#write a book with me

[leeloooonfire]

23. January 2025

What did I do today:

I watched the 8th ep of Sanderson's Creative Writing Lecture on youtube. It's something I've been watching on and off for a while whenever I feel like I want to get some good insides from an already published author. And he has some pretty good points and a nice teaching philosophy. TBH, I haven't read a book from him yet, but some of his series are on my physical tbr. In this Q&A lecture he spoke quite a bit about internal and external logic/consistency in writing, which I I've never really gave much thought before.

after, I wrote a detailed summary (ca. 2.5 pages) about the book I'm working on to get a dense and comprehensive, but also short, overview what I have/had in mind and what needs some serious revisions.

and then, tired person that I am, I only worked on a one page long writing exercise. I always write on paper for this, so it's even less than some might expect, but you can read it under the cut.

That's it for today :)

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writing exercise: choose the opening line of an unread book and write a scene based on it. "Mistborn" by Brandon Sanderson

Ash fell from the sky.

The High Priestess lifted her arms to the darkened sky, welcoming the white flakes with bloodied hands. As her prayers raised to a frantic chant loud enough to be heard over the war drums and howling of the people of Naas, Mizáne covered her mouth with a cloth. The stench of burning flesh and old spices unbearable as she choked on every breath.

She never saw such a thing before - flames taller than Bokra the Giant consuming the last hollow ships of Naas' fleet while the city's people cheered with fevered joy. It frightened her, the way all their eyes have turned white since the priestess and her blacked-robe covered men arrived in the earliest days of summer.

First, they took over the long coasts, raising thousands of tents along the beaches only disrupted by the ever burning statues of the gods. Then they found their way into the temples and halls of the lords where they whispered sweet promises into the ears of the old and entranced masters. It didn't take long for the small folk to follow, praising her and the abundance she seemed to have prophesied.

At last, they opened the palace's doors for her to place a gnarly hand on the throne.

Not once did the High Priestess or her men shed some blood - until this night.

Now, rivers of it run through the streets and the last cry of the children of Naas has stopped.

Reaching for her cloak and carefully putting on hand on her dagger, Mizáne turned to leave the temple's courtyard. Her naked feet slipped with every step as she pushed through the crowd. She tried to shield herself from the onlooker, not wanting to see the people she once loved and now have fallen for a spell so dark, it destroyed their entire way of life.

No one tried to stop or talk to her, they were all gone long ago.

With one last look ever her shoulder, she watched as the High Priestess shed her robe and hair and the first bones cracked in rhythm with the war drums.

[inkskinned]

this is just my opinion but i think any good media needs obsession behind it. it needs passion, the kind of passion that's no longer "gentle scented candle" and is now "oh shit the house caught on fire". it needs a creator that's biting the floorboards and gnawing the story off their skin. creators are supposed to be wild animals. they are supposed to want to tell a story with the ferocity of eating a good stone fruit while standing over the sink. the same protective, strange instinct as being 7 and making mud potions in pink teacups: you gotta get weird with it.

good media needs unhinged, googling-at-midnight kind of energy. it needs "what kind of seams are invented on this planet" energy and "im just gonna trust the audience to roll with me about this" energy. it needs one person (at least) screaming into the void with so much drive and energy that it forces the story to be real.

sometimes people are baffled when fanfic has some stunning jaw-dropping tattoo-it-on-you lines. and i'm like - well, i don't go here, but that makes sense to me. of fucking course people who have this amount of passion are going to create something good. they moved from a place of genuine love and enjoyment.

so yeah, duh! saturday cartoons have banger lines. random street art is sometimes the most precious heart-wrenching shit you've ever seen. someone singing on tiktok ends up creating your next favorite song. youtubers are giving us 5 hours of carefully researched content. all of this is the impossible equation to latestage capitalism. like, you can't force something to be good. AI cannot make it good. no amount of focus-group testing or market research. what makes a story worth listening to is that someone cares so much about telling it - through dance, art, music, whatever it takes - that they are just a little unhinged about it.

one time my friend told me he stayed up all night researching how many ways there are to peel an orange. he wrote me a poem that made me cry on public transportation. the love came through it like pith, you know? the words all came apart in my hands. it tasted like breakfast.

[soliusss]

Funniest thing I’ve seen on tiktok are those sigma male boys getting mad that American psycho was written by a gay man and going “well I like fight club better” buddy I’ve got some world ending devastating news for you

[memesonnets]

Hi my name is Don Quixote of La Mancha the Knight of the Rueful Figure and I have a rueful figure (that's how I got my name) with purple bruised ribs and tall stature and gaunt features and hair turning gray and a rather hooked aquiline nose and large black drooping mustaches and a lot of people tell me I look like Amadís of Gaul (AN: if u don’t know who he is begone!). I’m not related to Lady Oriana but I wish I was because she’s an incomparable flowering beauty. I’m a knight errant but some of my teeth and grinders are missing. I have long lank limbs. I’m also a defender of damsels, protector of orphans, succourer of the needy, righter of wrongs, undoer of injustice, and I wander a magic countryside called the mountains of Spain where I’m in my first year of knighthood (I’m forty-nine). I’m a gentleman (in case you couldn’t tell) and I wear mostly armor. I love my great-grandfather's forgotten corner of the house and I cobble together all my clothes from there. For example today I was wearing a doublet of fine cloth with matching shoes and velvet breeches and a helmet, morion, visor, breastplate and backpiece. I was riding outside La Mancha. It was early morning so the rays of the sun fell obliquely and the heat did not distress me, which I was very happy about. A lot of giants stared at me. I put up my pasteboard visor at them.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

HOT, SINGLE, UNSTUDIED SPONGES. 3000 NAUTICAL MILES AWAY. Come sail the distance and read Tiger Tiger!

[lazylittledragon]

i need guenhwyvar to be Cat so bad

[fruit-teeth]

Me: maybe I’m not cut out to be a writer…idk what if I’m not good enough

BookTok romance writers: ‘what if you were just a normal school teacher…but the MINOTAUR wanted to get you PREGNANT’

[ameliasmiscmonsters]

[decaffeinatedpartymuggoop]

My favorite thing about Annabeth is her wardrobe.

Cause like, Rick simplifies her clothes in a way a man would, and you can tell.

Cause in EVERY book, from The Lightning Thief to Chalice, she’s in the goddamn CHB shirt. With like some shorts or cargo pants. Nothing more, nothing less.

He’s made improvements over the years, giving her some other clothes. But he’ll always come back to old faithful.

Like, he most definitely did it on accident, but he made her so Adam Sandler and I love it

[misteria247]

I'm realizing that Stan is actually incredibly smart. Like in a Ford kind of way to some extent.

Like yes Stan's street smart and life smart but he's also got the smarts that Ford's praised for. Because he had rebuilt the portal and figured out his brother's notes and equations.

Like do you know how hard math is on Ford and Fiddleford's level of expertise??? How complicated and delicate it is????? Especially the kind that brings portals to life???? And Stan figured it out. Had taught himself to read and comprehend these difficult things. Difficult things that requires college degrees in science and mathematics.

And Stan did this on an incomplete high school grade level of academics.

That's fucking nuts. Sure it took 30 years but he learned it. By himself, can you imagine how frustrated he got, teaching himself Ford's educational level??? Using his mechanical skills of fixing his car to be up to par to Fiddleford's impressive craftsmanship????

And I can just see how Ford and Fiddleford react post apocalypse. Ford doing equations and science stuff and talking while Fiddleford listens and gives his input when Stan pipes up unintentionally and puts his hat into the ring. And it's mathematically sound?? And these two men are just blown away cuz what the actual hell?? Ford's immediately questioning Stan, wanting to hear his thoughts while Fiddleford watches impressed and Stan's mortified and a bit overwhelmed. Or Fiddleford working on something and Ford's watching him when Stan points out a better way to make a part work and Fidds is like omg thank you Stanley??? And Ford's looking at his little brother dumbfounded and itching to bomb him with questions and whatnot.

Stan never knows peace afterwards.

[fullmetalswift]

Neil Gaiman should be fucking drawn and quartered in a public square. the vulture article is one of the most horrific accounts of sexual abuse i've ever read in my life. disgusting and depraved beyond comprehension. i can't wrap my head around how this man wrote such warm and empathetic and thoughtful stories and preached for years about inclusivity and representation and championed fans etc etc only to have been doing this utterly depraved shit behind closed doors. i genuinely feel physically ill. kill him. and Amanda Palmer too for knowing and not only staying silent, but pushing vulnerable women his way too. she's an accomplice and they will both rot in hell.

[a-scary-lack-of-common-sense]

Part 2/2

By the time Stanley had realized he wasn't as alone as he believed himself to be entrapped in this ravenous abyss; he had honestly begun to suspect that he was finally starting to properly lose his mind.

In all the ceaseless miles that Stanley had journeyed during his apparent permanent residence within the dark devouring void, not once had he encountered another conscious, walking, talking being similar to himself. Every other formerly living creature that he had crossed paths with had been so... silent. Empty. Dead, in every sense of the word. It was as though the very essence of life itself had been sucked out of their bodies with a straw, their forms slowly falling apart piece by piece under the vicious gluttony of the darkness that surrounded them. They looked like they actually were supposed to be there, unmoving and comatose, unlike him.

So, when Stanley first began to encounter the twins, all of a sudden, he wasn't the only one in the dark.

When meeting the first pair of them, he found himself standing in a lake.

He hadn't even noticed the changes at first. It felt as though he had been walking for weeks on end, his body moving purely on autopilot and his aching legs leading him towards a destination only it knew. A thick fog of forgetfulness and flickering memories had descended upon his brain like a heavy blanket of numbing static as he had traveled. In this absentminded state, he hadn't even realized that the ever-present undulating, buzzing darkness surrounding him had begun to gradually shift and morph to form a horizon line; stretching into tall looming cliffsides that almost seemed to close in on him. Once the nonexistent floor beneath his soles abruptly began to ripple and warp, like the disturbed surface of a shallow puddle; only then did he finally notice his transformed environment.

The transition was seamless, almost dream-like. One moment, he was still surrounded by that filthy, overwhelming abyss; and the next, his boots were suddenly plunged deep into the cold, dark lake water.

The silence didn't leave, however. It still choked and stuffed its way into Stanley's ears to clog up his mind with thick cotton; the eerie quiet not quite matching the calm, almost serene scenery the void seemed to have abruptly transformed itself into. Like a movie with its sound cut off; leaving only the unsettling hum of the projector to fill the empty air.

It was odd. The lake was surely incredibly deep. He could obviously tell from how thin and pathetically small the shores appeared all the way from where he now unceremoniously stood in the middle of the lake. Stan could look down and see the darkness below his feet swallow what meager light that managed to break through the murky waters. The overwhelming black almost seemed to beckon him, gaping and haunting; a bottomless underwater pit of pitch black that never seemed to end.

And yet, he didn't sink. Stanley remained perfectly level, the almost ink like waters stopping just at ankle level, as though he were held up just above the surface by some invisible force. Even the writhing waves seemed small and low, as though the waters were shy to climb up his legs further than that. It was odd, so very odd.

However, it wasn't nowhere near as odd as the sight that greeted him when he finally lifted his eyes from the waters.

Stanley had crossed paths with truly unbelievable sights in this strange somewhere; from bursting, collapsing stars; to the imploding heat death of entire universes, but none of them seemed to hold the candle to what he saw then when he lifted his eyes:

Children.

Two, to be exact. Two, nearly identical looking children stood motionless before him; completely soaked through to the bone as though they had taken a plunge into the frigid water that pooled around their ankles. It was a girl and a boy, both adorned with twin expressions utterly devoid of emotion, their wide eyed stare seeming to burn holes into his thin jacket. Their drenched clothes sagged off of their scrawny frames; thin rivulets of water dirpping off of them and disturbing the glassy surface of the water at their feet. The little girl's hair had messily stuck to her face in thin sodden strands, her cheeks still full and round with youth just like the boy's. They looked young. Too young to be in a place such as this.

Oh, but their eyes; their eyes.

They burned with such anger; such injustice, brighter than any dying star or galaxies he had ever seen. Anger towards the world, to fate, to whatever cruel deity that had deemed them fit to be sent to this wretched place so prematurely. They were too young to be here; to be entrapped like he was amongst this hungry darkness. And yet, here they were, sheer denial against their own untimely deaths being the only thing keeping them awake and conscious amongst the dead and rotting. A show of juvenile defiance to nature itself so vehement even the all-consumign darkness seemed hesitant to devour them whole just yet.

It saddened him. It saddened him to know that they belonged there, that they were supposed to be there. He could see it, he could feel it; they were dead. No amount of determination could deny that universal fact.

When they spoke, Stanley could hear anger:

Stan chuckled in a futile attempt to lighten the suddenly heavy atmosphere that threatened to crush him whole. "A lake monster? You kids and your imagination," he teased, hoping to somehow rid the poor kids of the haunted look that seemed to whirl in their glares. No child should have been burdened with such a knowing look; such eyes that looked like they had seen everything there was to see about the world, the horrid and the good.

Clearly, it had been the wrong thing to say, and Stanley's faux pas was rewarded with a scowl from the little boy. A world's worth of sour contempt etched into every contorted groove that his grimace seemed to dig into his much too young face. Stan suddenly felt guilt squeeze at his weary bones for having caused that.

"That's what they all said," the boy spat out, eyes shining with a sheen of wetness Stan wasn't sure he was prepared to deal with.

Stan left that first interaction with the twins with the feeling of guilt and sorrow still clining to him.

He couldn't have known, at the time. He couldn't have known that this wouldn't be anywhere near the last time that he would meet the pair. He hadn't realised just how many of them there were. After that first pair, his endless journeying within the Abyss was hardly be spent alone anymore. Countless more times, he came face to face with the exact same two young and impossibly worn faces; forced to meet one pair of beaten and bruised kids after another.

Not one pair had died the same death as another. Some had gotten lost, prey to whatever threat that had snatched them up out in the open; some had fallen from high up; some had been crushed under an incredible weight; some had burned; some eaten alive; some zombified. Some didn't even seem physically harmed at all, body perfectly intact, and yet that same faraway, distrubed look in their eyes remained.

He thought the worst ones were the ones he found alone. A little girl or a little boy, left all lonesome without their other half there. Twins, he remembered a pair of them telling him once.

Once, he had come across a town full of silent, stone statues. It was a rustic, shabby, almost nostalgic looking town- odd and strangely familiar. The sight of it had tugged at an aged memory that had long since wasted away in the back of his mind. It was serene, almost deceptively so. The sun shone; the air smelled crisp and fresh; numerous waterfalls continued to crash down from the tall cliffsides; and a soft nonexistent breeze whistled through the thicket of pine trees that blanketed the outskirts of the town. None of it seemed to match the gruesome scene of the hundred wailing statues that littered every inch of the town.

He had found the boy's statue on the other side of town, deep within the green forest and toppled over the gnarled roots of a towering tree. Like the rest of the townsfolk, he too, was frozen mid-shriek; his stone face twisted and contorted into a mock impression of a silent scream as his body lay paused in a writhing struggle. He made sure to be gentle when he carried the boy's statue over to place it beside the girl's, whose statue stood far deeper into the forest, sporting the same rictus grimace of terror as her brother's. It somehow felt wrong for them to have been so far apart from one another, even in death.

He had come to dread meeting of the twins. He hated every second he had to confront yet another pair of dead children that did not belong here, but fate had decided they did. He despised having to listen to their tales of woe as they wept about the injustice of the world, of having died young; he despised himself for being unable to do more than weep with them.

"We don't belong here, Grunkle Stan," he would listen to the little girl weep, calling him a title he didn't recognize. He never remembered if they had ever told him their name, but they all seem to know his, without a fail. "If we're dead, then what about you? What about Grunkle Ford? Mom? Dad? What about them? We can't be dead, we can't be," they would say, confusion and frustration written all over their faces. They didn't understand. They didn't understand why they had come to the darkness so early, so unfairly.

He never knew what to say, he'd never been good with words.

All he could do was kneel down to their levels and engulf them in his arms, hoping he could somehow squeeze the pain straight out of their bodies in his embrace. He hugged them, because what else could he do?

[inkskinned]

you know, you know. no gods, no masters, no kings on pedestals. everyone is fallible. death of the author. you know! you are balanced about your intake of media - you allow the wiggle room, the grace, the gratitude, the skepticism. nobody above criticism.

but still. a weird gut-punch feeling, something akin to betrayal. you read the article. surprise! an author you love is actually: a serial fucking predator.

well, shit. what now. no, you knew he was a person (all people are), but now you're wondering - what have i overlooked by accident? what messages have i internalized that are strange and cruel? and also, like, what the fuck?

his actions lay a thick glaze on top of everything. like each place is now ruined, opaque in a new way. but okay, fine, you've done this before. you knew better, right? you've been betrayed by many a cherished childhood author.

still, this stickiness. fuck. can you pick up that book again. will you read it to your children. you've recommended it to others - will you ever do that again? and of course, of course, no parasocial relationships. you were theoretically above this kind of sentiment. but the artist informs the art, right.

so it's not something as clear-cut as feeling he owed you, specifically (a stranger) better behavior - just that you kind of, in a distant and odd way... sort of trusted him to do better. it's not like a real trust or something speakable, just the faint hope that the product (good books) was a thin representation of the soul. now it feels like the product (good? books?) was a mask. in some small or insignificant way, your previous support of this person lent them power. your money and your time and your laughter.

and the thing is - you have this terrible, echoing sensation. how many times will this happen? over and over. you find out that the singer you love is actually a predator. you learn over drinks that your favorite high school english teacher is in jail for what he did to her. you listen to the news idly and suddenly discover that a woman you used to idolize has been abusing her kids for an actual eon.

what can you touch without the static melting off. you can't even really complain about it too much (you were supposed to know better, and besides, you don't want the same re-split "it's not your fault, love what you love" basic advice), but now it's here. somehow, it feels like - you let him into your life.

it's not that things need to be pure or an artist has to be like, endlessly perfect, mindful. demure. it's more just this terrible truth that has been replayed through your veins so often it feels criminally vain. power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. did you want any one person to be worth that power?

it's just that he wrote books where he seemed to understand that. he seemed to know about hierarchies and unfair systems and bigotry and privilege. you thought they were books about what it means to struggle. you thought they were about having power and still using it for good rather than for control. he spooned you a narrative of being a good guy, a kind soul. you fucking bought what that fucking monster sold.

maybe that's why they were fantasies, after all.

[somnimagus]

My page for @sheikahzine; about Impaz's duty to her village, empty of people and full of memories.

[id in alt text]

[lazylittledragon]

ok someone please correct me if i'm wrong but am i weird for thinking those 'audiobooks don't count as reading' posts are ableist as fuck????

[morbidpunk]

Fatima Aamer Bilal, coffin heart? bury me.