If you say anything other than Deliver Us, you’re wrong. I’m sorry I don’t make the rules.
1, 7, 10, 26?
1. what song makes you feel better?
"Egg and Soldiers" by Cosmo Sheldrake has a wonderful energy that's fun to sing along to, so it always cheers me up 😄
7. what color brings you peace?
Probably dark blue or dark purple - nighttime colors are very calming and relaxing.
10. what’s something you’re excited for?
Well, I have a tentative plan to move out this spring, so I'm excited about that 😁 But I'm also excited about the book project I'm working on, because I love the characters so much and I can't wait to flesh out the story and world as best as I can!
26. what movie would you want to live in?
Hmm...some of the Disney and Pixar movies with really vibrant and cozy color palettes seem like they would be nice settings to live in, such as Ratatouille and Encanto!
soft asks to get to know people
- what song makes you feel better?
- what’s your feel-good movie?
- what’s your favorite candle scent?
- what flower would you like to be given?
- who do you feel most you around?
- say three nice things about yourself (three physical and three non-physical).
- what color brings you peace?
- tag someone (or multiple people) who make you feel good.
- what calms you down?
- what’s something you’re excited for?
- what’s your ideal date?
- how are you?
- what’s your comfort food?
- favorite feel-good show?
- for every emoji you get, tag someone and describe them in one word.
- compliment the person who sent you this number.
- fairy lights or LED lights?
- do you still love stuffed animals?
- most important thing in your life?
- what do you want most in the world right now?
- if you could tell your past self one thing, what would it be?
- what would you say to your future self?
- favorite piece of clothing?
- what’s something you do to de-stress?
- what’s the best personal gift someone could give you (playlist, homemade card, etc.)
- what movie would you want to live in?
- which character would you want to be?
- hugs or hand-holding?
- morning, afternoon or night?
- what reminds you of home (doesn’t have to mean house… just things that remind you of the feeling of home)?
PSA: Just a friendly reminder that whenever you start a creative project, you will invariably hit a phase where the Thing™️ appears horrendous and you start asking existential questions. But if you keep working, it invariably passes and starts to resemble something less like the devil’s vomit. Doesn’t matter if it’s art, writing, or what–this happens repeatedly. Carry on.
Writing dialogue for four people is a lot like playing with Barbies
This is what it looks like
It’s weird to grow up in a family where you know you’re loved but you don’t feel loved. And then later in adulthood you understand how almost impossible it seems to cross that distance and let yourself experience closeness, how otherworldly love feels now and how love feels unbearable at times. You flinch when someone tries to wholeheartedly love you. And over and over you see so clearly how you cannot be loved unless it's from afar and love is mixed with that familiar sensation of distance and coldness.
just so u know everything in the entire universe is always about love and when it isn't about love it is abt the absence of love. hope this makes sense
that whole "make your characters want things" does so much work for you in a story, even if what your characters want is stupid and irrelevant, because how people go about pursuing their desires tells you about them as a person.
do they actually move toward what they desire? how far are they willing to go for it? do they pursue their desires directly or indirectly? do they acquire what they desire through force, trickery, or negotiation? do they tell themselves they aren't supposed to feel desire and suppress it? does the suppressed desire wither away and die, or does it mutate and grow even stronger? is the initially expressed desire actually an inadequate and poorly translated different desire that they lack language for? does the desire change once the language has been updated, or when new experiences outline the desire more clearly? do they want something else once they have better words for it, or once they know that they definitely don't want something they thought they wanted before?
how does the world accommodate those desires? what does the world present to your character and in what order to update and clarify their desires? how does your magic system or sci-fi device correspond to those desires and the pursuit of them?
there's so much good story meat on those bones; you just have to be brave and decisive enough to let characters want specific things instead of letting them float in the current of the plot.
and I loved the responses of “Well, my character is very passive and doesn’t know how to want things, the story is about their process of learning to do that exactly”, because that’s fine, that’s all well and good, but passive people still want things. passive human beings who have been so thoroughly neglected that the articulation of a single desire is beyond them want what their internal sphere of control tells them they are allowed to want. they desire constancy and a lack of conflict. they desire nostalgic artifacts that remind them of prior constancy and lack of conflict. the desire to float is an engineered desire that runs in conflict with the development of a happy healthy human being. Who engineered it? How do you begin to chip away at something like that? How do small, passive desires lead up to that?
"Everyone has motive" needs to be at the forefront of your thoughts. If a passive character wants something and yet does not act to achieve it, the crux of the story is WHY they are inactive. Therein lies your conflict and complications.
passive people (or characters) will often displace their desire. they'll fixate on something insignificant with all their passion and need and rage, and then you get stories about someone having a meltdown in a grocery store because their brand of peanut butter isn't in stock, and the whole times they're screaming about peanut butter you can see it isn't really about that brand at all, it's about the way their husband never does the dishes, the way their job is forty minutes each way in traffic, how their sister died and their parents haven't mentioned her name since and so all that love and loss and memory just sits inside them like a stone.
because no one is passive, not really. we all want so many things. we're only tired and afraid and ignored, and we turn it inside, turn it against ourselves.
Edward Hopper, Sketches and preliminaries for Nighthawks, 1942
Happy Birthday, Edward Hopper
USA Cultural Regions Map
This is super cool
For non-Americans: this is actually accurate and reflects how Americans understand ourselves and regional identities. These aren’t official labels, but they’re not totally made up either.
lyrics that you mishear and find out the real one and are like. my version is better