wordwings

[wordwings]

read in 2024: anthologies

Everything Under The Moon

Heartwood: Non-binary Tales of Sylvan Fantasy

Inara: Light of Utopia

Fifty Beasts To Break Your Heart

Thyme Travellers

Faeries Never Lie

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friendly reminder to everyone that first draft just needs to exist.

it doesn’t need to be good, it just needs to be there. stories go through so many different drafts that nobody is gonna care if your first draft is a little messy.

you can’t edit and clean up something that doesn’t exist, so make it exist!

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does anyone else here find fantasy diagrams interesting? I really want to make more fake flyers and ornamental maps and diagrams and fake storybook stuff for my fantasy wip, but it never gets a lot of notes hehe. but I wanna start collecting them to make a free digital zine (or a donation base one). I have four shrapnels of Hidnilawonen (the story of Hidlawonen) they are all southeast asian inspired, so I'm not sure how much of an audience I can garner..

[wordwings]

Check out this queer romance December bookfair!

[wordwings]

how to spot a writer:

unhinged google search history

crying over fake people

owns 200 notebooks (they're all empty)

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Writing fantasy and speculative fiction is actual Hell because achieving verisimilitude demands that you, the author, have a clear idea of how the speculative or fantastical elements of your setting work, but the story will almost always be improved by not explaining it to the reader.

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GO LISTEN TO YOUR WRITING PLAYLIST AND DAYDREAM ABOUT YOUR WRITING INSTEAD OF JUST SCROLLING THROUGH TUMBLR FOREVER

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lol

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you ever get a comment that makes you want to reread your fic ?? it’s like ‘dang u liked it that much?? lemme go look’

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My biggest tip for fanfic writers is this: if you get a character's mannerisms and speech pattern down, you can make them do pretty much whatever you want and it'll feel in character.

Logic: Characters, just like real people, are mallable. There is typically very little that's so truly, heinously out of character that you absolutely cannot make it work under any circumstance. In addition, most fans are also willing to accept characterization stretches if it makes the fic work. Yeah, we all know the villain and the hero wouldn't cuddle for warmth in canon. But if they did do that, how would they do it?

What counts is often not so much 'would the character do this?' and more 'if the character did do this, how would they do it?' If you get 'how' part right, your readers will probably be willing to buy the rest, because it will still feel like their favourite character. But if it doesn't feel like the character anymore, why are they even reading the fic?

Worry less about whether a character would do something, and more about how they'd sound while doing it.

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me as a writer

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“As you read a book word by word and page by page, you participate in its creation, just as a cellist playing a Bach suite participates, note by note, in the creation, the coming-to-be, the existence, of the music. And, as you read and re-read, the book of course participates in the creation of you, your thoughts and feelings, the size and temper of your soul.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

[wordwings]

ways to support indie and small press authors:

(beyond the obvious of buying their books directly)

review their books on GoodReads, the StoryGraph, Romance.io, the book retailers you get their books from, etc

recommend their work to like-minded friends or family

talk about their work on socials - in a fannish way if you like, with headcanons, artwork, playlists or moodboard, or just talking about what you liked in the works and what you're hoping to see more of

mention their names if local queer events organisers, conventions, bookshops, or publications ask who people would be interested in on rec lists, interviews, signing events, book panels

request their books at your local library and/or in your eLibrary apps

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Wanting in Arabic by Trish Salah

Winner of the Lambda Literary Award, Transgender Fiction, 2014

Wanting in Arabic is a refusal of convenient silences, convenient stories. The author dwells on the contradictions of a transsexual poetics, in its attendant disfigurations of lyric, ghazal, l’ecriture feminine, and, in particular, her own sexed voice. Without a memory of her father’s language, the questions her poems ask are those for a home known through photographs, for a language lost with childhood.

Braiding theoretical concerns with the ambivalences of sexed and raced identity, with profound romanticism,Wanting in Arabic attempts to traverse the fantasies of foundational loss and aggressive nostalgia in order to further a poetics of a conscious partiality of being, of generous struggle and comic rather than tragic misrecognition.

[wordwings]

My #1 recurring thing as an editor is to guide people away from writing shyly and defensively. If you preempt aggression and try defuse it in your writing itself, you are showing your belly. The audience wants blood.