#musings of a writer

[scaredpigeons]

What happens in my mind every time I see a new note on a fic:

A well dressed butler scurries in the room, out of breath and wearing a red face of desperate urgency.

“Sir!—“ he calls me, though I am a woman— for I bade him so. “Sir!”

I set down my cup of tea, but the tea is not really tea, merely Mountain Dew fizzling like the citrus battery acid it is inside my finest of teacups.

“What is it this time, Bernard?”

“Sir! It’s the bitches, and the hoes!” He exclaims, “they… they—“

“For gods sake, you stuttering buffoon! Spit it out already!” I slam my fist upon my mahogany desk, rattling my teacup in its little matching saucer. I do not mean to raise my voice at Bernard, I do love him so. Perhaps this rage stems from unresolved conflict with my mother. Perchance.

“They… they be vibing with your shit, my lord.” He says.

“Ah,” I say, relaxing back into my chair, which in reality is merely a beanbag in the shape of an elegant chair. “Good, good. As they should.”

My work isn’t for naught. The depravity of the internet rages on, and I shall continue to add my personal brand of fuel to the fire. Mother will rue the day she birthed me, for I will surpass any and all expectations and move on to live in glorious filth and frivol.

[soultayi]

the violin is pulled taut the sound shakes my teeth and you find me cowering besides the bed. the softest of touches on my jagged cracked skin breaks me. i fall apart, i come undone, i unravel at your touch and you stare at me as bones become indistinguishable from flesh, you look at the bloody mess i have turned into— what the lightest of touches has done to me. . .and in the glow of the setting sun, you begin to eat.

(it’s monday evening after my first shift at a new job and im thinking about how i will hide my eczema while listening to a violin mix on spotify. violins always makes me think of vampires which always makes me want to write poetry.)

[clarislam]

Happy Friday, readers and writers!

What are you reading or writing this weekend? 📖✍️

Currently reading "Heaven Looks A Lot Like The Mall" by Wendy Mass and editing some poetry!

Also, friendly reminder that I'll be revealing the official cover of my upcoming third book, "Bloody Fantasia," AND the official release date, on May 1st, 2024!

Subscribe to my newsletter, check out my website, and/or follow my other socials so you don't miss it: https://clarislam.carrd.co

[djappleblush]

Two halves of a whole

[binickandros]

Hello, I hope you’re doing well,

I re-read your Roosthoard fic and I love it so much!

Will you be continuing with the series?

❤️

Helllooo!! Thank you for this lovely message, nonny :) I’m doing very well and hope you are too!

I do have a roosthoard pwp started in my drafts rn. I’m working on the sequel to With Teeth, which is very emotional and Serious, so I like to have a low stakes fic going at the same time for a brain break. I got distracted by my wolf!Eddie fic, but it’s basically done besides final edits, so I’ll need something new to take its place. I’m hoping it’ll be the roosthoard thing because I miss those crazy kids and these bts images we’re getting of thicc Joe are ummmm inspiring.

[lostinfic]

I'll be posting a new Cesare/Lucrezia fic tonight, I hope you're in the mood for some Christmas fluff.

[lostinfictoo]

I’ve been having a hard time getting back into writing The Librarian and the Lighthouse keeper (looking at you old fandom that made me ship a straight couple all over again) but this morning I wrote a good chunk of the climax of the story, which means the first draft is nearly finished 😅😃. It’s a mess, but I can start editing it knowing how the story ends and what’s important. I don’t feel hopeless anymore about publishing this story one day.

[llenodealegria]

Have come to understand that what was left in the past must stay there out of safety! If you dare step into the void for even one second you will find that you are actually transporting to a different line of what is no longer. Therefore, in this you are creating a new space in time. Something entirely different than what it was you intended to step back into. This is now a creation of a new line and after that an even newer line, there is no end to all the lines that are now alive because of you daring to travel.

[aleriawrites]

coming back to writeblr after years of hiatus b/c higher education and a career sucked the personality out of me but i always find my way home <3

[binickandros]

This is great advice, and I’d like to offer another alternate: if you have a Mac, Pages and Numbers are amazing. They aren’t quite as…maybe business focused as Word and Excel? But they do so many things so well and I’ve always found them fun and easy to use

I do wish they hadn’t taken away the jump to feature in Pages though. Loved it for my table of contents.

Anyway of course since they’re an Apple product, there’s a mobile version and it auto-syncs with iCloud. And they’re free!

I believe in backing up my backups, so I write in Pages then copy everything to a Google doc just to make sure it’s all in like 5 different locations

You don’t have to pay for that fancy worldbuilding program

As mentioned in this post about writing with executive dysfunction, if one of your reasons to keep procrastinating on starting your book is not being able to afford something like World Anvil or Campfire, I’m here to tell you those programs are a luxury, not a necessity: Enter Google Suite (not sponsored but gosh I wish).

MS Office offers more processing power and more fine-tuning, but Office is expensive and only autosaves to OneDrive, and I have a perfectly healthy grudge against OneDrive for failing to sync and losing 19k words of a WIP that I never got back.

Google’s sync has never failed me, and the Google apps (at least for iPhone) aren’t nearly as buggy and clunky as Microsoft’s. So today I’m outlining the system I used for my upcoming fantasy novel with all the helpful pictures and diagrams. Maybe this won’t work for you, maybe you have something else, and that’s okay! I refuse to pay for what I can get legally for free and sometimes Google’s simplicity is to its benefit.

The biggest downside is that you have to manually input and update your data, but as someone who loves organizing and made all these willingly and for fun, I don’t mind.

So. Let’s start with Google Sheets.

The Character Cheat Sheet:

I organized it this way for several reasons:

I can easily see which characters belong to which factions and how many I have named and have to keep up with for each faction

All names are in alphabetical order so when I have to come up with a new name, I can look at my list and pick a letter or a string of sounds I haven’t used as often (and then ignore it and start 8 names with A).

The strikethrough feature lets me keep track of which characters I kill off (yes, I changed it, so this remains spoiler-free)

It’s an easy place to go instead of scrolling up and down an entire manuscript for names I’ve forgotten, with every named character, however minor their role, all in one spot

Also on this page are spare names I’ll see randomly in other media (commercials, movie end credits, etc) and can add easily from my phone before I forget

Also on this page are my summary, my elevator pitch, and important character beats I could otherwise easily mess up, it helps stay consistent

*I also have on here not pictured an age timeline for all my vampires so I keep track of who’s older than who and how well I’ve staggered their ages relative to important events, but it’s made in Photoshop and too much of a pain to censor and add here

On other tabs, I keep track of location names, deities, made-up vocabulary and definitions, and my chapter word count.

The Word Count Guide:

This is the most frustrating to update manually, especially if you don’t have separate docs for each chapter, but it really helps me stay consistent with chapter lengths and the formula for calculating the average and rising totals is super basic.

Not that all your chapters have to be uniform, but if you care about that, this little chart is a fantastic visualizer.

If you have multiple narrators, and this book does, you can also keep track of how many POVs each narrator has, and how spread out they are. I didn’t do that for this book since it’s not an ensemble team and matters less, but I did for my sci-fi WIP, pictured below.

As I was writing that one, I had “scripted” the chapters before going back and writing out all the glorious narrative, and updated the symbols from “scripted” to “finished” accordingly.

I also have a pie chart that I had to make manually on a convoluted iPhone app to color coordinate specifically the way I wanted to easily tell who narrates the most out of the cast, and who needs more representation.

—

Google Docs

Can’t show you much here unfortunately but I’d like to take an aside to talk about my “scene bits” docs.

It’s what it says on the tin, an entire doc all labeled with different heading styles with blurbs for each scene I want to include at some point in the book so I can hop around easily. Whether they make it into the manuscript or not, all practice is good practice and I like to keep old ideas because they might be useful in unsuspecting ways later.

Separate from that, I keep most of my deleted scenes and scene chunks for, again, possible use later in a “deleted scenes” doc, all labeled accordingly.

When I designed my alien language for the sci-fi series, I created a Word doc dictionary and my own "translation" matrix, for easy look-up or word generation whenever I needed it (do y'all want a breakdown for creating foreign languages? It's so fun).

Normally, as with my sci-fi series, I have an entire doc filled with character sheets and important details, I just… didn’t do that for this book. But the point is—you can still make those for free on any word processing software, you don’t need fancy gadgets.

—

I hope this helps anyone struggling! It doesn’t have to be fancy. It doesn’t have to be expensive. Everything I made here, minus the aforementioned timeline and pie chart, was done with basic excel skills and the paint bucket tool. I imagine this can be applicable to games, comics, what have you, it knows no bounds!

Now you have one less excuse to sit down and start writing.

[selenekallanwriter]

Person: What's your book about?

Writers:

I'm both somehow 🙃

[soultayi]

the words in my throat have dried up and when i try to swallow i taste poetry that has turned sour. like ash. but now. i sit beside a railing on the edge of the thames. a man plays a harp his fingers are so gentle the strings look like silk and the sun is setting. i can hear the waves and i think maybe the words haven’t dried up- perhaps i have had nothing of truth to say. or maybe nothing of substance of permanence. and the water continues the gentle caressing of pebbles. all of this is truth. substance. permanence. the tightness in my throat is just… tightness. it will ease. and eventually, it will go away.

[clarislam]

It's my 10 year anniversary on Tumblr! 🥳

....Oh wow, this blog is old 😂

But honestly, I'm so grateful for everyone who followed my writing journey through Tumblr, whether it be through my fanfics or my original fiction and poetry!

I know I haven't been super active on Tumblr for the past while - you can find links to my other socials in my Carrd, as I tend to be more active on Bluesky and Instagram these days social-media wise (or, better yet, follow my email newsletter or main website which are also linked in the Carrd).

However, I do appreciate all the support you've given me in my writing journey, whether it be purchasing one of my books or reading my other works in some form. Here's to many more years on this blog (hopefully, depending on what happens with Tumblr going into the future)! 🎉

[starklyscifi]

The thing people don’t realize about writing is that time spent just staring out the window is CRITICAL

[binickandros]

I have an AU idea and I’d really love to write it so if my brain could cooperate thank you!

[eve-writes]

Sometimes I fantasize on living in the medieval England….filled with Royal Castles, medieval towns, woods, forests, rivers, grasslands….

Royal princesses living in huge castles ; cladded in satin gowns and corsets laced  with frills and laces…. Charming young princes wearing tunics and cloaks and trousers with thick black leather boots and silver swords hanging by their waists….

Evening balls with everyone dancing to royal music and enjoying the drinks…. A huge feast laid out in the royal dining hall… People sipping on elite wine and feasting on the grand dinner…. Young love blossoming on in the dancing halls while young princes and princessess dance to their content….

Riding horses out onto the great dark woods and gazing into the great blue black sky studded with diamond like stars…. Fresh salty winds gushing onwards from the endless roaring seas….

Another fantasy which I often tend to muse about is a concept of 'Forbidden love'… Young couples separated by the constraints of the medieval society, secretly meeting in the woods and forests; while their love for each other blossoms…..

A young Prince falls in love with a peasant girl… Due to the restrictions set forth by the society they meet secretly and hang out together…

I like my fantasies to generally have a happy ending rather than a tragic one… The couple finally unites and lives happily….

All this might sound a bit cliche for some. But there's nothing wrong in fantasizing as long as it doesn't hurt anyone.

I let my imagination run wild and free with no bounds… It's the beauty of the human mind… Thoughts come gushing into your mind… Let them come and go as they please… Never try and obstruct them… do this.. and your mind can take you to worlds and places like you've never imagined…

~eve~