Rise Up, Oh Heart, For There is Another Battle to Win

roboticdreams:

do you ever think about your oc and you’re like “i headcanon that—” and then you stop and realize that this is YOUR character and all of your headcanons are canon and you are powerful and should be feared

(via cthulhu-with-a-fez)

emissary-architect:

me: i feel awful in so many different ways. I have no idea how I’m supposed to cope and process everything that’s happening.
me: turns to my ocs
my ocs: sweats
me: jaws theme

(via clockwork-mockingbird)

PSA for self-published authors

leightaylorwrites:

suck-my-dick-gansey:

I recently learned that if you sell your ebook through Barnes & Noble and sell over 1,000 copies over a 1 year period, they’ll automatically consider your book to be sold in stores and if you sell over 500 copies they’ll automatically consider you for a signing/in store book talk. I don’t know how realistic these numbers are for all of you, but it’s definitely something worth keeping in mind.

Just in case you all hadn’t heard: @an-author-and-his-books @leightaylorwrites @ladybookmad

Thanks for tagging me! I had heard about the selling 1k thing but I hadn’t heard about the possible signing if I sell 500 copies!!!

If anyone wants to help out, pick up a copy of my book, Epic, through the Barnes and Noble online store here for $1.49

@amyhlynnofficial for future reference?

(Source: authorctcallahan, via slyrider)

perorat:

wyomingsmustache:

shinyhappygoth:

pervocracy:

pirozhok-s-kapustoj:

ten-and-donna:

my-fair-ladybug:

my-fair-ladybug:

Something that’s almost never covered in fantasy mediums is common names.

Like we all know fantasy names are unusual, but any name to a foreign culture is considered unusual English names to Indian people are very unusual for example. But naturally, given that it’s an entire culture, there will be some common names, it’d be refreshing to at one point here this exchange.

“So I was talking to Vicnae and-”

“Wait which Vicnae? You can’t just say Vicnae. There are ten Vicnae’s in my village alone.”

This has 100 notes yesterday and 300 this morning what the fuck happened.

People understand the truly important things.

DSA (a German fantasy P&P RPG) actually has the name Alrik, which is hugely popular in the universe. Everyone is Alrik.

This is also a great excuse to use “X the Y” or “X of Y” type names without being pretentious. Calling someone “Thognor The Stout” goes from pomposity to practicality if he lives down the road from Thognor The Small.

Not-as-big-as-Medium-Sized-Jock-but-bigger-than-Wee-Jock Jock.

~~*~surnames~*~~

my family is from a town in Ireland where everyone has the last name Ryan.  literally like everyone.  so they differentiated families by calling them by their professions, right?

anyway we’re the Horse Thief Ryans

(via clockwork-mockingbird)

my fever thoughts the last two days:

bogleech:

While sick in bed I kept thinking, or rather my brain kept thinking with or without my input, about the sheer overwhelming volume of fiction human beings have produced, like the number of myths, legends, novels, comics, games, movies, plays, original characters and even dreams and imaginary friends felt so vast and all encompassing that it seemed to dwarf all of our other achievements as a species and the sheer immensity and pointlessness of it all felt almost terrifying until suddenly my foggy mind was like “whoa, whoa, wait, WAIT A MINUTE….THAT’S WHAT WE ARE!!!!!! WE’RE THE STORYTELLER PLANET, THAT’S OUR THING IN THE UNIVERSE!”

So that turned into all these scenarios where for whatever reason most other sentience races could have technological power beyond our comprehension but still no knack for concocting even rudimentary child-level fiction and are so easily entertained by any shit we can make up that it’s basically our superpower

Humans end up paying their way across the galaxy just making things up as they go along and even our worst most garbage pieces of media become an almost priceless commodity.

You’re cornered by a tentareaver from the bloodstar or whatever and she’s all “SO, EARTHBEAST…TELL ME ONE OF THESE FAMOUS FICSHUNS OF YOURS AND I’LL CONSIDER SPARING YOUR LIFE”

*sigh*…okay, once upon a time there was a tentareaver…

“WAS SHE OF THE FLESHRENDER CASTE????”

….Yes, the most beautiful fleshrender in her whole clusterhive.

“TEE HEE”

(via lathori)

A Sociological Look at Soulmate Universes

reclusiveq:

transformativeworks:

upagainstabookcase:

I want to take some time to think about Soulmate AUs in broader social and historical context. (I’m sticking to the ‘first words written on your body’ version of those aus)

Thoughts on Society:

• In a soulmate universe there would be distinctly less homophobia because queerness would be both normalized and no one would be able to argue that it isn’t natural. (Not that there wouldn’t be any because people are assholes). 
  
• Religion would be structured differently - destiny would be seen as an incontrovertible subject. “Of course you have a destiny and a place in God’s plan, just look at those words on your arm.” What words were written on the arms of Messiahs and prophets?
  
• Scientists attempting to explain it through genetics and physics. 
• The culture of introductions would be essential. What you say to new people would be built into the culture of what is polite and it would change society by society. 
• Societies with strict verbal introduction rules that limit the finding of soul mates (because what would disrupt strict social stratification than princes discovering that their soul mate is a maid). 
• Societies where people craft personalized introductions and use the same line like a personal signature each time they meet someone new.  
• First day of school or college or a new job being almost all meeting rituals.  
• Special festivals that are dedicated to meeting new people and talking to them. Pilgrimages for young adults to go town by town to meet as many people as possible. 

Pop Culture

• Massive online databases full of those first words. 
• Books dedicated to the first words of famous people. 
• Analyses of your words (a la astrology: because you have the word ‘time’ in your words it means…)
• Matchmakers who promise they’ll find you Your Soulmate! 
• Imagine the shipping debates around TV shows: “Her words haven’t been revealed yet! So she could be his match!” or “They revealed his words in season 2 so we know his match isn’t Fred!” 

Interpersonal:

• Imagine the pressure to find your match 
• People who claim children raised outside of matches are more destructive and less well adjusted and at a disadvantage
• “If you have sex outside a Match you will catch chlamydia and you will DIE”
• Special marriages for matches. 
  
• Support groups for those who find their Matches late in life. 
• Imagine the family pressure in some families to never meet anyone unapproved by the family. “Your father speaks to everyone first!” 
  
• Different marriage systems 
• Flexible ones where every non-match marriage is considered voidable if a soulmate match is found. Imagine being the person left behind by someone you love and trust because of words on their skin. 
• Or a system of different marriages where people have different partners for different contexts: This is my household wife June and my Match wife Alice her household husband Larry and we all make it work. 
• Or systems where you can’t legally marry unless you can both show your words and prove you are a match. 
• People who lie about it to avoid the social pressure inherent in finding your match. “Of course my husband and I are a match!” Or teens who lie to their parents that someone is their match because their parents disapprove of their new date. 
• Parents who worry like hell about their kid’s words. 
• People who fall in love with the “wrong person” because this social system means that there is literally a wrong person. But they truly fall in love. Who try and scratch off their soulmate words from their skin because FUCK destiny, we’re making our own. 
• Imagine how broken you would feel if you were asexual/aromantic and you didn’t have words. 
  
• Imagine having words that you hated. Imagine having words on your skin that were a slur or an insult or a threat and knowing that someday you will meet someone who will say that to you and they are someone you are supposed to love.
  

It fascinates me because the idea is so much bigger than just meet-cute scenarios and fluff fics. It would change society from the ground up. 

I want to write the one in bold a little bit. 

I would love to read in-depth discussion about each of these ideas. Sadly, there’s not much available. What does exist, though, is discussion about fannish tattoos, which are voluntary physical marks of things we value. Transformative Works and Cultures has a couple of interesting articles on this topic by Bethan Jones, which you can read here and here.

Growing up believing that the words have to be spoken out loud, in person, to you, but discovering it was that person you met online that one time.

(via bronzedragon)

If you’re a writer and you see this post, stop what you’re doing.

hsavinien:

minim-calibre:

minim-calibre:

minim-calibre:

mark-helsing:

WHENEVER YOU SEE THIS POST ON YOUR DASH, STOP WHAT YOU’RE DOING AND WRITE ONE SENTENCE FOR YOUR CURRENT PROJECT.

Just one sentence. Stop blogging for one minute and write a single sentence. It could be dialogue, it could be a nice description of scenery, it could be a metaphor, I don’t care. The point is, do it. Then, when you finish, you can get back to blogging.

If this gets viral, you might just have your novel finished by next Tuesday.

Goddamn it, it’s back.

If it stays back, I might manage to finish a third story this year. Jesus.

I swear, this is now my only writing motivation.

BACK AGAIN??? Sigh. 

Okay, sorry if anyone gets sick of this, but it’s the best way for me to get myself to write.

(via suzukiblu)

writing-prompt-s:

You get a membership to a tiny rundown gym as a present from your eccentric uncle. It takes some time, but you begin to grow suspicious: Is every member here a…super hero?

Okay but if I was writing this I would drag out this person’s investigation to the last possible minute and be like NOPE, SUPERVILLAINS.

(via itsybittle)

dainesanddaffodils:

One of my favorite phrases my Creative Writing professor had for when you’re writing fantasy is ‘giving your story a Flux Capacitor’.

Because it’s not real, it doesn’t exist. But the way it’s thrown into Back to the Future, at no point does it throw the audience off or suspend any more disbelief than time travel would. You believe Doc when he says he created the Flux Capacitor - the thing that makes time travel possible, because the universe never questions him. 

So it essentially means like, there are going to be elements to your universe that are just not gonna make any sense, even if you set up a whole system based on it. And the only way to make it work is completely own it. You cannot second-guess your system or else the reader will too. You can give it the strangest explanation, but write it like you own it.  

Either you’ve got to follow the rules of reality and physics and shit TO THE LETTER, or you have to say “naaaaaah” and fuck off with your magic/sci-fi/whatever to have a marvelous garden party where reality isn’t invited.

(via slyrider)