Yay, unsolicited advice time! Or, not really advice, more like miscellaneous tips and tricks, because if there's one thing eight years of martial arts has equipped me to write, it's fight scenes.

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Fun things to add to a fight scene (hand to hand edition)

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Just thought these might be useful! If you want a more comprehensive guide or a weapons edition, feel free to ask. If you want, write how your characters fight in the comments!

Have a bitchin day <3

Ship Sizes

Supercarrier: fandom flagship.  Everybody and their dog ships it.  The fandom is glutted with artwork and fic.  You cannot escape this ship.

Dreadnought: massively popular.  Nearly everybody ships it.  You can, with dedication, in theory, reach the end of the AO3 archive for the ship’s tag, but it’ll take a long time.

Cruiser: pretty popular ship.  Not everyone ships it, but everyone knows about it.  Has a good amount of fic/art, and probably multiple ask blogs.

Frigate: just plain popular.  Feels like it could use more fanworks.  New people to the fandom might not know about it, but they’ll stumble across it sooner rather than later.

Gunboat: bit of a rarepair.  It might have an ask blog or two.  A couple big name fans ship it.  Probably only takes a few weeks to get through the entire AO3 backlog, and one new fic gets added during that time.

Tugboat: rarepair.  Almost never seen except as a side pairing to a more popular ship.  You can usually get through everything on AO3 in a matter of days.  You’ve forgotten what it is to be picky about what you read.

Rowboat: less than a dozen people ship it.  You all know each other.  You exist in an endless cycle of the same five people desperately producing art and fic and one person who constantly contributes headcanons.

Canoe: you are one of maybe three people who ship it, and there’s a not-insignificant chance you’ve never encountered those other two hypothetical shippers.  You spend your days paddling furiously in hopes of keeping the ship afloat, dreaming of the day you upgrade to a rowboat so you can finally rest.

Submarine: Quite a few people ship it, but nobody wants to admit to shipping it. Will randomly appear and throw the other ships into confusion.

Pontoon: that random crossover ship with that one black dress character/trope/fandom everyone will ship with everything else. Has the potential to turn into a massive party until someone gets sick and everyone goes home.

Pedalo: That iconic bizarre crackship whose proponents claim they’re only into it ironically, but secretly they’re all dead serious.

Paging @amythe3lder for the pool noodle definition.

Barge: Not quite seaworthy, but buoyant in both the literal and figurative senses. Someone is always merrily drunktweeting about it at 11pm on Saturday night and then wistfully sobertweeting about it 4 hours later from their kitchen floor. The kind of ship that generates more playlists than fic. Artfully covered in trash and dirty laundry.

Raft: There’s two-to-four people who Ship It Hard and a few others who grab onto the side for safety when there’s drama on their usual flagship.

Barrel: There’s orphaned fic of it. There’s unsigned art of it. There’s headcanon asks on anon. Someone must ship it, but no one knows why or who they are. Your friend got a glimpse once before they ducked back down.

Pool Noodle: It’s just you, kicking your feet. You named the ship and wrote it on your noodle with a big sharpie. You tell people about it and are met with confused blinking. Most of the fics in the tag were either written by you or for you. You are caught between wanting to shout about how lovely life is on this floating scrap of whimsy and fearing that your noodle can’t bear much weight. Or worse, that someone will come over and dunk you, take your noodle and fwhap you on the head with it. 

This is a brilliant guide 😆

Ever Given: the fandom Supercarrier is, unfortunately, your NOTP, and it is impossible to find art/fic/meta of your preferred ship without being impeded by the Ever Given’s presence.

this is SO IMPORTANT for creatives! understand WHY you love things, why they move you, how the writer (or artist or whomever) did the thing that made you laugh or cry or see the world through a fresh perspective

I like to mark passages that really work for me, that reveal some insight into the human experience or deliver a beautiful image that lingers in my mind or a powerful scene our great dialogue or whatever. by marking it, one can go back later for inspiration or insight, especially when stuck in a revision or feeling uninspired

I love me a fantasy monster-slaying greatsword, but the historical greatsword has a pretty badass purpose too!

Art refs, tutorials and more!

How writing angst goes

....I'm a sadist, Ana-

I know that—objectively—this is bullshit, but I have chosen to believe that the reason the US hasn't formally changed to the metric system is for the poets. When the going gets tough you can still claw your way forward inch by inch, but centimeter by centimeter just doesn't quite carry you. You're in love/excited/nervous/scared and your heart is beating a hundred miles per hour, whoa that sounds fast and dangerous! But a hundred kph? I've been passed by people going faster than that coming out of downtown on capital boulevard. The pound of flesh they take from you is raw and bloody and full of pain, the kilogram of flesh is impersonal and excised in laboratory conditions under strict observation. Liters are okay tho, if only because they sound like meter and a meter is used to measure things, so the measure of a man can be siphoned (as a byproduct of the kilogram) into a bottle with a screw cap lid and stored in a dark cool room until he is found wanting. A gallon would be wasteful, a quart too unserious, and a cup not enough to keep him from withering in the desert sands under 100 degree faeghreignheit sun. ...Okay maybe celsius gets a pass too.

hi, op here. you're my new favorite person and i am express airmailing you 10 thousand high fives and this heart emoji: 💜

hope is a skill

hope is a weapon you are trained to wield

favourite additions

You cannot hide this in the tags, bestie. This is too lovely to keep a secret.

It may not be apparent to everyone how to easily find out who wrote the poem in the tags, so: @mumblesplash

(an instant-classic example of a Tumblr thread where so many people add value!)

So wherever you look, be it near or far,

know Hope can be found wherever you are.

Less magic schools. More magic universities. Unlearn the simplified models of your secondary education. Discover how to reference scrolls written by a wizard possessed by a different wizard. Identify bias in the voices that whisper from beyond the veil. Have your institution be accused of promoting a Merlinist agenda. Become addicted to energy potions.

I have a fantasy novel in my brain inspired by a dream I had when I was in college, and I want to write about it someday.

The story takes place on a world that is a flat, infinite plane. Every morning the miniature sun of this world rises vertically out of the caldera of a volcano. Its light and heat allows a circle of the plane to be warmed, and it falls and sets in the same volcano every night.

Immediately surrounding the volcano is a world of blasted and blackened stone. Beyond that is a Goldilocks zone of temperate climate, where most of the populace of this world lives. And at the very edge of civilization is a ring of snow and freezing winds, where the very last of the sun's light and heat feebly tries to warm the world.

Beyond that ring - beyond the spotlight of life illuminated by the miniature sun - is a world of darkness and ice. No light, no life, no heat. Explorers say every day that there must be worlds beyond the one lit by their own sun, and venture into the shadow and frost to find them.

They never return.

And then one day in the village of Longshadow - a village at the furthest edge of the sun's light, where shadows only ever stretch in one direction - someone returns from the darkness. They say they found something in the ice.

They say they found a sun in chains.

I think in the same way there's a 90/10 rule with horror and comedy (horror works best when it's 90% horror and 10% comedy and vice versa) there's a 90/10 rule for some relationships in fiction that's like. Wholesome and fucked up. A good friendship is at its most compelling when it's also 10% a bit fucked up. Fucked up relationship is at its most compelling when there's at least 10% of something actually sweet and substantive within. Do you get me

you know what? Fuck you. *turns your strong and stoic and serious character into a crying, traumatized, whimpering, curled up mess in the floor*

‘A good tragedy is always both preventable and inevitable’ is one of my main hills to die on. It’s literally so important to me. I’m fucking correct

It’s only tragedy if you convince yourself, for even just a moment, that everything could be ok, despite knowing it won’t be. Tragedy lies in ‘so close, yet so far.’ It’s avoidable because it would only take a tiny alteration to prevent disaster, but human nature is in the way- not maliciously, not knowingly, despite trying so hard.

If it’s just preventable, that’s barely even sad. Why didn’t they prevent it, then? If it’s just inevitable, that’s only marginally better. Why would we weep? Our hopes can’t be dashed on the rocks, we can’t hope.

Every tragedy worth the paper it’s written on could be averted by a single word, a single choice, a single hesitation, but won’t be, because the subjects are only human. Not because they were weak, stupid, or evil- simply human. Their simple humanity makes disaster inevitable.

And in my opinion, the very best tragedy, the very most heartwrenching, comes from the hero making the right decision every time- from their perspective.

It’s when you know you would have done the exact same thing in their shoes, and only because of your perspective as the reader are you able to see what it will cost. That’s what really rocks my socks

Fanfic authors are amazing like they could be literally anyone. That one coffee au you read last night? Could have been written by morgan freeman who knows

Dude I am acutely aware of this whenever I see people writing at coffee shops and stuff

Story time: I used to sit at the library for hours to mooch the wifi and work on my fics. Almost every day, the same person would sit across from me. We both had our established spots and no one ever really took them. Couple months passed and I was working when I got an email from Ao3 saying a story I was following had updated. I proceeded to take a break to grin and giggle behind my hand throughout the story. I left a comment and went back to my writing. Not five minutes later, the person’s phone went off, and they started grinning and typing on their phone. Another few minutes go by… And my phone pings that the author has replied to my comment.

Long story short, we traded a few odd looks while we both typed on our phones, before we finally put the pieces together and realized we were talking to each other while sitting across from each other. Turns out we were mutual followers of each other and ended up talking for hours about our favourite fics.

Give me THIS as a coffee shop AU!

I think there's something that needs to be said about encouraging readers to leave feedback.

For me it's not about "tell me my writing is amazing and stroke my ego"

It's more about "please engage with me so that I can experience your joy secondhand and foster a connection with you"

I understand that not everyone wants this in their reading experience, some people are shy and a million other reasons why maybe someone wouldn't want to engage and that's perfectly fine!

But what I'm trying to steer away from is being a passive content creator with passive consumers. What I want to steer toward is fostering a community that is essential to fandom. I want to see your reactions because it makes me feel like I'm a part of something.

On encouraging reblogs —

I understand that not everyone is comfortable reblogging, especially explicit content. This is ok!

But just consider that the only reason you were able to enjoy a fic or fanart is because someone else shared it, and by not sharing it yourself you are potentially robbing someone else of the opportunity to enjoy it as much as you did.

As OPs our reach only goes so far and this website relies on reblogs in order for anything to truly get seen by a wider audience.

So that's really it! That's why I encourage these two things at the end of every story I post. Not because I'm trying to be demanding and "make people feel bad" if they don't do it.

I know most other social media sites encourage mindless content consumption and that's just the way of the world nowadays, but I am from a time when community was at the heart of fandom and I just don't want to lose that.

But what I'm trying to steer away from is being a passive content creator with passive consumers. What I want to steer toward is fostering a community that is essential to fandom. I want to see your reactions because it makes me feel like I'm a part of something.

Currently thinking about the people who AREN'T stuck in the time loop and how jarring that must be

Imagine: You wake up to a morning like any other morning and suddenly you don't recognise your friend. Your friend has lived for years - decades, maybe - in worlds that you can't possible understand and it shows. You don't understand. Your friend was fine yesterday.

And even if you find out about the time loops, you have no memory of them. You can plan, but it's probably something your past selves have already tried. You can offer comfort, but you can't tell them anything they haven't heard before. And you can't go with your friend into tomorrow. You're just a ghost.

Official Time Loop Post

Thusly we conclude our tale