lailah-tov

[lailah-tov]

better than drugs

#writing life

[lailah-tov]

some of my favorite replies to this tweet. happy lesbian visibility week!

[lailah-tov]

"I have spent many days stringing and unstringing my instrument while the song I came to sing remains unsung." Rabindranath Tagore.

Dev Patel promoting Monkey Man, 10 April 2024

[lailah-tov]

the recently published work by another author, so similar to your own, seems so much better written than your own

The word "seems" is doing all the work here, OP. It's not just that you're your own worst critic. It's that some part of you is desperate for reasons not to finish and share your creation, and latched on to the idea that excessive similarity can justify it, and then went looking for something it could claim is similar. Spritz that part of you with the spray bottle and go on writing.

I have a question for the fanfic writers among you: How do you treat your work in progress when a very similar story is put out there? Do you go on writing - in the spirit that everything is unique in its own way - or do you abandon the piece - in the spirit of preventing 'superfluous' contributions?

Let's add a further wrench into the process by saying the recently published work by another author, so similar to your own, seems so much better written than your own (granted we are always our own worst critics). Where do you go with that?

Maybe this is a question for readers, too. Do you mind reading similar works/story lines?

#shave and a haircut #TWO CAKES #art is never superfluous

[lailah-tov]

Okay I wasn't expecting it to literally be a tie

Please reblog for greater visibility!

#the untamed #wen ning #wen qing

[lailah-tov]

Genuinely couldn't answer because I'm still thinking about percy's question of whether WQ is so protective of WN because she thinks he's fragile or because she knows he's capable of calmly doing incredibly violent things, and also whether she thinks he should be stopped from doing incredibly violent things or whether she doesn't really care as long as he doesn't come to harm.

A thing I missed on the first watch of CQL and that I think a lot of fanfic also misses is that Wen Qing and Wen Ning have their full fair share of Wen family traits. What makes them different is their capacity for love. But it's layered on top of the standard-issue Wen unhingedness, not substituted for it.

Anyway, I think it's a tie.

Please reblog for greater visibility!

#the untamed #wen ning #wen qing #if you don't have an innate moral compass then storebought is fine #and if you're too broke to buy one then ruthless pragmatism and utterly devoted loyalty will just have to do

[lailah-tov]

One of the funniest failures of US school system is the fact they are legally obligated to teach us all the states but they never actually show how big Alaska is like I have actually had teachers tell me that Texas is the biggest state. We have all just convinced ourselves that Alaska is that small shrunken down thing on most US maps and the people that know it's the largest state can almost never accurately describe how large it is.

For context here is a picture

[lailah-tov]

Well that takes me right back.

The sounds of the 80s.

[lailah-tov]

being a fan of a friend's ocs is actually so humiliating....... like yes my favourite character rn is tragically doomed and a pillar of humanity who i think is relevant to the current world. you can find information about them on discord dot com and sometimes in late-night conversations with this guy i know. what the fuck

#royals having a nice time #i'm just as normal about my own OCs

[lailah-tov]

Sigma male pronoun suggestions!

(requested by @tmbgareok)

- sig/sigma/sigmaself

- busi/business/businesself

- brief/briefcase/briefcaseself

- rise/grind/riseandgrindself

- andrew/tate/andrewtateself

- ben/shapiro/benshapiroself

- protein/shake/proteinshakeself

- woman/hater/womanhaterself

- pod/cast/podcastself

if you have any more suggestions, l-leave them in the comments below for all my sigma male pals out there! >,<

#laugh rule #because i'm a bad person

[lailah-tov]

@nonethefewer

i cannot possibly be the first person who has had this idea

#nonethefewercore

[lailah-tov]

Girl pants (multiple colors), boy pants (black), suit trousers, jeans, fleece-lined jeans, sweatpants, waterproof rain pants to go over the other pants... I'm a genderfluid person living in a place with four seasons and a lot of weather, I probably have even more pants that I'm not remembering right now

this does not apply if you wear exclusively leggings. Those things tear all the time you need like a million on standby

#marie kondo cannot save me

[lailah-tov]

I did exactly this last month and it was great, except that I went into a two-day "retreat" intending to finish revisions on book two of my trilogy, and I finished them within three hours. So that left me a little bit at a loss for what to do with the rest of the time!

Lessons I've learned for the next time I do a retreat like this:

The best time to go is when you have more to write than you can possibly do on the retreat. For me, being about 2/3 of the way through a project would probably be ideal.

You won't write the whole time, and that's fine. You'll still probably write more than you would have otherwise. Time spent recovering between bouts of writing is not wasted.

Plan in advance as much as possible, so you don't have to think about planning while you're there. That includes everything about where you're staying, where and when you'll have meals, and what your policy will be around social media, work, calling home, and other things that aren't writing.

Plan your writing too, in whatever way works for you.

Really clear your calendar. I thought I could call in to a couple of meetings and otherwise ignore my day job, but I should have officially taken time off.

Pick a thing to do on breaks that's as unlike writing as possible. Getting up and moving around is ideal. I went out out for every meal and my legs were glad for it, even with the three flights of stairs down to the street.

Know whether you work better in solitude or in company, and plan accordingly. Being alone was great for me. I thought I'd want to take my laptop out to a cafe, but I was so happy in front of the fireplace with no one around at all.

Make sure the venue has the right kind of furniture for you to use while writing. Mine only had a chair with a hard seat and fixed arms, and it was not ideal.

Take extra good care of your body in the week leading up to the retreat, and pack your most comfortable clothes. I felt so smart for bringing sweatpants, slippers, and a cozy sweater. Intensive writing is very physical; you need happy arms and a well-rested brain. Take care of your tools too: new ink in the fountain pen, a fresh notebook, all the crumbs cleaned out of your keyboard.

Pack lots of snacks, and everything you need to prepare them. I brought soy milk and hot chocolate mix... but the kitchenette doesn't have a whisk, so I drank tea instead.

Afterwards, I thought about how I could probably have rented an office for a month for what I paid for two nights at a hotel. Then I remembered my day job pays for me to have an office, and I realized I could go to the office more and do more writing while I'm there. It wouldn't be the same as an overnight stay, but the building is open 24/7, so I could write until very late and then go home when I'm ready for bed. This month has been all schedule disruptions all the time, with Emmy visiting and Passover and all of that, but next month I might try making some time for that.

Lately, it's felt like every time I've started to work on writing, I'll just be getting into the rhythm of it when I get interrupted, either by work or the cats or because the time I'd booked in the library study room is up (you can only do two hours at a time, and only four hours a week total). It was getting to the point where I kept re-reading the same chapter or so of previous work but never managing to add to it.

So I tried an experiment this past weekend -- I found a really cheap rate on a local hotel room, and on Friday I took an overnight bag and a very old laptop with limited processing power and checked into a room about a mile from home for a quasi "staycation". I unpacked and had a quiet night on Friday, as prelude to working Saturday-Sunday. The idea was to write uninterrupted by other people, pets, the presence of all my Stuff around me at home, et cetera.

I had snacks but I also bought meals out, which was nice; I don't often order in or buy out when I'm at home. The way I set up was that I would do fifty minutes of writing with do-not-disturb engaged on my phone and then ten minutes of checking email, texts, etc. since often what pulls me out of writing is a text or an email that needs answering, or the anxiety that I'm missing one that would. If I set it so that every hour I check, well, nobody's going to die if something doesn't get answered in an hour, so the anxiety isn't there, and neither is the distraction. (I found a nice app for this, review later depending on how functional it continues to be for me, but it's a like $4 app called Forest.)

It worked pretty well -- writing for an uninterrupted hour, as long as I know what I'm working on, is very functional for me. I average about two thousand words, that way, though there is a limit to the number of hours I can put in. I ended up doing two hours in the morning and one hour in the afternoon, then switched from fiction writing to clearing out my tumblr drafts and some correspondence for the fourth hour. So it went something like

Go out and get breakfast, bring back and eat in room

Change into lounging clothes and do two one-hour sessions

Go out and get lunch, eat lunch out

Bit of a rest break back in the room

Two one-hour sessions, one of writing; when tired, switch to something that requires less creativity

Go out and get dinner, bring back and eat in room

And then in the evening the plan was to watch movies or catch up on reading, but I ended up being mentally weary, so instead I did some simple tarot reading. It was less divination or even meditation than just messing around, keeping the creativity stimulated; I did a couple of Creative Writing spreads, some very brief divination spreads (I nicked a nice three-card spread here that I mentally call He To Hecuba, and just used it in general rather than for a specific question) and then invented a spread when I was starting to get irritated that the same like, five cards kept coming up, more on this in its own post.

Sunday I did one more writing session but it was less successful, I think partly because what I was writing required a lot of research and partly because the previous day I'd dumped eight thousand words into the file. (Research took longer because I brought the most garbage laptop known to man, and the browsers crash if you try to open Google Maps, but in other ways it was ideal since there wasn't much I could do on it other than write.) But I had a good breakfast, got some rest, packed up easily enough, and headed home just ahead of the rain storm.

I don't think it's something I'll be able to do in that format especially often, since the deal I got on the hotel was an anomaly and Chicago lodging, even just AirBNB stuff, is stupid expensive. But in addition to helping get some work done it was a nice break, so I'm going to look into ways I could swing it on a perhaps monthly basis, or some other way to cheaply spend an entire day alone with decent access to a bathroom/snacks and a way to come and go easily. I've looked into coworking spaces before but they tend to be prohibitively expensive and don't really have the setup I'd prefer; there's a hostel on the north side with private rooms that I might try out but it doesn't seem significantly cheaper than a hotel. I might just have to pick one weekend a month and watch last-minute hotel price cuts where they simply want to fill a room for a day or two.

Anyway, functionally I wrote almost a fifth of a novel this weekend, and one that I wasn't feeling super on fire about; I'm feeling much better about it now that I've got some established plot going and I feel like I "know" the newer characters a bit better. (Also I'm enjoying writing Simon as someone who is absolutely entranced by his love interest and clueless that what he's feeling isn't mild antipathy because they met while fighting over ricotta.) So it was a big help, although if I were to put a budget line item in the Extribulum Press ledger for "writing staycation" it would wipe out my royalties surplus very quickly.

#writing life

[lailah-tov]

I'm wearing a dark gray shirt today and it makes me laugh every time I wear it, because I went to the store going "Okay! I'm going to get something that isn't my usual dark green! I'm going to wear COLORS!" and I came out with three more dark green shirts, a light blue shirt, and this.

#in my defense #shirts don't really come in colors i like #or patterns i like #or maybe i just don't like colors or patterns #anyway gray is a perfectly fine color okay

[lailah-tov]

Reblogged for important truth.

I was going to say that we need an autism diagnosis test created by autistics, but then I realized it's called community. Are most or all of your friends neurodivergent? Congratulations, you're one of us now, please collect your membership card and stim toys on your way out.

When I was younger and researching the autism diagnosis criteria and symptoms, I thought “oh I couldn’t POSSIBLY be autistic.” Because when I read “takes everything literally” I thought it literally meant EVERYTHING and I was like “I don’t take EVERYTHING literally, just most things!” And I just realized the other day that it didn’t actually mean EVERYTHING and that was an overstatement.

#autism awareness #which i guess sounds more professional than “look out! autism!”

[lailah-tov]

y'ever get haunted by the fear you will never write anything as beautiful as the US Steel Pipe Works Slag Dump Youtube Comment cuz hoo boy i sure do:

shoutout to you, youtube user mrc109, wherever you may be today

[lailah-tov]

Hello! And Welcome to Taskmaster! Please welcome our five contestants! And next to me, a man who once told me in confidence that his wife has filled his house with chintz. To keep it real I fuck him on the floor. It's little Alex Horne!

#if this clip existed #i would make it my phone background