A Little Writing Piece

"Do you know how much I hated you? How I laid awake at night, imagining scenarios in my head, imagining if I ever saw you again. What I would say to you. A..And now I can't even say what I have been planning on saying for so long, I can't even be angry with you. I look at you, and my heart only feels love for you and I hate it!" they scream at the mirror in front of them, slamming their fists onto the bathroom sink.

There was only silence filling the air around them. "Why can't they see you?" you heard them say. You look up from where you were standing. You couldn't look into their eyes, you hated when people would yell and be angry with you, especially them.

You rubbed your arms, as a way to distract yourself from crumbling to the ground in pain. This question always breaks you into millions of pieces when asked, you used to come up with all sorts of excuses and reasons. But this time is different, this time you were facing your love of your life.

Your best friend

Your partner..

But you couldn't just tell them the whole truth, as they wouldn't believe it. They would tell you are mad, and tell you to say what's really going on.

All you can say is "I only show myself to you" with the smallest smile with tired eyes..

You, you support trans men.

But institutional racism is imaginary, right?

Watch.

never stop reblogging this

Maybe I should figure out a way to apply to jobs as a dude…

Your book is going to be great; just put one word in front of the other. 

Until we hit a plot hole.

Nope. No negativity - you drop into that hole, see what you can learn from it, clamber out and finish your draft.

You can edit a bad book, but not a blank page.

I think that’s a really, really important note and I never thought of it in that context. But if you stop and look at your plot hole and can identify why you stopped? you CAN get back out.

Examples:

Just a few small things, but it helps.

fucked up how colors look different depending on what screen you’re looking at them on. that should be illegal I think

this fucking shit, you know

I spend so much time carefully picking and adjusting the colors in every single drawing I make that I’d probably lose my mind if I didn’t just repeatedly push this out of my memory and pretend it’s not a thing. Why am I reblogging a blank empty post that doesn’t say anything??? Weird

good news! you can’t make sure that everyone will see the correct colors on their own device, but you can make sure your monitor is as accurate as possible for printing and sharing by calibrating it! 

there are a bunch of free monitor tests, but here’s an easy one you can use. the passmark and eizo tests are also pretty good, though passmark doesn’t work in your browser. be warned that some tests may cause eye strain.

you can either use the settings built into your monitor itself or use the display color calibration settings in your operating system to adjust the settings until everything looks correct, and then enjoy your accurate colors.

REBLOG TO SAVE A LIFE

Photographers, too. Color calibrate your monitors if you intend to print or sell your work. There’s a ton of info out there for this.

Oh my god ❤️

Absolutely love this

Wow.

Please watch this. 

i was a little apprehensive to watch this because it’s four minutes long and i have a short attention span, but within the first 30 seconds i was hooked.

watch this. please, you won’t regret it.

That last line

That fucking last line hit me.

Stop whatever else you’re doing and watch this. This is an amazing story of the best of humanity amidst the worst mankind is capable of. It’s proof of that one act of kindness can last a lifetime.

Abandoned somewhere in France.

📸Julien Harlaut

People horrifically fucking up facts about evolution and genetics too support their stupid beliefs or to seem smart and “rational” is probably one of my big pet peeves 

Yeah. An enormous number of racists, misogynists, homophobes and transphobes I’ve met eventually whip out something about evolutionary biology and they never, ever, ever, ever have the slightest shadow of even a half-right idea what any of it means or ever cite a claim ever actually made by a scientific study.

Here’s a quick handy reference list or anyone who isn’t sure:

Some more stuff!

gynecologist offices and women’s clinics are for people who have uteruses and vaginas and ovaries and breasts. even if those people are not women. even if those people are men with facial hair and deep voices and adams apples. im a man with sideburns and a baritone voice and I’ve had an abortion, surgery for endometriosis and an ovarian cystectomy. restricting access to these spaces based on gender would kill me lol

#this post isn’t just abt trans men#it’s intersex men too

as a trans intersex man who has had an abortion: yeah

You can now get HQ prints of these from MY INPRINT SHOP If there are other arts of mine you wish were available please, don’t hesitate to ask ^^

Have created a new novel-writing approach for myself that I am calling Very Gentle Writing. Very Gentle Writing is an approach for people who live nearly every waking second in self-castigation and actually need peaceful slowness to unleash their creativity. 

Very Gentle Writing does not set staggering word count goals and then feel bad about it. No! Very Gentle Writing for me sets an extremely low word count and then feels magnificently productive when the low bar is exceeded (which is easy…it’s a low bar, I mean really low). 

Very Gentle Writing is about saying hey yo maybe I just want to listen to a chill playlist for a while and feel one sentence spill out. Go me! 

Very Gentle Writing is kind of about realizing I have a really limited amount of time to write in between work, and adulting, and taking care of a thousand life responsibilities, and trying to heal&deal from trauma in 2020. So I want that writing time to be….just…..nice. 

Very Gentle Writing means I have a goal of enjoying every single time I sit down to write. Really. I use all the fun words first. 

Very Gentle Writing came to me as an idea when I started to think about how as someone actively trying to recover from a lot of lifelong trauma, the usual word harder!! Work harder!! mantras in the world of “people doing hard things” didn’t motivate me at all, they only hurt me. I truly need a voice saying work less hard, personally.

Reblog this if you think it’s okay to support multiple different ships for the same character in a fandom.

I can’t get this FrozenxPrey crossover au out of my head and it’s driving me nuts because head full of THOUGHTS but all of them refuse to coalesce into anything coherent 

#Frozen cast in space#Frozen cast in space with aliens#Frozen cast in space with KILLER aliens and a dope space station full of dubious ethical experiments#there’s some elsanna in there I can feel it#but I can’t rattle it out#Elsa’s in engineering cuz she’s a nerd and Anna is somewhere in Life Support#occasionally doing work in the G.U.T.S. bc wheeeee low gravity Anna make brain go brrrr#someone’s got memory loss issues from neuromod testing#that same someone has nightmares and out of body experiences when touching the Coral#about the Apex and a future full of teeth and darkness#I’ve got notes upon notes of rambling but no story and I feel like a hamster on a wheel

I’m still thinking about it so many hours later I’ll probably just pin a deluge of notes to the next reblog

Unless someone has…. questions 👀

okay

I keep seeing this post and I am VERY CONFUSED AND INTRIGUED but I’m always mildly scared to ask what Prey is

Oh gosh @themountainsays​ please don’t be nervous to ask D: I promise for as much as I can babble endlessly about what I love about anything Prey, I can condense it just as well

Prey is a sci-fi, soft-horror video game that came out in 2017 developed by Arkane Studios, that I fell in love with IMMEDIATELY because of its amazing atmosphere, beautiful art style, and gripping story

The Summary is that Morgan Yu (the protagonist and player character, shown above as male but also playable as female) works alongside their brother Alex to test a device called a Neuromod that allows humans to gain nearly any ability instantly by copying the brain of someone who has that skill and creating a replicant of their neural pathways in the recipient of the Neuromod

Obviously that’s kind of incredible! Want to visit a foreign country but don’t know the language? Insert a Neuromod and now you do! Takes 30 seconds or less. Got an emergency situation where you need a welder with 40 years of experience in 5 minutes? Boom. Neuromod. Now you’ve got 12

Alex asks Morgan to join him onboard Talos I, a space station from the Space Race Era that is now owned by their company, TranStar, but before coming up into space, they need to run a few basic tests to get started

Morgan does. Everything is fine :)

Until an alien transforms from a coffee mug and kills a scientist when he picks it up

And then Morgan wakes up and starts to repeat the same day

Turns out? They’ve been doing that for a while. 3 years, actually. They’ve just forgotten

Cuz here’s the thing about Neuromods that not many people know about: if the skill given by the Neuromod is removed, so are all the memories the patient created past that point. That language you “learned” 6 years ago? Gone, and all 2,190 days after that. Got a Masters Degree in that time? Dated around? Got married? Yeah, you don’t remember, not a single second

The rest of the game is Morgan navigating Talos I, the space station (above) they didn’t know they were on, constantly butting up against places and people they “don’t know” but know them, and attempting to avoid or eliminate the alien threat that has crippled the entire facility

Cuz oh yeah! Aliens!!

These a$$holes: (note, if you have arachnophobia or find spider-like creatures distasteful, do not google “Mimics + Prey”. I will not be posting pictures of Mimics here, though they are the most common enemies in the game and arguably have the most relevance to the plot and au)

(none of these images are mine, most are official marketing images with the exception of the last, which is from reddit)

The aliens are called “Typhon”, and they’ve been a government, and then TraStar, secret for almost 70 years. The first human encounter (via Russian cosmonaut) was a Mimic that was floating in space disguised as debris. It dispelled it’s form and attacked the cosmonaut, killing them violently. Mimics might be the weakest and smallest Typhon, but their ability to perfectly mimic objects in their environment is what captured TranStar’s interest in the first place. The spooky aspect of Prey (especially early game) is that in each new environment, you caNNOT trust your surroundings. Nearly anything in any room COULD be a mimic, and they are difficult to spot without practice. Is a chair ever really just a chair? Does that stack of toilet paper have one too many? You don’t know, and neither does Morgan

But that’s okay, right? Escape Talos I, make it back Earth-side with the Neuromod research and pick up where you left off, right? It’s still life-changing technology, still worth preserving…. right?

Except, remember what I said about how the Neuromod “replicates” someone else’s brain? And those Mimics…. they can copy just about anything. And Morgan has been unknowingly testing these devices for 3 whole years and….. what exactly has Morgan had shoved into their skull everyday?

Uh oh

So let’s see we’ve got:

- a ton of missing memories

- a space station full of self-replicating aliens (like a virus)

- aaaaaand a brain full of Typhon goop that, while handy, is probably super dangerous

The game allows the player to make plenty of decisions that propel the narrative forward. Everything from who to save, what to destroy, the destruction or preservation of Talos I as a whole, and, ultimately, whether the player/Morgan makes it out alive or not

And that just scratches the surface. Prey launches ethical questions at the player over and over again. They ask “Who are you?” - the person you were 3 years ago, 10 years ago, or 5 minutes ago? How many lives are worth sacrificing for progress? Is progress ever worth the suffering put into it? What’s fair? What’s just? Can someone who doesn’t remember committing a crime be held responsible? Should they?

Prey is a playground of unique set pieces and fantastically tricky questions disguised as normal space-enthused, first person shooter and I absolutely adore it

So… maybe you can see why an au in a world this complex is so tantalizing^^

I had to read again, because this game sounds really cool and interesting!

90% of writing advice can be thrown out the window for your first draft.

Show don’t tell? Ignore.

Basic grammar and punctuation? Unnecessary. 

Physical descriptions of characters? Don’t need to bother. 

Solid plot? That’s for later. 

The words don’t come as fast when you’re thinking of the best way to put them together. It doesn’t have to be pretty, or much more than inconsistent nonsense.  The point is to have it exist.

Effective storytelling is for subsequent drafts! Go write some nonsense! 

As a hyper-perfectionist human, THIS is a piece of advice I wish I’d internalized a hell of a lot sooner. If I hadn’t overwhelmed myself by considering every little thing, starting over when it gets “too messy”… there’s no doubt in my mind I’d have a first draft by now.

Now, passion is the only thing I care about in my first draft.

when i’m writing fiction, the main rule i try to stick to is that: the first draft is where i write what’s important to me.

this usually means character arcs and deep ethical and political debates for me, but for some people it’s gonna be physical description or in-depth plotting or Whatever

your subsequent drafts are where you fill in the gaps and make things make sense, but that first draft should be everything you personally care about, and don’t worry much about the rest

Also? PRE. 👏  WRITE. 👏 THINGS. 👏

Got a scene in mind? Don’t try to fit it into your draft, just write it in a separate file and save it.

Got some witty dialogue on deck? Jot it down and keep it in your pocket!

Settings? Character development? Plot point ideas? Dramatic scenes? Write it all down! Keep a prewriting file, or two, or three, or however many you need. It doesn’t matter if what you put in them makes sense, or is totally disjointed, or whether it gets used at all.

Get those ideas in writing. Do NOT trust yourself to remember a great idea six weeks, two days, or fifteen minutes from now when you’ve got time to work it into the larger story. If you get ideas while you’re out and about or at work, keep a notepad in your pocket or text them to yourself.

Keep a treasure trove of all those wonderful fiddly bits that make your writing unique. You never know when they’ll come in handy!

the first draft is you telling yourself the story. the following drafts are where you help them first draft make sense

Transgender Day of Visibility.

Idea: RPG game in which your character's "race bonus" cames in the form of the game giving you different information about the different things you can do.

For example, do you come from a bow-wielding elf culture? Easy. The tutorial is your dad giving you the bow and arrow tutorial in the game. Your dad just explains shit to you and you absorb it like a sponge, and that's how your elf character is better at archery than the human characters. The mechanics are still there in other playthroughs, don't get me wrong, whatever you learn as a baby elf from your elf dad is something you COULD hypothetically stumble upon by accident playing as a human/dwarf/catgirl/whatever. But the other options simply don't give you the bow and arrow tutorial, because they didn't have an elf dad to explain it to them. The non-elves just gotta deal with it. And maybe to spice up your different playthroughs so you can't just use the knowledge you've earned as an elf when you want to play as a furry, maybe your elf dad gave you a special tool to make bonus arrows idk. And if you want to be a genuinely good archer as a non-elf you need to go on a very long and complicated story-heavy quest to have you learn this shit. And you may not even do it right! You get one try per playthrough and if you didn't please the Gods or something, you're out. If you wanted to be an archer so bad, should have considered it before picking an orc. Go honor your forefathers' library traditions, become an astronomer or something idk intellectual orcs are trendy now.

This would apply to any "fantasy race" in the game. Does this human culture just really love horses? You get the Horse Tutorial with your human dad now. Or the Smithing Tutorial with your dwarf dad. Or the philosophy tutorial from your orc dad. "Race bonuses" are simply cultural knowledge your character has learned from their family, and that anyone else could theorethically learn as well.

I would play this game honestly

fairy ferret

died and came back as a cowboy i call that reintarnation

Today (March 31) is International Transgender Day of Visibility, and I’m sending love to all trans folks today, and always.

Happy TDOV 2021!