when u think michael mouse is telling u that the cool master lady u are trying to save might in fact have three (3) braincells just like ur boyfriend

Fleshing Out Your Plot

So you’ve written your outline, maybe even your first draft, and you’re a bit worried about the length. Maybe it’s too short for your genre. Maybe you feel something’s missing. Well fear not! There are many ways you can flesh out your plot without making it feel botched and pointless. 

1) Check your beats. Whether or not you’re actively using Save the Cat! as a structure, the beats make for good inspiration. Do you have a clear theme? Do you have a clear catalyst? Do you have a mid-point that raises the stakes? Do you have a B plot? If you’re missing any of these, it might be a good idea to weave them in. 

2) Foreshadowing. This is a good time to ask yourself if you’ve foreshadowed your plot twists and major character decisions. Have you laid the groundwork? Is it justified in the text? If not, you might want to add another couple of scenes that show the reasoning behind the plot twits and big decisions in your novel. 

3) Light Relief. If you really want your reader to feel something when reading your book, you need good dynamics. That means soaring highs before tragic lows. If your book lacks light relief, your reader will become used to the tragedy and it won’t have the same impact. Don’t underestimate the need for a bit of fluff here and there. 

4) Relationships. No, I am not talking about your romantic interest. I’m talking about friends, family, enemies. Explore how you can develop these, how they shape the character. If you’re planning on killing one of them off, make sure we see how much they mean to the protagonist to ensure it will really hurt the reader.

So there you have it, just a few ideas for fleshing out your plot. Feel free to add any other you can think of below! Happy writing! 

[Please credit @isabellestonebooks if reposting to instagram] 

Embrace “good enough” with your writing. Don’t shoot for “perfect”. Don’t try to “be the best you can be”. Setting really high standards is very hard on you and your creativity. It’s like running a marathon at top speed ALL THE TIME. It’s exhausting. It causes strain. And eventually you will grind to a dead halt with a complete aversion to continuing.

So give yourself and your writing some grace today. Let your writing be “just okay”. Challenge yourself to view your creativity in a different light or with a different angle. Aim for the elegance found only in simplicity. See how it transforms your creativity and brings you the joy you had when you first fell in love with writing.

MASS EFFECT: LEGENDARY EDITION [35/?]

I’ve been seeing an increasingly large amount of people get into fic binding lately, which is fucking amazing! I love each and every one of you guerilla publishers! With the history of fandom takedowns, purges, and the bull shit legislation corporations try and start every few years, it’s so good that fics are being given permanency. 

I’ve noticed that fic binders seem to be focused on longer fics, ones in the 50k onward range, which makes sense and is great because these fics absolutely deserve to be put into print! But, the thing is, my favorite fics have almost always been short one-shots, and no one seems to be talking about binding them.

So! I’m gonna show you how to bind short one-shots.

Someone had once called Kaidan Alenko boring.

Of course, there’d been more words than that, some diplomatic expression spoken on board the Citadel in hushed tones, something that Shepard had overheard while looking for thermal clips. The rattle of the galactic news played over the hum of voices, some over-blown story about her ground team succeeding on some mission or another (again). And then she’d heard it; the slight hiss of a salarian tongue, a voice riddled with that particular amphibian rattle, followed by a quiet laugh.

Shepard dropped her heat clips.

The salarian caught sight of the gaze she threw over her shoulder, the violent red gleam of her pupils, the way the fissures in her skin flickered. Blood drained from the salarian’s face as recognition set in, and he fled, followed closely by his compatriot.

Boring, Shepard thought. She picked up her thermal clips with fingers flushed from anger.

“Is something wrong?” Kaidan asked when she met with him outside the embassies, and Shepard shook her head, ignoring the way Kaidan’s eyes narrowed. He didn’t believe her, not for a second.

Kaidan always presented himself well to the media. He appeared in vids either in the middle of battle or in the midst of a diplomatic situation, dressed in his blues rather than armour. When his face wasn’t covered by his helmet his expression was always perfectly neutral; he was curiously tempered for an experienced marine, especially considering he’d been to the equivalent of a biotic torture camp in his youth. Despite his trauma his eyes remained kind and his voice remained gentle. He was handsome, certainly, in a gravelly kind of way. Shepard supposed it was possible to mistake his temperament for him being boring.

Despite being taken from his family at an early age and inducted into a program that sought to extort his biotics by any means necessary (often resulting in broken bones or snapped necks), Kaidan had remained kind. Selfless. He wasn’t angry or filled with fire the way Ashley had been; the way Shepard had been. Where they turned red he remained blue and put a stopper in the bottleneck of pain; Shepard admired him for that, truly she did. His sensibility, Ashley had said once, was boring. You need to start taking some risks, LT! she’d laughed. I’d prefer not to get myself killed, if it’s all the same to you, Ash, had been his reply. Sensibility was a rare thing to see in the Alliance, these days, what with the chaos of war taking the galaxy by the throat and throttling it for all it was worth.

And Shepard knew what the vids didn’t show, what the audiences didn’t see. She knew the way Kaidan’s face looked when it was smeared with blood, when his teeth were bared and his fingers trembling and glowing blue. She’d seen his power, the way he could blast an entire squadron off their feet with a single pulse of biotics. His ability to hide that power was so perfect that Shepard found herself forgetting he was one of the most powerful human biotics in the history of the galaxy. Though after what happened at Jump Zero, she didn’t blame him for wanting to keep a cap on it.

The vids didn’t show despair, either. They didn’t show the way he’d been nearly crippled with grief after Ashley’s death on Virmire, when Shepard had cradled his head in her lap as he’d cried and cried and cried, blaming himself, always blaming himself. They’d grieved together, then, and somehow they’d made it, though the image of Kaidan’s entire body warped with despair wasn’t something she wasn’t likely to forget. They didn’t show the tenderness in his face - the fear - when he told her he loved her, that he’d always loved her, and that losing her frightened him more than anything in the galaxy. And they certainly didn’t show the way his eyes had shone and his smile had lit up her life when she told him that she loved him too.

FINALLY YES

Well, if that’s what we have to do, let’s get started.

♡ ♡

DRAGON AGE: INQUISITION | REPLAY ➤ Valammar

imagining a tender moment between your own ocs but you are the only person with any context

let’s do a thing:

colonist, earthborn, or spacer? ruthless, war hero, or sole survivor? paragon, renegade, or neutral? control, destroy, or synthesis?

As noble as the Council members seem now, if their backs are against the wall, they’ll abandon us.