ettawritesnstudies

[ettawritesnstudies]

You Are No Chicken. Frank Paton (1856-1909)

via

[ettawritesnstudies]

[ettawritesnstudies]

Stream Peeps: @abalonetea @catkin-morgs-kookaburralover @prettylittlelyres @vampkaashis-wife @thethistlegirlwrites @ladyphlogiston @hyba @jasperygrace @writeblrfantasy @lesleymoonwriter

We're live! Doing some last-minute editing sprints tonight before I have to hand this manuscript off to my editor if anyone would like to join me!

#taglist reblog

[ettawritesnstudies]

We're live! Doing some last-minute editing sprints tonight before I have to hand this manuscript off to my editor if anyone would like to join me!

#etta rambles #livestream #write-in #writeblr #writeblr community

[ettawritesnstudies]

“Nobody’s going to want to sit on high-speed rail for fifteen hours to get from New York City to LA.”

Me. I will sit on high-speed rail for fifteen hours. I’ll sit on it for days. I’ll write and read and nap and eat and then do it all over again. I’ll stare out the windows and see America from ground level and not have to drive. I’ll see the Rockies and the deserts and cornfields and the Mississippi River and your house and yours and yours too. I’ll make up stories in my head about the small towns I see as we go along. I’ll see the states I’ve yet to see because driving or flying there is a fucking slog and expensive to boot. I’ll enjoy the ride as much as the destination. And then I’ll do it all over again to come the fuck home.

[ettawritesnstudies]

If you don't mind me tagging onto this, I first found your channel when I was in my freshman year of high school and while I'd been interested in writing stories since I was a little kid, your trope talks showed me how to hone my skills and... 8ish years later I credit you for teaching me media analysis and how to be the writer that I am today. Your folklore videos also inspired me to read the source material for stories like Tam Lin, the Wild Hunt, and other fairy tales which turned into me memorizing the tale-type index as the basis of the worldbuilding for my debut novel, Runaways, which I'm going to be self-publishing next year. Beyond that, the very first Iliad and Odyssey videos, combined with Aurora inspired me to learn how to draw and I've been chipping away at a space-setting retelling of the Odyssey as a comic in my free time, listening to the original epic poems while I do lab work at my day job.

All this to say, I try not to approach you too often because I know parasocial relationships with internet people are weird, but you've inspired so much art and creativity in my life on a weekly basis. I just want you to know that for every person intentionally misunderstanding your projects, there are dozens more trying to act chill about how cool you are and how badass it is that you share your passion for storytelling and learning with the internet.

Hello! This isn't comic-related, but concerning the Frankenstein's Eyes Incident, I thought it might be worth it to drop by and say that the main thing your classics summaries inspired me to do is actually read more, especially the source materials, including Frankenstein, which became my favorite book a few years ago, and still inspires basically everything I create (the amount of homunculus and artificially constructed characters in my writing are... something). And after being introduced to it through OSP, Dracula was my gateway read into the horror fan I am today. ith the risk of putting too much feels into an ask to a stranger, if I haven't stumbled into OSP when I did, I might not have ended up being a writer at all, and now a few weeks ago my first short story got actually published and that rekindling of love for the art of storytelling sorta kinda maybe changed my life. It's frustrating when people on the internet misinterpret what you're saying and use it as basis for misinformation, but there's also other cases! I'm sure you know about that already but still, a quick "hey, your fascination with stories was so contagious it made my life better" wouldn't hurt, probably. That's all I hope you have a good day!

cool cool coolcoolcool-

#I've joked to my friends that I want to be like you when I grow up but I'm not really joking #anyway i'll shut up now I'm sorry if this was too much but I hope you aren't too discouraged by the haters

[ettawritesnstudies]

If you buy a lot of books and end up not liking some of them very much, can I suggest checking them out from your library first?

I worked in bookstores for a long time, and of course lots of my paycheck went directly back into the store. I've ended up "weeding" a lot of those books and donating them to different places just because I knew I wasn't ever going to read them again.

Now I'm a librarian, and I'm realizing just how much money I'm saving by checking books out FIRST. Maybe I check something out and I end up DNF'ing it within 50 pages. Maybe I check something out and I enjoy it, but not enough to read it again. Maybe I check something out and I really love it, but it freaked me out so bad it's tattooed on the inside of my eyeballs and I won't need to read it again (Drew Magary's The Hike, I'm looking in your direction).

Or maybe I check something out and I love it! And then I go buy a copy to own because I know I'll reread it, probably with a pen to mark up the margins in a way I know I can't with a library book!

Idk man. If you want to be more intentional with the way you spend your money, if you want to combat the commercialization of the publishing industry, if you hate that authors are being forced to do all their own marketing on TikTok and that readers are feeling shame about not purchasing and finishing literal hundreds of books per year... Maybe start by going to your local library. You can still post haul photos of library books without spending a dime.

[ettawritesnstudies]

To anyone who believes fairy tale romances never happen in real life, may I remind you that JRR and Edith Tolkien met and experienced a forbidden love in their youth, and then were separated for five whole years because of his guardian’s rules that he could not date till he was 21, and she got engaged to someone else only because she assumed he’d forgotten her and lost hope that she could ever be with him, but then on his 21st birthday, he wrote her a letter saying he still loved her and wanted to marry her, she responded basically saying ‘if I’d known you hadn’t left me on the shelf, I would never have said yes to anyone else,’ then a week later she greeted him at the train station and then immediately dumped her fiancé, and they got married and she converted to his religion and danced for him in a flowering field far away from the trenches into which he was drafted, which left such an impression that he crafted an entire story about the most beautiful maiden in the world who danced in the woods and made enormous sacrifices to be with the man she loved, and they had four kids and remained faithful to each other and blissfully grew old together and their gravestones are now marked with the names of that same fictional couple that he created, who broke every rule and overcame every possible obstacle to be together and get a happy ending, who only did all that because he based it all on their own real love story.

[ettawritesnstudies]

Show some respect, people.

[ettawritesnstudies]

@lingerie_addict has a really cool thread on ancient fashion over on twitter.

Those source links are here

cambridge.org

Youtube

ucl.ac.uk

[ettawritesnstudies]

I love you crafts i love you bookbinding i love you pottery i love you carpentry i love you baking i love you leatherworking i love you embroidery i love you knitting i love you smithing i love you weaving I love you dyeing i love you glassblowing i love you gardening i love you art that doesn't get enough recognition as art

[ettawritesnstudies]

i tripped and fell down and a new product happened! these signs and stickers have a re-writable surface. you can write on them in dry erase marker and terrorize yourself into doing more frequent file backups! there's a sticker version, and a little card version that just so happens to hang perfectly off a standard-size tack. great for digital artists, programmers, photographers, writers, and other creatives who should REALLY BE BACKING UP THEIR STUFF. SERIOUSLY. MULTIPLE BACKUPS. AS OFTEN AS YOU CAN PRACTICALLY DO IT.

get 'em here!

[ettawritesnstudies]

True Name worldbuilding is such an inescapably fascinating thing. You can’t have True Names in your setting without deciding to some extent which Names are True. There are people who I would say know me, who know me only as Tuesday - does that make it a True Name? Do I think of myself as Tuesday enough for it to be a True Name? Is my deadname a True Name? If not, when did it stop being one? When it stopped being the thing you should shout if I was gonna get hit by a bus? When exactly was that? Once I had a violating experience and when I got home I took off the clothes I’d been wearing, curled up under a blanket, and addressed myself by my deadname when comforting myself. It wasn’t not an attempt at name magic. If Tuesday is a True Name, does any moniker I offer to one of the Fair Folk risk becoming a True Name if I interact with them long enough? Do I have to carefully maintain it in my mind as an alias, lest it slip? Are there creatures who play the long game, not trying to find out your True Name but trying to build you one? Can they use the process of building you a new True Name to shape you?

#hi hey its the premise of Runaways #kinda but its a main theme #etta rambles #writeblr #runaways #OP you're so real for this

[ettawritesnstudies]

When I took my literary criticism theory class in undergrad the professor told us that in modern literary criticism “The author isn’t dead but they are a ghost breathing down your neck”

Basically, the old way of thinking was that the point of literary criticism was to find the true original intentions of the author. Then death of the author was introduced and literary criticism swung hard the other way, saying that what the author thinks and the context they were in doesn’t matter.

Nowadays, it’s somewhere in between. Yes the author had intentions and yes the work had context. But the work also has context right now and a history of people reading it and interpreting it and sometimes an author puts meaning in something that they didn’t realize they were.

I can’t sit down and interview Jane Austin about every little decision she made in Pride and Prejudice but I can look at what we know about her life and the era and place she lived in. I can also ignore all that and look at what the book means right now to modern people. I can compare Austin to writers in her own time as well as writers now. I can speculate on what I think was on purpose and what wasn’t.

A lot of people go on about death of the author like that’s the only correct way to interpret fiction when modern lit crit moved past it years ago. Reading critically is a conversation between the author, the reader, and the various contexts surrounding both of them. Nothing exists in a vacuum but at the same time nobody can anticipate every interpretation their work might present with.

The question of analysis and separating art from artist isn’t a simple cut and dry issue. It never has been and it never will be.

[ettawritesnstudies]

April 2024 Camp Nano Project - Thief of Hearts

He stole her heart. She wants it back.

Rory is no angel. Then again, angels wouldn’t last long in Rime, the city of eternal winter and night she calls home. But it is the only place someone with half-magic bloodlines can make a semi-honest living without getting harassed. Or at least it was until her heart was stolen. Now she’s got two days to get it back from the thief who took it before she dies. Unfortunately, this also means keeping him alive long enough to get it back, and that’s not going to be easy when most of the city’s magical syndicates have a bounty on his own heart.

…

Some kinds of magic are illegal, even in an enchanted city like Rime. Emmett’s talent for stealing people’s life forces has put him on the wrong side of the law, and on the blackmail list of one of the corrupt leaders of the city’s biggest magical syndicate. If he wants to keep what’s left of his family, he has to keep stealing the hearts of his employer’s competition. One job gone bad, and he’s got a heart with a very determined owner on his track, and a boss who wants him to make things right. That is, if either of them get their hands on him before the rival syndicates’ bounty hunters do.

Project WorldAnvil

Character Profiles

Rory

Emmett

Playlists

YouTube

Spotify

Taglist:

@nade2308 @catwingsathena @the-one-and-only-valkyrie @telltaleclerk @ettawritesnstudies

[ettawritesnstudies]

Dreaming of the stars again.

[ettawritesnstudies]

Ch👏