#why am i writing this novel

[ganondoodle]

"to even give people the mere chance of starting to understand how you feel about this character and this story you made up around them you have to actually draw that comic, you are at chapter 2, even just the rough draft for it took you a year despite your best efforts on being faster"

[myokk]

Eloise is really, really bad at chess😐

(this is a scene from my fic & I typed it up here:)

"Milady, you cannot send him there! He will surely die a terrible death, and Murdoch is our finest knight!"

Eloise blinked her bleary eyes at the wizarding chess board, not really comprehending what the tiny pieces were yelling at her. The one that seemed to be doing the most talking was gesticulating wildly and jumping up and down, trying to get her attention. When she had taken the pieces out of the box Sebastian had lent her, they had immediately recognized her and started protesting, appealing to 'their benevolent lord's innate sense of goodness', but their protests fell on deaf ears. Eloise was positive that Sebastian took some sort of perverse pleasure at watching her lose at chess.

In the background, she could hear Ominis's laughter echoing through the Undercroft. His own pieces were quite happy at the moment, preening and occasionally sending rude gestures towards Eloise's, much to Sebastian's amusement. He was narrating their every action to Ominis, whose laughter was egging on his soldiers even more.

"Eloise," Sebastian said, propping his chin up by one hand (entirely too amused, infuriatingly so, why did he have to look so handsome when she was trying to be annoyed at him?), "maybe you should move the knight..." his other hand pointed to an empty space on the board, "...here."

This declaration caused an uproar. There were shouts of betrayal, tiny pieces gesticulating wildly to the carnage surrounding the board as they shouted in vain. She didn't see any other viable moves, so Eloise sighed and ordered the brave little Murdoch to where Sebastian had suggested. Chaos immediately ensued and Ominis's queen gleefully knocked his head off with a violent swing of her scepter. Eloise's pawns all doubled over, sobbing as their most valient knight fell, and her remaining bishop shook his tiny fist in outrage up at her.

After a few more minutes, much to Eloise's ashamed relief and the boys' disappointment, her pieces refused to move for either her or Sebastian. They solemnly collected the remains of their fallen comrades with as much dignity as they could muster and marched off the board and back into their box in a mourning parade of sorts.

Sebastian joined Ominis's pieces as they jeered the losing team off the board, causing Eloise to glare fiercely at him. "You were the one telling me what to do, and they're your pieces! Show some loyalty."

He shrunk away from the intensity of her gaze and held up his hands in protest. "I was suggesting the moves as a joke! After last week's fiasco, I didn't think you'd fall for it again."

Ominis was laughing so hard he was gasping for breath, and the two of them turned to watch him. Even through her irritation, Eloise couldn't help but smile at him - he was always so solemn and these bouts of mirth were few and far between. He managed to speak between bouts of laughter. "I...I couldn't...I couldn't believe it when you sent your bishops one by one into my trap! It was so obvious! And then...and then you..." Ominis dissolved into fits of laughter again and couldn't finish.

Eloise turned her angry glare to him. "We can't all be chess geniuses!"

"I've tried teaching you and you don't listen! For the next time, I'm only going to give you one piece of advice: don't listen to Sebastian." He chuckled once more to himself and then turned slightly to the board, addressing his men (and queen) and giving them a debriefing. He always did this after he won the matches; it was a strange sort of ritual that he seemed to look forward to.

[lunarriviera]

asylum (≈90k words) by lunarriviera chapters: 22 + extras fandom: 猎罪图鉴 | Under the Skin relationships: Shen Yi/Du Cheng rating: E warnings: chose not to warn characters: He Rongyue, Li Han, Chief Zhang, Jiang Feng, Yan Tansheng, Jiang Xue, Qin Huai (Are You Safe), Huo Tengyi, Xiaoxuan (Shen Yi's Cat), Du Qing, Bai Xilin, Original Characters tags: Post-Canon, Police Procedural, Corruption, Canon-Typical Violence, Trauma, Childhood Trauma, Painting, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Angst, Awkward Conversations, Slow Burn, Hidden Depths, Miscommunication, Therapy, Each Chapter Tagged Separately summary:

He’s been through canvas after canvas but they’re always the same, until he yanks them off the easel, flings them off to one side and primes another, then another. Instead of gesso or zinc he uses an asphaltum he’s mixed himself, somewhere between brown and gray. The murkiest underpainting he can conjure, phthalo and alizarin pulped together into a dull colorless swamp. And then, as if helpless to do otherwise, every time, his arm jerks up and slings a hot wet spatter of perylene red across the canvas’s glazed surface, three-dimensional globs and drips, an arterial spray, and the bright sheen of it sickens him even as his hands make the movement again and again. And again.

posting two chapters a week | read it on ao3

[geneeste]

Things I have discovered while writing my NaNo project

turns out I'm not the expert speller I thought I was

'says' has lost all meaning

there are so many phrases and sentence fragments I repeat over and over DEAR GOD

god, so many "she/he/they moves" "walks" "goes over there" etc this is excruciating

why do we even need to know where characters are or are going anyway

SO MUCH EYE CONTACT AND EYE EMOTING. I'm running out of synonyms for "look"

transitional paragraphs WHAT TRANSITIONAL PARAGRAPHS

character development is overrated, right?

tenses are outrageous.

[paleturtlecherryblossom-blog]

Thoughts on Rise of Ning, Pt 2

Now that I’m through like 14 episodes of The Rise of Ning (and I’m having a amazing time), again I want to harp on the changes from the novel, and how I feel they’re logically executed:

First! LU JIAXUE! Even in the novel, he is an incredibly compelling character and in the drama, the actor brings out a fantastic intensity that makes it even better. The shot where Yining is arguing with him to spare her Third brother, and you see her whole face and just his jaw, but then the twitches of his jaw and lips convey SO MUCH repressed emotion, ahhh I was having a lot of fun.

The interesting thing about him for me (at least in the novel) is that he’s not exactly the typical scumbag ex-husband/lover you find in reincarnation/rebirth stories. He was genuinely very good to Yining when they were together, and in many other settings, he could be the endgame male lead after one key misunderstanding gets resolved, and I would cheer for him. In fact, the author did write an alternate universe extra where Yining doesn’t meet Luo Shenyuan and remarries Lu Jiaxue! 

So the romance in the novel is very context dependent; it works out because Yining meets Shenyuan in a setting filled with family struggles, slowly grows to rely on him more than anyone else and gives him her ultimate trust. All of this leads up to her falling in love with him, and this is never in doubt, even when she clears her misunderstanding of Lu Jiaxue (this relieved me a lot lol). 

I don’t really know where I’m going with this, but I just really like stories where characters falling in love for the second time dont have their first love be portrayed as ‘not really love’ or ‘loved a person unworthy of it’. Because in the novel, while I was all for Luo Shenyuan, I couldn’t say Lu Jiaxue was a scumbag who deserved to be dumped quickly. Also those two are very similar in terms of their ruthlessness and capacity for obsession, so I agree with @dangermousie, they should fuck it out. (they do it via court politics, but the direct version would be great to ;) )

So in the novel, Yining has an older sister (from the same mom Gu Minglan), who’s married off to a duke household. This sister of hers is very fierce and capable of defending her to her shitty dad (who’s unchanged across both versions, sigh). And her stepmom is actually not so cool in the novel, she is equally kind to Yining, but she doesn’t have much say. In this aspect, I much prefer Lin Hairu’s character in the drama, which I guess they derived by combining the novel! Older sister and the novel! Lin Hairu.

The change also makes sense, because in the novel, Yining only stays on in the main residence after her mom dies because of her elder sister marrying into a powerful family. In absence of this, and given that Lin Hairu would have married in only years later, it makes sense that Lady Qiao schemed to send her off to a country estate.

Also because Yining stays on the estate and grows up with Luo Shenyuan, Old Lady Luo is also, I think, a bit more accepting of him than in the drama, Again, it makes sense, in the novel, she is aware she is dying and she makes a deal with him: he gets legitimate status, and Yining gets his protection. In the drama, this logic doesn’t apply, because the grandma is looking for a suitable husband for Yining to protect her, and also she isn’t in immediate danger of dying anymore. So whether he can get added to the family registry really would require Yining to put a fair bit of thought into it. Also at this point of time in the novel, Shenyuan is the only adult son of the Luo second branch, so even shitty dad will grasp at straws to elevate his reputation. 

[jasminewalkerauthor]

A thought has just popped into my mind of that trope where a woman leaving her baby on the door step of a mansion thinking it belongs to a rich family that will give her child a better life but what she doesn't realise is that it's actually a frat house and it becomes a whole 3 men and a baby situation but with frat bros and now it won't leave my mind

[kineticallyanywhere]

wip wednesday, why not

[xxplastic-cubexx]

what is your favorite thing about charles and your favorite thing about erik? separately, as in what you like most about their characters :]

a devious question this one is, my friend!!! it's hard enough for me to explain my thoughts cohesively, but having to pick ONE thing i particularly love is difficult. with characters like charles and erik, theres been so much done with their characters over the decades and so they have so many components to them that make them so interesting and fun to observe. BUT I TRY FOR YOU TODAY. under the cut i kinda ramble and the size of this text box makin me anxious

i think if i were to be simple and broad, what i enjoy most about charles is his determination to help others, even if he isn't really thanked and/or if people don't even like him. ofc, this isn't to say he hasn't done wrong- to be honest, the fact he does wrong/questionable things at times is another aspect of him i really enjoy, maybe because- broadly speaking- he's meant to be altruistic (intent vs outcome and all that). i don't know if that's super exciting to most people, but it is for me

as for erik, my reason for liking him is easier to explain tbh. To Be Simple And Broad, his progression from villain to antihero over the decades has been fun to observe (as much as i have so far anyhow) and analyze. i think to be a bit more specific, him using his rage and pain as justifications for his villainous actions is definitely what compels me the most: hurt people hurt and the sort, an idea i've always found interesting (something something vicious cycles and the like). yet now, he recognizes this wasn't really. A Just Thing To Do and is beginning to change that, which i enjoy

[hislittleraincloud]

...

Gee, I didn't realize that "freshly spilled blood" is black.

[20cm]

hi, i unfortunately need help covering a combined bill that rounds to roughly ~$1500 due to the vehicle i share with my mother + my only transportation to work being suddenly very out of commission.

$500 is renting the cheapest vehicle we could for a week, the rest is for the part we need to repair it and the repair itself. the issues with it have already cost me hours at work.

i work 'full time' (a little under 40hrs) making minimum wage to support myself + my mom and our animals and we'd been coasting by despite having a $600 vet bill we were chipping away at. right now im prioritizing trying to get this $1500 off our backs.

if youre able anything helps, truly, even just reblogging this. thank you so much in advance (pls dont tag with b00st/etc)

♡ v3nmo: @/rookwind

♡ p@/pal: @/ceeqyinn

[hopecomesbacktolife]

not me reading this definitely m/f romance novel but reading heavily into every interaction between the main character and her best friend…

[edwinspaynes]

.

[clover-46]

the writers on here making the miguel fics need to remember his fangs inject paralytic venom hes not a real vampire it was just a joke in the movie 😭

oh but i still want him to bite me don’t get me wrong idgaf if they have venom 🤷🏾‍♀️🤷🏾‍♀️

[severeblizzardlady]

Well, it's fanfic brainrot hours.

You wake up one morning to the sound of someone cooking in your kitchen. You live alone. You go downstairs to find Sans the Skeleton making eggs on your stove.

He looks at you. You look at him. He tells you that you look tired. You decide that if you're going to die from carbon monoxide poisoning--because that's clearly what's going on, how else could you talk to a fictional character--you may as well do it from the comfort of your bed. You return to your room and fall back asleep.

Except you wake up later. You wake up, and your room is lighter, the sun higher in the sky. The TV is on downstairs. You go back down to find Sans is asleep on the sofa. Ru Paul is on, and there's a single sock on the floor.

It is not your sock.

But apparently you have a roommate now.

...

...

...Be a real shame if he couldn't leave....

[rokurookajima]

wan is frantically googling “is soap toxic???!!!!”

[tommybowefuneralattendee]

something about "god has abandoned us, tommy, we did this," does not belong in a smosh hooey and beef beef video