Chimken

PACING IS ABOUT LOAD BEARING WALLS.

*staples violently to my own forehead*

This is such good advice.

All I will add is: WRITE THOSE BREAKFAST SCENES if you want to, they can be absolutely critical in getting a handle on your characters. Or even on the setting. Write them all to fuck. Go hogwild.

Then cut them. They're for you, and for the characters. Not the readers.

Lo these many years ago, in an elevator at some convention or other, Larry Niven gave me some of the best writing advice ever:

"You can always burn it."

Go ahead and write that stuff. The breakfasts, the staring-into-empty-space scenes, whatever. Then pull them out of your work if they serve too little useful purpose. If you feel the need, shove such material into a separate folder to examine for possible usefulness later.

Even if you don't put it where other people can see it, no writing is ever wasted. Every sentence will teach you something. But if a passage or sequence doesn't help illuminate character, build the world, or advance the plot, get it the hell out of your narrative.

Your readers' time is precious. Do them the courtesy of not wasting it.

The above is true, but I will also add one more thing:

You will not please all readers all of the time.

Different people will have emphatically fucking different opinions about whether that breakfast scene was necessary, important, or worthwhile. Tolkien spends a lot of time describing the landscape and you can put people in a room and watch them have knock-down bloody fist fights about whether this is of immense literary value or whether this is why Lord of the Rings is unreadable.

They're both right. Objectively correct answers to that don't exist.

I have a friend who finds My Neighbour Totoro unwatchable. To them, the pacing of that movie is literal torture, and there was a point in our lives that they looked at me and went "can we please watch something else I would literally rather do my taxes." I am absolutely sure a bunch of people reading this just choked on something and want to go fight my friend. I think my friend is wrong. But also, my friend is 100% right.

I have personally had both someone bitch about the absolutely appallingly slow pacing in one of my stories and then other people cite the exact same scenes as their favourite thing in the world and the reason they reread constantly. And thank me for not rushing, for giving those details, for filling things in.

Both of those people are right, I just don't care to write with one of them in mind.

Context matters, too. To the person in the original thread, here and now, that 15 minutes describing Starbucks is agonizingly painful; a hundred years from now a historian might read or play that description to their colleagues or a historical fiction author might put exactly the same description in a novel and it will have people utterly fucking rapt.

Context is everything, and so is audience. What is "good" pacing will depend on your context and your audience.

This is a giant pain in the ass! Because it means that part of nailing down the skill of pacing is nailing down who your audience is, and whether you're reaching them, and how to find out from them if you're succeeding, and also if this is the audience you want to be writing for. If this is the writer you want to be.

But it means that's another reason to write that scene if you want to write that scene: because you literally won't know if it's a scene to keep until afterwards, anyway.

All of this is very much in line with the advice I’m getting as I’m about to jump head long into podcasting.

The golden rule of both: your audience is giving you their most precious thing, their time. Don’t waste it.

People used to comment on web comics.

People used to comment on fanfiction.

People used to comment on fanart.

People used to comment on OCs.

I hate "content" culture.

I hate "consuming content" and scrolling immediately to the next thing.

People used to be excited about the art that other people created.

People used to want to share that excitement with creators.

I hate this future.

Once someone tagged art that I made with "woah" and I think about it at least once a week. Someone else said "oh neat" once. Someone else WROTE A WHOLE DAMN POEM IN THE COMMENTS. Anyways even just one word can change how someone sees their art. You don't even have to think about it too hard. You could put a keyboard smash and I'd probably cry from joy.

I'm also trying hard to interact more, I understand that it's hard to break away from opening your phone and being in Content Consumption Mode.

Gods, all this

James baldwin’s the artists struggle for identity. Btw.

"That I have experienced my share of traumatic experiences, have survived abuse of various kinds, have faced near death from accidental circumstance and from violence (different as the particulars of these may be from those around me) is not a card to play in gamified social interaction or a weapon to wield in battles over prestige. It is not what gives me a special right to speak, to evaluate, or to decide for a group. It is a concrete, experiential manifestation of the vulnerability that connects me to most of the people on this earth. It comes between me and other people not as a wall, but as a bridge."

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Elite Capture, 2022

Random assortment of cryptic reasons why I think Lunar Boy is neat and you should pre-order it!!

I always wanted to do the pointy arrows on the book cover trend thing, but I've never been good at talking in tropes so here's my spin on it, haha.

Preorder Potions 101: The Final Project by Rebecca M. (@raspberryimps ) NOW from March 1st - March 30th!

wildstarpress.com/shop

IF THE OPT-OUT OPTION IS NOT SHOWING FOR YOU

go to the blog settings page & refresh it. this is the only way i was able to see the additional options

I am not good at self-promotion. I’m struggling with grief. I will be okay, but right now I’m not.

I appreciate everyone who listens to/interacts with me no matter where it is. If you’ve got it in you to follow the Patreon, even for free, it would help.

Alberta's Transphobic Government

I try really really hard to keep this blog about RPGs and writing. I really do. But when someone comes for my students, fists gets thrown.

We've seen the rise of transphobic legislation in various US states, as well as in Saskatchwan and New Brunswick. Now Alberta has joined the party. Despite the premier pointing out that there are trans youth in her extended family (I don't know how close the relation is, but somewhere in her close family) and swearing to not marginalize trans youth in the last election.

And ohhhh boy oh boy, my home province is once again aiming to hi the bottom of the barrel

Here's the tl;dr (quoted from the article):

This goes well beyond what SK and NB have passed. It violates the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, but Smith doesn't care and will likely use the Notwithstanding Clause to bypass it. Parents, medical professionals, and educators have all reacted with justified outrage. It is clear to those of us who care about youth that these policies will kill.

There is flattly no way in hell I will be deadnaming my students. For a government that says they want to remove red tape and bureaucracy, making parents opt-in to every single lesson involving anything other than heteronormativity sure seems like trying to use red tap to make teaching anything other than their ideology impossible.

What can you do to help?

This is not the content I want to go viral from me... but if I have to choose one, make it this one. Please help us proect our kids.

FFXIV Endwalker: A Call for Help

Pages 1 and 2

Next: Link

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Endwalker Spoilers!

Following Elpis and Ktisis Hyperboreia dungeon, I really wanted to delve into possible misadventures that Azem dragged her friends into...And thus this comic was born! It's been on the back burner off and on for a year and then some.

I took some artistic liberties, so please don't @ me about ability inconsistencies haha.

To The Substitute Art Teacher - Jordan Bolton