you can't waste your life btw it's just not something that's possible to do. your mere existence is already a precious and valuable use of your time. the time you spent becoming who you are now was inherently worthwhile

The legacies people leave behind in you.

My handwriting is the same style as the teacher’s who I had when I was nine. I’m now twenty one and he’s been dead eight years but my i’s still curve the same way as his.

I watched the last season of a TV show recently but I started it with my friend in high school. We haven’t spoken in four years.

I make lentil soup through the recipe my gran gave me.

I curl my hair the way my best friend showed me.

I learned to love books because my father loved them first.

How terrifying, how excruciatingly painful to acknowledge this. That I am a jigsaw puzzle of everyone I have briefly known and loved. I carry them on with me even if I don’t know it. How beautiful.

if shes your girl why is she calling "woohoo boys" off her balcony and leading me into her apartment and letting me sit on her bed and telling me the reason these expensive linens aren't even soft is because sometimes things that are expensive are worse

“You’re not for the streets Pricilla.”

Absolutely

For all my friends in which it is now june in your time zone - HAPPY PRIDE MOTNH BESTIES!!!!!! 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍🌈

People love listening to/watching rain fall because they’re not out in it. Some survival gene is probably really satisfied to be safe and warm and rewards us for being out of the inclement weather.

winona ryder's character in stranger things has never been wrong even once and every time the fucking gravity turns off or whatever she says "hey thats weird right" and everyone in a 10 mile radius is like "woah category five woman moment incoming"

if i were joyce byers and somebody told me i was overreacting to anything i would say "remember the time an entire town thought i was insane but it turned out the government actually did fake my son's death after he got sucked into an alien hell dimension?" i would milk that for all it was worth for the rest of my life

There’s discovering that you have a kink as in learning something new about yourself, and there’s discovering that you have a kink as in you always knew you were into it, but you didn’t realise it was a kink because you honestly thought everybody was into it, and of the two, the second one is much, much funnier.

It’s like the boner-based equivalent of folks with undiagnosed food allergies going “I just thought bananas were supposed to be spicy”.

Please… you CANNOT HIDE THIS IN THE TAGS

> #you never see foot fetishists talking about how all men naturally crave toes as part of the human condition

Not only have I seen that, I have seen it in a power point at a conference

You’ve seen in a what now

did i stutter

what if welcome to hell was an indie movie? 

Keep reading

oh my god, these are so good

You’d think I’d be used to it by now instagram | prints

the word “queer” being used by someone who uses that word to describe their own experience of love and their cherished community should not ever sound the same to you as it does coming out of the mouth of a homophobe. acting like these two types of people are the same is unbelievably cruel

^^^

Adding on once again: there is no word for our experiences that has not been used as a slur and isn’t *still* used as a slur.

My mother never said fag but she sure could say “gay” in a way that made it clear that was what she meant 🙃

“Homosexual” in the mouth of a Southern Republican US Senator is more vile than “faggot” in the mouth of a 50-year-old gay man from Seattle, where they made an attempt at one point to reclaim the word. (Unlike queer, it didn’t really work.)

Hell. “Those people” in the mouth of a homophobic mom to a closeted gay teen is probably fouler than either of those.

Just chiming in here from over on the disability side of things, where we can testify that it doesn’t matter what you call yourself, your terminology will get used as a slur by people who don’t want you to exist because you fuck up their ideas of how the world should be. So, call yourself whatever you want, and don’t yield to the people who don’t care what you’re called, because your greatest crime is existing in the first place.  They’re never going to have a polite word for you anyway.

Trading the one for the other is called seeking treatment — which, interestingly enough, is what Van Gogh did for himself. Starry Night itself is particularly good proof of how well this worked, and memorializes the place where he did it: it is a painting of the view from his room in the San-Remy asylum. His time there was one of the most prolific of his career; many of his best-known and most beloved works are from that year.

There is no depression that helps us create art. Only healing does that. Even where it seems that art is made from or about someone’s suffering, it is not so much that the suffering made the art, but that the art itself is the healing.

The Art of Invisible Movement

Several weeks ago, an aspiring writer asked me what my opinion was on “in-between” scenes — scenes where “nothing happened.” She noted that her favorite scenes in books were often ones where characters were only talking about their lives. How did I recommend including these while maintaining pacing?

I have three thoughts on Nothing scenes.

1. Always Be Mindful of Invisible Movement

I don’t believe in Nothing scenes. I believe in scenes that appear as Nothing scenes to the reader, but are actually full of invisible movement. I have a rule for myself — insofar as I do rules — that every scene should be doing at least two things, preferably three or more, no matter how much it appears to be about merely one.

Here are examples of things scenes can do:

• give backstory

• demonstrate character change

• create a sense of place

• satisfy logistics; i.e. move a character from place A to place B

• establish character

• explain worldbuilding

• move through action sequence

• move external plot forward

• establish dynamic between two characters through conversation or action

It can be tempting to grab just one of those and say DONE. SCENE. GOOD. But efficient storytelling, powerful storytelling, involves doing many of these at one time. A scene may appear to be merely about a character crashing his best friend’s car. But it must also be about his character journey and about his dynamic with another character, all the while pushing the external plot forward. Complexly written, but simple to read: ah yes, these scene where Ronan takes the car.

A Nothing scene might overwhelmingly appear to be merely a conversation, but it needs to be doing heavy lifting in the places in between words. Work in place, backstory, character motivation. Let the unspoken seethe inbetween the spoken. Subtly tie the conversation to the external plot. Why is the conversation happening now? Make sure it references the steps that came before it to make it seem inevitable instead of like an element that can merely lift out and be placed elsewhere without consequence.

What you’re attempting to do is maintain invisible movement. Remind the reader of what is still lurking during this quiet moment. Or remind them that this is the stake: that this quiet moment is what the characters are fighting for. Or situate the quiet moment within a larger, external plot machination, and end the conversation by wrenching them externally according to the plot.

But don’t just let them talk. You can at first. Draft it that way. Be delighted by the quiet conversation you’ve written. But then get back to work. You ain’t done. Push things forward invisibly by having the scene do something else in the background.

2. Earn It

You’ve got to earn all frothy conversations or quiet moments in two ways. First is the rhythm of the thing. It’s like a mix tape. Don’t group all the quiet stuff together, dude! Tense action scenes seem more speedy when interspersed with quiet moments, and vice versa. Earn your quiet moment by putting us through our paces for a bit first.

Second: you’ve got to emotionally earn your quiet moments, your Nothing conversations. You may have been daydreaming of the moment your two characters finally open up and reveal their deepest truths through memes, but if you do it too soon, the scene will feel empty … and slow. Like just a Nothing scene. 

An emotional conversation should be a reveal, a satisfying culmination of something half-seen until that moment. Timed correctly, far enough along in the emotional journeys, these conversations will feel like a resting place or a reward instead of a lull. 

3. You Can’t Live on Ice Cream Cake, or You Ruin Ice Cream Cake

There’s a reason why a lot of readers think they love Nothing scenes — they mean the scenes mentioned above, quietly emotional scenes placed well within the narrative. They feel amazing! But the chemical make up of these scenes mean that they only work when used sparingly. It’s not the quietness of them that makes them incredible. It’s what had to happen to make the quietness possible. Ice cream cake is special because it’s a rarity, brought out only for special occasions. The same goes for all pleasurable excesses in novel-making: banter, kissing, action sequences, emotional porn. They all need to be used sparingly, and to be placed as a result of story, not instead of it, or you’ll find yourself with a Nothing novel, because ice cream cake for every meal makes it lose its meaning.

The thing to remember about novel writing is that the key to pacing is tension, and tension doesn’t always come from negative consequences. Positive consequences can work just as well (think of it: love stories, exploration narratives, training sequences). Make sure your Nothing scenes maintain invisible movement by continuing to promise some kind of tension, and you’re golden.

Oh yeah, and most important? Don’t beat yourself up if you can’t pull it off in a first draft of a scene. Just because you have to end up with a hard-working scene doesn’t mean you have to be able to juggle all those layers at once. Writing is revision, revision is writing, etc. etc. etc. 

I have gone back to this post because I keep thinking about it!

I remember a scene from one of my books which an editor asked me to take out: a scene in which the characters were largely enjoying themselves. Readers have often told me that this scene was one of their favourites, because I think it does work as a reward for them–it gave both the characters and readers a respite after a time of some stress! At the same time, I thoroughly understood why the editor asked me to take it out, and I did cut it down. And it wouldn’t have worked–it wouldn’t have BEEN a relief–without the stress preceding. Pleasurable excess is super pleasurable, but you don’t want there to be an excess of excess. 

I deeply understand the impulse to go ‘too much of a good thing is wonderful!’ Boy do I. I once wrote an entire chapter devoted to a long-running yoghurt joke. (I don’t even eat yoghurt.) Friends, I did not keep this chapter, because it wasn’t doing the work described above–it was not infused with meaning. There was no hidden ballast in there (telling you more about a character, how they feel or what they want, through the jokes).

I love to make people laugh, and I love to make people suffer, and I think people really do enjoy doing both. I think the two things are actually best when done side by side–for instance, once you make a character seem funny, lovable, and like someone you know, it’s much worse when you kill them! 

A friend of mine once told me she didn’t like making her characters suffer, and I was like ‘…Can’t relate.’ I don’t think anyone can name a character who they love, who also hasn’t suffered. The suffering is part of their story, as suffering is part of all our stories to some degree. Characters win our sympathy through their suffering, and win our love by how they struggle through it. To use the words of my people, in the land of Tir na nOg, because there is no sorrow, there can be no joy. (Because there is no hurt, there can be no hurt/comfort. Don’t look at me, I’ll show myself out.)

Another writer friend of mine refers to frosting scenes–reading just those would make readers feel like you do when you only eat the frosting. Initially awesome, but you start to feel rather peculiar quite quickly, and after a bit you don’t feel like eating anything at all. The frosting is all the sweeter for having its sweetness cut.

There must always be balance, in novels as well as the Force. ;)

Warwick Davis being shown how to use a bong for Leprechaun In The Hood

in the top 5 best pictures ever taken

I told my gf that I was having an episode earlier and she replied "is it the beach episode" and it shocked me so much that it grounded me immediately

#i want you all to know that this is like. a legit strategy that's taught to people LMAO #i.e. say something so fucking stupid/absurd that it distracts the person's brain so much that it drags them back and grounds them #like. people are actually taught to do this

boss is presently trying to figure out an app

this would be objectively the funniest way to find out you got fired though