writedayandnight

[writedayandnight]

✧･ﾟplaylists to help pass the time *:･✧

hi everyone! it’s been a while since i made a huge playlist masterpost, but i thought that right now when we’re all stuck inside wondering what to do with our time i would make a list of all my playlists. listening to music is so calming and definitely helps me pass the time…so enjoy! - cam

songs that remind me of a fashion show 

a mix of songs that remind me of driving down the coast 

a playlist dedicated to paris 

songs that inspire me 

a dreamy mix

songs to listen to when you feel carefree

a super fun workout/running playlist to keep you pumped up 

songs to listen to during golden hour 

a mix of songs to listen to on a sunny day 

a playlist full of songs that make me feel alive 

songs that remind me of my teenage years 

a study/coffee shop playlist to keep you calm 

songs to listen to on the weekend 

songs that make me feel like living in the moment 

a friday kinda mix !

songs that remind me of a warm spring evening 

a mix dedicated to nature 

my all-time favorite songs all in one playlist 

songs that remind me of flowers and sunshine 

a 12-hour long playlist of songs that make me feel nostalgic 

songs that remind me of going back to school 

my ultimate summertime playlist 

songs that make me feel like i’m in a movie 

upbeat songs to get ready to in the morning 

songs i’m currently loving & listening to right now

a playlist dedicated to italy and all its wonders 

songs that are soft and delicate 

a mix to listen to while watching the sunrise / sunset 

a playlist for a rainy and stormy day 

songs to listen to when you wake up ! 

another nature playlist because why not?! 

a monday playlist to make your monday more enjoyable 

my springtime playlist 

songs that are bittersweet 

my girl power anthems playlist 

for the daydreamers 

songs that remind me of the spirit of traveling & exploring 

a mix to listen to before bed 

songs to listen and dance to in your kitchen 

a super fun 70s playlist 

relaxing songs for a sunday 

songs that remind me of wintertime 

for people who love the east coast 

for people who love the west coast 

a mix of lo fi beats 

songs to listen to in your car at night 

fresh finds (new songs every monday!)

the ultimate sing along playlist 

an indie playlist 

the perfect road trip / daily commute mix 

a super studious playlist to keep you extra focused 

songs that remind me of the beach 

a mix of songs to listen to when you’re j chillin

songs that remind me of a trip to outer space !

listen to this when you’re in love 

songs for stargazing…

the perfect autumn playlist 

songs that make my heart flutter 

a mix of carefree & happy tunes 

the grooviest 80s playlist around 

a mix of golden oldies 

listen to this if you like rap / r&b 

another workout playlist !

a mix of fun, upbeat songs to dance to 

a playlist inspired by call me by your name

a coming of age playlist 

a mix of songs that deserve more hype 

songs for all the main characters out there 

a mix to listen to with your best friend(s) 

songs that make me feel angelic 

a dark academia playlist 

a spooky halloween mix !

[writedayandnight]

Humanity has finally reached the stars and found out why no one had contacted us. The universe is in a sad state. As such, Doctors without Borders, Red Cross, and many othe charities go intergalactic.

[writedayandnight]

top ten saddest men?

obsessed with this ask. never wanna be asked about anything else ever again

[writedayandnight]

Josiah William Gordon

[writedayandnight]

> THE JESTER

[writedayandnight]

most writing advice is good as long as you know why it is good, at which point it is also bad. the hardest thing (and most precious thing) about being an artist is that you gotta learn how to take critique. i don't mean "just shut up and accept that people hate your work," i mean you need to learn what the critique is saying and then figure out if it actually helps.

i usually tell people reading my work: "i'm collecting data, so everything is useful." i ask them where they put the book down, even though it's too long for most people to read in 1 sitting. i ask them what they thought of certain characters. i let them tell me it was really good but i like it more when they look a little stunned and say i forgot i was reading your book, which means they forgot i exist, which is very good news.

sometimes people i didn't ask will read my work and tell me i don't like it. and that is okay, you don't have to like it. but i look at the thing that they don't like and try to figure out if i care. i don't like that you don't capitalize. this one is common, and i have already thought about it. i do not care, it's because of chronic pain and frankly i like the little shape of small letters. you use teeth and ribs in all your work. actually that is very true. i don't know what's up with that. next time i will work to figure out a different word, thank you. you're whiny, go outside. someone said that to me recently and it made me laugh. i am on the whine-about-it website as an internet poet. you are in my native habitat, watching me perform a natural enrichment behavior. but i like the dip of whiny, how the word itself does "whine" (up/down, the sound out your nose on the y), but i don't know if i want to feel whiny. maybe next time i will work on it being melancholy, like what you would call a male writer's poetry.

repeated "good" advice clangs in a bell and doesn't hold a real shape, dilutes in the water. like sometimes you will hear "don't use said." you turn that around in your head and it bounces off the edges of your brain like it is a dvd screensaver. it isn't bad advice, but it feels wrong somehow, like saying easy choices are illegal! sometimes i will only use "said." sometimes i will just kick dialogue tags out to the trash. sometimes i make little love poems where the fact that i do not say "said" is very bad, and makes you feel bad in your body, because someone didn't say something. i am a contrary little shitbird, i guess.

but it is also good advice, actually. it is trying to say that "said" sometimes is clutter. it makes new writers think about the very-small words and very-small choices, because actually your work matters and wordchoice matters. "i know," you said. "i know," you sighed. "i know." we both know but neither of us use a dialogue tag, because we are in a contemporary lit piece.

it is too-small to say don't use said. but it is a big command, so it gets your attention. what are you relying on? what easy choices do you make? when you edit, do you choose the same thing? can you make a different choice? sometimes we need the blankness of said, how it slides into the background. sometimes we don't.

i usually say best advice is to read, but i also mean read books you don't like, because that will make you angry enough to write your own book. i also mean read good books, which will break your heart and remind you that you are a very small person and your voice is a seashell. i also mean you need to eat books because reading a book is a writer's version of studying.

my creative writing teacher in the 7th grade had a big red list of no! words and on it was SUNSET. RAZORS. LOVE. GALAXY. DEATH. BLOOD. PAIN. I liked that razor and love were tucked next to each other like birds, and found it funny that he believed we were too young to know the weight of razor in the context of pain. i hated him and his Grateful Dead belt, where the colored teddy bears held up his appraisal of us. i hated his no list. it is very good/bad advice. i wasn't old enough yet to know that when you are writing about death you are also writing about sunsets and when you write about love you are tucking yourself into a napkin that never stops folding.

back then my poetry was all bloody, dripped with agony when you picked it up. i didn't know there is nothing beautiful about a razor, nothing exciting about pain. i just understood sharpness, which he took to mean i understood nothing. i wrote the razor down and it wasn't easy, but it was necessary. that's what i'm saying - sometimes it's good advice, because it's not always necessary. and sometimes it is very bad advice, because writing about it is lifesaving.

hang on my dog was just having a nightmare. i heard that it is a rule not to write about dogs - in my creative writing mfa, my teacher rolled her eyes and said everyone writes a dead dog. the literature streets are littered in canine bodies. i watched the rise and fall of his ribs (there is that word again) and had to reach out and stop the bad dream. when he woke up he didn't recognize me, and he was afraid.

it is good/bad advice to say that poems and writing have to mean something. it is bad/good advice to say they're big feelings in small packages. it is better advice to say that when my dog saw where he was, he relaxed immediately, rubbed his face against me. someone on instagram would make fun of that moment by writing their "internet poetry" as a sentence that tumbles across a white page: outside it is sunset and my dog is still in a gutter, bleeding a galaxy out of his left paw. or maybe it would be: i woke the dog up/the dog forgot i loved him/and i saw the shape of a senseless/and impossible pain.

the dog is alive in this one, and he is happy. when i tell you i love you, i know what i said. write what you need to write, be gentle to yourself about it. the advice is only as good as far as it helps. the rest is just fencing. take stock of the boundaries, and then break them. there's always somewhere else you could be growing.

i love you, keep going.

[writedayandnight]

foundations of rot

arthur with the corpse of dinadan because dindan's my favorite, but also it could be lamorak. the eyes are obscured and the corpse cannot speak except to represent the (gestures at the decay of law and desecration of bodies) happening, so you know. either one. maybe both! all the blood from these bodies are saturating the ground and eventually the whole setting collapse inwards/cannibalize itself etc etc

The Failure of Justice, the Failure of Arthur, L.K. Bedwell

society6 | ko-fi | redbubble | twitter | deviantart

[writedayandnight]

Hey btw, if you're doing worldbuilding on something, and you're scared of writing ~unrealistic~ things into it out of fear that it'll sound lazy and ripped-out-of-your-ass, but you also don't want to do all the back-breaking research on coming up with depressingly boring, but practical and ~realistic~ solutions, have a rule:

Just give the thing two layers of explanation. One to explain the specific problem, and another one explaining the explanation. Have an example:

Plot hole 1: If the vampires can't stand daylight, why couldn't they just move around underground?

Solution 1: They can't go underground, the sewer system of the city is full of giant alligators who would eat them.

Well, that's a very quick and simple explanation, which sure opens up additional questions.

Plot hole 2: How and why the fuck are there alligators in the sewers? How do they survive, what do they eat down there when there's no vampires?

Solution 2: The nuns of the Underground Monastery feed and take care of them as a part of their sacred duties.

It takes exactly two layers to create an illusion that every question has an answer - that it's just turtles all the way down. And if you're lucky, you might even find that the second question's answer loops right back into the first one, filling up the plot hole entirely:

Plot hole 3: Who the fuck are the sewer nuns and what's their point and purpose?

Solution 3: The sewer nuns live underground in order to feed the alligators, in order to make sure that the vampires don't try to move around via the sewer system.

When you're just making things up, you don't need to have an answer for everything - just two layers is enough to create the illusion of infinite depth. Answer the question that looms behind the answer of the first question, and a normal reader won't bother to dig around for a 3rd question.

[writedayandnight]

- letters from the end of the world

[writedayandnight]

I'm volunteering for a literary journal right now and there's two things I think you all should know.

1. Most people that submit to literary journals are cis white men. We know this because our journal has an anonymous survey about demographics for people that submit.

2. Most things that get submitted to the creative non fiction section are on the level of middle school "What I did over the summer" essays.

I cannot see the demographics of the people whose essays I'm reading, but guys, if you are wondering if you should submit your work to a literary journal or not, I promise you that just in terms of statistics there are a lot of mediocre cis white men and people in general confidently submitting weird crap that isn't literature to literature magazines. Do it. Submit your work. Please. If you want there to be more diversity in literature, be the diversity. Do it. Do it do it do it.

[writedayandnight]

mary maclane, the story of mary maclane / pierre bonnard - jeune femme écrivant, 1908 / louise fitzhugh, harriet the spy / phil grey - two photos from will self’s writing room: a 360 degree view in 71 photos, 2007 / tom astor - susie boyt’s notebooks, 2018 / stephen king, on writing / jill krementz - stephen king at his home office with his corgi marlowe, 1995 / joan didion - “on keeping a notebook” / wayne miller - author and poet maya angelou, 1974 / photo of sylvia plath from the everett collection / anne carson in a 2016 interview with NPR / octavia butler’s motivational notes to self / jim carroll, the basketball diaries / benjamin garcia - writing painting, 2012 / wayne pascal - writer’s block, 2019 / louisa may alcott, little women / little women (2019) / mary shelley (2017) / dickinson (2019) / anne lamott, bird by bird

on writing

[writedayandnight]

This is my favorite early demo song from Florence and The Machine and well as being probably one of the darkest songs Flo has written

[writedayandnight]

“Aside from myself, there was no sign of me.” ― Nicole Krauss

1.Rumi | 2.Holly Warburton | 3.Maggie Stiefvater | 4.Fyodor Dostoyevsky | 5.Nickie Zimov | 6.Clarice Lispector | 7.Nigel Van Wieck | 8.Georgia O’Keeffe | 9.Andrew Wyeth | 10.Mary Oliver | 11.Ilenia Tesoro | 12.Sylvia Plath | 13.Walt Whitman | 14.Nickie Zimov | 15.Jean-Paul Sartre | 16.Lydia Roberts | 17.Natalie Wee | 18.Lew Thomas | 19.Albert Camus

[writedayandnight]

oooh have you ever done a post about the ridiculous mandatory twist endings in old sci-fi and horror comics? Like when the guy at the end would be like "I saved the Earth from Martians because I am in fact a Vensuvian who has sworn to protect our sister planet!" with no build up whatsoever.

Yeah, that is a good question - why do some scifi twist endings fail?

As a teenager obsessed with Rod Serling and the Twilight Zone, I bought every single one of Rod Serling’s guides to writing. I wanted to know what he knew.

The reason that Rod Serling’s twist endings work is because they “answer the question” that the story raised in the first place. They are connected to the very clear reason to even tell the story at all. Rod’s story structures were all about starting off with a question, the way he did in his script for Planet of the Apes (yes, Rod Serling wrote the script for Planet of the Apes, which makes sense, since it feels like a Twilight Zone episode): “is mankind inherently violent and self-destructive?” The plot of Planet of the Apes argues the point back and forth, and finally, we get an answer to the question: the Planet of the Apes was earth, after we destroyed ourselves. The reason the ending has “oomph” is because it answers the question that the story asked. 

My friend and fellow Rod Serling fan Brian McDonald wrote an article about this where he explains everything beautifully. Check it out. His articles are all worth reading and he’s one of the most intelligent guys I’ve run into if you want to know how to be a better writer.

According to Rod Serling, every story has three parts: proposal, argument, and conclusion. Proposal is where you express the idea the story will go over, like, “are humans violent and self destructive?” Argument is where the characters go back and forth on this, and conclusion is where you answer the question the story raised in a definitive and clear fashion. 

The reason that a lot of twist endings like those of M. Night Shyamalan’s and a lot of the 1950s horror comics fail is that they’re just a thing that happens instead of being connected to the theme of the story. 

One of the most effective and memorable “final panels” in old scifi comics is EC Comics’ “Judgment Day,” where an astronaut from an enlightened earth visits a backward planet divided between orange and blue robots, where one group has more rights than the other. The point of the story is “is prejudice permanent, and will things ever get better?” And in the final panel, the astronaut from earth takes his helmet off and reveals he is a black man, answering the question the story raised. 

[writedayandnight]

my hot take is that sera gamble loved both castiel and sam too much and had to choose and picked sam fandom in the end by giving them the limp sam drama they crave. but our boss babe also gave us castiel's horniest season and sexiest episode the man who would be king.

first of all i refuse to credit her with man who would be king because that was comrade edlund’s doing, and also, fundamentally the existence of the man who would be king is actually a FLAW in the show, not a virtue. like, it’s a great episode, but the fact that it’s confined to one episode, instead of that stuff playing out over the course of a season, is why godstiel arc is such a goddamn mess.

anyway basically, my actual, non-joke opinion, is that sera gamble has two problems. 

the first problem is that she’s a specific kind of homophobic. she thinks of queerness as a special kind of spice to sprinkle on top of tragedy to make it even more tragic. this is why she has a history on supernatural of introducing gay characters just to bury them, this is why the premise of godstiel arc was “what if gay love makes you evil, but also, makes your evilness sympathetic,” this is why *waves hands* everything with the magicians happened. it’s a very literary sort of homophobia, very gothic. and in fact imo very sexy, if you don’t give her TOO much control of the narrative. like, is godstiel arc ultra homophobic? oh yes. do i eat it up like a starving dog? totally. and it’s totally not in conflict with her doing shit like writing a reunion scene in the born again identity so romantic that even misha couldn’t take it seriously. like, it was very much tragically romantic. sera gamble loves the idea of queerness as long as it’s a literary tool for tragedy.

her second problem, which is far more serious, at least as far as her fucking up supernatural goes, is that she’s a bronly. she doesn’t care about any characters other than sam and dean, except insofar as they can illuminate or bring development to sam and dean. seasons six and seven were essentially dedicated to exterminating as many side characters as possible. i’m pretty sure she’s said as much in her own words, that she wanted to go back to just sam and dean. that’s why godstiel arc happened: cas had to die. that’s why bobby died. that’s why rufus died. that’s why there was so much death in six/seven. you’ll notice she did this too in her earlier episodes: she’s responsible for killing off anna, and for killing off victor henriksen. she’s also responsible for heart, one of the o.g. sam winchester’s killer penis episodes. she’s a side character anti, basically. 

[writedayandnight]

stop this is so cute

[writedayandnight]

the only person that understands me is richard siken