xinandhisgoons

[xinandhisgoons]

i am a firm believer that ocs are a reflection of the self in the way that every character you create has to hold some piece of you to really feel alive. sometimes this is why all your ocs have certain traits, sometimes this is why you can track your various issues and traumas all the way from middleschool to now based on what your ocs are like. this is a feature not a bug

[xinandhisgoons]

Shit I don't have any bust doodles of Ken on my laptop but her little wooden pendant was her brother's before her Tragic Backstory happened!!

Jeez I need to share the photo album from my phone this picture is LOW quality damn

Does your OC wear any pieces of jewelry that they inherited?

[xinandhisgoons]

you can just name your characters anything. you can name them Printer. you can name them Shnorpty. you can name them There Are Pillars. and peoppe will just have to accept it.

[xinandhisgoons]

Does anyone want to be a beta reader for me

[xinandhisgoons]

"I guess this is where we part. Good luck."

Writers, reblog this with the last sentence you wrote from your WIP

[xinandhisgoons]

God I'm a sucker for characters who are so utterly loyal to someone that they're completely unhinged. Characters who have no moral compass except their overwhelming devotion to whoever they've chosen to listen to. That's the good shit

[xinandhisgoons]

found this post and I felt like I needed to say this:

writers, let your characters make mistakes.

a good and well-written character doesn't automatically mean that said character is immune to making mistakes. in fact, a good and well-written character tends to make lots and lots of mistakes during their journey as they continue to grow.

mistakes help shape and develop your characters. don't be shy to let them make mistakes and learn from those mistakes.

because how can your characters be interesting if they are always perfect?

how can their stories fascinate your readers if everything they do is correct all the time?

how can they develop and grow as a character if there are little to no mistake for them to make and learn from?

how can there be any depth and complexity for a character who hardly makes mistakes at all?

let your characters screw things up. let them cry on their knees while they hit rock bottom. let your readers feel their pain and then let your characters grow from that. this is how you get yourself a well-written character with depth and complexity.

[xinandhisgoons]

Cracking down and getting to work writing about the goons for the first time in forever and Google Docs has the nerve to tell me I've misspelled the name of my own made up country.

No, Google, I'm talking about the fictional oppressive Brixinad Empire, sometimes simply called Brixinad, I am not talking about the real life Britain!!!

[xinandhisgoons]

I'm a big fan of wizards-as-programmers, but I think it's so much better when you lean into programming tropes.

A spell the wizard uses to light the group's campfire has an error somewhere in its depths, and sometimes it doesn't work at all. The wizard spends a lot of his time trying to track down the exact conditions that cause the failure.

The wizard is attempting to create a new spell that marries two older spells together, but while they were both written within the context of Zephyrus the Starweaver's foundational work, they each used a slightly different version, and untangling the collisions make a short project take months of work.

The wizard has grown too comfortable reusing old spells, and in particular, his teleportation spell keeps finding its components rearranged and remixed, its parts copied into a dozen different places in the spellbook. This is overall not actually a problem per se, but the party's rogue grows a bit concerned when the wizard's "drying spell" seems to just be a special case of teleportation where you teleport five feet to the left and leave the wetness behind.

A wizard is constantly fiddling with his spells, making minor tweaks and changes, getting them easier to cast, with better effects, adding bells and whistles. The "shelter for the night" spell includes a tea kettle that brings itself to a boil at dawn, which the wizard is inordinately pleased with. He reports on efficiency improvements to the indifference of anyone listening.

A different wizard immediately forgets all details of his spells after he's written them. He could not begin to tell you how any of it works, at least not without sitting down for a few hours or days to figure out how he set things up. The point is that it works, and once it does, the wizard can safely stop thinking about it.

Wizards enjoy each other's company, but you must be circumspect about spellwork. Having another wizard look through your spellbook makes you aware of every minor flaw, and you might not be able to answer questions about why a spell was written in a certain way, if you remember at all.

Wizards all have their own preferences as far as which scripts they write in, the formatting of their spellbook, its dimensions and material quality, and of course which famous wizards they've taken the most foundational knowledge from. The enlightened view is that all approaches have their strengths and weaknesses, but this has never stopped anyone from getting into a protracted argument.

Sometimes a wizard will sit down with an ancient tome attempting to find answers to a complicated problem, and finally find someone from across time who was trying to do the same thing, only for the final note to be "nevermind, fixed it".

[xinandhisgoons]

fun fictional fruit that can heal or hurt you

[xinandhisgoons]

flower language has always been an intense source of disappointment for me

like, they all mean really generic things like “love” or “forever” or “i’m sorry” 

i thought you could combine flowers

like you could just send someone a bouquet and from the combination of hibiscus and posies and tulips they’d understand “the rebel leader is dead, rendezvous at the docks at 8, bring the dog, you will need lighter fluid and  a large tomato”

[xinandhisgoons]

If you're struggling to write sex, write food. if you're struggling to write food, write gore. if you're struggling to write gore, write sex. They're all variations on the same themes.

[xinandhisgoons]

me: i'm adding realism to this medieval fantasy setting

what people think i mean: grime, gratuitous sexual assault and murder, misogyny, child marriage

what i actually mean: everyone reads out loud, women are spinning wool all the time, peasants marry at 20, people wear colors.

[xinandhisgoons]

Dragon lineage over generations

[xinandhisgoons]

Folks act like "maybe the author isn't the final authority about what their work means" is some wanky post-modern nonsense and not a simple recognition that a lot of authors are perfectly prepared to bullshit about their own work. Like, leaving big-name popular media aside, I have personally encountered authors being actively disingenuous about their own work for all of the following reasons:

A true answer wouldn't fit the image they've cultivated.

They've decided they like the explanation the readers/viewers have come up with better than what they actually had in mind.

Something that was originally intended as a standalone work ended up growing into a franchise or series, and now they're pretending that was the plan all along for some reason.

They don't want to admit that the bit you're asking about is genuinely just a plot hole.

The real answer gets into some shit they don't care to discuss, so they've prepared a cover story to explain away the parts they don't want to talk about.

Their politics have changed since they wrote it, but they don't want to acknowledge that, so they're constantly trying to re-interpret everything they've ever written to be perfectly consistent with whatever their positions are this week.

They wrote it decades ago and they honestly don't remember what they were thinking at the time, so they're just making shit up; sometimes they also don't remember what shit they made up the last time, so the answer is different every time they're asked.

The work in question is at least partly autobiographical and they can't tell the truth without confessing to a crime in the process.

Most of the good bits are plagiarised and they don't really understand it themselves.

They're lying to you on purpose, for evil reasons.

[xinandhisgoons]

What are some chronic illnesses that can only occur in a fantasy setting?

[xinandhisgoons]

Tips for writing those gala scenes, from someone who goes to them occasionally:

Generally you unbutton and re-button a suit coat when you sit down and stand up.

You’re supposed to hold wine or champagne glasses by the stem to avoid warming up the liquid inside. A character out of their depth might hold the glass around the sides instead.

When rich/important people forget your name and they’re drunk, they usually just tell you that they don’t remember or completely skip over any opportunity to use your name so they don’t look silly.

A good way to indicate you don’t want to shake someone’s hand at an event is to hold a drink in your right hand (and if you’re a woman, a purse in the other so you definitely can’t shift the glass to another hand and then shake)

Americans who still kiss cheeks as a welcome generally don’t press lips to cheeks, it’s more of a touch of cheek to cheek or even a hover (these days, mostly to avoid smudging a woman’s makeup)

The distinctions between dress codes (black tie, cocktail, etc) are very intricate but obvious to those who know how to look. If you wear a short skirt to a black tie event for example, people would clock that instantly even if the dress itself was very formal. Same thing goes for certain articles of men’s clothing.

Open bars / cash bars at events usually carry limited options. They’re meant to serve lots of people very quickly, so nobody is getting a cosmo or a Manhattan etc.

Members of the press generally aren’t allowed to freely circulate at nicer galas/events without a very good reason. When they do, they need to identify themselves before talking with someone.