanted something more private, so instead of following them around point blank, i chose a park with this 30 foot rope tower, and i climbed to the top and i said: hey i can see you anywhere from up here, you are officially chaperoned from a distance. get panopticoned idiot. except my friend really is an idiot, and he didnt really get the whole 'now i dont have to third wheel so insanely hard with you guys' thing so he climbed up the tower too, and then his date followed behind him, so there are three people basically sitting together on top of a telephone pole.

and then they started making out.

i was close enough to hear it.

i didnt really know what to do so i was just kind of sitting there, dissociating, when some college kids came around and started shaking the tower. my friend's date went aaaaaaaaaa im afraid of heights :( and my friend went oh, dont worry, ill hold you tight ;) and i went hey, im gonna climb down and ask them to stop.

so i did climb down, and i did ask them to stop, and they flipped me off, which i wasnt even mad about. at that point i was i was like yeah, it would be weirder if this wasnt a mess. gods plan has been to fly this day like a 747 into my metaphorical twin towers and brother he is close enough for me to see him grinning through the cockpit window. still, eventually the college students got bored, so they climbed up the tower, which gave my friend and his date a window to climb down, and together we walked back to my car.

now, i cant explain why this is, but sitting back in the drivers seat was my carriage-back-into-a-pumpkin moment. i'd been chill about all the chaos, just rolling with the punches, but sitting down made me realize how much of a shitshow the day had been, and while i couldnt go back and fix all of it, i could go back and fix one thing.

so i told my friend and his date, hey, you two, stay here and don't do anything weird. don't. then i walked back to the rope tower, and i started picking up the shoes the college students had left at the base in order to climb.

about halfway through this, i realized that if i took all their shoes, they might think i was in it for the money, and i actually wanted them to know i was in it specifically to spite them. fuck those guys. so i put all the right shoes back, gave myself a 100 foot headstart, yelled "nice shoes, assholes", did a little jig, and started running.

my advice to everyone is that college students are faster than you think. even with the headstart, and the whole climb down the tower thing, i was still only fivish seconds ahead of them by the time i got to my car. i flung the door open, looked in the backseat, didnt see anyone, flung the stolen shoes in the backseat, heard two "ow"s, took that as proof of presence, jumped in and pealed out of the lot.

my friend and his date popped up a few seconds later. they were, uh, doing something weird in the back seat. my one request - obliterated.

they climbed up to ask where the hell all the shoes had come from, and i was like yeah i stole them from the college students, and they were like oh. cool. hope you had fun. and i was like, i did. i did. but speaking of fun, what were you doing back there?

and for the first time in my buddies life, i think he was actually embarassed.

[rozmorris]

Can SEO writing ruin your prose style? And why Bill Bryson can call a book Wubberhumptimuph and you can’t

I’ve had this question from Mark…. This question has been bouncing in my brain ever since the digital revolution began and especially after working for various publishers that asked me to help them with social media and website text.  Do you think that being forced to focus on SEO when writing articles, promos, headlines etc can negatively impact your non-journalism writing? My sense is that…

[lgbtlunaverse]

Nothing will dispell the "the curtains were just blue" myth faster than writing something yourself, because the amount of pretentious symbolism i am putting in my silly little fanfics is ridiculous. I mean SO much with these words, literally every single one of them. This fic has twenty five typos and zero correct uses of punctuation but if there's curtains you bet your ass I put thought into what colour they were.

[writtenbyevie]

do you ever not write for so long that you’re almost afraid to? like what if I’m dumb now

[suddenly-frankenstein]

his guardian angel

[stealingpotatoes]

the illness post is still getting notes (???!! <3) and that means people are still telling me to get better soon, which is really nice but im gonna be too powerful if i get any better

[cozylittleartblog]

Columbo and the Knight (1984)

put me in the universe where Columbo ran through the 1980s and had a crossover episode with Knight Rider. I think they deserved it, and I am not just saying that because they're my two favorite Old Shows. @telebeast wrote a little fanfic blurb about it and I HAD to visualize it into a comic (which is also the longest comic I have finished thus far at five pages...), so writing credit goes to them.

Autism W!

[ladyelainehilfur]

holding up a grown man and a teenager your own weight with one arm each?? okay miss girl, I see those pull ups coming into clutch

[where-is-vivian]

rosekiller but barty, instead of rejecting the path his father laid out for him, goes to law school and becomes a lawyer.

one day he has to defend a man who's accused of the most heinous crimes, and when he meets him, he comes face to face with pretty-face evan. And, despite having called barty to defend him to avoid jail, the first thing he says to him is "I did all of it".

[llamahearted]

two people will go through similar things & learn to cope in different ways

print ♥︎ song

[forgettable-au]

FORGETTABLE-AU (Page 36-39)

* To note. Her hands are scaly. * And...unexpectedly wet?

[BEGINNING] [PREVIOUS] [CONTINUE]

[zephyrchama]

It was late evening when your DDD started ringing. An unusual time for someone to call unless they were either drunk or in mortal peril. This occasion happened to be the latter.

Karasu's caller ID flashed a photo of Luke across the screen after the first ring. The angel was always early to bed and early to rise and never called without good reason, so you scrambled to answer, moving so fast that your finger slipped and you initially missed the right button.

"Hello?" you said. It took a moment for the call to connect.

"Hi... Sorry, umm, is now a good time?"

Luke sounded close to tears. He was trying to keep himself composed for your sake, but the distressed warble in his voice betrayed him. By the sound of things, he wasn't in his bedroom. He wasn't even in the living room or kitchen of Purgatory Hall. It was somewhere small, where his voice echoed off the walls.

"Luke, are you okay? Where are you?"

You recognized the sound of splashing water when he sniffled just before responding, "I'm in the bath."

It was an odd answer, but at least he was somewhere safe. So, why was he crying?

"Did Solomon feed you anything weird?"

"No, that's not it." Luke took a deep breath and winced. The sounds of agitated water accompanied his explanation. "You see... Simeon got a new shampoo that smells like cloudberries, and I really wanted to try some. Just a little bit, honest! But it came out of the bottle really fast, and it fell into my eyes." The crying began in earnest. "It really hurts and now I can't get it out of my eyes and Simeon's going to find out I used his shampoo without asking."

You felt slightly thankful that Solomon wasn't using the little angel as his food taster, but his small sobs over such a small matter made your heart ache.

"I'm going blind as punishment for stealing Simeon's shampoo," he confessed.

"Hey! Hey, no you're not! It's going to be okay!" you assured him. "You're not going to go blind. Listen. Turn on the faucet and try to splash some clean water in your eyes. Also, keep crying."

The sound of a running faucet could be heard through the phone. "Why? Will my tears prove that I'm repenting and weaken the punishment?"

"It'll... uh, yeah? Yeah, sure. It will also rinse the shampoo out of your eye so they stop stinging, but it'll do that, too."

There was a soft thud as Luke set his DDD down, followed by several minutes of loud splashing noises and weeping. He was having a tough time. You tried to be encouraging, unsure if he could hear you or not, by chiming in with the occasional "you're doing great!" and "hang in there!"

The tears came to a stop and Luke turned the faucet off. There was a beat of silence, followed by him exclaiming from afar, "it worked!"

He picked the phone back up. "It worked! I can see again! It doesn't hurt as much! Thank you! I'm so glad I called." The boy sounded like he was crying again, this time in relief. He had his usual cheery demeanor back.

"Everything OK now?"

"Yeah! I really owe you. I have to go tell Simeon what I did now, but I'll properly thank you tomorrow at school."

You wondered what sort of treats he would present. A drain popped open and you heard the water swirling away. Your muscles were still tense from concern, but the emergency had been swiftly dealt with.

"Glad I could help. Be sure to get lots of sleep, okay? You need to rest your eyes."

You could tell Luke was nodding even if you couldn't see him. "Got it!"

"Good night, Luke."

"Good night!"

[godly-mistake]

child Annabeth watching her father choose an easier mortal family without any demigod baggage attached to it over her and shunt her to the side

15 yr old Annabeth thinking she's watching that start to unfold a second time

[casscainmainly]

The Batkids' deaths vary in severity/importance, but they all serve to shake some core part of their superhero identity. Sometimes it affirms their existing identity (Cass' first death), or it spurs them to discover more about what their current identity means (Damian, Tim); sometimes, however, it severs them from who they were. Dick's transition into Agent 37 and Cass' turn to evil both stem from very temporary deaths, where the death is not as important as what happens after. It's not the pill or Cass' dip into the Pit that actually changes them, but the boundary these events create between their old and new selves.

Which is why Jason's death is different from all of the above. Beyond being (at one point) permanent, his loss of self is irreversible. Dick and Cass claw their way back to their identities pre-death, Nightwing and Batgirl respectively; Jason does not. He cannot, because he doesn't fit Robin anymore, and Robin doesn't fit him. It's not only that his sense of self is shaped by his death, but that it was, in many ways, destroyed by it.

But it's ultimately Stephanie's death that links death so closely to the loss of a superhero identity. Her death, unlike the others, is instigated by loss - Batman fires her from Robin, which leads to the events of War Games. On her deathbed, Steph asks "was I ever really Robin?", and Bruce replies "of course you were." It's a sweet moment, but it's retroactive. He can only affirm her legacy as Robin in the past tense (it's over; it can't impact anyone anymore). Her non-existent memorial can be read not only as a lack of care for Stephanie Brown the person, but for Stephanie Brown the Robin - Jason's Robin is immortalised, Stephanie's Robin is erased. She dies because she was made Robin, and she was made Robin to die.

I guess my point is that everyone's deaths are linked to how much they are valued within their mantle, not just in a metatextual sense (as in, how much DC editorial liked them) but also in the text itself - deaths either instigate further ownership of their name, or dismantle their sense of self. This is why it's important to recognise Steph's tenure as Robin (both in comics and fandom). Recognising Steph-as-Robin is a direct refutation of her death, a long-delayed memorial.