Humanity has finally reached the stars and found out why no one had contacted us. The universe is in a sad state. As such, Doctors without Borders, Red Cross, and many othe charities go intergalactic.

The thing the recruiters don’t tell you about space battles is that you die slowly.

Ships don’t blow up cleanly in flashes and sparks.  Oh, if you’re in the engine room, you’ll probably die instantly, but away from that?  In the computer core, or the communications hub?  You just lose power.  And have to sit, air going stale and room slowly cooling, while you wait to find out if the battle is won or lost.

If it’s lost, nobody comes for you.

It had been about half a day (that’s a Raithar day, probably a bit shorter than yours) and Kvala and I were pretty sure we had lost.  Kvala was injured, Traav and I were dehydrated and exhausted, and Louv was dead, hit by shrapnel when the conduits blew.

Most fleets give you something, of course.  For Raithari, it’s essence of windgrass.  I looked at the vial.

“It’s too soon,” Traav said.

Kvala gestured negation, shakily.  She had been burned when conduits blew, and her feathers were charred, and her leftmost eye was bubbly and blind now.  Even if we were rescued, she probably wouldn’t survive.  “You know we’re losing the war.”

They couldn’t deny that.  “It doesn’t mean we lost the battle.”

“Doesn’t it?  The Chreee have better technology.  Better resources.  And they have their warrior code.  They don’t care if they die.”

“We can’t give up!” Traav protested.  They were young, a young and reckless thar who had listened to a recruiting officer and still believed scraps of what they had been told.  “Any heartbeat now—”

There was a clunk.  Something had docked with our fragment of the ship.

“You see?!” Traav crowed triumphantly.

Kvala exchanged glances with me.  The Chreee never bothered to hunt down survivors.  What was the point, after all?

The Aushkune did.

There weren’t supposed to be Aushkune here.  They were supposed to hide in nebulas.

But if there were—

If there were, we were too late.  The windgrass couldn’t possibly destroy our nervous systems in time to stop the corpse-reviving implants, and once you were implanted, it was over—or it would never be over, depending on how you looked at it and whether Aushkune drones were aware of anything—

Footsteps.

Bipedal.  The Aushkune were supposed to be bipedal.

And then the blast door opened, and a figure stood in it.  My first thought was, robot?  That’s almost worse than Aushkune . . .  But no, it was a being in some sort of suit.

Who wore suits?

“Friendly contact,” the suit’s sound system blared, as the being moved over to Kvala.  “Urgent treatment.  Evacuation.”

“Who are you?”  Kvala struggled upright.

Despite the primitive suit, the blocky being was using up-to-date medical scanners.  “Low frequency right angle shape,” it explained—or maybe didn’t explain.  Two more figures came into the room and put Kvala firmly onto a stretcher.

“You’re with the Chreee, aren’t you?”  Kvala was not at all happy to be on a stretcher.

“Not Chreee,” the sound system said.  “You Man.  Soil Starship Nichols.”  The being hesitated.  “Rescue Chreee as well.  On ship.  Will separate.”

“You what?” I said faintly.  Who would do that?

“Oath,” the being explained.

“What kind of oath?  To what deity?”

The shoulders of the being moved up and down.  “Several different.  Also none.  For me, none.  Just—oath.”

I exchanged glances with Traav, who looked as unsettled as I was.  I had never, ever heard of groups cooperating when they couldn’t even swear to or by the same power.

The being scanned me.  “Have water,” it said.  “Recommend.”

Raithari have fast metabolisms.  I could—would—die of thirst quickly, and painfully.

“Where will you take us,” Traav asked, “after you give us water?”

“Raithari to Raithar.  Chreee to Chreeeholm.”

“Chreeeholm would kill them for failing,” Traav remarked.

The being hesitated, and then said, “War news sometimes bad.  Sometimes lie.”

We had learned long ago not to believe the recruiting officers, but what did that have to do with anything?

“And you—what?” I asked.  “Just fly around looking for battles and rescuing victims?”

The being seemed to consider this.  “Best invention of soil,” it said finally.

Most of what it was saying didn’t make any sense.  Did it worship soil?  But it had said that it had sworn to no deity . . .

Madness.

On the other hand—war was a deliberate, rational act by deliberate, rational people, and I wanted no more of it.  So why not embrace madness and see what happened?

“Soil Starship—Rrikkol?” I asked, stumbling over the word.

“Yes.  Soil Starship Nichols.”

I followed the being in the suit.

Took me well over a minute to realize "low frequency right angle shape" was Red Cross.

I love how this shows the weirdness both of language and of culture. Excellent writing!

"Soil Starship Nichols"

This is what took me a moment.

Earth Starship [Nichelle] Nichols

I am asking you to endure it.

a lot of Gregory Berrycones in the notes missing the reference to my twelve note magnum opus from several hours prior in which the narrator silently begs an entity that isn't really God for death and the entity says no

the narrator is operating under the constraint that they can only use words "god" has already spoken, "god" is aware of this and says the 'Time flies' sentence on purpose in order to give the narrator the pieces they need to voice their complaint; "god" has constant access to the narrator's thoughts, and answers them as though they're having a conversation between equals, but clearly absolutely dictates the terms under which the narrator can speak. it becomes obvious as the scene continues that the narrator is silently screaming and that the request being denied may be a request for death, but is at minimum a request for some acute suffering to be stopped

this could be an interaction between a normal person and an evil telepath with some mind control ability pretending to be the voice of a benevolent god. or it could work as a demon lord speaking to a soul they've trapped in a mirror and keep at their side. or it could be an actual god trying to calm down their only believer because they're trapped in the same prison. the concept amused me so kindly forgive the ugliness of the execution

Posts that altered the fabric of the universe

I was thinking about a conversation I had with a fellow writer a while back and I think it might also apply to fandom.

He was upset because his partner did not read much of his fiction. His partner was supportive of his writing in every other way--supporting his need to have space to write, asking questions about it, being a listening ear during brainstorming, encouraging him to make friends with other writers, etc. He (the partner) had never said anything belittling, discouraging, or negative about my colleague's writing.

But he didn't read much of it. The writer I was talking to wrote sci-fi, and his partner didn't read sci-fi. In fact, he (the partner) was not a big reader of fiction at all.

I told this colleague of mine something that I had decided about my own relationships: my friends, lovers, acquaintances, relatives, etc., have no obligation to be my fans. I met almost all of them outside of the context of writing. Our relationships are built on those things: common history, common non-writing interests, common social circles, common humanity. They didn't decide they liked me or wanted to hang out with me because of what I wrote. And I didn't decide to hang out with them because I thought they would read my stuff.

So, expecting people who I know from other contexts to be interested in my stories is kind of unfair. Yes, I should expect them to be supportive. No, I shouldn't expect them to change their personalities and start liking long, drawn out romances about gay Mormons (or whatever it is I may happen to be writing at the time).

If the non-writing people in my life also happen to be interested in my writing, awesome! If not, that's okay too!

And actually, this even applies to the writing people in my life. Most of the writers I know, I met not through reading their work, but through writers groups etc where we talk about the process of writing. I hit it off with people who face similar issues as I do, or because our personalities just happen to mesh. Sometimes, it turns out that I also like reading their stories. Sometimes, it doesn't. That doesn't mean I don't like them or I think that they are bad writers or that we can't learn anything from each other. It just means the story is for someone else.

This relates to fandom in multiple ways. Someone might like me as a person, but not be interested in most of the stuff i post on Tumblr. They might like talking with me about our shared fandom, but not follow me into my next fandom. They might like my blog, but not be interested in reading my fanfic, for whatever reason--they don't like reading fanfic, what I write doesn't jibe with them, what I write is triggering, they have many competing obligations and can't read every single fic that ever gets posted in the fandom, etc. They might love one of my fanfics, but not the others. They might enjoy my fanfics, but blacklist my personal posts or my political posts. They might enjoy conversing with me in the DMs, but not follow me at all.

And that's okay. That's normal. We are all different, and no one person is going to connect with me on every single level. In and out of fandom, I try to keep the attitude that the relationships I have are significant for what they offer, not for what they lack. If I feel like a certain need of mine is not being met, I can look to make additional friends, to expand into additional communities.

That isn't always easy. But it is much easier than trying to force the friends I already have to fulfill a need that they just can't fulfill.

And, by looking at the ways my friends support me, instead of focusing on the ways I wish they would support me, I appreciate the friends I do have more.

And I'm happier.

I'm not, like, a constant joy factory. But I'm definitely happier than I would be without this outlook.

The Importance of Mary Sue

When I was in Ninth Grade, I won a thing.  

That thing, in particular, was a thirty dollar Barnes & Noble gift certificate.  I was still too young for a part-time job, so I didn’t have this kind of spending cash on me, ever.  I felt like a god.

Drunk with power, I fancy-stepped my way to my local B&N.  I was ready to choose new books based solely on the most important of qualities…BADASS COVER ART.  I walked away with a handful of paperbacks, most of which were horrible (I’m looking at you, Man-Kzin Wars III) or simply forgettable.  

One book did not disappoint.  I fell down the rabbit hole into a series that proved to be as badass as the cover art promised (Again, Man-Kzin Wars III, way to drop the ball on that one).  With more than a dozen books in the series, I devoured them.  I bought cassette tapes of ballads sung by bards in the stories.  And the characters.  Oh, the characters.  I loved them.  Gryphons, mages, but most importantly, lots of women.  Different kinds of women.  So many amazing women.  I looked up to them, wrote bad fiction that lifted entire portions of dialogue and character descriptions, dreamed of writing something that the author would include in an anthology.

This year I decided in a fit of nostalgia to revisit the books I loved so damn much.  I wanted to reconnect with my old friends…

…and I found myself facing Mary Sues.  Lots of them.  Perfect, perfect, perfect.  A fantasy world full of Anakin Skywalkers and Nancy Drews and Wesley Crushers.  I felt crushed.  I had remembered such complex, deep characters and didn’t see those women in front of me at all anymore.  Where were those strong women who kept me safe through the worst four years of my life?

Which led me to an important realization as I soldiered on through book after book.  That’s why I needed them.  Because they were Mary Sues.  These books were not written to draw my attention to all the ugly bumps and whiskers of the real world.  They were somewhere to hide.  I was painfully aware that I was being judged by my peers and adults and found lacking.  I was a fuckup.  And sometimes a fuckup needs to feel like a Mary Sue.  As an adult, these characters felt a little thin because they lacked the real world knowledge I, as an adult, had learned and earned.  But that’s the thing…these books weren’t FOR this current version of myself.   Who I am now doesn’t need a flawless hero because I’m comfortable with the idea that valuable people are also flawed.

There is a reason that most fanfiction authors, specifically girls, start with a Mary Sue.  It’s because girls are taught that they are never enough.  You can’t be too loud, too quiet, too smart, too stupid.  You can’t ask too many questions or know too many answers.  No one is flocking to you for advice.  Then something wonderful happens.  The girl who was told she’s stupid finds out that she can be a better wizard than Albus Dumbledore.  And that is something very important.  Terrible at sports?  You’re a warrior who does backflips and Legolas thinks you’re THE BEST.   No friends?  You get a standing ovation from Han Solo and the entire Rebel Alliance when you crash-land safely on Hoth after blowing up the Super Double Death Star.  It’s all about you.  Everyone in your favorite universe is TOTALLY ALL ABOUT YOU.

I started writing fanfiction the way most girls did, by re-inventing themselves.  

Mary Sues exist because children who are told they’re nothing want to be everything.  

As a girl, being “selfish” was the worst thing you could be.  Now you live in Narnia and Prince Caspian just proposed marriage to you.  Why?  Your SELF is what saved everyone from that sea serpent.  Plus your hair looks totally great braided like that.

In time, hopefully, these hardworking fanfiction authors realize that it’s okay to be somewhere in the middle and their characters adjust to respond to that.  As people grow and learn, characters grow and learn.  Turns out your Elven Mage is more interesting if he isn’t also the best swordsman in the kingdom.  Not everyone needs to be hopelessly in love with your Queen for her to be a great ruler.  There are all kinds of ways for people to start owning who they are, and embracing the things that make them so beautifully weird and complicated.

Personally, though, I think it’s a lot more fun learning how to trust yourself and others if you all happen to be riding dragons.

Mary Sues exist because children who are told they’re nothing want to be everything.

A girl making herself the hero of her own story is a radical act. Stop shaming girls for doing it. Stop shaming yourself for it. 

Who I am now doesn’t need a flawless hero because I’m comfortable with the idea that valuable people are also flawed.

That… that’s important. So’s this whole post, but I just.. wanted to pull that out for a moment and look at it a little longer.

You’ve been sentenced to 400 years for multiple murders. It’s been 399 years and your jailers are starting to get nervous.

I was twenty… twenty-five, I think?… when I was sentenced. Four hundred years was a length of time I couldn’t even imagine. It was a length of time I don’t think anyone could imagine, even the judge. It was just a big showy number that let everyone know I’d never see the light of day again. The mages who cast the spells were dramatic about it, practically shouting the part about ‘until death claims you, or four hundred years hath passed, forsooth, thou shalt be imprisoned here’. They don’t waste that kind of magic on most prisoners, but I was special.

The Slayer, they called me then. The Monster of Sentan. I’d killed nineteen people… I remember that number because I was so furious that they stopped me so close to my goal of twenty-one. And I didn’t just kill ordinary people, no, but the Chosen of the Gods. The Great and Good. They were terrified of me. So they locked me away, to die forgotten.

It had been a little less than a hundred years when the king died without heir, and a civil war tore the country apart. When the fighting was all over, the losers were dragged down to the deepest cells under the castle, and the new king and his soldiers stopped and stared at me. “Who… who is this?” he asked, frowning. “Some victim of the usurper?”

People like cooks and jailers and scrubbers don’t change as easily as kings. The same man who’d been bringing me my meals since there was still brown in his hair and beard shuffled forward, hunched and grey now. “No, yer majesty,” he said humbly. “That be a special prisoner, from before the old king died.”

“Special? Special how?” He frowned, moving closer to my cell. “The old king died more than ten years ago. This woman must have been a child then. What could she have done to - “

“Don’t get too close, yer majesty,” the old man said sharply. “That’s the Monster of Sentan… an’ she bites.”

That was true. I do bite.

Lees verder

hitch your heart to one small thing

reminds me of this!

You’re strapped to a table. Surrounded by cultists. They’ve summoned their demonic deity and are preparing to sacrifice you. You’ve decided to go all-in on the only way out you have left. Make the demon an offer the cultists can’t match.

I LIVE

With thanks to everyone who’s made donations and sent encouraging messages to help me get through Covid and Charlie’s illness.

—

(This document is a fair and correct copy of the ancient text held in the First Temple Of Transformation, being the first and most precious of its holy writings.)

An Account Of Andry And His Demon

So there I was, about to be sacrificed to a demon.

I’d already made two escape attempts. Neither worked. A virgin with unused magical potential and the right bloodlines isn’t easy to find, apparently. They’d gone all out with the security.

The ritual was well under way. It was too late to escape from inside the circle. I theoretically had no way out. I’d never learned magic. I’d always been small and skinny, nowhere near strong enough to pull off some last minute bond-breaking. If anyone was going to come to my rescue, they would have by then.

 Theoretically, I was out of options.

But I’m a small, skinny guy who’s not strong enough to win a fight, who didn’t know magic was an option, so I’d had to learn other skills. 

I’d never learned magic, but everyone’s heard the stories. Everyone knows what a binding circle is. Everyone knows that it matters what side of the circle the runes are written on, and if I turned my head until my neck almost broke I could see the runes they’d written. They were on the outside of the circle. And it was a triple circle, too, and the stories say that’s the strongest kind. 

The cultists might have said that this demon was their god, and maybe the drones chanting down there below the showy sacrificial stage actually believed it. They couldn’t see the circle from there. But this demon wasn’t showing up voluntarily, I was almost sure. The cult leaders were compelling it to appear. I’d heard stories like this, too. They usually ended with a lot of dead cultists and one - or a few - leaders with far too much demonic power. 

I listened to the speech the leader gave before they started. Shorn of ranting, it basically boiled down to ‘after this night, our bond with our demon god will be cemented in blood, praise him, our path to immortality will begin, and so on’. So… the demon wasn’t bound to them already. This was an important sacrifice. Possibly their first human sacrifice, or the strongest, or the one that sealed the deal. 

When the demon appeared inside the circle with me, I forced down the panic with the weight of more panic. If I froze up, or screamed, or fainted, I was a dead man. The next few seconds were all-important. 

Lees verder

that whole "make your characters want things" does so much work for you in a story, even if what your characters want is stupid and irrelevant, because how people go about pursuing their desires tells you about them as a person.

do they actually move toward what they desire? how far are they willing to go for it? do they pursue their desires directly or indirectly? do they acquire what they desire through force, trickery, or negotiation? do they tell themselves they aren't supposed to feel desire and suppress it? does the suppressed desire wither away and die, or does it mutate and grow even stronger? is the initially expressed desire actually an inadequate and poorly translated different desire that they lack language for? does the desire change once the language has been updated, or when new experiences outline the desire more clearly? do they want something else once they have better words for it, or once they know that they definitely don't want something they thought they wanted before?

how does the world accommodate those desires? what does the world present to your character and in what order to update and clarify their desires? how does your magic system or sci-fi device correspond to those desires and the pursuit of them?

there's so much good story meat on those bones; you just have to be brave and decisive enough to let characters want specific things instead of letting them float in the current of the plot.

and I loved the responses of “Well, my character is very passive and doesn’t know how to want things, the story is about their process of learning to do that exactly”, because that’s fine, that’s all well and good, but passive people still want things. passive human beings who have been so thoroughly neglected that the articulation of a single desire is beyond them want what their internal sphere of control tells them they are allowed to want. they desire constancy and a lack of conflict. they desire nostalgic artifacts that remind them of prior constancy and lack of conflict. the desire to float is an engineered desire that runs in conflict with the development of a happy healthy human being. Who engineered it? How do you begin to chip away at something like that? How do small, passive desires lead up to that?

"Everyone has motive" needs to be at the forefront of your thoughts. If a passive character wants something and yet does not act to achieve it, the crux of the story is WHY they are inactive. Therein lies your conflict and complications.

It's really important to remember that "things staying the same" is a thing that characters can want, and that it's almost by necessity different than passivity. And so if you have a character who wants things to stay the same, is it that they don't want to change things, or that they actively want to maintain the status quo. And consider how that may conflict with the desire of other major characters. Stories are often about changing something--a relationship, a government, whatever--so how does that play against a character who very much doesn't want things to change?

So, okay, fun fact. When I was a freshman in high school… let me preface by saying my dad sent me to a private school and, like a bad organ transplant, it didn’t take. I was miserable, the student body hated me, I hated them, it was awful.

Okay, so, freshman year, I’m deep in my “everything sucks and I’m stuck with these assholes” mentality. My English teacher was a notorious hard-ass, let’s call him Mr. Hargrove. He was the guy every student prayed they didn’t get. And, on top of ALL OF THE SHIT I WAS ALREADY DEALING WITH, I had him for English.

One of the laborious assignments he gave us was to keep a daily journal. Daily! Not monthly or weekly. Fucking daily. Handwritten. And we had to turn it in every quarter and he fucking graded us. He graded us on a fucking journal.

All of my classmates wrote shit like what they did that day or whatever. But, I did not. No, sir. I decided to give the ol’ middle finger to the assignment and do my own shit.

So, for my daily journal entries, over the course of an entire year, I wrote a serialized story about a horde of man-eating slugs that invaded a small mining town. It was graphic, it was ridiculous, it was an epic feat of rebellion.

And Mr. Hargrove loved it.

It wasn’t just the journal. Every assignment he gave us, I tried to shit all over it. Every reading assignment, everyone gushed about how good it was, but I always had a negative take. Every writing assignment, people wrote boring prose, but I wrote cheesy limericks or pulp horror stories.

Then, one day, he read one of my essays to the class as an example of good writing. When a fellow student asked who wrote it, he said, “Some pipsqueak.”

And that’s when I had a revelation. He wanted to fight. And since all the other students were trying to kiss his ass, I was his only challenger.

Mr. Hargrove and I went head-to-head on every assignment, every conversation, every fucking thing. And he ate it up. And so did I.

One day, he read us a column from the Washington Post and asked the class what was wrong with it. Everyone chimed in with their dumbass takes, but I was the one who landed on Mr. Hargrove’s complaint: The reporter had BRAZENLY added the suffix “ize” to a verb.

That night I wrote a jokey letter to the reporter calling him out on the offense in which I added “ize” to every single verb. I gave it to Mr. Hargrove, who by then had become a friendly adversary, for a chuckle and he SENT IT TO THE REPORTER.

And, people… The reporter wrote back. And he said I was an exceptional student. Mr. Hargrove and I had a giggle about that because we both knew I was just being an asshole, but he and the reporter acknowledged I had a point.

And that was it. That was the moment. Not THAT EXACT moment, but that year with Mr. Hargrove taught me I had a knack for writing. And that knack was based in saying “fuck you” to authority. (The irony that someone in a position of authority helped me realize that is not lost on me.)

So, I can say without qualification that Mr. Hargrove is the reason I am now a professional writer. Yes, I do it for a living. And most of my stuff takes authorities of one kind or another to task.

Mr. Hargrove showed me my dissent was valid, my rebellion was righteous, and that killer slugs could bring a city to its knees. Someone just needs to write it.

This is the first time I’ve seen this post but I know I’m gonna love reading it every time it shows up on my dash

@jackdaw-kraai I think you would love this

HELL YEAH

You are apparently the most powerful magical being of your time. But the thing is….you’re not. You spend the entire story trying to convince everyone that’s you’re not being humble, you’re genuinely not the person they’re looking for

the first time you tell someone that you’re not magic, they laugh. they tell you that you’re being humble. they act like announcing your utter lack of ability is modesty akin to a saint. they tell you that they’ll always believe.

‘don’t,’ you say. your hands are so empty. ‘don’t.’

they do.

—————————

the second time you say it, you say it over the crown of your best friend. he’s asking for a blessing on his way to the war. you’re so powerful, after all, a little magic on him isn’t anything you can’t afford to lose.

you whisper that, if you had any magic, it would all go into the golden strands brushing your lips. the sun catches on his shining hair.

he gives his hair away in chunks, that first month on the front lines. no one gets hurt. no one dies.

magic, they say. your hands shake when men bend at the knee to thank you for the small bits of blessing your best friend gave them.

you have not given them any part of what they carry.

———————————————————–

the third time you say it, it’s barely a whisper dropping from your numb lips. your best friend is gone, again, and your family is serving tea to the king’s knight, the highest ranking warrior in the land. he’s heard of you. he wants you by his side.

men are disappearing, he tells you, and not coming back. even if your magic is nothing more than words, they need it. they need it.

your family assures him it’s not words. it’s not words.

it’s power to change the world.

(the world is war. war doesn’t change.)

——————————–

the first time you feel magical is with the king’s knight, his hand in yours. he is looking at you like you’re the best parts of homecoming. he is looking at you like he loves you.

magic, you whisper into the lines darting across his palms. you’re magic.

‘no,’ he says, ‘darling, that’s you.’

you don’t correct him.

————————————-

(you have nightmares for a week. you don’t know why even he won’t believe you.)

(no one believes you.)

—————————————————————-

the fourth time you say it, you say it over your best friend’s grave. he’s been dead months while you’ve been playing wizard for the king’s knight. he’s been rotting in a cave on the front line, his own golden hair locked in his fists as if it could heal the blood sickness that took his life.

magic, they tell you, runs out on mortal flesh. not your fault. not your problem.

‘but, i’m not,’ you say into your lover’s chain mail. ‘i’m not.’

‘darling,’ he says, ‘it’s not your fault you are.’

—————————————————

you scream the fifth time you say it. the sky is dark with clouds and lightning. there is blood on the ground in front of you. your sword is black with it, dripping with carnage and death.

the king’s knight lies at your feet. he died believing in magic.

he died believing in you. 

you scream because dying with belief in your heart doesn’t change anything. you scream because, even with magic, this war was always going to end here for the both of you. with mud sinking into the creases of your armor and the people you care about dead. dead. dead.

you scream and the sky screams back, a roar of thunder and the shriek of metal against metal. no one dares get too close to you in your grief and rage. no one dares get so close to the one who’s calling chaos from the rioting storm above them.

i wish, you say. the world trembles around the words. the ground buckles. you extend your hands out over the battlefield and let the first drops of hot, hot rain pull at the blood staining your skin. i wish no one had ever heard of magic.

your ghosts, your lover and your best friend, howl. they beg you to stop. they beg you to see how very full your hands are. they are full, for once in your life. they are full with golden light, trembling with the heat of the world held in your palms.

you don’t care. you don’t care. 

i wish for all the curses to just be words, you say. the rain begins to pound down, whisking the sound of your voice into the depths of the earth. the soldiers around you clap their hands to their ears as if to block you out. they’ve already let you in when they came to you for magic. i wish for all the blessings to just be prayers. i wish the only shine in the wind came from the lakes and the rivers and the oceans. 

darling, your lover’s ghost whispers. don’t.

but, just like he once did, you refuse to hear the word.

there are arrows raining down on you now, flaming arrows. they know what you are. they know what you’re doing. you invite the tips into your flesh and speak your final, damning words.

i wish love was enough.

the world rocks, arrows and flames racing across the bloodied ground. men are screaming, scrambling away from the fissures that open under their feet. just as suddenly, it stops. the rain stops. the screaming stops. the earth stands still.

magic disappears.

the story ends here, you know it does. when love is enough, there isn’t a need for poisoned apples. the prince kisses you of his own volition, without prophecy, without compulsion, without magic. 

with love enough, no one needs blessings on golden hair or cursed swords. they just need each other. only that.

so maybe you were magic after all. because the second magic disappears, so do you.

it’s okay though. your ghosts come with you.

How to name a female character from a culture and language you're unfamiliar with, a guide by me:

That moment you end up giving your female character a male name because of this exact scenario

I think it was before I started posting story concepts on tumblr but I had an old concept called ‘apocalyptia’ which was a dark comedy about a world where every apocalypse movie premise happened simultaneously

The big joke was that all these HUGE disasters cancelled each other out. A bunch of shit flooding kept the zombies contained. The super intelligent apes stopped global warming. The leather-clad motorcycle murder gangs intimidate the alien invaders.

Everything sucks in like 8 overlapping ways but it’s just become the norm at this point. There’s a guy named Cannibal Jack that people trust to cook for them for some reason.

The main character is a recluse with a shotgun who just wants to sit in her shack and give cynical advice to passing young people, but unfortunately, her younger brother and only surviving family member is a conman with his fingers in every stupid decision being made within a ten mile radius

The brother’s name is Sal, which is short for SOMETHING but he changes his answer every time. He seems to think this qualifies as an alias, and bizarrely, it usually works. Notable ‘definitely Sal’s real name’ options include Salt, Salmon, Salamander, and Salad.

His sister’s name is Marian, occasionally called Misery Marian. It is a running joke that young characters think this is a reference to her bad attitude, but anyone who actually CALLS her that is clearly terrified of her for some unspecified reason.

Sal’s got an on-again off-again business partner by the name of Kent Bardsley, who is just…. SO irresponsibly horny. Sal’s motivation is money, but Kent’s is sex. He keeps getting run out of town for sleeping with important people’s wives. He’s an idiot, but he’s not a conman like Sal, he just helps him with his schemes as an in to towns so he can visit his assortment of fuckbuddies.

The joke of Kent’s character is that the ‘apocalypse’ he’s part of is conservative scaremongering about sexual freedom destroying society. He gets a last name because while Sal calls him Kenny, Marian calls him ‘Bardsley’ with deep contempt.

The fuck types of our characters so far:

Marian: fuck off

Sal: fuck you, pay me

Kent: fuck me

Cannibal Jack: what the fuck

There’s an alien named Glipix who is investigating why the invasion failed and her analysis tends to boil down to ‘damn bitch you really live like this?’

Kent is really into her but his flirting goes right over her head. Marian’s the only one she respects anyways.

Kent: Hey, you looking to get those eggs fertilized, beautiful?

Glipix: What pollinators are operating on this horrible planet? Did you see one? I need to speak with them if you did.

Kent: uh

I have a mental image for a TV opening where it’s Marian at like.  12.  watching some apocalypse happen through a window and saying “The world ended when I was a girl…” in a really serious tone, and then it pans out to show like 6 other apocalypses happening and her voice turns sarcastic and she says “about thirty fucking times, actually.”

Alright here’s more content for you guys:

—Marian is 46 and spent her 20s and early 30s as a mad max style motorcycle gang member. ‘Misery Marian’ was her moniker while she was LEADING one of these gangs.

—Sal and Kent are somehow unaware of this.

—Sal’s apocalypse is capitalism. Also Godzilla.

—I’m not kidding about that, Sal and Marian’s parents were killed by a giant dinosaur that still sometimes shows up to bother Sal.

i’m in love with this

Please for the love of god write this book so i can do fanfiction of the characters in already in love with

stuff I like

- when the person kidnapped by the villain is all ‘no one’s going to come for me’ and 

- someone does, but it’s the person they’d least expect

- EVERYONE COMES because wow, maybe I am depressed because I didn’t think I knew this many people, much less that they liked me

- no one comes and the villain gets pissed on their captive’s behalf and treats them better than their former associates did

- they rescue themselves and everyone’s so impressed but the person yells because I AM CAPABLE AND YOU SHOULD HAVE AT LEAST NOTICED I’D BEEN KIDNAPPED

- they get rescued by a deus ex machina, preferably their dad/mom/grandma/old associate who is exponentially cooler than the heroes 

basically, I like it when people get rescued and get validation

Can I add: people getting rescued by their pets.

Y’all I read a lot of scripts. And the one note I give over and over and over and over to the point that I can pretty much copy and paste it from one review to another…. let your characters lie. Let them omit, stumble, and circumvent. Allow them to be completely unable to express what they’re feeling. Make them unable to admit a truth. Let them sit in silence because they can’t think of anything clever to say! Let them say the exact wrong thing!

Dee Rees talks about it in her BAFTA lecture (which you should ABSOLUTELY WATCH): that what your character actually says should be three degrees of separation away from what they mean to say.

I read script after script after script where characters articulate their needs, desires, and objectives with perfect accuracy off the cuff 24/7 and there is not one single human person on this planet who is actually able to do that. This is the #1 thing that’s going to make your script sound stilted and the #1 thing that’s going to make shit difficult on your actors. Let them shut up, and let them lie.

This!! In real life no one says what they mean. We say we’re fine when we’re not. We keep secrets because the truth is painful or embarrassing. We fight over stupid shit that’s a stand-in for what we’re really upset about. We don’t say what we want or need because recognizing, let alone vocalizing, our wants and needs is hard.

If your characters say what they mean all the time, you, as a writer, are robbing yourself of so much power to affect the audience. This is true in all writing but especially in dramatic writing, where everything in the character’s interior life has to be externalized in some way to be known. You can create intimacy by allowing the audience to see something your character hides from other characters. You can create tension by letting the audience know the character has a secret or has told a lie they don’t want revealed. You can create catharsis by allowing the character to finally say what they’re really thinking at a key moment.

You’re also creating a much more interesting text for your actors because you allow for the presence of subtext. If you’re someone who directs your own material you’ll start to realize how little you actually need your characters to say to make it clear exactly what’s going on with them. What starts as a monologue in the first draft may, in rehearsal, become a single line, which in the final cut becomes a shared glance, and the audience will still know exactly what you mean.

fake relationship but its a king and his concubine that was once an amazing soldier but he couldn’t go up the ranks for whatever reason so the king was like listen. hear me out. you can be my strategy dude. u just gotta be okay w walking around shirtless a lot. and soldier dude is like man that’s an UPSIDE and yknow they end up falling in love

some idiot advisor: I can’t believe his majesty lets his boytoy attend these council meetings, it’s an insult to the noble institutions that uphold our nation, it’s an outrage—

a somewhat smarter advisor: you’re just mad bc he pointed out how dumb your naval attack strategy and no one laughed when you made a mean joke about him

Boytoy has gone from a top fighter who was well respected but in constant danger to wearing silks and eating grapes on daises. That fucked up rotator cuff was the best thing to ever happen to him

Bonus points: at least half the other concubines are experts in assorted fields, the monarch brings them to relevant meetings to both play up a reputation for frivolity, and make sure at least one person there doesn’t have an outside agenda.

my harem? 

did you mean: my chief strategic advisors

Six years working with child protective services should have taught him to keep a straight face even when confronted with the weirdest situations, but the social worker has to admit that he’s struggling right now. He looks down at his papers for a moment and then back up at his visitors.

No, the pointed ears are still there. So are the just slightly sharper teeth in their hopeful smiles. In fact, they look exactly the way they do in the stories. Right down to the emerald green eyes.

“Excuse me,” he says, nervously clearing his throat. “Could you go over that for me one more time?”

“Certainly! We would like to apply to be foster parents.”

“Right…” The social worker looks anxiously from one of the couple to the other. “But…but you’re fae.” He really doesn’t know a way to be delicate about this fact.

“Oh you noticed!” the one on the right says. (The couple introduced themselves as Mr. and Mrs. Peters, but he doesn’t remember who was who and as far as he is concerned their appearance gives him no clue whatsoever.)

“Well, yes,” he says uncomfortably. “And this being the case, I did wonder…”

The Mx. Peters (surely that can’t be their real name) on the left nods understandingly. “Of course, it’s quite alright, we do understand. But you see, the whole changeling thing doesn’t really appeal to us at all.”

“Taking care of a human child sounds wonderful!” their partner smiles brightly. “And we have plenty of room to love one or two more! But we simply refuse to give ours away, and that is regrettably a big part of the changeling business.”

“Your children?” the social worker blinks.

“Yes,” the parents beam proudly. “Two of them,” one of them adds. “A wee one of barely four summers and our eldest, who is nearly eight.”

The other smiles enthusiastically. “It is preferred for foster parents, is it not, to already have children of one’s own?”

The social worker pulls himself together. “Yes,” he says. “Yes it is.” Parents are parents, aren’t they? And if he forgets about the teeth, and the ears, and the intangible feeling that his carpet might start sprouting daisies, these two are giving off practically nothing but parent vibes.

“So you’ll consider us for the programme?”

He nods. “Yes, certainly, I will. Just—” He clears his throat. “We will need to visit your home fist, to verify your circumstances.”

“Of course!” the parent on the left agrees.

“That should be quite alright as longs as we remember not to offer refreshments,” their partner nods.

The social worker nods along and silently scribbles a discrete little note on their file. He is going to have to have a talk with his supervisor about this. And another thing—

“I will need your full legal names for the forms,” he says, looking up.

The two fae meet his eyes with silent stares.

He swallows. “…a legal name for the forms?”

The radiant smiles return.

another absolutely fantastic trope is when a scifi/fantasy character calls the oblivious object of their affections a term of endearment in their fictional first language during an emotional moment which they refuse to translate, and their love interest assumes due to the unresolved sexual tension fuelled rivalry aspect of their relationship that it's an insult, only to have their world absolutely rocked to its core when they finally manage to get a translation and realize that the other person has been pining for them the entire goddamn time

like,

character a: it's just, i try so hard but i honestly think [character b] hates me. i mean, they called me a [untranslated word or phrase] a few weeks ago, and they've hardly looked, let alone spoken to me since then :(

person they're talking to: "[untranslated word or phrase]"? are you sure?

character a: ...i think so. why?

person they're talking to: hmm. yeah. well that's uh. well it's not an insult. that's a declaration of love.

character a: w

character a: what