Today I Explained Why I Can't Really Travel To Florida Right Now To My Dad & Watching Him Get Increasingly

Finding joy again in things you used to love is one of the miracles of life

𝔯𝔢𝔭𝔲𝔱𝔞𝔱𝔦𝔬𝔫: リボーン (reborn) | Taylor Swift

// reputation as a comic book

in the death of her reputation, she felt truly alive.

how did I get past my writer’s block for a specific scene I was rewriting?

i tried rewriting the same scene in the same way with different words

i tried changing character povs

i tried cutting out the first part of the scene

i tried cutting out / significantly changing the second part of the scene

i basically just wrote a hundred false starts and hated all of them.

but all these false starts helped me build context. I learned more about the characters, and I learned about what the scene did and did not need to do to be successful.

i took a step back and looked what was important - primarily introducing the main conflict and giving the reader a sense of the main character’s personality, but on a subtler level I also need to set up the important relationship that the entire story hinges upon. And this last part turned out to be the missing key - I needed to make the inciting incident tell us more about the relationship between the two characters.

So I did a bit of everything in the end. I cut out the initial writing-myself-into-the-story bits but kept the first bits of action, and just did a better job of weaving character development into that. I moved the inciting incident a little further back to allow for more character development time, and also to make the character introduction feel more natural and meaningful.

and yeah, it still needs line edits and some fleshing out (it is still only draft two), but I finally don’t hate this scene and it makes way more sense for what I want out of an opening scene for this story

i just heard someone say that the reason reputation only has one outfit is because her reputation hasn’t changed. no matter how successful she is, people will still see her as someone who dates around and writes songs about her exes (bs) and i am flabbergasted.

The most attractive thing to me is effort. Someone who really wants to talk to me, wants to see me, wants to make me a part of their day.

perfect new meme template just dropped

For Novice Writers: the quick test for Are You Being Scammed Or Not...

I read a sad case today of a young writer who had had her story rewritten into illiteracy by a so-called publisher, who then abused her in email when she wrote to complain. She wsn’t getting paid for her story – instead she was actually buying copies of the anthology to show people that she had sold a story. And I thought, it is time to remind the world, and to enlighten young writers, about…

Yog’s Law: 

Money flows towards the writer.

That’s all. All writers should remember it.  When a commercial publisher contracts a book, it will pay an advance against royalties to the writer. Money flows towards the writer. Literary agents make their living by charging a commission of between 10 and 20% on the sales that they make on behalf of their clients, the writers. When advances and royalties are paid by a publisher the agent’s percentage is filtered off in the direction of the writer’s agent but the bulk of the money still flows towards the writer. If a publisher ever asks for any sort of financial contribution from a writer, they’re trying to divert money away from the writer, in direct contravention of Yog’s Law. If an agent ever asks for up-front fees, regardless of what they call them (reading fees, administration costs, processing fees, or retainers), then they are trying to divert money away from the writer, in direct contravention of Yog’s Law. It’s a brilliantly simple rule. We should thank James D Macdonald for it in the best way there is. Buy his books

Money flows toward the writer.

No, that doesn’t mean that the author should get paper and ink for free, or that he won’t pay for postage. It does mean that when someone comes along and says, “Sure, kid, you can be a Published Author! It’ll only cost you $300!” the writer will know that something’s wrong. A fee is a fee is a fee, whether they call it a reading fee, a marketing fee, a promotion fee, or a cheese-and-crackers fee.

Is this perfect? No. Scammers have come up with some elaborate ways to avoid activating it. But it’s still a good and useful tool, and will save a lot of grief. Any time an agent or publisher asks for money, the answer should be “No!”

  —  Celebrating Childhood by Adonis (translated by Khaled Mattawa)

[text ID: Love and dreams are two parentheses. / Between them I place my body / and discover the world.]

the problem with reading and writing leading to a strong vocabulary is that you tend to know the vibe of words instead of their meanings.

if I used this word in a sentence, would it make sense? absolutely. if you asked me what it meant, could I tell you? absolutely not.

Of course I know what I'm doing, I'm a writer! (Hurriedly patching a massive plot hole with duct tape and pins)