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Andrew Brosnatch - Weird Tales, November 1931

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Strange Visitor

Ink/watercolor/digital animation

Print available here

Etsy patreon

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I never put my art here, but I'm putting my art here today because I feel like it. Ok thank you 💛

[Caption: a realistic digital painting of Dream of the Endless from The Sandman series. Dream is portrayed by Tom Sturridge, a white actor. Portrait is from the waist up with strong, pale light shining down, and Dream is wearing a slender black overcoat with a high, flipped collar. His chaotic black hair is swept to one side. The background is a skyscape of distant, violet-gray clouds looming above and below a band of soft orange dusk.]

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the concept of death as a character is something that can be so personal

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Artwork by Aalma do Luar (Aalma’s Artville)

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Pre-Yelp review.

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Driftwood by Adam Oehlers.

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Part of me wants to shift the entirety of Magical Fantasy Adventure Land into the normal world instead of splitting it into a separate realm.

Part of me is still annoyed that this fucker still doesn’t have a proper title. Or at least something that sounds better as a place holder.

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from Tiny Beautiful Things, adapted for the stage by Nia Vardalos. 

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How do I deal with flat writing that lacks enough details and kind of moves the plot along too quickly? I'm writing in first person, present tense and my writing comes out really fast paced (as it goes with present tense) but I feel like it lacks...meat, metaphorically speaking. How can I fatten it up without taking away from the action sequence?

Write through it first and then go back to pick out the places that seem to be going too fast. Here are some reasons for why they seem rushed:

Word Choice: Your word choice determines the way a sentence flows by itself and how it flows with other sentences. If a section of your writing seems too fast, rewrite it and rearrange it until is sounds right.

Not Enough Something: If you look at a scene that is much shorter than you thought it would be, you might be missing detail or story. You can add more to the story by introduce subplots, adding in a little bit more conflict, or adding something else that puts more space between the beginning and the end. For tips on detail, go through the description tag on the tags page.

Pacing: Your pacing is probably off. This goes back to the above points. If you need help with pacing, go through the pacing tag on the tags page.

No Down Time: You need some down time in a story. The action scenes can go fast, but after that something should slow the story. The reader needs time between fast paced scenes to wrap their head around what had just happened, but this doesn’t mean it should be a pattern of fast-slow-fast-slow. Mix it up. Entire chapters or scenes shouldn’t be fast or slow. They can be a combination. There can be little moments of quiet in an action scene where you can catch up on everything that happened within the narration and where you can put in more detail about the world around your character.

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I've been learning short story structure, and "reading like a writer" by making notes on a lot of short stories, breaking them into their three big moods, and seeing what falls out.

If you want to follow along, I've started collecting my rambling Twitter threads into giant posts:

January Big Giant Three-Mood Story Reading Thread

February Short Story Reading Thread

March Short Story Reading Post

April Short Story Reading Post

Possibly more in future (they'll be under the short story reading post category)

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Bog Guard by i Asimov

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Invader Girl aka Invadergirl aka Black Canvas LLC (German, b. Germany) - Death Waits for None, Paintings: Golden Acrylic on gallery Canvas

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Myrto Apostolidou - I don’t think we’re in kansas anymore, 2011