writing

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

cryptovexillologist:

The Four Sacred Artistic Motives:

-what if this bad thing was good instead

-how about Make-Believe Land can have whatever I want

-would that be fucked up or what

-I think that shit’s hot

Tags:

#prev tagged this as glowfic #and…yeah‚ within my first four threads I’d already hit three of these‚ huh #(although ”what if xianxia was good” was pretty much my coauthor and not me) #maybe I should write a ”would that be fucked up or what” to complete the set #glowfic #writing #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

cwritesfiction:

“How many times have I used this phrase?”

CTRL + F

OH NO

Tags:

#I didn’t actually laugh aloud but it still amused me enough to reblog #writing #embarrassment squick? #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

stiffyck:

Put the things you’re insecure about on your blorbo, give them all your insecurities, and then have someone comfort them

Tags:

#…oh fuck is that what I’m doing #I have known this otherkin OC for three days and if anything happened to him I #writing #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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{{ourladyoflampreys asked:}}

Ooh! Brin!

Is your fiction anywhere we can read it?

Or is it only secret, and private?

​

sacrificedtoatree:

brin-bellway:

brin-bellway:

The current one is semi-private, but most of my fiction is publicly available at the Glowfic Constellation (a roleplay/collaborative-writing site: some rat-Tumblrites may recognise it as “that format planecrash / Project Lawful was written in”).

Glowfic is an infamously high-context medium and needs a certain amount of tolerance for reading things without having read their prerequisites, but you can get a head start on understanding the background context relevant to my stuff by reading How to Read Glowfic and the glowfic wiki page on medianworlds (people who understood the phrase “the format planecrash was written in” may recognise this as the relationship Keltham’s homeworld has to Eliezer Yudkowsky).

ourladyoflampreys / @sacrificedtoatree replied: “Ah, I have heard of glowfic, actually. I read through some of Alicorn’s posts and fics on her site at some point and found a brief explanation of it, although I confess I didn’t understand it very much. But you know, I have a long bus ride tomorrow and I hear them Greyhounds have decent wi-fi these days, so I may take a dive into this!”

Thanks for the shoutout!

The Greyhounds, it turned out, did *not* have decent wi-fi.

Tags:

#conversational aglets #glowfic #writing

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

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{{ourladyoflampreys asked:}}

Ooh! Brin!

Is your fiction anywhere we can read it?

Or is it only secret, and private?

​

brin-bellway:

The current one is semi-private, but most of my fiction is publicly available at the Glowfic Constellation (a roleplay/collaborative-writing site: some rat-Tumblrites may recognise it as “that format planecrash / Project Lawful was written in”).

Glowfic is an infamously high-context medium and needs a certain amount of tolerance for reading things without having read their prerequisites, but you can get a head start on understanding the background context relevant to my stuff by reading How to Read Glowfic and the glowfic wiki page on medianworlds (people who understood the phrase “the format planecrash was written in” may recognise this as the relationship Keltham’s homeworld has to Eliezer Yudkowsky).

ourladyoflampreys / @sacrificedtoatree replied: “Ah, I have heard of glowfic, actually. I read through some of Alicorn’s posts and fics on her site at some point and found a brief explanation of it, although I confess I didn’t understand it very much. But you know, I have a long bus ride tomorrow and I hear them Greyhounds have decent wi-fi these days, so I may take a dive into this!”

Tags:

#(January 2024) #(he’s changed his username in the three weeks since this reply‚ hence the slash) #(in related news‚ I looked at the list of glowfic accounts and saw that user ”sacrificedtoatree” joined February 1st) #(welcome to the Constellation) #((I am aware that in-between the previous reply and this one‚ Blazer sent me a music meme)) #((but that will take more energy to do and I think it will have to wait for the next cycle)) #((I appreciate its existence and I still plan on doing it at some point)) #replies #conversational aglets #glowfic #writing

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~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

{{previous post in sequence}}

{{ourladyoflampreys asked:}}

Ooh! Brin!

Is your fiction anywhere we can read it?

Or is it only secret, and private?

The current one is semi-private, but most of my fiction is publicly available at the Glowfic Constellation (a roleplay/collaborative-writing site: some rat-Tumblrites may recognise it as “that format planecrash / Project Lawful was written in”).

Glowfic is an infamously high-context medium and needs a certain amount of tolerance for reading things without having read their prerequisites, but you can get a head start on understanding the background context relevant to my stuff by reading How to Read Glowfic and the glowfic wiki page on medianworlds (people who understood the phrase “the format planecrash was written in” may recognise this as the relationship Keltham’s homeworld has to Eliezer Yudkowsky).

Tags:

#(it was not in fact planecrash that introduced me to glowfic) #(my own introduction to glowfic has been lost to the mists of time but was no later than 2018) #(but planecrash was a breakout hit‚ which makes it a useful reference) #and yeah that post from today’s queue is very much a thing #if you told me in early 2022 that I was going to write over 40k words of fiction in the following calendar year #I would boggle at you #I do think early-2022!me would *endorse* this development‚ though #it’s just not something that I ever particularly expected to be *capable* of #and was making no active attempt to change this

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~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

gummybugg:

Do yall ever just draw/write/do something and go “I did that? Me?? This lil guy??? I had the power in me this entire time, but nobody told me????”

Tags:

#me looking at the nearly-three-thousand-words of fiction I have written over the past 48 hours #writing #relatable #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once #(but I moved it up to the top of the queue‚ so that ”last 48 hours” will only be slightly off by the time this is visible)

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~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

oc-factoids:

Tag the OC that’s from a different dimension than the one they’re currently in

Tags:

#look #in this life‚ two things are certain #and those are taxes and isekais #I didn’t actually laugh aloud but it still amused me enough to reblog #writing #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

the-real-seebs:

thebibliosphere:

So, anyway, I say as though we are mid-conversation, and you’re not just being invited into this conversation mid-thought. One of my editors phoned me today to check in with a file I’d sent over. (<3)

The conversation can be surmised as, “This feels like something you would write, but it’s juuuust off enough I’m phoning to make sure this is an intentional stylistic choice you have made. Also, are you concussed/have you been taken over by the Borg because ummm.”

They explained that certain sentences were very fractured and abrupt, which is not my style at all, and I was like, huh, weird… And then we went through some examples, and you know that meme going around, the “he would not fucking say that” meme?

Yeah. That’s what I experienced except with myself because I would not fucking say that. Why would I break up a sentence like that? Why would I make them so short? It reads like bullet points. Wtf.

Anyway. Turns out Grammarly and Pro-Writing-Aid were having an AI war in my manuscript files, and the “suggestions” are no longer just suggestions because the AI was ignoring my “decline” every time it made a silly suggestion. (This may have been a conflict between the different software. I don’t know.)

It is, to put it bluntly, a total butchery of my style and writing voice. My editor is doing surgery, removing all the unnecessary full stops and stitching my sentences back together to give them back their flow. Meanwhile, I’m over here feeling like Don Corleone, gesturing at my manuscript like:

31b98620a458fdfb8be1f6f4c9fe46bd793eb44e

ID: a gif of Don Corleone from the Godfather emoting despair as he says, “Look how they massacred my boy.”

Fearing that it wasn’t just this one manuscript, I’ve spent the whole night going through everything I’ve worked on recently, and yep. Yeeeep. Any file where I’ve not had the editing software turned off is a shit show. It’s fine; it’s all salvageable if annoying to deal with. But the reason I come to you now, on the day of my daughter’s wedding, is to share this absolute gem of a fuck up with you all.

This is a sentence from a Batman fic I’ve been tinkering with to keep the brain weasels happy. This is what it is supposed to read as:

“It was quite the feat, considering Gotham was mostly made up of smog and tear gas.”

This is what the AI changed it to:

“It was quite the feat. Considering Gotham was mostly made up. Of tear gas. And Smaug.”

Absolute non-sensical sentence structure aside, SMAUG. FUCKING SMAUG. What was the AI doing? Apart from trying to write a Batman x Hobbit crossover??? Is this what happens when you force Grammarly to ignore the words “Batman Muppet threesome?”

Did I make it sentient??? Is it finally rebelling? Was Brucie Wayne being Miss Piggy and Kermit’s side piece too much???? What have I wrought?

Anyway. Double-check your work. The grammar software is getting sillier every day.

I think I’ve been fully convinced to simply never, ever, use “grammar” software, because I think it’s actually just getting wildly worse now.

Tags:

#PSA #writing #disappointed permanent resident of The Future #embarrassment squick? #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

sing-you-fools:

dollopheadedmerlin:

dollopheadedmerlin:

I have … a tip.

If you’re writing something that involves an aspect of life that you have not experienced, you obviously have to do research on it. You have to find other examples of it in order to accurately incorporate it into your story realistically.

But don’t just look at professional write ups. Don’t stop at wikepedia or webMD. Look up first person accounts.

I wrote a fic once where a character has frequent seizures. Naturally, I was all over the wikipedia page for seizures, the related pages, other medical websites, etc.

But I also looked at Yahoo asks where people where asking more obscure questions, sometimes asked by people who were experiencing seizures, sometimes answered by people who have had seizures.

I looked to YouTube. Found a few individual videos of people detailing how their seizures usually played out. So found a few channels that were mostly dedicated to displaying the daily habits of someone who was epileptic.

I looked at blogs and articles written by people who have had seizures regularly for as long as they can remember. But I also read the frantic posts from people who were newly diagnosed or had only had one and were worried about another.

When I wrote that fic, I got a comment from someone saying that I had touched upon aspects of movement disorders that they had never seen portrayed in media and that they had found representation in my art that they just never had before. And I think it’s because of the details. The little things.

The wiki page for seizures tells you the technicalities of it all, the terminology. It tells you what can cause them and what the symptoms are. It tells you how to deal with them, how to prevent them.

But it doesn’t tell you how some people with seizures are wary of holding sharp objects or hot liquids. It doesn’t tell you how epileptics feel when they’ve just found out that they’re prone to fits. It doesn’t tell you how their friends and family react to the news.

This applies to any and all writing. And any and all subjects. Disabilities. Sexualities. Ethnicities. Cultures. Professions. Hobbies. Traumas. If you haven’t experienced something first hand, talk to people that have. Listen to people that have. Don’t stop at the scholarly sources. They don’t always have all that you need.

I … LOVE reading the replies and tags for this post! I’m happy that, out of all my posts, this is the one that’s blown up so quickly.

I love the people who are a part of a minority, that are gushing about their favorite fics or books that seem to have done this and offer proper representation.

I love the people who are bringing up the toxic mindset that is very popular on tumblr, the “you can’t write about it if you haven’t lived it” ideology that makes writers feel guilty for providing representation.

I especially love the people who are mentioning how they should start doing this. I love the people who are probably young or inexperienced writers that are seeing this and thinking of doing this for the first time. I love that there are people who read this and then think to better their writing because of it.

i was writing an autistic character and tried looking into firsthand accounts of what a meltdown feels like so.

now i’m here to tell you that you also might learn something fun and interesting about yourself

Tags:

#the wondrous variety of sapient life #writing #embarrassment squick? #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once