wordsmithandwanderings

[wordsmithandwanderings]

a study in stone | digital

[wordsmithandwanderings]

About Me: A 2025 Writeblr Intro

Hello! Apparently I've made something of a habit of refreshing my introduction at the start of the new year, so here we go again!

As the url suggests, I'm Teri, and I write. Mostly novels, mostly fantasy, but a bit of a smorgasbord when it comes to short stories. What you can typically expect to find in my writing are close and complicated family/friend dynamics, playing around with worldbuilding, themes often around trust and paranoia, and more!

I've got a page for various WIPs I've posted about, a couple of which I'll briefly touch on below.

I set out a few goals for myself back at the start of 2024, and managed to accomplish 3/4. For 2025, I've been trying to piece together a few more:

Revise the 2nd and start the 3rd draft of Beyond Alder Creek

As always, try to crack 100K words worth of writing/brainstorming/etc.

Focusing more on the more formal craft side of writing/dedicating more time to actually improving my skills, which leads me into the goal I set out for 2024 and didn't finish:

Read back through my old NaNoWriMo(/whatever we're calling it now) drafts, both for entertainment and to sort of assess the kind of progress I've made over the past 14 Novembers (with the acknowledgment that November writing emphasizes quantity over quality ofc).

There are a few other goals I'd like to toss out, like going back to a few WIPs that I've set on the back-burner for the past couple years, but I think formally setting out a couple feels more realistic.

With that, here are some of the WIPs to look out for in 2025:

Beyond Alder Creek | Revising Draft 2 | Tag: #bac

When Winnie's little brother is stolen by the fae, she finds she has no choice but to risk venturing into their home, the Beyond, to bring him back. But in order to protect herself in this topsy-turvy new world, Winnie deliberately crafts a cautious deal with one of its residents, a golden fae with a grudge against her brother's kidnapper.

The Lies in the Legend | Drafting | Tag: #litl

A fictional autobiography of an elven noblewoman recalling her various, highly publicized diplomatic exploits and warning her readers about the dangers of aggrandizing and villifying figures like herself in the public eye.

Castle on the Hill | Revising Draft 1 | Tag: #coth

Five West German young men work through a year of university in the 1960s, coping with a drastically shifting political landscape as the emerging generation comes to terms with their nation's past and look ahead to its future.

With that, here's to a new year!

[wordsmithandwanderings]

And this here is what we in the writing industry call "a display of hubris that may or may not have karmic consequences but is very, very fun".

[ID: a screenshot of white text on a black background reading "All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. The sole exception for the ocean, the ocean is The Pacific Ocean from real life. If it is unhappy with its portrayal it can settle the matter personally." /end ID]

[wordsmithandwanderings]

Reintro!

I've been on writeblr four years, I figured it's time for a reintro! a lot of the folks who were here when I first came to this wonderful community aren't here anymore, and it's time to meet some new lovely people!

I'm Lila, she/her, and I am a queer fantasy romance author! I'm an indie author with three books currently out! they are:

All of those are available here! This is my author website, and my author instagram!

I also have an author newsletter, which gives a monthly update on what i'm working on, as well as first looks and sneak peeks!

This is my Kofi, where I post novelettes/short stories. I'm working on a membership system for serial short stories.

I have a general taglist that i use semi-often, so please let me know if you'd like to be added to that! you can find more details about my finished/unfinished works here!

I'm also a frequent fanfic writer, so dm me if you want my ao3 or my fandom blog.

I am always looking for new writeblrs to follow and wips to track! please especially reblog if you're a writer who fits any of these:

is an indie author (ALWAYS looking to support more indie authors)

writes mostly fantasy

writes queer romance

is active and posts about their wips often

but of course, all writers are welcome, even if you don't fit those points! boosts are encouraged!

GENERAL TAGLIST: @worldbuildng @muddshadow @nikkywrites @47crayons @directionoftime

@chayscribbles @magic-is-something-we-create @rodentwrites

[wordsmithandwanderings]

i've heard your pleas

[wordsmithandwanderings]

making a collection

[wordsmithandwanderings]

“Be curious about what you’re writing about” is not stock Common Writing Advice but it really, really should be. There are a lot of written works that fail due to the authors just being obviously incurious about what they are writing about.

[wordsmithandwanderings]

I love you "strange little town where weirdness gathers" trope

[wordsmithandwanderings]

Really can't go wrong in fantasy with a giant skeleton being part of the environment. I'm talking colossal, part of the scenery bones.

Oh yes, let me wonder what the hell it is, how it died, how long it has been there. Let me walk on its ribs pathways, climb inside an eyesocket, look at where it fused with the nature around it.

[wordsmithandwanderings]

I will NEVER not fuck with women using a traditionally masculine title. Tell me more about that girl that's also a prince.

[wordsmithandwanderings]

In the past fifty years, fantasy’s greatest sin might be its creation of a bland, invariant, faux-Medieval European backdrop. The problem isn’t that every fantasy novel is set in the same place: pick a given book, and it probably deviates somehow. The problem is that the texture of this place gets everywhere.

What’s texture, specifically? Exactly what Elliot says: material culture. Social space. The textiles people use, the jobs they perform, the crops they harvest, the seasons they expect, even the way they construct their names. Fantasy writing doesn’t usually care much about these details, because it doesn’t usually care much about the little people – laborers, full-time mothers, sharecroppers, so on. (The last two books of Earthsea represent LeGuin’s remarkable attack on this tendency in her own writing.) So the fantasy writer defaults – fills in the tough details with the easiest available solution, and moves back to the world-saving, vengeance-seeking, intrigue-knotting narrative. Availability heuristics kick in, and we get another world of feudal serfs hunting deer and eating grains, of Western name constructions and Western social assumptions. (Husband and wife is not the universal historical norm for family structure, for instance.)

Defaulting is the root of a great many evils. Defaulting happens when we don’t think too much about something we write – a character description, a gender dynamic, a textile on display, the weave of the rug. Absent much thought, automaticity, the brain’s subsconscious autopilot, invokes the easiest available prototype – in the case of a gender dynamic, dad will read the paper, and mom will cut the protagonist’s hair. Or, in the case of worldbuilding, we default to the bland fantasy backdrop we know, and thereby reinforce it. It’s not done out of malice, but it’s still done.

The only way to fight this is by thinking about the little stuff. So: I was quite wrong. You do need to worldbuild pretty hard. Worldbuild against the grain, and worldbuild to challenge. Think about the little stuff. You don’t need to position every rain shadow and align every tectonic plate before you start your short story. But you do need to build a base of historical information that disrupts and overturns your implicit assumptions about how societies ‘ordinarily’ work, what they ‘ordinarily’ eat, who they ‘ordinarily’ sleep with. Remember that your slice of life experience is deeply atypical and selective, filtered through a particular culture with particular norms. If you stick to your easy automatic tendencies, you’ll produce sexist, racist writing – because our culture still has sexist, racist tendencies, tendencies we internalize, tendencies we can now even measure and quantify in a laboratory. And you’ll produce narrow writing, writing that generalizes a particular historical moment, its flavors and tongues, to a fantasy world that should be much broader and more varied. Don’t assume that the world you see around you, its structures and systems, is inevitable.

We... need worldbuilding by Seth Dickinson

[wordsmithandwanderings]

I cannot emphasize enough how much you need to read thoroughly through the terms of any publication before you send your writing to them. It is mandatory that you know and understand what rights you’re giving away when you’re trying to get published.

Just the other day I was emailed by a relatively new indie journal looking for writers. They made it very clear that they did not pay writers for their work, so I figured I’d probably be passing, but I took a look at their Copyright policy out of curiosity and it was a nightmare. They wanted “non-exclusive, irrevocable, royalty-free, perpetual, worldwide license and right to use, display, reproduce, distribute, and publish the Work on the internet and on or in any medium” (that’s copy and pasted btw) and that was the first of 10 sections on their Copyright agreement page. Yikes. That’s exactly the type of publishing nightmare you don’t want to be trapped in. 

Most journals will ask for “First North American Rights” or a variation on “First Rights” which operate under the assumption that all right revert back to you and they only have the right to be the first publishers of the work. That is what you need to be looking for because you do want to retain all the rights to your work. 

You want all rights to revert back to you upon publication in case you, say, want to publish it again in the future or use it for a bookmark or post it on your blog, or anything else you might want to do with the writing you worked hard on. Any time a publisher wants more than that, be very suspicious. Anyone who wants to own your work forever and be able to do whatever they want with it without your permission is not to be trusted. Anyone who wants all that and wants you to sign away your right to ever be paid for your work is running a scam.

Protect your writing. It’s not just your intellectual property, it’s also your baby. You worked hard on it. You need to do the extra research to protect yourself so that a scammer (or even a well meaning start up) doesn’t steal you work right from under you nose and make money off of it.

[wordsmithandwanderings]

Do not really know what to say. A year ago we were making posts about how Gaza was being bombed through Christmas- how the oldest Christian community was being bombed- how the birth place of Jesus was being destroyed and his people murdered. A year later, it is going to be Christmas again soon, and the bombings have not stopped. But the news, and the attention seems to have died down considerably. It feels terrible and scary.

[wordsmithandwanderings]

Polycule but it’s just two people in a romantic relationship with each other and their third who’s pretty obviously aroace but also somehow so deeply intertwined in their lives that it’d just be wrong to not count them as involved. Is this anything.

[wordsmithandwanderings]

Romanticism-inspired fantasy.

Joining inprnt’s print sale through the weekend 💜

[wordsmithandwanderings]

A zillion hours of hammering, skiving, dyeing, and Angelus paint later, finally finished my rapier hanger.

[wordsmithandwanderings]

“I have all these OCs! But no story…”

bruh

make a fighting game