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#blm #jock #green #cartoon

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Joshua Hill

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Celebrate Black History Month with Tumblr!

Here's some of the songs we're vibin' to at Tumblr. Serving you jams from some of your faves, some new hits and some songs you forgot you loved — giving you Black Excellence from start to finish.

🎨: @everlastingrandom

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A List of DND Things that I Find Funky

An Oath of Fertility Paladin, aka, a temple prostitute 

The equivalent of “ONLY Real Gamers” but like, they’re a wizard trying to gatekeep bards 

A  swashbuckling rogue woman lesbian pretending to be a man to join the army after abanding being a paladin and accidentally being so good at it that fathers keep promising their daughters to her so she has to keep running away in the middle of the night (AKA, Catalina De Erauso)

An Illusion Wizard using their illusary magic to pretend to be a transmuatation wizard 

A Knowledge Domain Cleric who’s entire life has been dedicated to correcting everyone about factual inaccuracies in their particular era of study. They have pamphlets 

A Warlock who’s patron is their parent and their parent loves them very much and it’s wholesome–weird because their mom has a million eyes–but wholesome.

A gunslinger who insists his gun can cast a spell called bullet 

A Goblin who tells people they’re a gnome, and insists upon it. 

A Lore Bard, but they’re a conspiracy theorist 

A Druid who hates nature, studies it so they know how to get rid of it 

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I was cleaning up the storage in my Switch, and I found this clip from when my wife and I were playing MHGU during self-isolation. And, damn, this game can make you feel like a such badass.

We’re so excited to experience Rise together~ 💚

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some mini collections of tips for writers

(based on things that yours truly notices as an editor-in-training. This list is in no way complete, and will probably be added to as I continue to find repeated mistakes) 

Dialogue

Use beats in your dialogue to break it up. Even “said” can make a very effective beat between lines. 

(No beats: “It’s not lethal. Just highly dangerous with a good chance of being mutilated.” // Beats: “It’s not lethal,” he said. “Just highly dangerous with a good chance of being mutilated.”)

Note how the break allows a bit of a pause for ~dramatic effect 

thinking of dialogue, use punctuation and distinct speech patterns! “Life, uh, finds a way.” is an iconic line anyway, but Jeff Goldblum’s signature verbal tic gives it character. 

It’s okay if characters stutter. Don’t let the condemnation of stuttering characters as “cringey” in fanfic put you off. (and on that note, fuck cringe culture. Seriously. It saps all the fun out of creativity and fun is important.)

Start! A! New! Line! Whenever! Someone! New! Speaks!!

DO NOT FEAR THE WORD “SAID” 

Setting & Blocking

 Use the landscape and settings around your character, and always, always remember a scene’s blocking. Where is everything in relation to your characters? Have you left someone holding a coffee cup for the last three scenes? Did you lose a character somewhere along the way? 

using the contents of a scene is also great for fight sequences. 

Similarly, large character casts are hard to keep track of so don’t be afraid to break them up. Sending someone off somewhere else can create some nifty little subplots. 

Keep a personal note of how time passes. Trust me, it’s incredibly helpful to you as a writer and also for future readers. 

Characters

Character growth does not have to be positive. Sometimes characters fail or suffer or get their motivations twisted up, and they finish the book as a villain rather than a hero. 

All that matters is that a character changes throughout the plot in a way that readers can see; the sort of change they go through is entirely up to you. 

scrap the idea that someone has to deserve a redemption arc. They probably don’t deserve it, which is the whole point. So don’t be afraid to make your villains seem completely irredeemable. 

and you don’t need to redeem your antagonists in order to make them complex, sympathetic villains, anyway. Sometimes people get so stuck in their beliefs that they can’t see another way and it goes too far. Not everyone comes back from that. 

Also, motivations and goals can absolutely change. That’s okay. You just need to have something that drives your character so that your readers are rooting for them. 

Protagonists don’t need to be heroic. How you define the protagonists and antagonists in your story is based entirely on the morality in your story-world, NOT the moral ideas in the real world. What counts as a complex protagonist in a world torn apart by biological warfare will be very different than one living in our world. 

Prose & Grammar

simple prose is just fine and you don’t need to fluff it up for pretty quotes.

Remember to vary your sentence structures and length. Start smaller and build it up, drawing your reader’s attention. 

“And” and “But” are very valid sentence starters that are great for communicating the tone of internal narrative. You’re allowed to tweak grammar if that’s helpful for telling the story, it just needs to be accessible. Test out what you’ve written on other people. 

Check that your tenses are consistent!! 

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Tumblweeds with BENEE:

Show & Tell

BENEE shows and tells us about the strangest thing she owns, an impulse buy, something she’s made, and her puppy. Check out the full interview here.

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Tips for Writing Healthy Romantic Relationships

Don’t base them exclusively on physical and/or sexual attraction. While these kinds of attraction can certainly strengthen relationships, they can’t create anything but a weak foundation for a relationship on their own.

Know how your characters like to show and be shown affection. Not everyone shows their interest in others the same way. Some people like to give gifts. Others like to cuddle. Still others like giving compliments. Different people like to receive different kinds of affection as well. 

Remember that love at first sight is a myth. You can have lust at first sight and romantic interest at first sight, but true love takes time to develop.

Show the characters interacting and getting to know each other. This should be obvious, but it is all to common for a character to be given a love interest at the last minute or to be paired off with someone the reader hasn’t seen them interact with much. Remember, the reader doesn’t have to see every little thing they do together, but the relationship will feel forced to the reader if they don’t see the characters interacting and establishing that they genuinely care about each other in a significant way. If the reader views your character’s significant other as little more than a stranger, then you’re doing something wrong.

Have both characters do things for each other and contribute to the relationship in meaningful ways. Relationships are two way streets. While you don’t need to keep score of exactly who does what for who (Relationships are not a competitive sport!), the relationship should seem fairly balanced or, if it’s not, then the characters should be working to change that.

Don’t give your characters completely incompatible traits. While it’s healthy for people to differ from each other, there are some differences that even people that are otherwise perfect for each other probably can’t overcome. For example, a environmental activist would have a hard time having a healthy relationship with someone who wants to chop dow a forest. Basically, know your characters’ deal breakers so that you won’t try to match up characters who are simply incompatible with each other.

Have them share interests. This is a great way to add substance to relationships outside of physical attraction and compatible personalities. Maybe they both like fishing. Maybe they share a passion for baking. Whatever you decide to have them like, don’t be afraid to use your characters’ shared interests as opportunities for them to bond. Also, if your characters don’t share a lot of interests/hobbies, consider having one character introduce the other to their hobby or have one character take initiative to try something the other likes. This is a great way to show how much your characters care about each other because it demonstrates your characters’ genuine interest in what makes their partner happy. 

Let the relationship experience at least a few bumps in the road. No relationships are perfect. Let your characters disagree, argue, and maybe even have a full on fight. Relationships that withstand obstacles seem stronger to readers, especially if the characters grow as people because of these hardships. 

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do you want to write but just can’t seem to get into it?

Hello everyone! In this post I want to share some helpful excercises and things you can do when it’s hard to get into the mindset of writing.

Write fanfiction of your own characters. Take the tropiest trope - sharing one bed, hAnD hOlDiNg, idk whatever - and write about it with two characters in your story. It doesn’t have to be good. It just has to make you feel good. It doesn’t have to make sense within the story, this is not meant to move your plot forward, this is not meant to be a part of your book, it’s just made to put you in the right mindset, to make you excited for writing.

Find incorrect quotes that fit your characters. This might also help you get a better understanding of what types of characters they are. You might even get somewhere within the story with these.

This might be similar to the first one but, write fanfiction of your own story. I mean, take a concept, Doctor Who, for example, and write how it would be if your characters were the characters in Doctor Who! Again, it doesn’t have to be good, it doesn’t have to be useful in the story, it just has to get your creative juices going!

Reread stuff you’ve written that you really like. It might be stuff that is on the book you’re writing - maybe a fluffy scene between two lovers, maybe a fucking great fighting scene, maybe the death of your favorite character. If you haven’t writen anything for that book yet, or you don’t have a passage that moves you (YET), read something else you’ve written! Maybe a short story. It doesn’t need to be anything related to what you’re currently writing, it just has to be something that proves how fucking much you love writing!

Go back to what inspired to first, work the idea, think about what you wanted to write in the beginning and work with that.

Thinka bout a certain character’s background! That can be super helpful for whenever you need reasoning for that character’s actions! You don’t even need to put it in the story just like you’ve written it, but it will be super helpful for the characterization! And if you already have this background thought out, write a scene that happens then! Think about how the character was before the starting point.

These are mainly focused on writing fiction, because it’s mainly what I write. Feel free to add more things that help you!

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A Place of Rage (Pratibha Parmar, 1991)

This exuberant celebration of African American women and their achievements features interviews with Angela Davis, June Jordan, and Alice Walker [as well as Trinh T. Minh-ha]. Within the context of the civil rights, Black power and feminist movements, the trio reassess how women such as Rosa Parks and Fannie Lou Hamer revolutionized American society. 

– [x]

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60 Awesome Search Engines for Serious Writers