callipraxia

[callipraxia]

I can never decide if I love or hate Pathfinder and Starfinder for their “pocket editions.” On one hand, hurrah! - the rpg book does not cost $50. On the other hand…the print…tiny…so tiny. Pathfinder Pocket Editions are how I discovered you can put reading glasses on over top your normal glasses and it actually does have a minor positive effect - only offers a slight increase in magnification, but without the distortion of trying to read with a magnifying glass, where words are in multiple sizes at the same time and only a few are a good size to read and the sentence is so choppy as a result that my brain cannot process it.

TL;DR - you ever see a short, auburn-ish haired woman trying to read an RPG source book while wearing two pairs of glasses at the same time, you have probably found me. If, when confronted, this personage acts extremely startled and uncomfortable while exhibiting the verbal and emotional range of a Stepford Wife, then yeah, it’s me, thanks in advance for giving me the impetus to actually move to Canada finally!

[callipraxia]

Welp, looks like I’m on track to finish at least the first volume of this story, then, because chapter 6 is up!

[callipraxia]

Update: I still have not written chapter 6, but as of last night, I do now have a detailed outline for rewriting the entire Original Trilogy from Star Wars. Episode three is gonna be epic…if, you know. I get past E1 chapter 6.

Me: Okay. Chapter Six. This is where I find out if I fumble this one or not. It’s always chapter 6 where everything stalls out and I either break through or give up on the whole project. I seem to have lost that chunk of text I meant to move into here, so we’re off to a good start. Let’s get to it.

Me, several hours later: *has written nothing new for chapter six, but did write the core of the Big Emotional Resolution And Redemption Scene that’s like sixty-something unwritten chapters away, making self cry until it brought on a headache.*

Good start. We’re definitely off to a good start.

[callipraxia]

Me: Okay. Chapter Six. This is where I find out if I fumble this one or not. It’s always chapter 6 where everything stalls out and I either break through or give up on the whole project. I seem to have lost that chunk of text I meant to move into here, so we’re off to a good start. Let’s get to it.

Me, several hours later: *has written nothing new for chapter six, but did write the core of the Big Emotional Resolution And Redemption Scene that’s like sixty-something unwritten chapters away, making self cry until it brought on a headache.*

Good start. We’re definitely off to a good start.

[callipraxia]

…now there’s an ambulance at the library and I am unsure if it’s legal to go in until after it leaves. It is surely shaping up to be A Day.

[callipraxia]

Also, I know it’s probably just a preset radio station and not the store’s choice what music to play, but it was really surreal to be in a Target, not feeling inspired to change my life during the back-to-school sale, and then hear the ceiling belt out the words “long live Walmart!”

[callipraxia]

One of my yearly rituals is visiting the back-to-school sales. These things are my “April is the cruelest month” moments. Every time I’m almost convinced that I’m completely dead inside and can approach life like a grown-up - I always, seeing so many clean notebooks and immaculate stationery displays and such, end up feeling a flicker of hope in the necrotic ashes of my soul*. Some last gasp of optimism for the future, the feeling that: maybe I can get it right this time around….

Anyways, my favorite sale is always Target. Always. But although it is marginally better than the Walmart-in-[Smaller Town] sale was, it was…just not on point, somehow. Too small. Too restrained. Have I mentioned that I have OCD and one of my Things is that it’s really hard not to buy consumables (especially the kinds that stick around post-consumption, like matching notebooks) in threes? Cause I have that, and it was barely triggered at all. I was able to put up a real fight against the impulse to make Poor Choices, that’s how little stuff I saw that made me feel like it could solve all my problems. I am concerned.

Target, honey, you ok? You doing all right? Has the start of the school year just slid so far back into July now that I was late to the party? What is happening in there?!

*yes, I know that was obscenely melodramatic phrasing. But we’re on tumblr. This is not where we come for sensible shoes.

[callipraxia]

Star AUs, Episode I: The Sleeping Empress - Chapter 5 - Callipraxia - Star Wars - All Media Types [Archive of Our Own]

Where many old friends gather...and also Anakin. Who is in his "if the Great Gatsby was a necromancer" era, apparently. Also features a link to a thorough-provoking but kinda horrifying article about how recent experiments could potentially redefine the words 'life' and 'death' from Scientific American.

[callipraxia]

I’m bustling about my living room, vaguely tidying things and even cleaning a few, and I have YouTube playing for background noise. Nothing unusual about that. Since apparently I’m having one of my Star Wars phases, the video happens to be a lore video. Nothing…too unusual about that; at this point, I think even the corners of the Internet I have only heard bad rumors about must know that women also like Star Wars, and the more lore tidbits I gather, the better the fanfic goes, right? So there goes I, listening to my lore video with less than half my attention, when a man’s fervent voice comes from my phone and says something….well, it’s funny out of context, anyway. To quote:

“Darth Nihilus was the first Sith Lord I really fell in love with….”

I know, of course, what the guy meant, which was that he just really enjoyed the lore around the character, but when that sentence just (from my point of view) came out of nowhere - well, frankly, dear reader, I laughed out loud. There’s someone for everyone I guess….

[callipraxia]

Either

a) Homer called it, and there really are supernatural forces with personalities which decide whether or not we write or suffer the dreaded Block, or

b) brains are weird, man.

To expand on B a little - creativity is associated with a larger number of neural connections in the brain, electricity jumping all over the place in odd patterns, and there are specific brain states associated with when the writing (or other art) is going well - the wave patterns in the brain actually change. I’ve read people who claim they can induce flow states at will, but as someone whose life has revolved around the written word for more than 20 years, and who has tried pretty much every trick in their books, I am skeptical of this. There’s getting to the point where you can churn out readable prose on command, and then there’s true flow - I think Virginia Woolf once noted in her diary that she was “bringing up handfuls of light” while writing Mrs. Dalloway, and I felt like I understood what she meant by that. These are the times when it’s harder to not write than it is to write.

Plus, even if you don’t go in heavily for psychology, it’s a known fact that while our consciousness is off doing whatever, other parts of the brain are still physically trying to solve other problems and puzzles; I attribute a lot of my best work to this, as the solution just comes to me, and at first I don’t know how the heck I got there, but I’m often able to reconstruct the logic later, with some effort.

Of course, writing also does have some correlation with mental illness and neurodivergence. Dostoyevsky was epileptic, I believe, and whatever he experienced during seizures was apparently what made him obsessed with questions about God and morality and sanity and such. Hypergraphia is a compulsive disorder; I read once that Danielle Steel has such a severe case of hypergraphia that she feels compelled to start trying to write on her hand when she has to stop her car for a red light. Me, a lot of my writing has its roots in the way more than one form of neurodivergency has intersected in odd ways with my mental health; I realized when I was very young that other people didn’t think like I did, and writing was a way to try to bridge the communication barrier*. Fiction writing in general also requires the ability to imagine yourself in someone else’s shoes; writing characters is just a more dignified way to keep playing pretend as an adult. Unfortunately, sometimes this ability to pretend to be other people in other situations can turn against you, into manifestations of depression that involve the feeling of being crushed under the weight of all the sadness in the world, not being able to get one’s mind off feeling for literally everyone and/or thing you hear about - your powers turning against you, if you’ll forgive me the flourish of drama.

Though it’s always worth noting that severe mental illness tends to interfere with your functioning too much to allow you to do art, and that a lot of the famously mentally ill creatives did their best work when they were under treatment, or otherwise experiencing a respite/remission of their symptoms. Virginia Woolf may have drawn on her illness for some of her material and techniques, but the actual writing was done during her “well” intervals; Van Gogh was at his most prolific while being cared for in a mental institution, and the era’s crude attempts at medicating his illness may have had side effects that influenced his perceptions of colors and therefore his paintings. Plus, one of the first things drilled into you in AP Psychology is “correlation does not equal causation” - maybe the brain connections that equal “mental illness” and “creativity” have an unusually high rate of presenting together, but there’s creative people who aren’t ill and ill people who aren’t creative, so one doesn’t appear to be ‘necessary’ for the other.

* an unfortunate side effect of this is how complaining is sometimes now a necessary part of my writing process; I have to communicate my frustration to someone else, give it a kind of reality outside of me, in order to move past it when I’m stuck.

Hey so you know how when you write the characters sometimes just do their on shit out of your control

What the actual hell happens in the brain when we write??

This sounds like mental illness

[callipraxia]

I realized there was one scene in the WIP that needed to be settled, badly - it’s still two or three chapters away, but if I write chapter 5 one way and then decide it just doesn’t work anymore in the pivotal chapter, I waste at least a third of the space in chapter five. So I sat down and started trying to draft The Scene.

…yeah, I got a paragraph in and then jumped back to a currently-poorly-defined point in the timeline to write yet another scene, completely unrelated to the ones I went in with on my mind. Instead, I dedicated…more time than I care to admit to writing a philosophical dialogue between Princess Leia and Emperor Vader that would probably have to be mostly cut to avoid boring everyone who’s not me to death (this fic is still just below 25,000 words, it’s waaaay too early in the game for the guy with delusions of godhood who was placed under severe stress last chapter and the girl who was basically raised in a cult and has never knowingly met people who didn’t think she was a demigoddess to sit down and calmly discuss aspects of the Force and its sides through the lens of religion over literal tea) and because the one semi-funny bit (“Do you know the tragedy of Darth Sidious the Great?”) is probably, in context, a little too warped…but then the postman dropped these off, so here’s me off to see just how thoroughly my world-building is about to get demolished!

[callipraxia]

I don’t even know how permitted romance works, so why am I oddly tempted to use some of these?

Forbidden Romance Prompts

𓆙 “If anyone finds out—” - “Then let them.”

𓆙 “This is a mistake.” - “Then why does it feel like the most right thing I’ve ever done?”

𓆙 “We’re not supposed to do this.” - “Then stop kissing me like that.”

𓆙 “We promised we’d stay away from each other.” - “Yeah, well, I break promises for you.”

𓆙 “We’re on opposite sides.” - “Then I’ll burn down the whole field to stand in the middle with you.”

𓆙 “This will ruin everything.” - “I don’t care if it ruins the world. I choose you.”

𓆙 “You’re not safe with me.” - “Good. I’m tired of being careful.”

𓆙 “If anyone knew—” - “They’d never understand.” - “You don’t even understand.”

𓆙 “You’re a risk.” - “Worth taking?”

𓆙 “I’ll walk away. Just say the word.” - “…Don’t.”

[callipraxia]

outlining my novel like it’s a conspiracy board. red string. post-its. tears. caffeine.

[callipraxia]

*glances at WIP, where the current scene involves a robot talking about a coma patient*

Uh…I suppose playing checkers and scraping together quarters for a couple of orange sodas in a waiting room could be a good opportunity for revealing conversations?

5 Tiny Writing Tips That Aren’t Talked About Enough (but work for me)

These are some lowkey underrated tips I’ve seen floating around writing communities — the kind that don’t get flashy attention but seriously changed how I write.

1. Put “he/she/they” at the start of the sentence less often.

Try switching up your sentence rhythm. Instead of

“She walked to the window,”

try

“The window creaked open under her touch.”

Keeps it fresh and stops the paragraph from sounding like a checklist.

2. Don’t describe everything — describe what matters.

Instead of listing every detail in a room, pick 2–3 objects that say something.

“A half-drunk mug of tea and a knife on the table”

sets a way stronger tone than

“There was a wooden table, two chairs, and a shelf.”

3. Use beats instead of dialogue tags sometimes.

Instead of:

"I'm fine," she said.

Try:

"I'm fine." She wiped her hands on her skirt.

It helps shows emotion, and movement.

4. Write your first draft like no one will ever read it.

No pressure. No perfection. Just vibes. The point of draft one is to exist. Let it be messy and weird — future you will thank you for at least something to edit.

5. When stuck, ask: “What’s the most fun thing that could happen next?”

Not logical. Not realistic. FUN. It doesn’t have to stay — but chasing excitement can blast through writer’s block and give you ideas you actually want to write.

What’s a tip that unexpectedly helped with your writing? Let me know!! 🍒

[callipraxia]

This goes for reading as well. I literally gasp out loud thisclose to “jump scare scream” when other humans attempt communication with me (oddly, I have never been so far under as to be startled by my pets. Deep enough to literally not hear a ringing phone feet away from me, but the little ones are always allowed to come by for a cuddle, no matter what else I am doing).

there is nothing quite like being interrupted while absolutely immersed in whatever you're writing. i think this must be how fish feel when they're snatched out of the water by a bird of prey

[callipraxia]

Also, took the possibly-unprecedented (for me, anyway) step of using the Relationships tag bar, and

Apparently, someone out there ships Sabé with Harry Potter

People also ship Padmé with Susan Pevensie

Please, please, please let me have remembered the symbols for "romantic relationships' and 'other kinds of relationships' correctly, otherwise I just implied that the literal only married couple thus far shown in the story are just gals being pals and that almost everyone else is committing incest, which was not the intended message, let me assure you

Without further ado: chapter four is up!

Star AUs, Episode I: The Sleeping Empress - Chapter 4 - Callipraxia - Star Wars - All Media Types [Archive of Our Own]

In which dreams are had, parades attended, re-enactments observed, and we end on a cliffhanger of bad news. Also features unprovoked abuse of the Russian language and maybe a ghost.

[callipraxia]

Without further ado: chapter four is up!

Star AUs, Episode I: The Sleeping Empress - Chapter 4 - Callipraxia - Star Wars - All Media Types [Archive of Our Own]

In which dreams are had, parades attended, re-enactments observed, and we end on a cliffhanger of bad news. Also features unprovoked abuse of the Russian language and maybe a ghost.