litakino reblogged
[OC X CANON APPRECIATION POST! 🩷✨]
litakino reblogged
Alright, to ao3's soon to be arriving Wattpad Refugees, a basic guide to general user culture:
1.) Unlike Wattpads vote system that let's you like each chapter, the ao3 equivalent kudos only allows one per work. Everyone is generally quietly annoyed about this. To engage with each chapter, you're heavily encouraged to comment. Trust me, it makes people's day.
2.) Ao3 has no algorithm. By default it's latest updated work first. You can find things to your taste through searches, filters and tags.
3.) 'No archive warnings apply' and 'user has chosen not to use archive warnings' mean two very different things. No archives warnings means the work is free from any content that could require a warning tag (character death, graphic depictions of violence, non-con, etc). User has chosen not to use archive warnings means it could contain any of the warning content, be it hasn't been explicitly tagged. Treat it like an allergen. No archive warnings apply is allergen free. User has chosen not to use archive warnings, may contain traces or whole chunks of the allergen. If you're likely to have a bad reaction, maybe don't take the risk.
4.) Speaking of warnings, ao3 has very few restrictions on the type of work that's allowed. Whatever your personal thoughts or feelings on that are, thats how the site is. You're likely to run across some dark subject matters and a lot of people are uncomfortable with reading that. You're well within your rights not like these works and have your opinion on whether they should be allowed, but harassing the authors of such works (or any works) is more likely to come back on you than them. Ao3 operates on a strong policy of 'don't like, don't read'. Use the tagging system to your full advantage to only engage with the kind of works you want to see.
We look forward to welcoming you all and seeing the fantastic works you create. Happy writing!
5.) AO3 doesn't have an app. AO3 will probably never have an app. AO3 is optimized to run in your mobile browser on your phone or tablet. Anything that is selling itself as an official AO3 app is lying to you.
litakino reblogged
How to Edit an Over-Length Story Down to a Specific Word Count
One of the most wonderful things about writing as a hobby is that you never have to worry about the length of your story. You can be as self-indulgent as you want, make your prose the royalist of purples, include every single side story and extra thought that strikes your fancy. It’s your story, with no limits, and you can proceed with it as you wish.
When transitioning from casual writing to a more professional writing milieu, this changes. If you want to publish, odds are, you’ll need to write to a word count. If a flash fiction serial says, “1,000 words or less,” your story can’t be 1,025 and still qualify. If a website says, “we accept novellas ranging from 20,000 to 40,000 words,” your story will need to fall into that window. Even when you consider novel-length works, stories are expected to be a certain word count to fit neatly into specific genres - romance is usually around 80,000 words, young adult usually 50,000 to 80,000, debut novels usually have to be 100,000 words or less regardless of genre, etc. If you self-publish or work with a small press, you may be able to get away with breaking these “rules,” but it’s still worthwhile to learn to read your own writing critically with length in mind and learn to recognize what you do and do not need to make your story work - and then, if length isn’t an issue in your publishing setting, you can always decide after figuring out what’s non-essential to just keep everything anyway.
If you’re writing for fun? You literally never have to worry about your word count (well, except for sometimes in specific challenges that have minimum and/or maximum word counts), and as such, this post is probably not for you.
But, if you’re used to writing in the “throw in everything and the kitchen sink” way that’s common in fandom fanfiction circles, and you’re trying to transition only to be suddenly confronted with the reality that you’ve written 6,000 words for a short story project with a maximum word count of 5,000...well, we at Duck Prints Press have been there, we are in fact there right now, as we finish our stories for our upcoming anthology Add Magic to Taste and many of us wrote first drafts that were well over the maximum word count.
So, based on our experiences, here are our suggestions on approaches to help your story shorter...without losing the story you wanted to tell!
- Cut weasel words (we wrote a whole post to help you learn how to do that!) such as unnecessary adverbs and adjectives, the “was ~ing” sentence structure, redundant time words such as “a moment later,” and many others.
- When reviewing dialog, keep an eye out for “uh,” “er,” “I mean,” “well,” and other casual extra words. A small amount of that kind of language usage can make dialog more realistic, but a little goes a long way, and often a fair number of words can be removed by cutting these words, without negatively impacting your story at all.
- Active voice almost always uses fewer words than passive voice, so try to use active voice more (but don’t forget that passive voice is important for varying up your sentence structures and keeping your story interesting, so don’t only write in active voice!).
- Look for places where you can replace phrases with single words that mean the same thing. You can often save a lot of words by switching out phrases like “come back” for “return” and seeking out other places where one word can do the work of many.
- Cut sentences that add atmosphere but don't forward the plot or grow your characters. (Obviously, use your judgement. Don't cut ALL the flavor, but start by going - I’ve got two sentences that are mostly flavor text - which adds more? And then delete the other, or combine them into one shorter sentence.)
- Remove superfluous dialog tags. If it’s clear who’s talking, especially if it’s a conversation between only two people, you can cut all the he saids, she saids.
- Look for places where you've written repetitively - at the most basic level, “ ‘hahaha,’ he laughed,” is an example, but repetition is often more subtle, like instances where you give information in once sentence, and then rephrase part or all of that sentence in the next one - it’s better to poke at the two sentences until you think of an effective, and more concise, way to make them into only one sentence. This also goes for scenes - if you’ve got two scenes that tend towards accomplishing the same plot-related goal, consider combining them into one scene.
- Have a reason for every sentence, and even every sentence clause (as in, every comma insertion, every part of the sentence, every em dashed inclusion, that kind of thing). Ask yourself - what function does this serve? Have I met that function somewhere else? If it serves no function, or if it’s duplicative, consider cutting it. Or, the answer may be “none,” and you may choose to save it anyway - because it adds flavor, or is very in character for your PoV person, or any of a number of reasons. But if you’re saving it, make sure you’ve done so intentionally. It's important to be aware of what you're trying to do with your words, or else how can you recognize what to cut, and what not to cut?
- Likewise, have a reason for every scene. They should all move the story along - whatever the story is, it doesn’t have to be “the end of the world,” your story can be simple and straightforward and sequential...but if you’re working to a word count, your scenes should still forward the story toward that end point. If the scene doesn’t contribute...you may not need them, or you may be able to fold it in with another scene, as suggested in item 6.
- Review the worldbuilding you’ve included, and consider what you’re trying to accomplish with your story. A bit of worldbuilding outside of the bare essentials makes a story feel fleshed out, but again, a little can go a long way. If you’ve got lots of “fun” worldbuilding bits that don’t actually forward your plot and aren’t relevant to your characters, cut them. You can always put them as extras in your blog later, but they’ll just make your story clunky if you have a lot of them.
- Beware of info-dumps. Often finding a more natural way to integrate that information - showing instead of telling in bits throughout the story - can help reduce word count.
- Alternatively - if you over-show, and never tell, this will vastly increase your word count, so consider if there are any places in your story where you can gloss over the details in favor of a shorter more “tell-y” description. You don’t need to go into a minute description of every smile and laugh - sometimes it’s fine to just say, “she was happy” or “she frowned” without going into a long description of their reaction that makes the reader infer that they were happy. (Anyone who unconditionally says “show, don’t tell,” is giving you bad writing advice. It’s much more important to learn to recognize when showing is more appropriate, and when telling is more appropriate, because no story will function as a cohesive whole if it’s all one or all the other.)
- If you’ve got long paragraphs, they’re often prime places to look for entire sentences to cut. Read them critically and consider what’s actually helping your story instead of just adding word count chonk.
- Try reading some or all of the dialog out loud; if it gets boring, repetitive, or unnecessary, end your scene wherever you start to lose interest, and cut the dialog that came after. If necessary, add a sentence or two of description at the end to make sure the transition is abrupt, but honestly, you often won’t even need to do so - scenes that end at the final punchy point in a discussion often work very well.
- Create a specific goal for a scene or chapter. Maybe it’s revealing a specific piece of information, or having a character discover a specific thing, or having a specific unexpected event occur, but, whatever it is, make sure you can say, “this scene/chapter is supposed to accomplish this.” Once you know what you’re trying to do, check if the scene met that goal, make any necessary changes to ensure it does, and cut things that don’t help the scene meet that goal.
- Building on the previous one, you can do the same thing, but for your entire story. Starting from the beginning, re-outline the story scene-by-scene and/or chapter-by-chapter, picking out what the main “beats” and most important themes are, and then re-read your draft and make sure you’re hitting those clearly. Consider cutting out the pieces of your story that don’t contribute to those, and definitely cut the pieces that distract from those key moments (unless, of course, the distraction is the point.)
- Re-read a section you think could be cut and see if any sentences snag your attention. Poke at that bit until you figure out why - often, it’s because the sentence is unnecessary, poorly worded, unclear, or otherwise superfluous. You can often rewrite the sentence to be clearer, or cut the sentence completely without negatively impacting your work.
- Be prepared to cut your darlings; even if you love a sentence or dialog exchange or paragraph, if you are working to a strict word count and it doesn't add anything, it may have to go, and that's okay...even though yes, it will hurt, always, no matter how experienced a writer you are. (Tip? Save your original draft, and/or make a new word doc where you safely tuck your darlings in for the future. Second tip? If you really, really love it...find a way to save it, but understand that to do so, you’ll have to cut something else. It’s often wise to pick one or two favorites and sacrifice the rest to save the best ones. We are not saying “always cut your darlings.” That is terrible writing advice. Don’t always cut your darlings. Writing, and reading your own writing, should bring you joy, even when you’re doing it professionally.)
- If you’re having trouble recognizing what in your own work CAN be cut, try implementing the above strategies in different places - cut things, and then re-read, and see how it works, and if it works at all. Sometimes, you’ll realize...you didn’t need any of what you cut. Other times, you’ll realize...it no longer feels like the story you were trying to tell. Fiddle with it until you figure out what you need for it to still feel like your story, and practice that kind of cutting until you get better at recognizing what can and can’t go without having to do as much tweaking.
- Lastly...along the lines of the previous...understand that sometimes, cutting your story down to a certain word count will just be impossible. Some stories simply can’t be made very short, and others simply can’t be told at length. If you’re really struggling, it’s important to consider that your story just...isn’t going to work at that word count. And that’s okay. Go back to the drawing board, and try again - you’ll also get better at learning what stories you can tell, in your style, using your own writing voice, at different word counts. It’s not something you’ll just know how to do - that kind of estimating is a skill, just like all other writing abilities.
As with all our writing advice - there’s no one way to tackle cutting stories for length, and also, which of these strategies is most appropriate will depend on what kind of story you’re writing, how much over-length it is, what your target market is, your characters, and your personal writing style. Try different ones, and see which work for you - the most important aspect is to learn to read your own writing critically enough that you are able to recognize what you can cut, and then from that standpoint, use your expertise to decide what you should cut, which is definitely not always the same thing. Lots of details can be cut - but a story with all of the flavor and individuality removed should never be your goal.
Contributions to this post were made by @unforth, @jhoomwrites, @alecjmarsh, @shealynn88, @foxymoley, @willablythe, and @owlishintergalactic, and their input has been used with their knowledge and explicit permission. Thanks, everyone, for helping us consider different ways to shorten stories!
litakino reblogged
apparently i’m a millennial woman
I mean, yeah, valid! but but but I also want to add on the fact that lotr AGGRESSIVELY rejects the “grimdark” and “gritty” settings that is so prevalent in fantasy (and also in general) right now, because I physically can not shut up about it
It is hope and love and compassion that saves each character individually, and because of that, the world. Frodo fails in the end, but his acts of compassion from earlier in the story save the day. And even as the world is saved, it is acknowledged that Frodo failed—without judgement, without blame. He fails, and he is still loved.
And like what can happen in the real world, he is still irrevocably changed by his trauma. But there is still hope—he has to leave, but he leaves with the promise of healing, and the promise that his ever-faithful Sam will follow.
Aragorn, Boromir, Frodo, Sam; each and every one of the characters are driven by their love of the people around them and their hope for the future. They cling to that love and hope throughout their trials, and that bears them through.
Of course people are watching it for comfort!!!! Lotr is eternally consistent in its promise, which Sam articulates so clearly in The Two Towers: “Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines, it’ll shine out the clearer.”
Things are dark and awful and terrible, but it will not be that way forever. That is the promise of LOTR. A promise of hope, and the reminder that it is love and compassion—for our friends, for our families, for the strangers we’ve never even met—that will save us in the end.
Reblog so everyone can hear what they need.
litakino reblogged
litakino reblogged
tiktok is such an awful app, it's almost designed to feed you misinformation and expose you to insane discourse. unlike beloved tumblr, the app that feeds me misinformation and exposes me to insane discourse
No, no, no, you see on tiktok an algorithm feeds you misinformation. On Tumblr I feed myself misinformation from my charcuterie board of hand-selected unhinged mutuals.
None of that mass market junk. Only artisanal, small batch, sustainably cultivated, fair trade horseshit.
litakino reblogged
lovelysuggestion
treat yourself like you would treat your favorite character
As a fanfiction author I think this is a bad idea.
litakino reblogged
just learned about the granulated sea star . . .
dont talk to me
Hey, I'm gonna be that guy
So sea stars are echinoderms
Which means that they have a dermal skeleton of tiny plates basically infused throughout their skin
And while this lil guy looks like he gives the squish
His connective tissues are capable of becoming incredibly rigid, and so he's quite tough to the touch
So unless your various orifices are in need of a good sand blasting, I'd say ol Romeo here isn't exactly body safe
But I love the enthusiasm
bold of you to assume there'd be no takers for the hyper-exfoliating five-dicked sea dildo here on the i'm gonna fuck that poisonous rock website
Hi. Local friendly family doctor here with some free medical advice. Don't fuck the starfish. Do NOT.
Illegal to hide this in the tags
litakino reblogged
every time i start to feel cringe for being too deep in the hyperfixation i remember the intense depression i have waded through and have to remind myself that enjoyment is fleeting (so grab it with both hands), and life is for loving (so hold that love close), and if anyone thinks i’m cringe they must not be having a very good time (and i hope they can find a good time soon).
litakino reblogged
"disability only exists because the world isnt accessible" idk how to tell you this but chronic pain still hurts
i like the sentiment and i think its true in many ways, but people with mobility issues will still have mobility issues in an accommodating world, people with sensory disabilities will still have those disabilities in an accommodating world. and thats not including neurodiversity where two people with the exact same disorder will have very different experiences with them. like there's not a world where someone with agoraphobia wont be scared to leave the house just cause outside is more accessible
i dont think it accounts for the wide range of disability experience and caters more to low-support needs people. i think life would be so much easier if being disabled was less stigmatized, but disability wont just go away once it is
you can't autism proof a bright summer day, but you can normalize stimming and using sensory aids in public
okay but they are good tags tho
litakino reblogged
“Bamboo is antifungal”
Because it’s rayon
“Eucalyptus fabric is cooling!”
Yeah, because it’s rayon
“We make clothing called seacell out of seaweed!”
Yeah I looked on your website it’s made by the lyocell process, which means-
-wait for it-
It’s fucking rayon!!
Listen. There is a list of actual plant fibers that are directly made into fabric: cotton, linen, ramie, some hemp. I’m sure I’m missing a couple.
But if you’re wondering “huh how did they turn that plant material into fabric,” 99% of the time? It’s RAYON.
All rayon is made by putting plant material in chemical soup, dissolving out everything but the cellulose, and turning the cellulose into filaments/fibers.
The source of the cellulose has zero effect on the eventual fabric.
Rayon made from bamboo or eucalyptus or seaweed is not any better than rayon from any other sources.
Don’t let companies mislead you!
Hold on I need to DuckDuckGo something
Damn this was supposed to be a joke but turns out it’s hard to get scientifically rigorous comparisons of environmental impact across textile products from a casual search. “It’s all fucking rayon” appears mostly true but also I’m finding plenty of claims that it’s more sustainable than cotton anyway.
But that’s not what this post was actually about anyway so like
it’s all fucking rayon confirmed I guess 👍
So it's worth separating out two things here:
- the qualities of rayon as a fabric, outside of any other consideration
- the environmental impacts
This post is mostly about the first thing. A lot of companies are giving rayon many many different names as a way of disguising that It's Just Rayon, and claiming the fabric has special qualities.
But cellulose is cellulose. The process of extruding it into filaments and making those filaments into fibers/yarn/fabric is what gives it different qualities: some rayon is silky, some is fuzzy, etc.
It's all great at absorbing sweat, and it all takes longer to dry, and it insulates okay until it gets damp at which point it's worse than wearing nothing, which is why it's often blended into other things. The really nice tops I have from Uniqlo's Heattech line are a blend of a couple of synthetics and rayon. They're warm for being so thin and stretchy, but don't make me sweaty-feeling at all. (In a conversation among people with ADHD I found out I'm not the only one who wears them nearly daily for 3/4ths of the year lol.)
The irony of how often it's compared to polyester in the notes of this post is that polyester can also be made into a billion different textures. I have polyester that feels like wearing a plastic tarp, but I also own polyester that's light and breezy and totally comfy in boiling heat. I also have some very soft polyester fleece, as many people do. It's all a matter of how the filaments are extruded and how they're made into fabric.
But to get into the environmental stuff:
People get really into which fabrics are more "sustainable."
And rayon currently is made, 99% of the time, via one of two processes: viscose and lyocell (Tencel is a brand name for the lyocell process). Viscose is an older method and far more common, to the point that if a fabric doesn't specify that it's lyocell (or cuproammonium) you can probably assume it's viscose. Viscose is, generally speaking, far more polluting and hazardous to the humans working in the factory as well. Lyocell uses what's called a "closed-loop" method, so it puts out way fewer pollutants. It's also more expensive, generally speaking. There is such a thing as "ecoviscose" but I haven't looked into it.
(Modal just means rayon made from beech trees and afaict doesn't differentiate which process. Cupro is made using a less-common process called "cuproammonium," and I'm not sure how polluting it is, but apparently in China it's sometimes called "ammonia silk" which is wild.)
Rayon does have two definite advantages, despite everything I said up there:
- you can make it out of any cellulose source, and that includes things that would otherwise be considered garbage/waste
- it biodegrades pretty fast. Like, faster than cotton.
BUT THAT ALL SAID: every fabric requires something shitty, quite frankly. Cotton takes a TON of water and usually pesticides. Silk requires a lot of farming of mulberry and then electricity to warm the places where the silkworms live and also you have to cook the silkworms alive so they don't cut the fibers. Linen requires its own chemical soup to be turned into usable fibers unless you're making it from flax the old fashioned way which requires a lot of time and a shit-ton of effort. (Like seriously there's rippling, retting, breaking, scutching, and hackling. And THEN you can spin it into thread.) Wool requires a lot of land etc for sheep, but also any wool item you own that's machine washable has had the barbs melted off the fibers with chemicals, and in many cases is also coated with a resin!
And that's not getting into dying. But if you've ever dyed fabric at home you know that it usually requires careful handling and in many cases goggles. Those chemicals are often toxic as fuck.
If you're trying to be sustainable in your clothing choices, the fact is that the absolute best thing you can do is:
- BUY LESS CLOTHES. Period. End of story.
- Buy secondhand when you can.
- Make those clothes last: use cold water washes and don't put them in the dryer and don't use fabric softener. Repair them when you can, and use them for rags when they wear out.
"What fiber is it made of" just matters way fucking less than buying fewer items of clothing and using them until they wear out.
But most people don't want to do those things. They want to know which brand of clothes is "sustainable."
The sustainable thing is to buy and throw away less clothes. That's it.
The Fellowship gets on the topic of their ages one night and Boromir comes to the dawning realization that he has absolutely no idea how old any of his companions are supposed to be at all
Boromir, pointing at the hobbits: I don’t know how your ages work
Boromir, pointing at Legolas and Gimli: I definitely don’t know how either of your ages work
Boromir, pointing at Aragorn: I thought I knew how your age worked but apparently I was wrong
Boromir, pointing at Gandalf: I especially don’t know how your age works
Gandalf: It doesn’t, but carry on
Listen I will die on this hill. I don’t care what it says in the assorted apocrypha, if you go by the Actual Text of LOTR you can make a very good argument that Boromir is the youngest member of the group.
The hobbits are the only ones given official ages in the text, and are between fifty or fifty-one and twenty-nine. Elves and dwarves notoriously age slowly, and Gimli is the offspring of one of Bilbo’s pals, so okay, we’ve established that he’s old enough to call the hobbits young, and Bilbo confirms for them that Aragorn is Pretty Old For A Bigjobs. Gandalf is, of course, eternal.
But we are never given any context for Boromir and Faramir’s ages, except that a) they are humans and, though Sons of Gondor, not much longer lived than most Bigjobs, and b) Faramir is A QuiteYoung Man. I was absolutely convinced, when I read the books as a youngun, that Boromir, being in ‘the flower of manhood’ iirc, was probably between 25 and 30.
And it would be Freaking Hilarious, okay, for Boromir to finally get around to actually asking how old this baby-faced hobbit carrying The Ring is, and get told ‘oh, he’s only fifty, but he’s very steady for his age.’
Boromir: ?!?!?!
And then Pippin and Merry start asking everyone how old they are because this is fascinating are we all official adults here except for Pippin or what.
Boromir: …. Pippin isn’t an adult HOW OLD IS PIPPIN.
Pippin is just 29, which is why everyone calls him Pippin, it’s gonna be at least another 20 years before he can make Peregrine work. Why, how old is Boromir?
Boromir, who would rather DIE than admit to being 28 right at this moment: …. 43.
All the others, weighing up his apparent age compared to theirs: Sure, sounds legit.
Gandalf, who knows for certain, does not say anything because he is absolutely certain that telling Pippin that he’s older than Boromir will be an unmitigated disaster.
LOTR Heritage Post