#to get my brain in a good mode

[meownotgood]

how do you write so well ? can you give us any tips for anyone who wants to start writing fics ? :)

-anon from France (･ิω･ิ)

of course!!! I'm not gonna lie.... I wing a lot of stuff when I'm writing so I may not be the best at giving very solid advice 😭 but, I will share some tips that helped me, and maybe they can help you too!

practice! def the most obvious one, the more you write the more you'll be able to improve. but practice isn't just writing, you can improve so much more by reading as well. or even watching a show or playing a game, indulging in a story you really love, you can learn much from that story to improve your own writings as well

write like shit! I heard the phrase, "write drunk, edit sober" a little while ago, and it's so perfect to how I feel about the writing process. just write whatever ideas you have, don't stress about your first draft not being good, or not what you'd like. no one can write perfectly on the first try, that's where editing comes in, to smooth out wrinkles and make everything nice. it is perfectly okay if you can only write a simple outline right now because you can come back and make it beautiful. write "lol I don't know what to put here" and come back while editing, put "insert romantic scene here" and continue. and seriously, don't be afraid to write something that's "bad" or "cringe" because nobody will read your first draft but you! just speak from your heart and your head will take it from there! and if you write something you really don't like, you're under no obligation to let anyone see it. writing a bunch of crap is a part of the process. you can never improve if you put yourself down, and don't allow yourself someplace to start

find your own flow! everyone writes different, some environments might work better for you and some might not. some people write while listening to music because it helps, I cannot because my brain would turn pickled. some can write thousands of words per day, some can only write 100. do what is best for you, try different things to learn where your best flow state is. don't push yourself to write when you don't want to or more than you can, your best work will come when you are most comfortable.

write what you want! write the story you want to read. writing is hard, it's often frustrating, but the story you want to tell is something only you can do, that's why no one has told it yet. enjoy the process as much as you can, the bad and the good!

[hinamie]

spiraling

[egophiliac]

was this anyone else's first thought, or

[princessnijireiki]

weirdest casualty of long Covid (besides. yk. the Incurable Disability) is in terms of linguistic processing I can truly no longer talk or sing as fast as I used to

not that I was super fast before, but one of the days I was sickest, words actually stopped... meaning anything? like I was at work, I was hitting my DT script, but was pushing through on pure muscle memory phonetically. I could process what I was hearing or reading just fine, but could not talk outside of this heavily repetitive workplace script, which is actually very dystopian now that I think about it. virus hitting the brain means I'm a zombie that can't speak except to say, "HIII :) whatcanIgetstartedferyouthismorning?"

anyway, thought it was just fatigue, but went to my car on my break, watched a trending video of people trying to rap along to Fergalicious at double speed. I could LIP SYNC to it just fine. I tested my theory. but I could NOT get my mouth and voice to work at the same time to actually sing/rap it. even now, tbh, I have to make myself NOT think about it while rapping it to get the words to flow out or I get stuck. like it's truly something in the brain for where you process speech, but not where you process just lyrical phonics like music. I have to consciously make a REAL effort to turn off the "word" part of my brain to be fast again.

I speak perfectly legibly, I can genuinely get up to decently fast normal talking speeds, just not Northeastern fast-fast. but it comes up in music a surprising amount, and it's kind of annoying to have lost as a skill.

[odeliba]

i don't think i talk enough about how massively obsessed i am with logan sargeant

[cluescorner]

Canto 6 was incomplete

Literally why are we there? Like, we just go to a manor that's in t-corp I guess. But why are we there? We've got another Heathcliff and he's cool but he just shows up pissed off for no reason and then we leave? Weird af. Nelly, Linton, and Josephine were cool and Hindley...existed. But it's a weirdly low number of supporting characters, and I guess that 1 really important and cool one could have made up for it but that didn't happen. Even the Mili song felt incomplete, like only 1/2 of it was there! Such an odd choice to make at the halfway mark for our 12 sinners. It just feels like a lot of stuff was missing and it's really sad because I was excited for Heathcliff's canto.

[vaugarde]

kinda wanna switch my creative attention from starfall to something else tbh. feel like ive been in a stump with it for a pretty long while and i keep going over the same scenes in my head rather than getting ideas for new ones.

[ruvviks]

PLEASE DO NOT TAG AS YOUR OWN OC.

Sebastian has been searching for himself ever since he has freed himself from the shackles of Arasaka. Stripped from his identity and only just now rediscovering his own agency in life, he struggles with seeing his own worth— too used to existing solely for a purpose, and too used to relying on others' perception of him to define this purpose in the first place. He wants nothing more than to get back to himself; if there even is a self to get back to at all. SEBASTIAN VIDAL || BELONGS TO @MOJAVES.

mahmoud darwish, i didn't apologize to the well // 'out of control', by ruslan isinev // salt in the wound; boygenius // vardges petrosyan, a shirt made of fire // by liam wong // this is love; air traffic controller // bilal al-shams, sacrifice // 'the dying gladiator', by pierre julien // flesh and bone; black math // by hel7l7 // romance; fontaines d.c. // 'the invisible man smokes', rick castro // little words; the happy fits // georges bataille, the dead man // by matthew grant anson // deep water; american authors // kay redfield jamison, an unquiet mind: a memoir of moods and madness

[ticklace]

I feel like most of my experience of depression boils down to "I have the Lonely, but I cannot make the Conversation"

[sentientsky]

at the heart of every galaxy is a void; an empty space torn open between worlds. it's a consumption of light, of movement and warmth; a dilation of time, seconds fractured and turning in on themselves. he could walk the twenty-six thousand light years to the core of a galaxy he'd drawn from the silt of inexistence. he could stand at its edge and peer over into the depths of nothingness. and still, still, its pull would wither and die in the face of such desperate, hands-shaking gravity as a palm pressed to his own on a bus ride back from the end of the world. he would have let himself be devoured by the solar pulse of a far too human heart, let himself be run through, all sinew/bone/ichor, if only to be permitted to remain in that same orbit—the singular fulcrum upon which he'd turned for more than six thousand years. and yet. to be handed the same blade that sliced you open so long ago—to be asked, begged, pleaded with, to turn it on your own chest/to turn back around just before the sunlight hits your face/to turn yourself into the crawling, wounded thing that so often looked for nothing but a quiet place to die... well, that's something else entirely, isn't it? and so when the angel, with all his blistering antiseptic heat and amethyst eyes, returns to the scene of the crime, Crowley can't bring himself to speak. he lets the words gather and stagnate in his throat. and after a while, Aziraphale stops pushing. and so it's the end of the world. the shadows leer from the corners, the world turns faster on its axis, and still they're not talking.

[carnivalcarriondiscarded]

shoutout to those nights where the brain says We Literally Cant Do Anything Even Though We Really Want To <3

[coriander-candlesticks]

I've felt like I should check in with Apollo the past few days and finally managed to clear enough space on my floor to feel alright with breaking out the tarot deck again so I did! Lit his candle, said as as formal a prayer as I could muster beforehand, asked Hermes to help with communication, the whole shebang. For further context: I've been wanting to ask Aphrodite something specific (also via tarot, it's the most grounding tool I've got) but I only have the one deck at the moment and, while I've used it to ask Hermes about things in tandem with Apollo, and Aphrodite introduced herself via it (with a card that also introduced Apollo), I wasn't sure if it would be cool for me to use it to ask her specifically something not in direct tandem with Apollo. I mentioned that in the prayer but also said that that might be a question for a different session, since trying to get an answer to that (on top of the general "hey how are we doing/do you have anything you want me to learn") might muddy my ability to understand the message.

Cue twelve cards falling out of my deck/poking out while I was shuffling. I usually pull ~3 cards on top of whatever falls out, but I ended up not feeling like it was needed. Seven of them fell out face-up, too.

Despite having some concerns about whether all of the cards were "supposed" to be pulled, it was pretty coherent! And covered quite a few things I've been thinking about recently, including sorting out anxiety vs a warning/displeasure, a follow-up of a card that was the focus of my last pull, and a reminder to look at outside/intellectual sources to combat the whatever-the-fuck-my-brain's-on. There were four cards that fell out face-up together in a pile: a card I associate with Apollo at the front and one associated with Artemis (the Moon) at the back, with cards related to unity & growth in the middle. I'd had a pretty bad experience attempting an offering to Artemis last month and have stepped back and avoided asking her for anything or specifically invoking her in prayers/offerings/etc. since (except for once when it involved a pregnant friend b/c it seemed odd and tbh a little disrespectful to ask Apollo for help and not her as well) because I took it as a sign that she didn't want me to work with her. I'm also aware, though, that that bad experience could have just been a meltdown/panic attack. Regardless of whether it was either of those two things, a "hey slow down" warning, or a combination, it was nice to have some clear reassurance & an official introduction. It's also significant, I think, that part of the Moon card's message is about not letting anxiety/"self-deception" (direct from the guide) cloud your intuition. I've been wanting to burn the candle I dedicated to her for a few days now- it's possible that was a sign from her as well.

As far as the deck-use question...the first card that fell out was the Empress (face-up, reversed). My initial thought was that it was a "no", but I decided to look at the meaning in case it wasn't that which was. probably a bad idea. It freaked me out a bit because I couldn't figure out what it was referring to. I ended up using my alphabet oracle tiles for a makeshift yes/no system after finishing with all the other cards and got clear confirmation that my instinct was, in fact, correct.

All in all it was really cool?? By far the most cards I've had in one pill iirc, and a good lesson in identifying how my intuition works.

[youngpeachenthusiast]

me trying to explain to my body that it is not absolutely necessary to make me feel like dying every single day and i could use a break:

my body: okay but have you considered that we could do this forever?

[aropride]

if you imagine that guy from saw and he's sawing his own leg off in the bathroom but it's just like, a normal bathroom and he's not chained to the wall or anything and he really didn't have to saw off his leg at all but he imagined a situation in which he would have to do that so he decided to get it over with as soon as possible. well that's how i approach all my interpersonal relationships

[httpiastri]

[pa-pa-plasma]

kind of frustrating that people took "fat does not equal unhealthy" to mean "fat is not unhealthy." sometimes being obese IS unhealthy & excess fat can cause a lot of problems. ignoring health issues isn't progressive. real "oranges kill people with depression" moment