#the ranch was great

[yourfavebooklrsfavebooklr]

so I’m conflicted on how to feel about tsats

[beyondtheadobe]

[blinkees]

[horsegirlsodapop]

sodapop curtis loves strays! he feeds the cats that live under the porch of the abandoned house at the end of the block with canned tuna he buys with his paycheck. he crawls through the dirt on his stomach to count and make sure they're all alive after the first big freeze once winter rolls around. he tucks blankets into cardboard boxes and leaves them by dumpsters behind the dx for the strays that live there, too. he has scars on his hands and arms from reaching out to try and save them. he cried when his dad took him deer hunting and he grieves when he sees roadkill. he loves angry dogs with matted fur and their ribs poking through and he gets stupidly close every time and he leaves scraps out for them. he loves the horses that most give up on. he can't wrap his mind around anyone thinking an animal is something to be afraid of, give up on, condemn to starvation. he makes friends with angry kids like dally and scrappy boys like steve and he makes room for the kids that have been beaten down and chewed up by poverty like johnny and brings them home to show them they deserve love, too. he doesn't care if he gets hurt 'cause he'd rather get burned helping something than not doing anything at all.

[oleander-to-oleandest]

PATIENCE ZERO I WILL THROW MY SCHEDULE IN THE GARBAGEEEEEEEE

[fidgetspringer-art]

Just realised I have about 60k words worth of old-timey cowboys AU written that I have not drawn a SINGLE thing for

[kagoutiss]

“what does sheik actually do in this au” fair question. everything

[yanderefoeyay]

Is Doug still alive? I can’t imagine he’d be that old enough to have passed away from age

And if he is does Dev visit his Grandpa? Like does he spend time with the only other family we know of?

I can’t imagine Dale having the best relationship with his dad after what happened but does that affect his relationship with his grandson?

[shadowfalllen]

Where the Heart Stays

A Modern Ranch AU, Sapphic Christmas Romance Oneshot

Pairing: Shadowheart x f!Tav

Word count: 18,438

Summary:

Eliza moves back to her hometown of Pine Hollow just before Christmas. Encouraged by her adoptive mother, Jaheira, to try something new, Eliza signs up for riding lessons at Hallowleaf Ranch. There, she gets reunited with her childhood friend, Jenevelle "Jen" Hallowleaf, and soon, something more than friendship begins to blossom between them. But Jen carries a deep hurt that has made her more guarded than Eliza remembers. Can Eliza win her over, or will it be another lonely Christmas for them both?

[deadpresidents]

It's been a tough week to be an American, so here's something to think about for Independence Day.

When Lyndon B. Johnson was President, he was so determined to do as much as possible in the time that he had that, according to Presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin (who was also a personal aide to LBJ in his final years in office and retirement), his swimming pool at the LBJ Ranch in Texas "was strangely equipped with special rafts for a telephone, a notepad, and a pencil; if the President thought of someone he wanted to call or something important he wanted to record, he could float over to the various rafts that held the necessary equipment."

Notice that she used the plural "rafts" -- as in there were more than one of these rafts in the small pool at his ranch in the rural Texas Hill Country. And, while most business obviously wasn't done in the swimming pool, some of it was, and it was part of the way LBJ operated as a political genius. A political genius who helped leave behind the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Head Start and school breakfast programs, Job Corps, PBS, NPR, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for Humanities, Fair Packaging and Labeling for things you shop for and Truth-In-Lending laws, the Civil Rights Act of 1968 (which included the Fair Housing Act, Indian Civil Rights Act, and codified federal hate crime laws), the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (which eliminated racially discriminatory immigration policies), the first Clean Air Act (arguable the most important environmental protection law in American history), and much, much, much more including...oh, what was it? Oh yeah: the Voting Rights Act, Medicare and Medicaid.

[shutterandsentence]

Celebrate the simple beauty of today!

Photo: Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming

[beyondtheadobe]

[simplecountryboy]

[defiledtomb]

rook be upon ye

[ratboysims]

played for 5 minutes adopted the first horse i saw because it looked like the horse i used to ride when i was little

[nitewrighter]

So, on the topic of first person narration, I am usually staunchly against it too. While I think compelling narration is better suited as a neutral orator often, I found myself wanting to do a written piece like journal entries recently? A personal account of a guy who is stumbling while he is stuck in it? I know it has been done and redone and perhaps even overdone, but I am hoping that it lends an authenticity and shows a shift as he grows more involved with the circumstances surrounding him. Plus I am writing in old timey vernacular; hiding the fact it is purple prose behind characterization. >:3c

I mean like... I think we're well overdue to bring back more epistolary novels, more novels where the reader has to assemble the story from limited perspectives and other scraps of evidence. Speaking as someone who ends up reading a lot of first person narration because I'm a teen librarian and YA fiction is choked with it, you have to have several conditions running to really pull first person narration off, and a lot of them are structural

The first person narration has to be unique--I'm not just saying this as someone who is now stuck with a permanent, "Ough I'm in YA dystopia but I don't wike kiwwing peopwe" YA female protagonist voice in my head, I'm saying this because this is literally the story's backbone. Voice is what carries your reader AND establishes the level of suspension of disbelief expected from them, and you also have to figure out what impression you want the character to leave on the reader and how reliable they are as a narrator. For example, Brett's voice in The Great Cool Ranch Dorito in the Sky is like, Hella Cringe, Bro, but a significant part of that is by design--he's extremely intelligent and creative but is also actively arresting his own development, and it's this thin veneer of teenage obnoxiousness over a whole Rube Goldberg machine of grief and coping mechanisms and trying to understand his world through a shit-ton of comforting pop culture references. (There are definitely some weaker elements in the story itself, but Brett's voice is one of the strongest parts of it because Galarza was able to give it such a strong teenaged voice while actually keeping the story surprisingly tight despite the story itself basically being about being stuck in repetitive coping mechanism cycles.) But there's also differences between Brett's own narration of the story, and his asides through his journal entries and essays for his teacher. Like there's Brett's interior thoughts, and then there's Brett's thoughts as he's forcing himself to articulate them, so I mean, there is also that self-filtering factor when it comes to journaling/epistolary novel-style writing that I think is something to keep in mind.