Mariethecakegal - Bingo-Bango!

You were bitten by a vampire but you didn't die, instead the vampire died. The next day, you're captured by vampires and marked as unsafe for consumption. All because you had a rare, incurable condition in your blood. Cool, now you are a vampire slayer who kills vamps by letting 'em bite you.

being a writer is constantly google the definitions of words you already know the meanings of because your brain's always paranoid and telling you maybe you've been using them wrong your entire life

I can excuse misusing words in my daily life but my mlm slow-burn enemies to lovers smut has to be perfect

Romantic Gestures for Characters 

❥ The “I Know You” Gesture

Your character remembers something tiny. Maybe their partner always peels oranges but hates the stringy bits. So they do it for them, meticulously. No grand speech. Just peeled oranges on a napkin, handed over like, I got you. It’s not flowers. It’s better.

❥  The “You Matter More Than My Ego” Move

Apologies. Vulnerable, awkward, ugly ones. Not performative, not flowers-as-a-bandage. Just a raw, honest “I screwed up. And you didn’t deserve that.” That’s romance with guts.

❥ The “I Made This With My Clumsy, Lovesick Hands” Attempt

It’s not a five-star meal. It might be an overcooked mess. But they tried. They Googled recipes, burnt a pan, and still showed up with a crooked smile and a smoke-scented apology. Intimacy lives in the effort, not the execution.

❥  The “I’m Thinking of You Even When You’re Not Around” Habit

A voice memo left in the middle of the day. A text that says, “I saw this book and thought of you.” A saved pastry because “you love those stupid lemon ones.” It’s in the thought, the noticing. The I-carry-you-with-me-even-here of it.

❥  The “You’re Safe With Me” Moment

Middle of a panic attack. They don’t run, they don’t fix. They sit. Hold a hand. Count breaths. They become a lighthouse in the fog. That’s not just romance, it’s sanctuary.

❥ The “Make You Laugh When You Want to Cry” Trick

Silly voices. Bad dad jokes. A spontaneous dance in the kitchen just to make them smile. Love doesn’t always whisper—it cackles, snorts, belly-laughs until you can’t remember what the fight was about.

❥ The “I See the You Nobody Else Gets to See” Love

Noticing the nervous tic they try to hide. The quiet resilience. The softness behind the sarcasm. Your character sees it all and chooses to love them there. Not despite their mess, but because of it.

❥  The “I’ll Go to the Boring Thing Because You Care” Sacrifice

They hate art galleries. Or jazz. Or your character’s weird book club full of PhD students. But they show up. They try. They listen and maybe even ask a thoughtful question. Not because they suddenly love postmodern fiction, but because they love you.

❥ The “Let Me Take Care of You, Just This Once” Flip

Especially powerful when it comes from your fiercely independent character. When they finally let someone in. Accept help. Rest their head on a lap and let themselves be held. Or be the one doing the holding for someone who never asks.

❥  The “I Want to Remember This” Gesture

No, not just a scrapbook. Maybe it's saving movie stubs, or voice recording a partner’s laugh because it's perfect and might not last. Maybe it's writing a poem they'll never read. Romance often lives in what we keep sacred, quietly.

❥ Bonus — The Non-Obvious Public Gesture

Holding hands in public when your character usually doesn’t. Or kissing their partner’s temple in front of their disapproving parents. Or calling them “baby” when it makes their partner smile like a fool. Public affection isn’t about performance, it’s about pride. Claiming someone. Softly, fiercely.

@ellipsis-dotdotdot I would like to know..

Reblog if you want your followers to tell you which fictional character you remind them of.

Writing is so much easier when you actually write

random book idea

• Esmeralda is a stunning golden-era showwoman and singer. She's all short pixie cuts gelled and glittered with glam, calf-exposing glittery dresses with a slit halfway down the skirt, and black heels. In the early 1960s, she's untouchable.

• Francisco is a top-notch criminal who steals from the rich and gives to the poor. He's quick, witty, light on his feet, and always red-handed but always wearing gloves. 

• Esmeralda’s been divorced from Francisco for twelve years, ever since her second child Ava was born….if ‘born’ is the right way to put it. They had drifted apart; Esmeralda chasing success and Francisco being drafted into the war between the so-called heroes, magical humans with a somewhat toxic humanitarian facade- and the wearh, blood-sucking villains who rule the lands underground. 

• In Francisco’s absence, Esmeralda made a deal with William, a wearh with whom she has a bit of a history, to transform her pet bird into a living child- she just wanted to feel as though she had a purpose again- especially after the authorities had sent her son Arlo off to his designated “training center,” a school designed to harness children's powers and prepare them to become successful heroes as they reach adulthood. 

• Esmeralda just didn't understand why they had to take him at two.

• Arlo is an independent, solitary, shy kid. He grows up in books and maps and rules, always following, always on the sidelines. He wants nothing more than to break free. 

• Ava is different. Esmeralda’s hidden charm, she learns at one and a half to hide in the garage whenever any car pulls up in the driveway, and to only go to the market early in the morning, before the shops officially open. She's brilliant, social, energetic, loves inventing and designing anything and everything she can get her hands on. With a creative, fast-moving mind, she loves exploring and yearns to see the world and meet everybody who lives in it. 

• Ava meets Arlo, once a summer, only for a month. September is the hottest month of the year, but the two children always run around outside from before the sun peeks above the horizon, to long after dusk when the tiny “glowbugs” create a spectacle of sunny spots through the forest behind the house.

• Those were the good days. But then one night- in December- Ava hears a knock on her window. She almost doesn't recognize the boy hanging by two paralyzed hands on her windowsill. Arlo hadn't visited the previous year, claiming he'd been too busy in a rushed, chicken-scratched letter. He had been thirteen at the time; now he was fourteen. Considering the fact that she hadn't seen him since he was twelve, her age at the present, she had been expecting a very different boy. A boy with untied shoelaces and a missing molar or two, not a tall and lanky kid with a deep voice and long bangs that hid his eyes. 

• He says he doesn't have much time. Much time before they catch him, the people who had taken his dad and forced him to kill- or worse, the people who were trying to kill his dad. He says he wants to run away, and he has been collecting for years and now possesses every map that's ever been reprinted or even sketched once. 

• With Ava hungry for adventure and Arlo desperate for escape, they formulate a plan beneath spilled candlewax and messy scribbles of possible paths on worn-out maps. And thus, their adventure ensues.

i just beefed with someone online and I got tired of it so I said "I ate some really good blueberries today" and they replied "I had a fire ass peach today". world peace

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I trust That GP*-Eft over ChatGPT any day.

You will never, ever see me use any generative AI in my writing or other creative endeavors, not even to spin up a list of ideas. You don't get to be a good writer by letting an algorithm do the hard stuff for you. Doing the hard stuff is how you become a good writer, and then a better writer. It's as much about the process as it is about the output, and if you're only focused on the latter then you're missing the point. Never let your writing--or art, or music--become so commodified that you lose the sheer joy (and frustration) of creating in the first place.

*GP = Great Perfect