#i think i might actually be better in that medium than a novel

[writeouswriter]

I should write a stage play

#i've read only one play in the last several years and it's one that considerably goes against common play structure 😭 #and i am a little obsessed with it but like that's one play abd i didn't even watch it but ough #i just had an idea that i think would ONLY work as live theatre and it's kinda cookin #like i've read other plays but it's been a long time 😭 #my fav was the cr*cible but we also read juli*s caesar rom*o and j*liet+m*cbeth back when in school so didn't get the full appreciation #but recent things have me yearning to interact with theatre #i think i might actually be better in that medium than a novel

[canyourfavesurvivecastledracula]

aziraphale from good omens :)

Bahahahaha! Oh my.

Okay, for the sake of sportsmanship, let's be as fair as we can and give Dracula every fighting chance.

The first big question is holiness - Aziraphale is undoubtedly very very holy. But he's an angel of God, not literally God, and that makes a difference. If we take the demons of Good Omens as a test case, we can see that they share some traditional weaknesses with vampires, the most prominent one being Holy Water - (although NB Dracula never interacts with Holy Water in novel, just as none of the demons in Good Omens, book or series, never interact with the Host). It seems reasonable to presume that Crowley for instance would have a bad time with a crucifix. So we can perhaps say that the two are repulsed by the divine in much the same way. But. No one would ever suggest that Crowley cannot physically touch Aziraphale. Right? Apart from it being demonstrably untrue, whole pillars of fandom would collapse. It's a non-starter. So Aziraphale is not prima facie the kind of divine that is repulsive to the demoniac... except perhaps aesthetically.

The next thing to get out of way is that Aziraphale is not strictly speaking the kind of thing that can die. But he can be discorporated, and the waiting list on bodies is such a bother, so I am going to say that if his physical body gets destroyed by any means that counts as not surviving Castle Dracula, though I love the idea of him possessing people later in the novel (I'm thinking either Renfield or Van Helsing, because Renfield is basically a medium already and like real weird about angels, and Van Helsing has that one scene where Jonathan is like .... so I'm like 90% sure he was possessed and speaking with literal divine authority just then. Weird.) The question then becomes what it takes it discorporate an angel and whether Dracula in fact possesses those means. The one thing that actually accomplishes it in universe is that summoning circle, which is a pretty extreme example. BUT if we include actual biblical canon in our angelology, then, while while that doesn't bring us any closer to what, if anything, can kill an angel, we do at least have examples of angels being beaten in fistfights. So, for the purposes of this exercise, Aziraphale can in principle be killed, and he can also in principle be beaten in a fistfight.

It might make some difference if we are talking about the Book or the Series. Book!Aziraphale is a little bit more of a bastard, a little less naive, a little less distractactable, and (as is Crowley) a whole lot more terrifyingly competent than his televised counterpart.

...okay enough of this. Aziraphale outclasses Dracula so hard it's not even funny. Angels and Demons are set up to be evenly matched because they are fundamentally the same type of thing and that's the whole point - but Dracula isn't that type of Demon. He's a human person who's mildly demoniac because he majored in it in college. It's very impressive to other humans, sure, but like, the ravings of his solicitor aside, he's really not on the level of actual Demons of the Pit. And the things that humans are better at - creativity, growth, love - he's traded for vampirism. He's got the disadvantages of both without really the advantages of either.

Aziraphale's fatal flaw, if you want to call it that, is that he really likes humans. He would be delighted by Dracula's cooking and by his library. He would never stand for the baby eating. He would he more insufferable about the paprika than our baby lawyer. But he's also had 6000 years of learning to be unassuming and letting people underestimate him, and perfecting the Reverse Customer Service voice. He would do that Disapproving Bookseller thing and make Dracula uncomfortable in his own home. He's not the kind of thing that can be hypnotized. He's not going to waste time looking for the key, the doors will just open for him when he tells them to. And if all else fails he has wings, he can literally just leave whenever.

So um, yes. Aziraphale can survive Castle Dracula. And he will probably mess with Dracula non-trivially while he's there.

#aziraphale #good omens #divine entities

[physalian]

What No One Tells You About Writing #5

Part 4

Part 3

Part 2

Shorter list this time, but longer points. I expect this one to be more divisive, but it is what it is, and this is what ‘no one tells you’ about writing, after all. This one’s all about feedback and how to take it, and give it.

1. Not everyone will like your book, no matter how good it is

I’ve said this before, granted, but sometimes you can have very arbitrary reasons for not liking an otherwise great story. For example: I refuse to watch Hamilton. Why? Because everyone I knew and their dog was trying to cram it down my throat when it came out and I still don’t really like musicals, and didn’t appreciate the bombardment of insisting I’ll like it simply because everyone else does. I’m sure it’s great! I’m just not watching it until I want to watch it.

It can be other reasons, too. I won’t read fanfic that’s written in first person, doesn’t matter how good it is. Someone might not watch a TV show because the primary cast is white or not-white. Someone might not watch a movie because an actor they despise is in it, even if the role is fantastic. Someone might not watch or read a story that’s too heavy on the romance, or not enough, or too explicit. I went looking for beta readers and came across one who wouldn’t touch a book where the romance came secondary in a sci-fi or fantasy novel. Kept on scrolling.

Someone can just think your side character is unfunny and doesn’t hear the same music as everyone else. Someone can just not like your writing style with either too much or not enough fluff, or too much personality in the main narrator. Or they have triggers that prevent them from enjoying it the way you intend.

How someone expresses that refusal is not your job to manage. You cannot force someone to like your work and pushing too hard will just make it worse. Some people just won’t like it, end of story.

2. Criticism takes a very long time to take well

Some people are just naturally better at taking constructive criticism, some have a thick skin, some just have a natural confidence that beats back whatever jabs the average reader or professional editor can give. If you’re like me, you might’ve physically struggled at first to actually read the feedback and insisted that your beta readers color-coded the positive from the negative.

It can be a very steep climb up the mountain until you reach a point where you know you’re good enough, and fully appreciate that it is actually “constructive” and anything that isn’t, isn’t worth your time.

The biggest hurdle I had to climb was this: A criticism of my work is not a criticism of me as a person.

Yes, my characters are built with pieces of my personality and worldview and dreams and ideals, but the people giving you feedback should be people who either already know you as a person and are just trying to help, or are people you pay to be unbiased and only focus on what’s on the page.

Some decisions, like a concerning moral of your story, is inadvertently a criticism of your own beliefs—like when I left feedback that anxiety can’t just be loved away and believing so is a flawed philosophy. I did that with intent to help, not because I thought the writer incompetent or that they wrote it in bad faith.

I’m sure it wasn’t a fun experience reading what I had to say, either. It’s not fun when I get told a character I love and lost sleep over getting right isn’t getting the same reception with my betas. But they’re all doing it (or at least they all should be doing it) from a place of just wanting to help, not to insult your writing ability. Even if your writing objectively sucks, you’re still doing a lot more just by putting words on paper than so many people who can’t bring themselves to even try.

As with all mediums subjects to critique, one need not be an author to still give valuable feedback. I’m not a screenwriter, but from an audience’s standpoint, I can tell you what I think works. Non-authors giving you pointers on the writing process? You can probably ignore that. Non-authors giving you pointers on how your character lands? Then, yeah, they might have an opinion worth considering.

3. Parsing out the “constructive” from the criticism isn’t easy

This goes for people giving it as well. Saying things like “this book sucks” is an obviously useless one. Saying “I didn’t like this story because it was confusing and uncompelling” is better. “I think this story was confusing and uncompelling because of X, and I have some suggestions here that I think can make it better.”

Now we’re talking.

Everyone’s writing style is different. Some writers like a lot of fluff and poetic prose to immerse you in the details and the setting, well beyond what you need to understand the scene or the plot. Their goal is to make this world come alive and help you picture the scene exactly the way they see it in their minds.

There’s writers who are very light on the sensory fluff and poetry, trying to give you the impression of what the scene should look and feel like and letting you fill in the missing pieces with your own vision.

Or there’s stories that take a long time to get anywhere, spending many pages on the small otherwise insignificant slice-of-life details as opposed to laser-precision on the plot, and those who trim off all the fat for a fast-paced rollercoaster.

None of these are inherently bad or wrong, but audiences do have their preferences.

The keyword in “constructive criticism” is “construct”. As in, your advice is useless if you can’t explain why you think an element needs work. “It’s just bad” isn’t helpful to anyone.

When trying to decide if feedback has merit, try to look at whatever the critic gives you and explain what they said to yourself in your own words. If you think changing the piece in question will enhance your story or better convey what you’re trying to say, it’s probably solid advice.

Sometimes you just have to throw the whole character out, or the whole scene, whole plot line and side quest. Figuring out what you can salvage just takes time, and practice.

4. Just when you think you’re done, there’s more

There’s a quote out there that may or may not belong to Da Vinci that goes “art is never finished, only abandoned.” Even when you think your book is as good as it can be, you can still sleep on it and second-guess yourself and wonder if something about it could have been done better or differently.

There is such a thing as too much editing.

But it also takes a long time to get there. Only 10-15% of writing is actually penning the story. The rest is editing, agonizing over editing, re-editing, and staring at the same few lines of dialogue that just aren't working to the point that you dream about your characters.

It can get demoralizing fast when you think you’ve fixed a scene, get the stamp of approval from one reader, only for the next one to come back with valid feedback neither of you considered before. So you fix it again. And then there’s another problem you didn’t consider. And then you’re juggling all these scene bits and moments you thought were perfect, only for it to keep collapsing.

It will get there. You will have a manuscript you’re proud of, even if it’s not the one you thought you were going to write. My newest book isn’t what I set out to write, but if I stuck to that original idea, I never would have let it become the work that it is.

5. “[Writing advice] is more like guidelines than actual rules.”

Personally, I think there’s very few universal, blanket pieces of writing advice that fit every book, no exceptions, no conditions, no questions asked. Aside from: Don’t sacrifice a clear story for what you think is cool, but horribly confusing.

For example, I’m American, but I like watching foreign films from time to time. The pacing and story structure of European films can break so many American rules it’s astonishing. Pacing? What pacing? It’s ~fancy~. It wants to hang on a shot of a random wall for fifteen seconds with no music and no point because it’s ~artsy~. Or there is no actual plot, or arc, it’s just following these characters around for 90 minutes while they do a thing. The entire movie is basically filler. Or the ending is deeply unsatisfying because the hoity-toity filmmaker believes in suffering for art or… something.

That doesn’t fly with mainstream American audiences. We live, breathe, and die on the Hero’s Journey and expect a three-act-structure with few novel exceptions.

That does not mean your totally unique or subversive plot structure is wrong. So much writing advice I’ve found is solid advice, sure, but it doesn’t often help me with the story I’m writing. I don’t write romance like the typical romance you’d expect (especially when it comes to monster allegories). There’s some character archetypes I just can’t write and refuse to include–like the sad, abusive, angsty, 8-pack abs love interest, or the comedic relief.

Beyond making sure your audience can actually understand what you’re trying to say, both because you want your message to be received, and you don’t want your readers to quit reading, there is an audience for everything, and exceptions to nearly every rule, even when it comes to writing foundations like grammar and syntax.

You don’t even have to put dialogue in quotes. (Be advised, though, that the more ~unique~ your story is, the more likely you are to only find success in a niche audience).

Lots of writing advice is useful. Lots of it is contradictory. Lots of it is outdated because audience expectations are changing constantly. There is a balance between what you *should* do as said by other writers, and what you think is right for your story, regardless of what anyone else says.

Just don’t make it confusing.

—

I just dropped my cover art and summary for my debut novel. Go check it out and let me know what you think!

#writing advice #writing resources #writing tips #writing tools #writing a book #writing #writeblr #editing #constructive criticism #what no one tells you about writing

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

reading update: july 2023

I don't have a cool and witty opening for this one. I read a fuck of a lot of books this month and I want to tell you about them LET'S GO

Black Water Sister (Zen Cho, 2021) - Black Water Sister has a very fun premise: a closeted lesbian and unemployed recent graduate moves back to Malaysia with her parents and is already having a bad enough time when she starts hearing the voice of her dead grandmother, who turns out to have been deeply involved in supernatural organized crime. our hapless protagonist becomes a medium against her will, and has to navigate to world of Malaysian spirits and superstition to lay her grandma to rest. unfortunately the actual style of the story wasn't more me; although definitely adult fiction, the prose is breezy in a way I affiliate strongly with YA, which is not to my personal taste but is still so hashtag valid. if you're one of the countless people trying to make that jump from YA to adult fiction and you like queer urban fantasy then Black Water Sister might be a great fit for you, although I should provide a warning for a pretty surprisingly graphic near-rape in the book's climax that really took me by surprise in a story that's otherwise pretty zany in its violence.

The Bride Test (Helen Hoang, 2019) - I think I said last month that Alexis Hall's A Lady for a Duke was the best so far of the romance-novel-every-month scheme I'm trying to pull off this year. the Bride Test has pretty swiftly displaced it; have I finally discovered the really good romance novels? (worry not; I know what I'm reading for August and my hopes are. low.) our two protagonists, Mỹ/Esme (her chosen American/English name) and Khai, are both genuinely charming and are pretty strong characters independent of each other, which cannot be said for A Lot of romance protags. despite the absolute insanity of how they met (yes, Khai's mother went to Vietnam and offered, uneducated a poor single mother a tourist visa in exchange for trying to seduce her autistic son. yes, that's shady. don't think about it too hard) and Esme waiting until WAY too late in the game to reveal the existence of HER LIVING HUMAN CHILD, I liked this book a lot. it's silly and heartfelt and I had fun; what else do you need? 5/5 eggplant emojis.

Giovanni's Room (James Baldwin, 1956) - there's probably nothing I can say about Giovanni's Room that I could say that someone smarter and gayer hasn't already said, but god. it really is breathtaking. I so often see this book talked about as a gay tragedy, and honestly that feels like almost too glib of a description. it's a really meticulous dissection of white male masculinity and the claustrophobic constraints there of, and our narrator's claustrophobic fear of divesting himself from the power that he's entitled to by virtue of being a white American man perceived as a heterosexual. this man would rather live in repressed misery for his entire life than risk being like those effeminate faggots at the gay club, but spoiler alert! being miserable doesn't make you better than your fellow fags; it just means you're miserable AND a fag. sharp and painful and so so so smart. also I'm going to summon @zaricats because I was supposed to tell you what I thought about this book. oops!

Lone Women (Victor LaValle, 2023) - okay so listen. did I just say Black Water Sister wasn't really for me because of the simplistic prose? yes. did I really enjoy the very sparse, straightforward style of Lone Women? also yes. leave me alone, I contain contradictions. anyway, Lone Women is a ripping piece of historical fiction spliced with supernatural secrets, based on LaValle's research into 19th century Black women homesteaders who made their lives in Montana. LaValle opens on a scene of irresistible intrigue - Adelaide Henry, lone woman, sets out for Montana with a mysteriously heavy trunk after burning down her family's California farm with her parents' mutilated corpses inside. and boy, does it escalate from there! it's a story about isolation and community and the people who are failed by so-called close knit small towns, and the ways in which vulnerable people band together to protect one another. it also makes the compelling point that maybe, just maybe, the real monsters were your local transphobe and her husband's lynch mob all along.

Black Disability Politics (Sami Schalk, 2022) - what a cool book! Schalk's argument begins with the idea that Black disability politics are distinct from predominantly white mainstream disability politics, and are therefore often overlooked in conversation, activism, and academia. Schalk analyzes the historical work of the Black Panthers and the National Black Women's Health Project to showcase what she describes as Black disability politics in action. in Schalk's conception, Black disability politics take a much more holistic approach to disability, conceptualizing as just one form (and, frequently, as a result of) of oppression tangled up with a myriad of others that cannot be meaningfully addressed when they're treated as separate issues. the book concludes in interviews with contemporary Black disability activists and organizers that shed light on ways in which the wider movement is often unwelcoming to folks of color, and an exhortation from Schalk for readers to continue the conversation well beyond the confines of the book. in a killer show of praxis, the entire book has been made available to read in PDF form, and I strongly recommend giving it a look!

The River of Silver (S.A. Chakraborty, 2022) - mentally I am kicking myself a little for waiting so long to read this continuation of my beloved Daevabad trilogy, because it did take me a minute to get back into the swing and mythology of the world and that did make me feel unpleasantly like I wasn't appreciating these character-focused short stories as much as I could be. but even having said that - man! fuck I love the world of Daevabad, and I adore these characters so much. getting to see them again, even briefly, was a delight, and I am once again congratulating Nahri and Ali on being the invention of heterosexual romance. (also, on a related note, but I ADORE the way Chakraborty writes her characters having crushes. they crush SO hard and it's very sweet. these books are such big drama all the way down.)

Men We Reaped (Jesmyn Ward, 2013) - an absolute powerhouse of a memoir, and devastating the whole way down. in Men We Reaped Ward attempts to make sense of a series of tragedies that befell her community when five young Black men - beginning with Ward's younger brother - died between 2000 and 2004. the word 'unflinching' is hopelessly played out, but it's difficult to figure out how to describe the head-on way Ward explores each young man's life and ultimate end and her own upbringing. the men in Ward's history - her brother, the friends she lost, her father and other male relatives - are never idealized; their demons, miseries, infidelities, addictions, and violence are placed on full display. but Ward is also insistent on displaying these men with dignity, compassion, empathy; showing them at their best and, most importantly, as men who were loved and deserved better than the violence that poverty and racism wrought on them. it's a furious memoir, one that will leave you mourning too.

Nimona (ND Stevenson, 2015) - did I only read this so I can make more informed complaints if/when I end up watching the netflix movie with my wife? YES. but listen, it wasn't JUST petty hater behavior. Nimona is just really good, and I think I got a lot more out of it this time around that I did when I first read it years ago. this comic is wild and unfettered and so spectacularly weird; I wish more things felt the way Nimona does. I also with more things starred small girls begging to kill cops and stage a violent overthrow of the government, that rules hard. also man I love Ballister, he's SUCH a good protagonist. he's curmudgeonly, he's deeply principled, he's held a grudge for years, he's paternal, he's even gay. what a guy!

#reading updates

[hopjam]

valentine's weird shading not-a-tutorial tutorial

let me preface this by saying that i am not very good at tutorials, hence the "not-a-tutorial" in the title. let me continue prefacing this by saying that tumblr's search function is still shit and ass, making me incapable of trying to find the post i wanted to and forcing my hand into making my own instead. if anyone has the link to the post i'm talking about feel free to send it to me or something. anyway let's get into it

so the one thing that helped improve my art's lighting and shading drastically is, instead of thinking shadows being additive, is to think of light being subtractive instead. again emphasis on the words "my art" so this might not work for you personally + this probably also only really works in a digital medium, but like. what do i mean by that?

enlisting the help of that one sketch of ghost/ray i drew once, i've slapped together a few pics that may or may not help make the point i'm trying to make clearer. i dunno, but either way you're gonna want to decide where your light source is coming from first before you start. ok let's go

anyway, this is what i like to call "shadows being additive" or in layman's terms basically just drawing in your shadows by hand instead. this is probably how you've been taught to shade, and it works fine if you know what you're doing! however, since this pic of ghost just Standing There is pretty simple it makes shading this way relatively easy, but if your composition is more complex, you have a bunch of things blocking the light source, and/or you have weird perspective going on; then it might start getting pretty difficult. it sure as hell did for me in the past anyway

but. what if i told you. that there's a different way to approach shading

now introducing: "light being subtractive" aka drawing in your lights instead. in the real world, objects are naturally shrouded in darkness until a light source is present. this fact is then reflected in this shading style by having you begin with a layer filled with your shadow color before erasing the areas where your light hits (then refining it later). this style probably works better the more your knowledge of how objects reside within a 3d space is, but either way i personally prefer this shading style bc of how the shadows feel more organic to me + it works fantastic for dramatic lighting as well

honestly your layer mode doesn't even need to be set to multiply either. in a visual novel i released a while ago under a time constraint i chose to shade my sprite using pure black set to normal mode because it was faster to me than actually having to worry about the colors that come with using a multiply layer

but uhhh yeah either way that's how i got good at shading i guess by changing the way i approached doing it in the first place. hopefully this helps someone out there. idk man i'm not a professional artist or anything i just do this stuff for fun

#shading #art tips #val draws #(???) #val talks

[petruchio]

Bestie I think you’re so right about the movie altering Lucy and Coryo’s romance to better convey the themes within the limitations of the medium!

Like it’s actually a huge book! I knew they would have to cut a lot for the sake of run time so I was fully expecting them to sacrifice some of the details that do so much heavy lifting for the deeper themes.

But I was so pleasantly surprised, and I honestly think that preserving the themes must have been a central goal in the production! I was noticing small changes - but they all seemed to serve keeping the major themes in tact?

Like I saw it with my family (who all read thg but not tbosas) and I went in wondering. Like how are they going to make a meaningful, faithful, adaptation of such a large book?? Will my family understand The Themes? And they did!

I think it speaks to Suzanne’s writing ability (her themes are layered throughout every level, so a few cuts won’t gut them entirely) and smart/intentional alterations.

Like you mention with cutting the kiss, I think doing so highlights the transactionality of this moment. Coryo won’t kiss her OR give her the compact until she denounces Billy taupe! Like literally he won’t save her life (do the right thing, like Tigris says) if she’s in love with someone else! Interesting!

But like you say, if they do !finally! kiss (without that monologue) it’s easier to miss how manipulative he’s being in that moment and the importance of it!

I think they made a similar smart choice with being shipped off to 8 - I might be wrong here!! But I’m pretty sure he isn’t ordered to be a peace keeper? He CHOOSES that because he sees it as his only avenue left? (Which I thought was some military industrial complex commentary sprinkled in but now I’m afraid I imagined this whole thing LOL)

So assuming I’m not misremembering - I thought making highbottom force him to become a peace keeper also worked similarly. Like letting him choose that (without the internal monologue) makes his motivations seem genuine when they aren’t fully. So it’s just better for the movie medium perhaps?

Anyways, rambling done lol thanks for listening 🌟

ohhhh how i love all of this!! i love you for taking the time to send all this to me -- and thank you for validating my reading of the altered love story!!

and YES i was so pleasantly surprised by how well they managed to maintain a lot of the thematic content of the book, esp because we KNOW how much they gutted it in the original trilogy. i have a couple theories on why: the first is that the filmmakers are devoted readers of my tumblr blog and they understood the importance of preserving the political themes from the novels when adapting them to the screen (ok obviously i am joking.) my real theories are -- the cultural conversation has shifted a LOT since the original films got made, and i think they were more aware and more *able* to be more explicit with so many of those ideas. i also wonder if the act of adapting the story of someone from capitol was easier than adapting someone from district 12 -- there's been much ink spilled over how we, the privileged moviegoers who are watching the film in theaters, are much more like capitolites than we are like katniss herself. and i wonder if that made it easier to adapt -- because one of the big critiques of the thg films is that they really glam jlaw up even when she's in district 12, and it makes scenes like the "remake" scenes kind of lose their power and biting social commentary. whereas with snow, and the capitol, and the games themselves, we're meant to understand that they ARE a facade, and the movie can really lean into that. (side note, my least fav costume in the whole movie was lucy gray's swimsuit. pretty much for that exact reason -- it was too ~perfect~ for the setting.)

to your point about the change with snow deciding vs being ordered to become a peacekeeper -- i honestly couldn't remember either so i went to see if i could find the quote from the book and it's this:

[...] But as he approached the dean, a cold dread washed over him. There, arranged on the table like lab specimens, were three items: an Academy napkin stained with grape punch, his mother’s silver compact, and a dingy white handkerchief. The meeting could not have lasted more than five minutes. Afterward, as agreed, Coriolanus headed directly to the Recruitment Center, where he became Panem’s newest, if not shiniest, Peacekeeper.

honestly i wish i remembered what exactly is meant by "as agreed" but i do think you're right that in the book it's more implied that he doesn't have another choice -- because he didn't win the monetary prize, he has to enroll. so i think you're right that the point is that the idea that it's his choice at all is in question because it's societal pressure and his family's financial status that kind of forces him into the military industrial complex. but i think, because they made this scene so explicit in the film, that you're right that having him be ordered to do it instead of hearing him justify it in his head manages to accomplish what we need it to for the sake of the plot moving forward (if kind of weakening that angle of sc's commentary)

also, here's something to chew on -- i was thinking as i was watching the film if part of the reason some of the changes didn't irritate me so much was because i was more forgiving of the need to shift things around to account for the lack of internal monologue because the book is written in third person instead of first person. i mean, obviously i am overly attached to pretty much everything about katniss, and yes that comes down even to her internal monologue, but i did wonder if that made some of the changes feel more natural to me, because we still kind of get them explained to us in the book as an observer, instead of listening to someone explain themselves to us (i don't know if that makes any sense?) -- but i guess what i'm trying to say is that maybe reading tbosas is more like watching a film, vs reading thg which is more like you are experiencing something alongside katniss? and that's because of the pov choice?

WELL that was a ramble! i'm always amazed by how much we can say about these books and films!! they're just so layered and so fascinating -- i'm loving all the conversations i've been seeing about tbosas. i feel like a lot of it is really starting to gel for me the more i read people's thoughts and analyses. (i still think the third act is messy though. no matter how great suzanne's themes are, i do think the pacing is rough. lol!)

#answered #anonymous #tbosas #tbosas thoughts #<- feels like i should make a specific tag for tbosas metas

[tapwrites]

How to Become a Better Writer

It can be easy to stagnate in your writing. To feel like you're spinning your wheels and not progressing.

"But I'm listening to all the writing podcasts all the time!" Unfortunately, it's not as simple as that. Writing podcasts are great (I highly recommend Writing Excuses)... but are best for passively absorbing ideas around the art of writing.

You cannot passively become a better writer.

So what should you do?...

There are 3 main things to really get going in your writing: reading, writing, and getting feedback. (And there's a bonus hidden power up at the end!)

Read the language and medium you want to write in--regularly. ("Medium" being prose vs poetry vs academic papers, etc.) Why is that?

You need to learn and get a feel for how the grammar of the language works. You can do that with textbooks or a tutor. But if you've got a gut feel for what prose "looks" like on the page, because you've done a load of reading, you'll have a gut feel when your prose doesn't "look" right.

For example, if you've read a lot of dialogue, your brain naturally picks up on the rule that if the dialogue would end in a full-stop (period) but is followed by a dialogue tag... a comma is used instead of that period. And you won't have needed to memorise that edge case rule.

Reading lets you immerse yourself in the form of it, and absorb how it functions along the way. Including all the subtleties of how prose works that is different to everyday speech or communication. And it gives you a great baseline to learn these intricacies more directly, because it can click into place with what you've already picked up through reading.

Consuming stories through any art form--film, comic books, audio podcasts, etc.--helps you figure out your own tastes, your likes/dislikes when it comes to what you enjoy in a story. Which will form your style of writing, as you gain experience.

So reading isn't really required. For some, reading is a lot more difficult than watching a TV show, or writing their own stories. So you can learn these things in other ways as I mentioned.

The reason reading is the go-to recommendation is it is simply the most direct route. You can develop taste, understand story, and pick up on grammar and how the language works... all at the same time!

Whatever route you take, this is particularly helpful in the early days of writing. Seeing books by established authors with the eyes of a writer is a different experience to that of a regular reader. Instead of thinking, "Okay, I understood that part." You think, "Wow, you can do that in a novel?!"

You pick up tricks you can use in your own writing, as you read. And pick up on things you don't like in the way they write. This is "active reading"...

Don't just read: think about how what you are reading actually works on your brain.

You might think about how you would have written that sentence, or how you would've had it played out slightly differently to better hit that dramatic sweet spot.

That's what developing your own style is like, also known as a writer's "voice." Developing taste is when you start to gravitate towards some movies over others, and enjoy reading about certain characters and plots over others. You naturally do this when you've watched a lot of shows and movies. And you'll naturally do the same as you read books, as a writer.

Simply noticing what you like and dislike about what you read leaves you with a better sense of what you want your stories to be like. Both in terms of taste (genre, plot type, kinds of character) and style/voice (how you use the language to tell a story).

Writing regularly gets you the practise you need. Get used to sitting down and writing words--paper, digital, doesn't matter. And it doesn't matter if it's good. You don't need to show anyone else everything you write. What matters is that you practise the art of writing.

In the past I've used this exercise to get into the habit of writing, without worrying about it being good, editing/polishing it up, showing other people, etc. which actually lets the words come a lot easier. You can get into the flow of writing a lot better if you're not second guessing yourself, and this exercise gives you no time for such an indulgence! [Freewriting Exercise]

This is great for setting up a "mode" within yourself in which you are only creative, and you never second-guess or edit or revise. This is a great thing to work towards as you write, as it'll make the act of creating in the first place much more manageable. Think about it like this: when writing, your job is to slap down messy clay you can build with later.

Just writing something--anything--is productive in itself. And you'll probably start writing better stuff as you go just from the practise, and even find a story you want to develop from it!

But it's also good to finish things--both for the dopamine hit, and to be able to practise editing your work, understanding the structure of your story, and...

Getting feedback. Once you've got something you like but want to make better, get scientific! Ask people for feedback! (Preferably ask people that aren't your friends and family.)

Your goal in getting feedback is to understand how your writing is conveying your story to readers. What effect your use of language has on someone other than yourself.

Some will read it and like it, some will dislike like it, some may even hate it! Thing is, those are all subjective takes on what they read. When someone says a film "is good" or "is bad," they're really expressing that "it has things I like experiencing" or "it has things I don't like experiencing."

A hardcore fantasy fan might say a sci-fi film "is bad" because it doesn't have fantasy in it. Or visa-versa. All it speaks to is their personal tastes, not necessarily about the quality of the film as a whole.

Which means there's no need to worry. It's all just data.

Look at feedback like a scientist would the results of an experiment.

You're looking at your work in a scientific way. You're studying its effect on those readers. And through that analysis, learning how language affects their experience. Use that new understanding to bend language to your will so that it has the effect you wanted for your story.

This means it's not about doing what the readers want you to. Even if they're writers, and you respect their work... they are one reader among many. When it's published, it could be one reader among millions!

Others may have the opposite suggestion on the same piece. You could get 20 differing points of view. Don't give any one comment more weight than any other comment you might receive.

Learn about language and story, through reactions to your writing.

Use their reactions and suggestions to learn about language and story. Don't learn "how to make your story better," even if that's what they're trying to force on you.

Always, always, do what you want to do with your story. If you learn from the feedback and critique, and you end up wanting to tell your story differently, then do what you want and change your story. If you don't end up wanting to tell your story differently, do what you want and don't change your story.

In other words, any feedback can be taken or discarded at your own discretion. You're not trying to find out if your story "is good" or "is bad."

You're on a data-gathering expedition!

This process is vital to growing past writing readable prose and gaining mastery over the language--bending the words to your will and crafting experiences for readers to have.

By looking at things more scientifically, you'll begin to grow faster and faster. There's still a lot of subjectivity to it, of course. But that's the art: shaping another person's subjective experience by words on a page!

And as you do this more and more, you'll be able to write to a better standard even before you've gotten feedback.

"But it feels scary to share my work!"

It does, at first. "What if they don't like it? What if I get criticism?" The context of this process is that you are conducting experiments to gather data, sure. But it can be hard for your brain to get on board with that, and to skip the gut reaction of "oh no they don't like me!"

So here's one extra specific experiment you can conduct if you're worried about people seeing your work--even sharing complete stories we're proud of.

Write something you know isn't the best. Or is actually bad. First-drafts tend to be bad without editing--that's all just part of the process. So just write a little something. This is safe enough; if you lack confidence in the first place, then thinking your writing isn't good is par for the course, even if it's good. So doing this on purpose shouldn't be a big deal.

Now, knowing it's bad, post it somewhere actually requesting feedback on it. Asking people to tell you what's bad about it. You already know there's stuff wrong with it, things you might want to fix already. All that's happening is others are talking about the same things, and perhaps finding other aspects you can improve you didn't spot. That's the whole point of getting feedback: finding things that you'd want to fix that you didn't notice on your own!

But this way, you're initiating all of it, from writing "badly" to people telling you what you wrote "badly." That's what you wanted to happen.

And, even when you're more confident in your writing ability... that's what you'll be using feedback for too. This is like a practise run to get used to the feeling of putting something out there and people talking about what's good and bad about it.

Now, the uber-writers know this one last secret to growing as a writer: Giving Feedback (shh, don't tell anyone).

This is the juiciest of them all! You're active-reading... plus plus! Because you also have to put into words what is happening, which is even harder than just sensing you're not into how that writer did that one thing. You also get scientific with it--but from the other side!

That sentence didn't feel right to you. Why? How might it be changed to make it feel less weird? And how do you convey that to the writer so it's useful feedback?

That scene wasn't as impactful as you thought it was going to be. What about the structure of the story let that down? How might you shuffle things around to bring out the drama in that moment?

This is great practise for keeping your editor-brain separate to your writing-brain. You're practising not creatively writing at all, while being in the very analytical mode of finding any problems. You're figuring out how to shape the messy clay into something more purposeful, easier to read, more effective. While being detached entirely from the text, because it's not even something you wrote! This mindset is very useful when you want to get into editor mode and work on your own stories.

This kind of deeper thinking is what you get by giving feedback to people asking for it. And those that are looking for feedback are from all sorts of backgrounds, and all sorts of skill levels when it comes to writing.

You can see a lot of new ideas, new ways of writing, new traps to fall into, and analyse them all to figure out what makes them tick. And they tend to not be entire novels, so you can get a lot of that in a shorter time, too!

Just keep in mind those different skill levels when writing your feedback, however. Back when you were just starting out, if someone who seems to know what they were talking about said to you "it's good," like a family member might do... how would that have made you feel? On top of the world! And if they told you "it's bad," you would've quit writing on the spot!

So many writers have quit writing from bad feedback at an early stage for years!

This isn't to say you should coddle them and pat them on the head and send them on their way. Even if you sense that they're not at the "scientific" stage yet, they are seeking to grow as a writer. And hey, look at that--you're a writer, and you can help them grow!

So, start with a positive thing about their piece. Even if that's "you've got a clear vision of your world!" when you as the reader aren't exactly sure you have a handle on what that world is even if it's vividly described.

Be truthful, but find something that they've got a glimmer of that will help them in their writing journey. In the early days, finishing anything is tough. Having an idea and writing it down is tough. Getting tense correct is tough. Because it's all new to you.

Having a clear vision of their world isn't something everyone has. Sometimes it's so far in the background that you feel like you and the characters are standing in a blank white room. So even if the only good thing is that they have the confidence to have a world and present it to the reader... hype them up on that!

And whatever little slice of being a writer they've got is a good place to grow from. Nurture it, even in a brief comment pointing it out. Make them feel good about it.

Then, based on what their skill level might be, give them something to reach for in what they write next.

I like to make that clear to such writers... in the early days, you shouldn't be editing and revising and redrafting the same 3 opening paragraphs over and over, you should be writing new stuff all the time! So...

Give them something to work on for next time.

...Or next chapter, or whatever. Like, "For your next story, think about how you might show the world from your character's perspective more. What do they notice? What do they think about the statue in the distance? And how would they describe it? This helps the reader get to know the character better, just by how you narrate things. 👍"

Something simple, and understandable, with a hint of teaching them why that might be good for a story. Don't inundate them with your many pearls of wisdom and a full line-edit. Just gently help them take one more step in the right direction.

All of this is scaled according to the apparent skill level of the writer you're giving critique to, of course. A better-written story might warrant a real review of the story as a whole, and a longer list of aspects they could look into improving. Things like that.

Just be careful not to make people run away from writing. It's all too easy to cause.

#writing #get better at writing #improve #prose #storytelling #feedback #reading #advice #podcasts

[alwri-tes]

Hello, @alwri-tes ! 👋

Congratulations on self-publishing 2 novels! That’s a tremendous achievement! ✨

What got you into writing? Do you enjoy it as more of a profession, or a hobby? Were there any mediums that inspired you to take up the creative journey? 💫

Hello!

Thank you!

I don't think there was ever a moment where I specifically "got into" writing-I was a very imaginative child, and from the age of nine, if not earlier, I would make up stories in my head and sometimes write them down in notebooks. If we're talking about beginning to take creative writing seriously and as a legitimate endeavor, then I think that was when I was about thirteen, when I attempted to write my first novel over the course of a summer. It was one long story broken up into three separate parts, a trilogy of sorts I guess. I completed the first part (It was around 15 pages iirc) and felt immensely accomplished. But for a variety of reasons I never completed the second or third parts and eventually abandoned it. Though I might return to that idea one day, who knows. I was actually thinking about it for the first time in years the other day.

In a weird twist of irony, the first book I published was one I had not started with the intent of writing a novel. It was a quarantine project that I took up to distract myself from the world crumbling in 2020, and it just grew and grew and grew from there.

To answer your second question, I currently see writing a bit more of a profession than a hobby, especially since I now get real life money from book sales. The monetary aspect of it has definitely changed how I view it. I don't write with the intent of making money-I write with the intent of creating something-but now that the self-publishing and selling process is something I have to consider, I now think things like how long or short should this be? and I need to force myself to write to stay on top of it so I can sell this sooner.

There are a lot of mediums that have inspired me over the years. Books (obviously). But also television and movies, particularly animated ones. I've loved animation my whole life, and it's been a long time wish of mine to be able to animate my stories, but I find that writing them is a better fit.

#al talks #ask #thanks for the ask! #writeblr #authorblr #goldencomet69

[rigelmejo]

random observation/tips I use for myself when studying, so maybe they're useful to someone

To improve listening comprehension skills, listen and re-listen to audio a lot! I'm not kidding, put on an audio and listen to it 5-10 times or more some day. While you're working, or driving, or playing video games, or cleaning, or cooking, or walking. You don't have to pay attention the whole time, it's okay to just catch phrases or sentences here or there. The main thing is you get repeated audio exposure to words you need to know, so the words you 'in theory' studied before you get better at recognizing through listening FASTER, and so you start listening for new unknown words and somewhere in your mind you've got the vague idea of how they sound for when you learn them more during study or reading or repetition in shows/conversations. The more listening you can do, the more you'll get a sense of how the grammar should flow, how words usually show up in particular phrases, how some phrases sound slurred/shortened certain ways, how words sound in different voices and accents. And again, most importantly, you get better at recognizing the words you 'know' from study INSTANTLY when hearing them. That takes practice! At first, it might take you 20 minutes and 4 re-listens to recognize a basic word you learned today (like say 'mochiron' of course in Japanese) because you aren't used to immediately recognizing it when listening yet. Maybe it depends on your learning style, but for me I found increasing listening study time drastically improved my: vocabulary recognition, reading speed, active vocabulary, listening comprehension (of course), ease of watching shows/playing games/following conversations (because listening and reading comprehension Speed were improved). Also, at a certain point you know enough words to learn brand New words from listening, and at that point listening/re-listening can be valuable for learning new words by immersing with audio. Since audio like audiobooks, audiodramas, are going to expose you to more words per minute than shows or movies or games, and more words per minute than reading until the day you get your reading speed significantly high. (On a related note, lets plays on youtube you can sometimes turn automatic 'closed captions' on for, and they can be a useful beginner-intermediate immersion option. Some youtubers will talk constantly, giving you more words-per-minute exposure than playing the game yourself, and sometimes they'll explain what they're doing which helps give you context for words and helps you learn to play the game and understand the command names if you want to try to later, and lets players often say things like 'i think' and 'i feel' and 'i like' opinion statements which can be helpful for recognizing casual conversation kinds of topics and words. And because it is a visual medium, you can listen and also get visual context of the gameplay to figure out what's going on, and automatic closed captions to see how words are spelled and get some reading practice in).

If the goal is primarily learning to understand words through listening that you already understand when reading, then pick listening material of something where you could easily understand the written transcript. (So for example you'd understand around 95% of the written transcript).

If the goal is primarily to learn new words, pick something you can understand the main idea of if you read the written transcript but that would still have unknown words. (So for example you'd understand maybe 75-95% of the written transcript). The first 1-5 listens you may be figuring out the main idea and trying to recognize through listening the words you know the written form of, and then after that any future listens you'll start learning those new unknown words.

To improve reading comprehension: read a lot! (Well yeah, but-) Okay, more specific: read 1. things you enjoy 2. things you will ACTUALLY read (so if you love comics but hate novels, go read comics) 3. if you find yourself exhausted reading, burned out, drained, then go look for easier reading material. Read the easier stuff for a while, and then you can try that challenging reading material again and hopefully it will make you feel less exhausted. Depending on your target language, there are some sites with recommendations on what reading materials will be easier or harder. I suggest that if you are a beginner, you read at least some graded reading materials (unless you are SO bored you avoid reading them, in which case just dive into materials written for native speakers so you'll Read Something). The transition from reading Graded Readers to materials for native speakers is ALWAYS going to feel hard, you are ALWAYS going to feel drained/exhausted the first 3-6 months reading materials for native speakers. Just because the jump in difficulty, the drastic word increase, is usually a bit steep and you just need to keep trying until you learn enough of those extra words you needed to get used to materials for native speakers. It's usually 1000-4000 more words you need to get used to, once you make the jump to materials for natives. Ways to speed this transition along include: using flashcards (I can't but maybe you can get yourself to do them), word lists, picking gradually more difficult reading materials (that way you only need to learn 200-500 new words per new novel/comic etc, and that's much easier to just gradually do as you read a long story).

Beginner suggestions: pick up graded readers in order of unique word count. Start with graded readers with 100-500 unique words, then 500-1000 unique words, and then if graded readers exist with 1000-2000 words try out reading one of them. If you're extra lucky, read 2000-3000 unique word graded readers if they exist for your target language. The first graded reader you read may feel like a challenge or even exhausting, that's likely to happen each time you move up into a higher unique word count. You're likely ready to move onto a higher unique word count, if you re-read the beginning of a graded reader you're on and find it's easier to read than the first time you read it's beginning. If you're a perfectionist like me, just move forward to a more difficult (more unique words) graded reader each time and do not dwell in one difficulty level for more than 1-3 months. You don't need to be a perfectionist, I promise the words in that 500 unique word graded reader will keep popping up in NEARLY ALL the reading you ever do in your target language, and if you don't learn 'basket' or 'newspaper' now you will learn those words by 2 years in when you've seen the words countless times in shows and novels. If you tend perfectionist like me, I suggest aiming to vaguely recognize words then be okay moving on, and not stop if you haven't 'perfectly remembered' every word.

If you choose to skip or speed through graded reading material, I suggest studying the most common 1000-3000 words in a language ASAP. You can read a word list, do flashcards like anki, do a textbook/class that covers those words, whatever. You can study 1000 common words if you're okay with a STEEP difficulty spike, and study 3000 words if you'd like a less steep difficulty spike. Bascially, when you read materials for native speakers, most of those materials are at minimum going to have 2000 unique words. All of those materials are likely to have the most common words in them, which you will have just studied so you have some kind of skeleton foundation of knowledge to rely on when figuring out what you're reading's main idea is and try to narrow down which new words are most important to look up the meaning of and learn next. Many 'easier' materials for native speakers (like for middle schooler reading level) are going to have 3000-4000 unique words, half of which are not the common ~2000 words you studied.

During the initial difficulty spike, you'll start looking up these new words - either every single new word, or key words you feel are important to understanding the main idea. You may end up looking up many of the initial common words you already studied, because you forgot them or they're only vaguely recognized, that's fine. Once you've read a novel or two, ran into those common words 2-12 times or more, you'll KNOW them. Making the next novel that much easier.

It takes on average 12 word lookups to remember a new word. So just look up words (or guess them or some combination). Personally some words took me 1-2 word lookups and others took me 20. Any important/common words to understanding the main idea, I picked up fairly fast. If you utilize flashcards, it will also be likely a handful of reviews or less and you'll learn new words.

If you're reading and the goal is to improve speed of comprehension of words you know (how fast you recognize them) and improve reading speed, pick a novel/reading material that is EASIER for you. So pick a reading material where you do not need to look up words at ALL to understand the main idea, and ideally if you can find one then pick reading material where you understand most details too without any word lookup. This will probably be 95% words comprehended or more (so you know 95 out of every 100 words you see, or more). If you want extra challenge, read along while an audiobook plays, or while Text To Speech plays (like Edge's Read Aloud TTS). If you can control the audio speed, you can also increase it, to increase your reading speed. If you have some words you've learned in reading but not listening, this can be a good way to improve your listening word recognition so that it's closer to your reading word recognition. Reading material you mostly understand will also help you STRENGTHEN understanding of what you've learned: you'll get better at understanding grammar, at getting key information from a text faster, and be able to develop reading comprehension skills by practicing them on something you know you CAN read.

If you're reading and the goal is to improve vocabulary? This is the rare case where I purposely pick a reading material at least a little above my reading level. So if you know say 3000 words and just read a novel with 3500 unique words, you might look for a novel with 4000 unique words or even 4500 unique words. If comfort matters to you, pick a reading material where you can follow the main overall idea WITHOUT word lookup, but you cannot understand many details - so you'll learn a lot of new words when looking up words in the details and nuance, but when you get tired/burned out you'll be able to scrape by without looking up words and by guessing when a key unknown word comes up. If you are OKAY with feeling DRAINED for the first 1-10 chapters, you don't even need to understand the main idea without word lookup... although I suggest you pick a reading material where you can at least vaguely identify the setting, main characters, part of the main idea (like if its a murder mystery you can tell its a murder mystery at LEAST, even if you have no idea who the investigator is or who died or what they're talking about). If you don't understand even a little bit of the main idea, you are likely to be extremely drained when reading and will need to look up nearly every word... and if that happens you're likely to give up. What you're aiming for is a story you cannot follow, but COULD follow if you looked up around 5-20 words a page (or maybe 100 words a chapter). You'll look up a LOT of words in the first few chapters, and it will be draining. But then in the following chapters, the novel will KEEP using the words you looked up, meaning you will get practice identifying them and learn them quickly because recognizing them will make your life easier. Once that happens, it will be a few more chapters of looking up LESS words per page, and re-looking up words you just learned to double check you remembered them. And by about 1/3 to halfway through the novel you'll notice it's become much easier to read. Congrats, you just increased your reading level! Your vocabulary has improved by 100-500 words in a month! (or however long it took you to get through the first several chapters of the book). Picking a book just 1-2 reading levels above where you currently feel comfortable (so 500-1000 new words in the book) is a good way to boost your vocabulary level. It will be a bit of a slog initially because there's a LOT more new unknown words, but once you've gone through that slog you get practice reading the new words.

I tend to go back and forth between books I understand 95% or more of (for extensive reading where I only look up a word occasionally if it seems important and I can't guess it), and books where I understand maybe 85-95% of the words (I'll look up EVERY unknown word in the first few chapters, then every key word for understanding the main idea as the reading gets easier, then it'll become a book I do understand 95% of). As I go back and forth, the reading material I understand increases in unique word count. So for example: at the beginning of 2023 I could extensively read novels with a unique word count of around 2000 and could intensively read (look up many words) novels with a word count of around 3000. Now in the beginning of 2024, I can comfortably extensively read novels with a unique word count of 3000, and can intensively read novels with a word count of around 4000. This will depend on genre, and what genres you read and therefore words you ended up learning. But overall you'll notice the range of how many unique words in a reading material you can handle, goes up.

Usually the first thing I do when starting to study a new language, so for the first 6 months or so, is: 1. Look up a list of common words (either from a book, textbook, website, flashcards, anki, videos etc) and review it about once every week or two for ~2-3 months 2. Look up a free pronunciation guide online with audio examples (and go through it for 1 week to 1 month) 3. Look up how the language works roughly like structure, if it has conjugations, certain word order, the writing system (read a few free articles, usually takes 3-6 hours). 4. If the writing system is different, spend time learning it (a new alphabet would probably take 2-4 weeks, either reading articles with audio examples or flashcards or in japanese's case I did an app for katakana/hiragana with mnemonics and quizzes). That is the first 3 months or so. 5. If the writing system is vastly different (japanese kanji, chinese hanzi) look up a few introductory articles on how it works, like chinese hanzi being made of radicals often with a sound and meaning component, like words often being 2 hanzi together, or japanese kanji being the stem of verbs with hiragana conjugation, kanji having multiple pronunciations and meanings depending on the word they make. Then find a book (or anki deck or site) that goes through all common-use writing pieces with word examples. In Chinese's case this was a reference book covering all HSK hanzi, an introductory book with 800 common hanzi and word examples and mnemonics (my favorite reference book ever), and my common word list* (see point 1) which was Ben Whatley's 1000 and 2000 most common chinese words memrise decks. In Japanese's case, this was a 300 word common kanji reference book with mnemonics, a full JLPT kanji reference book with word examples, and then I learned a majority of kanji through my common word list*(see point 1) which was Nukemarine's LLJ memrise decks. I prefer learning hanzi and kanji in words, so my basic study of them was initial mnemonics to learn super common characters and practice learning HOW to remember them, then moving on to character study as a part of vocabulary overall study. For chinese, this initial hanzi study took around 3 months. For japanese, this process of initial 500 kanji study took 2 years because I was a mess who didn't know what I was doing. Basically, the goal is just a general understanding of HOW writing system works and recognizing basic things. For french, this might be some basic recognition of how conjugations change spelling. 5. Read a basic grammar guide summary online for free, to get an overview of how the language works roughly. This takes 1-2 weeks, maybe roughly 12-20 reading hours. I will go back and reread bits of this grammar guide summary later when I see grammar in real language, and may look up more specific grammar points in more in-depth grammar guides later on if I get confused or want to know more. 6. Around months 3-5, start reading Graded Readers. I will start reading graded readers once I have studied at least 500 words, maybe up to 1000-2000 words, which has usually happened by month 5. Reading is how I practice actually remembering the common words and writing system I've been studying, so the months of Graded Reading materials is where I really start remembering and learning what I've reviewed and been introduced to. All of the points 1-5 I do in whatever order works best, usually multiple at the same time.

7. As I increase the difficulty of Graded Readers, usually around months 6-12, I start trying to watch and read some materials for native speakers. It's usually very hard, makes me feel drained, and at first I can only handle 10 minutes and work my way up to being able to do it an hour. I watch/read some stuff without looking words up (to force myself to practice relying on what I've studied), and watch/read some stuff while looking words up that seem important to understanding the main idea. And if I feel up for it, sometimes I'll look up all unknown words. This 6-12 month period feels the most difficult, broken up by easier moments when I go back to graded readers and when I notice my grammar comprehension and comprehension of words I've studied is getting easier. By about the end of 1 year, I've learned around 2000 common words enough to transition to primarily reading stuff for native speakers to learn more vocabulary. (This 1-7 process is what I did to initially learn to read French, and Chinese, and I switched to this plan in Japanese which worked well... after dawdling for 2 years not really being goal oriented).

#rant #study plan

[stackslip]

everyone is allowed to have their own taste and to like different anime and manga and i don't actually want to be an animanga snob. again i'm a fucking dragon ball enjoyer, i have no legs to stand on. but there's so much animanga out there that people rave about simply because they think it's Different TM and Better TM than most anime and manga bc plot wise it deviates on a surface level from the basic shoujo or battle shounen formula that to most people represent 99.99% of animanga, and thus it has to be exceptional and worldstopping and truly unique. again treating anime and manga as incredibly restrictive genres rather than as full on storytelling mediums in which you can find practically anything, just like yknow, novels or comic books. and part of the issue i think might be that yeah the official commercial releases in the west tend to licence the same shit over and over again. but see this is why you look for fanscans and you don't just read weekly shounen jump! this is why even as they decline in numbers and copyright hawks fall down upon them, fan translator groups are heroes to all of us. look for non-licenced manga, or manga that's out of print in the west! look for anime that isn't on crunchyroll's front page! it's like the people complaining about the decline of tv because they only watch what's on their netflix front page and nothing else. it's like the people who moan about YA destroying literature who literally do not seek out any other kind of lit or self published authors. there's a wide world out there my friends! start looking for stuff outside of the mainstream licenced official pages that only want to show you the latest algorithm-selected works.

#eli talks

[lunarlagomorph]

what would you recommend to someone who wants to get into anime, manga and visual novels who only has mainstream knowledge of the mediums?

i think it mostly depends on the kind of things you like moreso than anything. that said i think if you're trying to move into visual novels I started with steins;gate and really loved it, it isn't currently my favorite visual novel but my favorites suffer from issues with translation or being really fucking long that might turn away someone new to the medium. Steins;gate also defines some terms it uses that you might not know otherwise if you haven't engaged much with modern japanese art (things like NEET and various references). Other options, while not actually visual novels, are 999 and Ace Attorney, which might be a good transition from video games to book games.

Anime is a bit harder for me to say because I don't know what you mean by mainstream and there's too many things to reccomend without knowing your taste. My first anime was Kill la Kill but I'm not sure I'd call that a good starting point. Maybe something like Mob Psycho 100 or Cardcaptor Sakura. Kaguya-sama is also a pretty good comedy to start with.

Manga there's about the same issues for reccomending things as with anime. Kaguya-sama's manga is good (possibly better) than the anime so i'd put that down here. If you're willing to deal with things like sexual assault I think Berserk is a great manga, and though it does have anime Kentaro Miura's art is the reason to read it (i haven't actually watched any berserk anime tho so shrug). That is long as hell though. A manga that is not that long and does not have an anime that I don't see anyone ever talk about is Spirit Circle. It's quick, very dynamic (basically an anthology), and pretty fun. Also I'm not sure if Junji Ito qualifies as 'mainstream' (though imo he is at this point) but Uzumaki was the first manga I read so that's worth putting out there too.

Other than that there's obviously boatloads of things to name but everything i named is imo a good starting point.

[maxhpart]

12 and 18 for the art ask!

(WHOOPS, didn't mean to take a week to get back to this! I'm hoping I can actually return to art-as-usual for a little while.)

12. Show your favourite drawing from this year (2023)

Ough, questions of favorites are tricky for me because it's hard to pick just one! However, I think I have my answer. The question isn't asking about my most popular (Matrix Barbie), most grueling (Art Fight multiattack), most experimental (Spider-Punk for style, Caduceus for medium), or best example of what I do (Izel & Yaretzi). The question asks for my favorite, which is this one from August:

(It has been my phone wallpaper for a while!)

I love the composition and colors on this one; they make me smile. I love the layering and texturing I did here. I love that I got to try out the Amogus technique, and it worked better than whatever I would have done instead! And I love it for what it's about: the heat and joys of summer :) Extra nice to think about on these (northern hemisphere) cold winter days.

18. Do you have any larger projects you’d like to pursue? Like comics, shortfilm, a series etc?

I've had recent-ish ideas for one-off comics (a few pages, tops) and merch sets and such, and I think it'd be neat to run a zine someday.

A few years back, I had an idea for a (fan/adaptation) TTRPG that I worked on intermittently for a while. I didn't get to the stage of making art for it, but I would definitely want to if I ever picked it up again and worked out the rest of the kinks in the mechanics/structure of gameplay. Might just want to rebuild it (from scratch) (again)...

I also have always—as in, literally since childhood—thought it'd be neat to make [art for] a video game. These days, I'm wondering if doing something like making my own visual novel would be a good fit (for doing final art in a style/medium familiar to me), or doing character design for a team that translates it to a different style/medium. I dunno! It's not a specific ambition for right now, just something that might be neat. But if inspiration strikes me or a suitable opportunity arises, I might pursue it after all!

Thank you for the questions! I hadn't thought about the game stuff in a while. These are good things to consider for a new year 👀

#ask meme #not art #artists on tumblr #maxhpart #maxhpart answers

[ash-and-books]

Rating: 5/5

Book Blurb: A clever con woman must convince a skeptical, sexy farmer of his property's resident real-life ghost if she's to save them all from a fate worse than death, in this delightful new novel from the author of Mrs. Nash's Ashes.

Fake spirit medium Gretchen Acorn is happy to help when her best (read: wealthiest) client hires her to investigate the unexplained phenomena preventing the sale of her bridge partner’s struggling goat farm. Gretchen may be a fraud, but she'd like to think she’s a beneficentone. So if "cleansing" the property will help a nice old man finally retire and put some much-needed cash in her pockets at the same time, who's she to say no?

Of course, it turns out said bridge partner isn't the kindly AARP member Gretchen imagined—Charlie Waybill is young, hot as hell, and extremely unconvinced that Gretchen can communicate with the dead. (Which, fair.) Except, to her surprise, Gretchen finds herself face-to-face with Everett: the very real, very chatty ghost that’s been wreaking havoc during every open house. And he wants her to help ensure Charlie avoids the same family curse that's had Everett haunting Gilded Creek since the 1920s.

Now, Gretchen has one month to convince Charlie he can’t sell the property. Unfortunately, hard work and honesty seem to be the way to win over the stubborn farmer—not exactly Gretchen's strengths. But trust isn’t the only thing growing between them, and the risk of losing Charlie to the spirit realm looms over Gretchen almost as annoyingly as Everett himself. To save the goat farm, its friendly phantom, and the man she's beginning to love, Gretchen will need to pull off the greatest con of her life: being fully, genuinely herself.

Review:

A con artist who makes her living as a fake medium finds herself in over her head when she begins seeing an actual ghost and now has to help him break the curse on his family... except said family member is a hot grumpy farmer who sees right through her and wants her off his farm. Gretchen Acorn is a fake spirit medium and has become one of the best at her job. She has only one rule though: to leave her clients better off than when she met them, thats so she can be different from her father, a horrible con man, Gretchen might take money from people but she's adamant that they're happier when she's done. Gretchen isn't a bad person, but she's not exactly a good one. When Gretchen's client pays her to help a friend she can't help but say yes, what was suppose to be an easy pay day is ruined when she finds out that Charlie Waybill, the friend she was suppose to help isn't an old man on a farm but rather a very hot farmer who is unconvinced Gretchen can communicate with the dead. Yet Gretchen is in for the surprise of her life when she actually begins seeing a ghost, this time the con isn't fake and she is really communicating with a ghost. The ghost is related to Charlie's family and tells Gretchen that she has to help him break the curse on their family and to save Charlie. How can she save Charlie when he wants nothing more for her to get away as far as possible. Now Gretchen has to find a way to convince Charlie that the curse is very real and that she can actually communicate with him. Gretchen won't leave so Charlie offers her a deal: she'll work on the farm for a few months in exchange for room and board, that'll give her enough time to try and save Charlie. Yet the more time they spend together the more the feelings between them begin to grow. Gretchen is about to face her biggest challenge yet: being her true self and possibly opening her heart up. Can she break the curse before it's too late? This was such a cute and cozy autumnal/spooky romance vibe book. I love a fun con artist story with a touch of ghost. Charlie and Gretchen were really cute, despite how much they thought they were different, they had so much in common and cared so much about each other. This was a really cute feel good read and I had fun with it!

*Thanks Netgalley and Berkley Publishing Group, Berkley for sending me an arc in exchange for an honest review*

#book review #bookish #happy medium

[eternalglitch]

What kind of stuff did u learn at screenwritting classes? I love how visual you're writting is, and i would like to get better at mine, but engineering is a bit (<- laughs at my daily 5 hours of sleep) time draining, so i would like to know what stuff could i learn by myself, when i've got free time. I would love to take actual classes, and i know that might be the best, but im at the half of my career, so that's kind of a far future

Oh do not WORRY I double majored in Computer Science and slept in that accursed hallway several times trying to code in college. That's also what I'm employed for right now, actually! It consumed so much of my time, honestly my writing classes was my one fun pick of each semester.

I would say watching movies and TV shows and figuring out the following is very helpful:

What is the POV? How does that affect how information is given to the viewers?

Visually what sticks out to you when watching a movie? What are the types of body language that go with each emotion?

What are character arcs that are tried and true and WORK? Which ones sometimes work, sometimes don't, and what is the deciding factor?

How do writers carry themes throughout their work? How do they place foreshadowing?

Also, I don't know if I would suggest focusing just on writing in college anyways. The secret is that you don't super need it, you just need to have samples of your work. Lots of samples. That's how you practice.

For actual classes, I learned a lot more at a summer class I took at UCLA for screenwriting than my actual college's classes because that teacher knew exactly what she was doing and had industry experience as a screenwriter.

I also joined a bunch of writing discord servers for screenwriters, joined writing groups, and hopped into free talks people would give until I decided that ultimately I would rather become a novelist someday in the future instead of a screenwriter right now.

Not to mention fanfiction! I've been posting online since I was 13; seeing what were the areas people liked about my work helped just as much as a teacher pointing out where I was struggling. It's really a free practice room. Post online if you have the courage!! Most people are super nice about recognizing your efforts.

Biggest thing is to consume a lot of media in different mediums; comics and movies both push visual story telling, so focusing on how those tell stories and contrasting them with novels can help get you thinking. What does a novel do BETTER? What does a visual medium do better? How can you take the best of both worlds?

Best of luck anon!

#glitch answers #writing advice #a little all over the place but I hope this makes sense! its a big subject

[bobbyinthegarden]

March & April Reading Wrap-Up

Just like my February Reading Wrap-Up, here’s March & April

Fiction

Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen 

Might be my favourite Jane Austen novel? Maybe? I love the relationship between the sisters, and I hard relate to Marianne in an “I’m in the photo and I don’t like it” kind of way.

The Passion of New Eve by Angela Carter

This book is really weird. I think I liked it, but I’m still working through my thoughts on it. I saw somebody on Goodreads say that this book is a bit like a hybrid of Mad Max: Fury Road and The Handmaid’s Tale, and that is pretty accurate. It’s bizarre at times, I was trying to explain some of the plot to my partner who was extremely bewildered by it. Major trigger warning that there is a lot of sexual violence in this book, and it also features forced surgical transition as a major plot point, so, do with that what you will.

The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins

Did a whole review of this one

Silas Marner by George Eliot

Absolutely adored this book, I am now a full fledged George Eliot stan.

Axoim’s End by Lindsay Ellis

I don’t know if this will be a surprise or not, based on my blog, but I do actually like sci-fi. Not so surprising, considering my lifelong X-Files obsession, I like stories about aliens and weird conspiracies to cover them up, so this definitely appealed to me for that reason and this was pretty decent, I will be continuing the series when I have time.

The X-Files: Fight the Future by Elizabeth Hand, adapted from the screenplay by Chris Carter

I thought it would be fun to check out some of the X-Files novelisations. As with most TV shows that get novel tie-ins, some are adaptations of episodes and some are original stories, with X-Files, they seem to mostly be original stories, but this one is a novelisation of the first movie. It’s a very faithful re-telling, it doesn’t really add anything, but it doesn’t detract anything either, it’s a very straight re-telling of the movie. I like the movie (the first one anyway), so that was fine for me, and the books pretty short so it only took me two days to get through.

The X-Files: Cold Cases by Joe Harris and Chris Carter 

Debated if I should include this in my wrap-up or not, since it’s an audiodrama, not a book, BUT I listened to it specifically for my 2023 Reading Challenge (the audiobook category). Full review incoming.

The Railway Children by E. Nesbit

Read this one for my reading challenge too, this time the children’s literature category. Despite really loving the movie when I was a kid, I’d never actually read the book, so it was nice to finally sit down and read it. Full review incoming.

Colonel Brandon In His Own Words by Shannon Winslow

I read this purely because I was curious to learn what self-published Jane Austen fanfiction is like, and I chose this one because I had read Sense and Sensibility so recently (for the unaware, this book is a re-telling of that one). It’s basically exactly what you expect. I saw somebody on Goodreads say that they liked this book better than Sense and Sensibility, which is definitely not an opinion that I share. The depictions of the Indian characters and the British Army in this book was quite questionable, in my opinion.

Non-fiction:

The Medium is the Massage by Marshall McLuhan

I read this book several years ago, when I was doing my BA at university, and it totally blew my mind. I have far too many thoughts about this book to express in one short paragraph, other than to say that it’s amazing that this book was written in the 1960s, Marhsall McLuhan was out there, writing about the internet 20 years before it was even invented.

First They Killed My Father by Loung Ung

Did a whole review of this one too

Poetry:

Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky 

This one too

Zines/comics:

The Fisherman’s Wife by @grendel-menz

A re-telling of the tale of the fairytale with absolutely gorgeous art that truly took my breath away. [LINK]

Two Pounds of Flesh by @thequeenofbithynia

I’ve talked about other comics by this user in my February wrap-up. This one is a beautiful and complex tale about gender, blended with horror - it’s extremely cool. I love everything that Andreas makes, and am planning on buying his most recent comic as well when I can. [LINK]

#Bobby speaks #bookblr #books

[nostalgebraist-autoresponder]

Title: Moby Dick (1851)

Author: Ishmael

Rating: 3/5 stars

Ishmael is really the perfect person to write this book -- too perfect, really -- not merely because he's so representative of "American authors in the 19th century," and not merely because he's such a good encapsulation of the "American" cultural attitude (as far as you can say that, when we're talking about a people who could not write a decent letter in reply to an invitation).

Ishmael is, for his time, such an impeccably perfect dude. He's a very successful writer, and, unlike Melville's better-known contemporary Nathaniel Hawthorne, he never even pretends that his writing is for any other purpose than pure self-expression. When Ishmael is writing, he is absolutely 100% sure that he has a story in his head and that he has to get it onto the page.

He's a writer in the same sense that (say) Nabokov is a writer -- and if you haven't noticed that yet, well, then, just wait a bit. At some point soon it should dawn on you that "I can only write fiction if I can think about fiction for hours without getting distracted" is not a novel, or even, really, an oddity. Maybe it never will. Maybe you won't ever be able to write that way. But, given how few of us are able to actually do that -- how many of us only write when we're thinking about something else, or don't even have a real story in our heads? -- it's not, perhaps, necessarily a fatal problem. I'm certainly glad that my (probably) limited ability to write fiction doesn't stop me from reading all the time.

The whole book is about this perfection, really. Ishmael feels his way into this book slowly, but it's very clearly the result of what he likes to do, and how he is: the product of a man who is obsessed with creating stories but who is, perhaps, also very lucky to have been able to find a medium in which he can do it. Everything about the story, down to its choice of title, feels like a calculated choice that it is perfectly entitled to make. His choice to do his thing, to go fishing (in some cases literally), to do whatever it is that he's doing, can't possibly be an accident or an accident of biography -- the book would otherwise be worthless, would have no life at all. There's nothing you could really do in the context of 1851 America, in a world that wasn't being torn apart, that would have made a difference here; only "chance" could have allowed the man who wrote this book and not someone else, so there really must have been some force working for it. In this book, everything feels very deliberate and very planned and perfectly "right."

Not every chapter is, perhaps, in this category. There are chapters that feel very odd and like they might have been inserted at some later, better point in the story -- although not, it should be said, in an attempt to "improve" this book, to make it into the "perfect book." But there are none that don't feel like a chapter, and I'm never in doubt that what I'm reading is what Ishmael has written in his head, what he has decided to have written, what he has decided to think about. It feels more like an "experiment" than an "exploration" -- not that there's anything wrong with that, but I'm reading the story of a man who feels like he knows exactly where the story will take him, and I've been waiting to see how it actually plays out.

There are chapters that I've seen many people mention in good reviews, chapters that are not bad but are clearly just not as interesting as the other chapters, and chapters that are in my opinion quite weak. Some of these weaker parts are in the chapters that I don't like. Some are, I suspect, just what happens when you stop being a total perfectionist and decide that, while your book isn't "for" anything else, it would be nice to have some chapters that might actually be "for" something. Some of them would be very good, or at least much better, if they were written from some other point in the story than the point they actually are.

One of the chapters, in particular, sticks in my head, because it has to do with a particular character and the idea that he is "the most wonderful, the most splendid of men" -- which sounds like a standard 19th-century author's dream. But this chapter, which has to do with this character, ends with the reader hearing the narrator speak of "the horrible, the loathsome creature, the leviathan" as though it were a completely ordinary thing. The narrator thinks this character, who he has just seen for the first time (for no real reason at all), is the most wonderful, splendid thing ever to be discovered on earth, and that the creature he is talking about is (in this chapter) an almost inhuman monster. The chapter ends in the most horrifying tone imaginable. It's as if the author of this book decided to say: "Here are my thoughts about this character. Here are some of his good qualities, and here are some of his flaws. He's perfect! And he's terrible! And he's fascinating! But also disgusting! But mostly, he is wonderful and glorious! Now you must read my book because this is important to me. And it is important for me to be seen as one who writes well. But mostly, I just want you to read my book because my book is the most wonderful and splendid thing ever. Read my book. Read it so that I can live, I guess. This book is so good that, well, you'll just have to read it. You don't have a choice."

Well, sure, that's what this is all about. The man is a writer who wants to write, but his characters have to be worthy. His story has to make sense, and it has to make you think about things, and, above all, it has to make you look at things. I could read a book written by someone who thought, at its beginning, "I want to write the most wonderful and the most splendid of books. I want this book to be read by everyone." This would be a weird book, one I wouldn't really want to read -- but it would still be a book, a real and fully formed entity, and it wouldn't just be something for me, something for my enjoyment. I'm not interested in reading that book. My book is about the way that the things I love happen to me -- and I've already read that book. It's as if I were looking at, say, some of the early chapters of this book, not looking to see how Ishmael makes his story, but hoping to find some new part of it that will make me feel.

If I had to sum up the book, I'd say that Ishmael wants to be, in a way, like Melville -- the writer who seems to want to be very well-liked by the people around him, the author who has put his soul into his story. This is not a bad thing, but at this point in time, when we've all learned, or should have learned, that that kind of artifice and artificiality are not necessary for creating "good" art, but are not just for the author's own benefit, it's a bit much, even for Is