squarebracket-trickster - Tumblr blog

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silly poll time

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Two Truths and a Lie

I was tagged by @kaylinalexanderbooks here, I love this game so much!

Rules: create a 24 hour poll with two truths and one lie about an OC!

No pressure tagging: @tephis, @winterandwords, @ceph-the-ghost-writer, @mthollowell-writes, and leaving an open tag

So from my still Unnamed Fantasy Western I'm going to go with Andrew, the elf.

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@stesierra hahahahahahahaha

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Okay, so I will be studying abroad this summer in France. (Yay!) However, that means to keep up my good reading streak, I will need lots of books to read on Kindle. So tell me.

What stories of yours are available on Kindle??? ♥️

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37 down, 3 to go!

I think it's 3, anyway. There could be some last-minute fiddling with the chapter divisions that are unknown at this point even to me. But 3 is the current plan ... 🩷

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The power of multiple drafts! Never settle!

First draft of the first page of KOD to now!

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nothing makes u feel stupid quite like being a writer. out here googling “rooms in a house” to make sure i didn’t forget one of em. blockhead behavior.

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Tagged by @bisexual-kelsier in this thread. Okay so 9 favorite albums? I have a hard time picking favorites so here’s something??

5SOS5 - 5 Seconds of Summer (honestly love all of their albums)

Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl Soundtrack (this is probably my most nostalgic)

Baldur's Gate 3 Soundtrack - Borislav Slavov

Ocean Avenue - Yellowcard

The Mandalorian - Ludwig Göransson

Greatest Hits 1978-1997 - Journey (also nostalgic)

Les Misérables (The International Cast)

Chroma - Cartel

All My Demons Greeting Me as a Friend - Aurora

And tagging people (do I know 9 people??) uhh how about @squarebracket-trickster @stajorathefallen @possuminabathtub @emptymanuscript and basically anyone else that sees this can consider themselves tagged (but zero pressure)

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trying to motivate myself to be a little more active here, i want to discover some new writeblrs to follow!! feel free to reach out if you wanna!

i'm particularly interested if you...

🎧 write adult fiction, especially literary fiction, horror (gothic or otherwise), gothic romance, fantasy, or really anything with a gritty/emotional feel

🎧 like any bands from the 90s grunge scene (or 80s hard rock) (i can and will yap for days)

🎧 like vampires, pirates, or cowboys

🎧 are a fellow college student (we can struggle together!!)

even if we don't have any of this in common, i'd love to chat anyway! hopefully this finds some folks <3

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<33333

I'm really, really curious about your Shakespeare-inspired romance WIP. Do you plan on talking more about it on your blog?

Hi anon,

WIPVII is the main thing I talk about here and has been since the beginning of this blog. I have several hundred posts under the tag #WIPVII if you are curious to check them out. It's the single most used tag on my blog by a landslide.

I don't post full chapters though. Mostly I just play tag/ask games and liveblog my thoughts while I am drafting/editing.

I am always happy to answer questions about my WIP (and am always excited when someone seems interested in my work) but uhh... I genuinely do not know how I could talk about it more than I already do...

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I write for MG, YA, and Adult age categories but I write the same length paragraphs for all of them.

My paragraphs tend not to get too long. I hate long paragraphs so I try not to do them in my own writing. If I have a paragraph on the longer end I will probably end up ruthlessly cutting stuff from it or trying to break it in two. And nine times out of ten I am a chronic over-writer so long paragraphs are generally an indication that cuts are needed.

On the other hand, I am a chronic over-writer, so I am somewhat incapable of making my paragraphs short.

They tend to be between 3 (long) sentences to 8 (short) sentences.

I was taught in school that paragraphs should be around 5 sentences. Personally I think that is an arbitrary rule - paragraphs should be as long as they need to be - but it definitely influenced my writing style i by being forced to adhere to it for many a school essay/short story.

I need to check something for science.

How many sentences do you normally have per paragraph?

How long are your paragraphs?

And what age range are you writing for?

I'm trying to figure out if there's a correlation between these things.

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#winks i know a hot author who would love to do some alpha/beta reading for u#she likes vampires#and is very human!

hahahaha is she in the room with us? bc I would love to take her up on it... eventually... <3333

I refuse to let anyone read large sections of it for the purposes of giving feedback until I have done all I can to edit it on my own first. My Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria (RSD) does not like scenarios where where someone points out a problem that I already know is a problem and am already planning on fixing, just give me a moment ahhh. It sends me into an anxiety spiral where I feel like the other person must think I'm not smart enough. So you know, inevitably that will probably happen at some point during the feedback process, but the less it happens the less time I spend feeling sick to my stomach.

I promise I am not expecting to have a perfect finished product before I even ask for feedback (as much as the little perfectionist in my mind would like to daydream...). I just want to get to a point where I feel like it's no longer worth the effort to keep tweaking and, fuck it, it's good enough, I'd rather just be done.

I'm really, really curious about your Shakespeare-inspired romance WIP. Do you plan on talking more about it on your blog?

Hi anon,

WIPVII is the main thing I talk about here and has been since the beginning of this blog. I have several hundred posts under the tag #WIPVII if you are curious to check them out. It's the single most used tag on my blog by a landslide.

I don't post full chapters though. Mostly I just play tag/ask games and liveblog my thoughts while I am drafting/editing.

I am always happy to answer questions about my WIP (and am always excited when someone seems interested in my work) but uhh... I genuinely do not know how I could talk about it more than I already do...

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Omg you are describing me too!!!

I actually did not realize I was hypermobile until I was in my teens. As a kid I had a theory that my knees were a little weird because the other kids' legs did not look like *that* when they were standing, but maybe they were all just bending their knees slightly and I missed the memo?

And every kid can w-sit and sit in lotus position and touch their heels to their belly-button, right?

Besides, I couldn't even touch my hands to the floor. How could I possibly be hypermobile? I was like the least flexible child I knew! I had friends that could do the splits!

One time another girl in my grade 6 class back-bent her elbows as a party trick and I was like, "haha cool trick! wish I could do that!"

I only started to realize something might be amiss when I was in my teens. One time after martial arts a few of us students were talking about a wrist lock we do during warm up. One of the senior students was demonstrating it and I realized her fingers did not bend back more than 90 degrees so I asked her why she was clenching her fingers and if we were supposed to do that. And she looked at me like ????? Then we all started comparing how far back our fingers could bend and that is when I discovered I was not normal.

Only after that did I realize I could, in fact, back-bend my elbows and I should probably stop doing that when I do push ups...

When I was 15 I had a naturopath tell me "you have a unusually long history of weird, unexplained health issues including fatigue, GI issues, terrible circulation, and random joint complaints... maybe you should google this thing called Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome and see if any of the types seem like you."

So I googled them, went through the symptoms of each of the 13 types, and went "holy shit! this all sounds so serious! none of this is me! ...well, maybe type-III could be me? but like, only if you apply the diagnostic criteria really, really loosely." So I told my naturopath I was fairly certain I did not have EDS and it never came up again.

Until I was in my twenties and my chronic fatigue got so bad I was like, "okay, think. are there any other weird things about my body that might be symptoms of something?" I revisited the EDS-III (now hEDS) criteria, decided it still wasn't me, but I did stumble onto some stuff about BHS/JHS/HSD and I was like "oh... oh. This is me."

So I went to my doctor, sat down in his office, twisted in my seat and cracked my back in 13 places at once, then went, "I think I have either Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome or Hypermobility Spectrum Disorder".

And he, without missing a beat, went, "sounds like it."

And then I feel down the rabbit hole of researching my condition and well, suddenly, soooo many weird things from my childhood started to make sense. I'm still discovering new things all the time about my HSD. Apparently it's not normal for your joints to pinch and grind together when you unscrew a jar lid??? And apparently that one vein that's always been visible beneath my eye is an indication of the thin, translucent skin that sometimes shows up in hEDS (I don't have it nearly severe enough to be worried about vEDS though THANK GOD). Also, apparently I do, in fact, have heel papules. I genuinely did not think I did (answered no when my doctor and I reviewed the hEDS criteria together...) until a recent imposter syndrome-induced hyperfixation on the hEDS criteria had me actually google what they looked like and how to make them show up.

fun times...

But, I agree, bendy bodies are great for sports. Other students at my dojo like practicing with me because it forces them to work on their technique. You need to get the angles for locks and pins just right if you want any kind of control over my arms. Luckily I have never been injured due to my hypermobility in 11 years of Aikido but I have started practicing with compression braces on my wrists (and thumbs), ankles, and elbows, just to be safe.

Writeblr Re-Intro

Yo! I'm V Saintsin. Or V or Vin or Saintsin or whatever you want to call me that sounds right on your tongue. I'm a self-proclaimed Social Media fumbler who got a late start to the party and has never quite figured it out. I hate how hipster and edgy it sounds to say "I'm bad at social media" but like I used to work with some people who actually managed the social media accounts for the business we worked for and there were rules and whatnot and damn, I think online media is just not my medium. That being said, here I am! Hah

I'm an author and general mess who's hoping to be the miracle man (somebody who makes a living writing silly little stories). I do use a pseudonym but please hear me out when I say I didn't realize how edgy it sounds, it just has some sentimental value to my personal life. I'm so sorry that I sound like I'm in my emo phase HAHA

About me -

He/Him Transguy from the American Midwest (arguably the south, depending on who you talk to, but the older people still say "Sodi-pop" and "ope").

I'm dysautonomic, bendy, permanently sleepy, and a survivor of Crappy Doctors Who Suck At Doctoring.

I like DnD, Pathfinder, Baldur's Gate 3, Cyberpunk, Dragon Age, and other things in that vein.

I do make art of my stories and characters (Tablet is currently not working so I'm in a dry spell).

My writing background is predominantly ancient, dusty RPs from as far back as the foopets days and fanfic writing on Quizilla - I am an old and wizened elder of the net.

My formal education was music performance and behavioral neuroscience, I don't really know how I got where I am.

This is not my first rodeo with tumblr but it is the first time I have anything to SAY instead of just lurking.

In the event of malfunction, you can put me outside for 5 minutes and I'll probably factory reset.

My existence as I know it hinges on a massive number of sticky notes plastered throughout my room.

What I'm lookin' for -

Idk, whatever? I'm down for most things. Did you write it? Cool, let me see. I'm not too bent on genre or anything, just fascinated by the art of storytelling.

A bit tentative with fanfiction but that's just because if it's not a fandom I'm familiar with I am rather clueless about what the hell is going on and if it's a fandom I am familiar with I HUNT DOWN THE DEEP LORE.

I like art a whole lot, including fanart. Also art advice, love seeing things from different perspectives and learning something new.

Mutuals, really, for any reason. Building better connections on here, getting to know people. I am hideously bad at this but I try.

What I write -

Science Fiction with heavy subjects that matter to me - trigger warnings on a story-by-story basis.

High Fantasy (eventually books I think?) characters and their backgrounds for DnD and Pathfinder - I have been tempted to share these to help people get ideas or just for free use?

Things that I delete because I have crippling imposter syndrome and publishing makes me nauseous (doin' it tho).

Stories that I hope will make people feel less alone or that people could relate to, stories that I wish I had when life was worse and I was reaching out for anything I could find to keep me afloat, stories that try to be critical of things that SUCK in a way that's any helpful.

Lots of curse words and cussing (that's just how people talk 'round here), dubious science, things that I hope might make you cry but in a good way though.

Character-Driven stories that revolve more around the development of the person and less around the plot itself if that makes sense.

I've put blurb things below for my primary project/series which features a grumpy, queer, 37-year old chain smoking Frenchman and his misadventures with life and love and unbridled rage. If any of that sounds cool stick around and hang out? (This part is a plug bc I did a thing and I'm proud of it) And if my books sounds interesting the first one is 99 cents on Kindle and you just need a phone and a free app to read it!

THE SECRET OF LIFE (Published) - Sci-Fi/Psychological Thriller, Bi M Lead, Lovers to Enemies, AI but the oldschool cool kind not the real world thing that's stealing our future

Carlisle-Trystan Antoinette is a mercenary on a hard road, navigating life and death itself in an infinite cycle started by powers above his understanding. He has one mission - warn The Dianican Space Station of the coming threat and put a stop to a war that would encapsulate the whole of the Sol System before it can ever begin. Unfortunately for Carlisle, reality is a tenuous thing, made up only by our understanding of it. At least, according to his Psychiatrist, who tells him that there is no war, that he was never a mercenary, and that what Carlisle is experiencing is a severe but manageable psychotic break. Stripped of his combat enhancements, his bio monitor, and everything he's every known, Carlisle has a decision to make. Does he give in to the thoughts and memories, so real that he can almost taste them, or does he live a life of comfort and ease, returning to a husband and daughter that he left behind?

TWs: Domestic and War Violence, suicide, rape, medical trauma, grief, drug use

THE SILENCE OF ANGELS (Due July '24, TSoL 2) - Betrayal and Rage, Learning how to love again slow-burn romantic subplot, Learning how to Dad, A general inability for any one thing to just go right

(Quick Rough Blurb that offers no spoilers for TSoL) Making connections isn't easy for somebody who's accustomed to burning bridges. Isolation has always been Carlisle's mantra for surviving his life. Playing a role comes second nature, pretending to be the man that everyone else wants to see in him. When an old friend is murdered Carlisle finds himself as the primary suspect with all evidence pointing to him so clearly that even he calls to question what he is capable of. Unwilling to believe that he could commit such a heinous crime, Carlisle sets off to find the truth of his friend's death - was Carlisle framed or does he truly have the capacity to bring such harm upon those he loves? Old and new bonds will be tested, faith broken, and the future of everyone called into question as lines are drawn and sides are picked.

TWs: Violence, mentions of SA, graphic character death, more grief, more death

I don't know what else to say... Later!

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#put you in a ship in a bottle#because it reminded me of the opening of your story taking place#well I guess no longer on a ship but close enough

omg!! <3333 I did not realize anyone was following my WIP this closely hahahaha

The opening scene still does take place on a ship! A medieval cog ship to be exact.

You guys really liked my last poll so