I Love The Phrase "they Get Along Like A House On Fire". It's Perfect. You And Me Have Perfect Chemistry

“the ending is always the same”

war of the foxes - richard silken / waterloo - ABBA / euripides’ medea - the little theatre / anne carson / the three fates - luca cambiaso / the oresteia - aeschylus / road to hell II - hadestown / when i met you - mira lightner / andersen’s fairy tale anthology

grabbing new writers by the shoulders. it is important to write what you love and to love what you write. if you spend all your time trying to make something other people will approve of you will hate yourself and everything around you. learn at your own pace. you have time. i’m proud of you

dystopias are getting too real and utopias feel too improbable. i propose a third kind of escape: a world that’s just okay

Let the world be saved by darkness, for once. Instead of blazing light - too bright and infinitely cold to comprehend even as it gives the illusion of warmth, let it be an all-consuming dark that snuffs out the calamity approaching. Fire or ice, the rage of a superstorm, some horror adrift in the vastness of space - whatever this supposed apocalyptic event might be, let it reach what it believes to be it’s victory only to be devoured in a lightless gulf.

There are things in the dark we will never know. Never have a name for. Things that have watched and waited from beyond the reaches of our limited memory as a species and will doubtless watch us go, in the end.

Let it be that dark which gives the battered heroine/hero their relief. The tingling rush of the end filling their veins, the weighty hopelessness, now left to hang in the air as all else is swallowed by an impenetrable abyss.

Let the air ring - for silence, true silence - has descended. Let the weapon in the savior’s grasp quiver, because it was never supposed to be over so quickly. Not like that. Not before they’d ever had a chance to fight at all.

Let them sense, just for an extended, weightless moment, the presence of something huge and dark and deep all around them. How they are not alone and never have been, not even in those comforting instances of the womb.

Let the one who’d been prepared to fight put aside their weapon, breathe in the thick air with a shaky inhale, and go home.

The light has demanded enough sacrifices. How many have burned themselves alive in its pyre, desperate and willing to throw themselves into the blaze if it meant others could benefit from the flicker of warmth? Of hope?

Let the champion of the tale go home, shed their armor, and crawl into bed. Let them look out into the darkness of sudden night and see, distant and strange, the glitter of delicate stars beyond their reach.

The dark has always been. When the last flicker of light goes, it will still remain.

The dark has always kept us safe.

how to balance multiple wips

i never thought that i would be qualified to make a post on this since i’ve only ever had one wip i was working on at one time, but since finishing the first draft of my first novel, that has changed! having more than one wip can be stressful and chaotic, which is why i’m going to offer some of my tips on how to keep your stories straight.

one per day

a useful strategy i’ve found is to decide which wip you’ll be working on today and set your daily goal for it. i do this by using my google calendar to plan out my writing week in sessions. you don’t always have to plan ahead on what wip you’ll work on—on occasion i schedule open or free writing sessions where i can choose which wip i want to work on that particular day. you can ofc adapt this strategy how you need, but i do think it’s one of the best ones i have to offer.

work on projects you love

you should spend your writing time with a story and characters you adore. if something isn’t working for you in one of your wips, don’t be afraid to change it or to put that project aside for a little while to focus on other wips. you don’t have to keep going with every single wip you ever started—as writers, our stories will fluctuate and persist and if we really love one, it will stick around for as long as you want it. sometimes it’s hard to let go, and you never truly have to. your characters and their stories will always be a part of you, no matter if you’ve left them behind or they still stand by your side.

stuck on one, move to another

one of the great things about having multiple wips is that you will probably always have something you can bounce back to. say one of your plots gives you writer’s block and you just can’t get past it. turning to one of your other wips will keep your creative brain busy and pumping out ideas, which will eventually lead to your block breaking down. this is definitely one of the best things about having more than one wip at a time, but if you can always start a small writing project like a short story too to overcome writer’s block!

distinguish battle lines

it is important to draw distinct lines between your wips to help keep you organized and your plots tight. you want to avoid the voices of one wip bleeding into another, so this is another good reason to stick to one wip per day. before you start writing, go through your wip notes or outline or skim the last few paragraphs you wrote to ensure your mind re-grasps the style of your current wip. deciding and identifying the differences like point of view (first person or third?), the number of character perspectives, the pacing, and the base themes will help with this.

final word

it really is up to you to take initiative of your writing projects and prioritize your time between them. remember not to overwork or stress yourself and practice making reasonable and achievable goals. as always, you and your mental health come first so don’t forget to take care of yourself!! a bit of a shorter post today but i hope you still find it useful. that’s all from me :)

“Public libraries are such important, lovely places!” Yes but do you GO there. Do you STUDY there. Do you meet friends and get coffee there. Do you borrow the FREE, ZERO SUBSCRIPTION, ZERO TRACKING books, audiobooks, ebooks, and films. Have you checked out their events and schemes. Do you sign up for the low cost courses in ASL or knitting or programming or writing your CV that they probably run. Do you know they probably have myriad of schemes to help low income families. Do you hire their low cost rooms if you need them. Have you joined their social groups. Do you use the FREE COMPUTERS. Do you even know what your library is trying to offer you. Listen, the library shouldn’t just exist for you as a nice idea. That’s why more libraries shut every year

“It’s only recently that I’ve come to understand that writers are not marginal to our society, that they, in fact, do all our thinking for us, that we are writing myths and our myths are believed, and that old myths are believed until someone writes a new one.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

sometimes i just really want to just take my spine and whip it around like a lasso to crack it

Reblog, click the picture, and prepare for battle.

Rating First Lines of My WIPs

There once was a very young filly named Mirabelle who lived on a lovely farm. She had a kind owner, and the horses who lived with her were very nice.

5/10

Major horse girl vibes

This might make a good children’s book, so it gets a couple extra points for reaching its target audience

I used to have a thing for writing stories from the POVs of animals, I think it was because I was a big fan of Erin Hunter books at the time

Author’s Note: This font I am typing in is Happy Monkey, for the story, and this is Handlee, which is my friend’s font. Remember, this font is mine and this font is hers. In this story, I am Ivy Keid, and my friend is Hailyn Keid. (My friend wishes to remain anonymous.) Got it? Cool. Let’s get on with the story. (Oh, and this may not make sense in some parts. So what? It’s a story. It doesn’t HAVE to make sense.

3/10

Younger me, I hate to break it to you, but a story does have to make some kind of sense

If it isn’t clear, I was going through a qUiRkY phase when I wrote this

I wrote this with my best friend, so I remember having fun writing it despite cringing at it now!

Heart racing, feet pounding the ground, Alara ran for her life, the monsters that would soon snuff out her life like a candle pursuing her relentlessly. She leaped over a fallen branch, and heard a series of loud thumps. She didn’t stop to check whether they’d fallen. She zigzagged through the streets and ran on into the darkness, where her people were hiding, where they had been chased out by the creatures of the darkness.”

7/10

Younger me was really trying to be hardcore huh

Actually I like this first line, but why is it so wordy, and what’s up with the confusing writing style?

This entire story was literally plagiarized from inspired by The City of Ember and I have fond memories of writing it

“You still reading that science fiction crap?”

A voice interrupted Joseph. He looked up from his copy of The Cyber War. It was Arnie, the class bully. He was one of those kids who never was caught when breaking the rules. The kids all complained about him, but the teachers never did anything because they never caught him. Make fun of his name, and he’d have you in a headlock giving you his infamous Sandpaper Noogie. No one ever sat in front of him. Kids would rather pull a desk to the other side of the room than sit near Arnie Jones.

6/10

Oh, look, a main character who likes books :) it gets a point just for that

This is unironically funny now, but I don’t think I was trying to be funny while writing this

Arnie Jones may be one of the best bully names I’ve ever come up with (for some reason, bullies featured prominently in my early stories--I wasn’t even bullied, so I have no idea why that was)

There’s nothing more awkward than being with four complete strangers and knowing that you might die with them.

6.5/10

If I want to know what I was reading at a point in my life, all I have to do is open up a WIP from that time, and I’ll immediately know what books I was liking at the time. This is one of those WIPs. In this case, it’s from my YA dystopia phase (yeah I had a lot of phases, don’t @ me)

From this first line alone, I’m getting huge Divergent vibes with some Percy Jackson flavor (it gets half a point solely for that)

I ended up abandoning this WIP after 4 pages, so I’m not really attached to it

“Halt!”

The soldier’s voice easily cut through the bustling plaza, as did its owner. Aydin pretended not to have heard and hurried on.

8/10

Points for the en media res, a point off for the second line being confusing

I wrote this around 7th-8th grade, which was when I started to get more serious about writing (although I abandoned it after 10 pages...in the middle of a sentence)

I might return to this one someday, I had a lot of fun with it!

Everyone says that time heals all wounds, but no amount of time could have prepared me for seeing my sister in her casket.

9/10

The intrigue? The hook? The mystery? Amazing, immaculate, we love to see it

Maybe I’m a little bit biased, but I think this is the best first line I’ve ever come up with!

This is from my current WIP, Pawn, btw ;)