chaton-katreal

[chaton-katreal]

do you see this shit my liege

[chaton-katreal]

now for the ultimate test. go to this website. set it to randomly generate ONE pokemon. all generations. all types. whatever it generates? thats you as a pokemon forever. what you get is what you get. NO RE ROLLING. now. who are you? i got goomy :^)

[chaton-katreal]

🥔

what soup ingredient are you.. options include garlic carrot potato corn and a secret option 🌽🍅🥔🍲🥕🧅🧄

[chaton-katreal]

Like, there are definitely no universal rules for editing one's writing, but at some point you've gotta step back, examine your reaction, and ask yourself: is this particular piece of editing advice bad in the abstract, or is it more that no piece of editing advice would ever be acceptable to you because you resent the fact you can't just write it once and have it be perfect on the very first try?

[chaton-katreal]

[chaton-katreal]

presented without commentary or apology

[chaton-katreal]

not to post even more Villains Discourse on main but it really bugs me how people read giving villains tragic backstories as inherently excusing their actions and/or demonizing trauma survivors.

the actual message of Tragic Villains is (almost) always “people who are never taught or given any healthy, constructive outlets for their emotions will often find unhealthy, destructive outlets.” it’s that people who are traumatized and never learn how to cope with that trauma can become a danger to themselves and others. the message isn’t “trauma makes you evil!!!!” or “genocide is okay if you’ve been sad before!!!!” it’s “people need compassion and help to recover from trauma instead of becoming increasingly angry and harming themselves and others in the process.”

this site takes an alarmingly behaviorist and punitive approach to everything and it’s literally the most annoying thing. y’all have this concept that “if we just punish people hard enough, if we just scare them enough, if we just make them feel guilty enough.” that people just Do Bad Things Because They Do Bad Things, I Guess, and Because We Didn’t Threaten Them And Shame Them Enough. but humans are an innately social species. at our very core, we need compassion and kindness. we need healthy relationships with other humans.

you can keep looking at traumatized villains and being like “haha this dumb pathetic sadboi thinks murder is okay because his parents died” but as a survivor myself, unaddressed/untreated trauma absolutely can make you ragey and destructive. i was lucky enough to have support and eventually get the treatment i needed. but it’s not hard at all for me to imagine how, if that hadn’t been the case, that could’ve been me. obviously not on a movie-villain scale like murder or war crimes, but it’s so irritating as someone whose trauma has always manifested as anger to watch people on this site be like “this is just bad writing!!! real survivors/good survivors don’t end up like that the writers just hate survivors and want the audience to condone murder!”

[chaton-katreal]

but what if a vampire drank the blood of someone who was anemic like would they be seriously grossed out

“what the fuck is this”

“i have anemia”

“can you take something for that you should probably take something for that this shit is nasty to drink let alone have running through your body i’m setting up a doctor’s appointment for you”

[chaton-katreal]

types of people - landscapes

tag yourself!

desert - old maps, tea drinker, earthy colors, late night nostalgia, cigarette smoke, pressed flowers

mountain - crisp shirts, overworked, winter air, early mornings, cursing, conspiracy theories, documentaries

beach - sleeping in, always broke, greek mythology, feeling lost, never gets angry, expensive 

meadow - raspberry muffins, good grades, picnic in a park, sad smiles, comfy pyjamas, doesn’t want to be overlooked

forest - flannel shirts around the waist, logical, the smell of rain, s’mores, inside jokes, expensive coffee

[chaton-katreal]

The real joy of fanfiction is getting to read several versions of the exact same, oddly specific plot written by different people and seeing the small ways things differ and falling in love with every one.

[chaton-katreal]

How to surreptitiously stretch within reach of kisses 

(via)

[chaton-katreal]

One of the best and most helpful things anyone ever said to me was: Don’t advertise your mistakes.

You will often notice when you’ve made an error, or when there’s something you could have done better, or etc, and sometimes other people will notice too. But often, they won’t. So don’t point it out.

It’s really a sign of a lack of self confidence – you think that if you point out the error first, it will save someone else from having to point it out for you. That by being self-depreciating, no one else will feel obliged to point out your flaws.

But here’s the thing. People don’t notice jack shit, most of the time. Sure, yeah, sometimes you’ll fuck up and people will notice and mention it, and thats fine, but 95% of your errors will go unnoticed. Unless you choose to point them out, in which case, you ensure that 100% of your errors get noticed.

The above sentence was said to me during a dance rehearsal. I’m not a pro dancer by any stretch of the imagination – this was a fun little between-friends dance that we were going to perform at a medium sized function full of people we knew. Half the people in the group did have dance experience, which made me - a non-dancer - feel self concious. So every time I messed up the steps, I would laugh at myself or made an “agh” sound or be verbally frustrated with myself that I was struggling to get that move, or whatever. Which drew peoples attention to the fact that I’d made an error.

There were like 10 of us doing this dance; me missing one step went largely unnoticed in the scheme of things, because with ten of us, anyone watching the dance had so much to look at that the likelihood of them seeing me misstep was extremely low. Unless I made a big deal about it, which would draw their attention to me, and ensure that they were made aware.

I used to point out my mistakes all the time. Not just with the dance, but across the board in general life, too. “Agh, whoops,” or handing over a completed project like “I know I could have done [thing] better, but hopefully the rest is ok,” or whatever. People were often frustrated with me, and I feel, in hindsight, that they were frustrated with me because in their eyes, with me constantly highlighting my own errors, they knew I could do better but instead here I was, giving them a shoddy, half-assed, error-filled effort. By me pointing out my every mistake, they were aware of how many I was making, and they were frustrated by my seemingly endless errors.

Then I got told to “stop advertising your mistakes,” and it was a bit of a revelation moment for me. I made a concious effort that day to minimise my reaction to my own mistakes – for the rest of the rehearsal and into the final performance – and you know what happened??

After the performance, countless people said some iteration of the phrase, “I didn’t know you could dance!!”

They thought I was a dancer. That I’d been dancing for years. They hadn’t noticed any of my missteps.

I messed up multiple times during the final performance. If I watch the recording and focus on me, I can see my missed steps, the time I span clockwise on the spot instead of anticlockwise, the time I was slightly out of alignment with the other dancers, etc. But if I watch the dance as a whole, watching all 10 dancers instead of just me….. I dont notice the mistakes I made. They blend in. Theres too much other stuff going on for anyone to notice the one dancer who spun on the spot in the opposite direction to everyone else.

And everyone thought i was brilliant. All I noticed, while dancing, were my mistakes, but no one else saw them, and everyone who saw the dance was super impressed with it and with me. That would not have been the case had I reacted to every one of my errors as I’d made them.

So I took that concept and applied it to the rest of my life. And you know what???? People were less frustrated with me. Because they weren’t noticing my minor errors, and I wasn’t pointing them out any more, so from their perspective, it looked like my output had improved. It looked like I was making “less errors.” I wasn’t, its just that before, I was pointing every one of them out, and now, I was letting people notice them on their own. And they didnt notice them.

You are always going to be hyperaware of yourself and your own mistakes, but other people are way too distracted by their own crap and have too much other stuff drawing their attention to notice your every misstep. So stop pointing your mistakes out. Stop being your own worst critic. Everyone fucks up now and then, its fine. You fix the error if you can, and you move on. You dont have to pre-empt someone else pointing out your mistakes, because its extremely likely that they wont notice your errors. Unless you point them out.

So stop advertising your mistakes, people.

[chaton-katreal]

do you have any tips for writing body language?

OH ANON OH ANON you've really done it now ✨ please, step into my office 🚪

first of all, I want to tattoo these charts onto my body:

and… okay there’s that. I’m not sure how much “advice” I have because I’m definitely not in a position to like, know things like this 😭 but I can tell you what I do and how I try to use body language??

I think the most effective way (i've found) to actually use it is to..... balance it out between physical descriptions (what's physically happening, what's moving the story along, physical perceptions/sensations/actions/dialogue) and some more introspective/inward descriptions? y'know?

I hope this makes sense, so bear with me for a second. I make a little triangle out of them 😭 "body language" and "physical description/action/dialogue" and "character thoughts" -- and then you can figure out based on who you're writing, and the situation they're in, what they're more likely to do, or which corners of the triangle they're more likely to gravitate towards.

for example, mickey leans heavily into body language. just as like, a part of his character. he chews on his lip and gesticulates with his hands and talks with his eyebrows. he brushes his thumb against his lip, along the side of his nose, when he's feeling uncomfortable or annoyed or uncertain. he grounds himself in the here-and-now, probably focuses more on the physical sensations, next steps to take, measurable chunks.

ian, on the other hand, is more speculative, gets tangled up in thought-webs and is more likely to kind of go inward to process things, maybe zone out a little. he won't focus on the physical sensations, won't display all these little mannerisms as openly, and instead he'll go a bit still. he'll tighten his jaw, stick out his chin, and he'll think.

so when I write for mickey, i tend to lean towards body language and tangible things, physical descriptions and thoughts tied to the here-and-now. for ian, I tend to go a little more inward, lean into the introspective and the feeling of those different body language things/physical descriptors -- lumps in his throat or red in his vision, something light or heavy or cold settling in his stomach -- rather than body language itself to show how he's feeling. thought-spirals, instead of outward mannerisms that would give away what he's going through.

....idk if any of that makes sense, but! I guess the "body language tip" hiding in this mess is that how it's used (characters, context) matters? so like... balancing it out with physical stuff and context and character insights is important, i think. there’s always going to be body language that can be described, because the characters are always doing something with their bodies. but the words you use to describe them and how heavily you lean on that to convey tone probably isn’t static, and will change as your characters move through different situations.

also, I think a lot of this just develops over time as you settle into your own style, so 🤷🏽‍♀️ there are no rules lol. language is fun! play with it!

and that's what I got!! anyone else, feel free to chime in with any tips you have and I will eat them up greedily 🤩

[chaton-katreal]

one of the hardest things to learn as a depressed former Gifted Kid™ is that half-assed is better than nothing. take the 50%, 40%, even 20% job. scrubbing your face is better than not taking a shower at all. picking up your clothes is better than never cleaning. nibbling on some bread is better than starving.

DO THINGS HALFWAY. NOW YOU’RE 100% BETTER OFF THAN YOU WERE BEFORE.

[chaton-katreal]

I said it in the notes on the last post but I’m gonna say it again.

I’m married to someone with severe memory problems. Automation of household appliances & systems helps him a lot and helps me a lot because it reduces the number of things I have to keep in my brain at all times. I love doors that lock themselves, being able to schedule dog food being delivered, a thermostat I can manipulate from wherever. Beyond my little bubble it should be noted that voice controlled appliances can be really good for people with mobility concerns. Appliances that can measure and talk and remember little tasks can be such a blessing for people.

I will never forgive Amazon and Google for taking technologies that could be really helpful and weaponizing them, and fuck everybody who acts like its some kind of conspiracy theory that those devices are spying on you. You absolutely should be distrustful of those devices but just make sure you’re getting angry at the right people.

[chaton-katreal]

there is a tendency with history, i think, because we're so far removed from it, to kind of forget that all of the people were people

a child 10,000 years ago left a handprint on a wall. they were fingerpainting. a viking climbs up a rock just to carve the words "this is very high" 10ft off the ground. somebody centuries... milennia... ago burned their dinner so thoroughly that they buried the ruined pot in the backyard rather than attempt to clean it. shakespeare got drunk and wrote dick jokes. tutankhamun was a little boy who liked ducks more than anything. a roman carves his name into a monument in another country saying "i was here". a prisoner, centuries ago, in the tower of london scratches lines into the wall as a tally marking the days. a medieval monk scrawls in the margins bemoaning the boredom of his work.

every human being across history has said "i was here. i lived. i loved. i made something. i laughed. i cried. please do not forget me"