#and some are multiple pages mixed actual writing and dot points

[sideblogforcrimpy-plus]

Opening my drafts/fic ideas and hunting through them like you do the pantry/fridge when looking for food

[myliobatis]

Why Did This Fic Involve So Much Math: Behind The Scenes Of A Really Long Chapter

I kept threatening to do this and here it is: the planning materials (scribbles) that kept me organized enough to finish chapter two of far to the west and worlds away, aka the ensemble-cast-repentance-in-avallónë fic that ate my life. I am not constitutionally suited to writing longfic (and a 10k chapter is LONG for me, I usually hover in the 1k or less range), so this was an extremely necessary part of the process. Let’s get into it!

where it all began: early shape-of the-world thoughts in the back of a work notebook. it also contains first drafts of several scenes, but those are not pictured because they have Actual Confidential Work Materials mixed in.

from there, it developed into this bullet-point conceptualisation of the “deal with the death”, which has lived in the bottom of the continually-growing gdoc ever since. almost none of this rationale made it into the text, even though it underpinned everything.

here are the notes I took during my silm and UT reread these past few months. I made a conscious effort to compare the text to fanon, because I hadn’t reread since my first time in the fandom eight years (!) ago. the areas marked with the red inkstick are notes I found particularly useful for this project (vs. generally interesting).

within that notebook, there are some pages specific to planning this series. this one was an early stab at working out the order in which the characters would return. you can also tell that I ran through multiple pens during this process!

working out relative ages at the time of the crossing to Beleriand, which was part of a larger effort to contextualize character relationships.

an early attempt to plan the order of scenes and break up the chapters, including a couple of concepts I later removed. I wrote myself into a corner with the publishing order at the start of the series and here was desperately trying to fix it (only partially successfully!)

another stab at the sequence of returnees, in which you can tell I was having trouble remembering the year of tyelpë’s death…!

questions I asked myself to flesh out the worldbuilding of returnee-aman. in the end I chose to go with less self-actualisation, because. well. drama

working out what exactly this in-universe project entailed; only some of which made it into the finished version. never could work in the random Teleri shipbreaker.

a page of painful math, using this timeline, to figure out when a reasonable date to start the returns was. I did so so much math and then remembered like two weeks later that the numenorean invasion happened and had to recalibrate all over again!!

finally, this large-format sketchbook sheet I wrote out at around 75% finished the fic, to finalize the order, mark down issues to resolve, and make sure the characters were getting roughly equivalent screen time (the dots are tracking focus scenes).

Not pictured: hours and hours and HOURS of thinking about scenes and mentally editing while running, walking, doing laundry, etc. It was weird to put my entire brain into this post, but fun!

[clydesgod]

Discovery

Feat. an unknown cast of people

(A very lorebased drabble based around a certain oc. Hope you like it. I sorta went off the trails lmaooooooo)

--------------------------------------------

Journal of Gervais Spear 11th of June, 1895 French Sudan

According to our records, there have been many sites like the exact one we have been excavating today all around the world. Some sites include Indochina, South America, the Pacific, and even some sites in Europe. It appears the British are also in touch with some of these sites, as well as the Spanish, Russians, and the Americans themselves.

However, this site feels VERY different to the ones logged before. This one is almost completely intact! Monsieur Leroy has been very adminant that this is the place that connects the other sides. If the translators are right, this entire temple could very well lead to some unknown treasure. Maybe something belonging to Mansa Musa? My brain is full of ideas, though the guide, Majid, tells me not to overthink it.

But I cannot help but think there is something strange about this temple. The stones that built this place couldn’t have come from Africa. That, and it seemed almost impossible for anyone to build such a place underground. It almost feels like this had to have been built by someone completely different from the ancestors of the locals here. Maybe an old empire we are yet to discover?

Maybe the heat is getting to my brain. Maybe I-

Gervais is pulled away from his journal, almost jumping out of his seat as a hand is placed upon his shoulder. He looked up, seeing the smiling face of Majid hovering above him.

“You look tired my friend,” He said, handing over a cup of what Gervais could assume was coffee. “Here, I know it’s early and the sun is not being too friendly to us. But you shouldn’t suffer alone.”

Gervais nodded, taking the metal cup and slowly taking a sip of it. It was a little stronger than what he was used to back in Metz. His face twisted a bit before swallowing, and taking in another sip. Majid simply chuckled to himself, and walked over towards another desk. 

“This place is old, but I hardly doubt the Carthaginians were the ones who built this. The columns here don’t look remotely Greek. Besides, there’s a lack of, er, how you say ‘charm’. Unlike most buildings I’ve seen.”

Gervais nodded, flipping a page as he quickly scribbled something in. He didn’t talk much during the boat ride, and the camel ride over. Majid often felt like the complete opposite to him.

“Monsieur, I hate to be rude but you cannot be trapped under all those ledgers and journals for this long. We’re on the brink of excavating a possible new civilization and all you’re doing is following what Mathéo orders you to do.”

“...we’re not supposed to call him by his first name,” Gervais replied, looking up as he placed a bookmark between two pages and then swiftly closed it. “Monsieur Leroy has put a lot of money towards the expedition. He’s been to many places already, made a name for himself. With this, we might all become shockingly wealthy.”

“Will the guides be as well?” Majid asked, crossing his arms and raising an eyebrow.

“I-I’m sure they will. Monsieur Leroy is a very generous man. He isn’t one to shy away from getting aid from nearby villages and garrisons.” He took another sip of the coffee, getting used to the taste of it after a few sips. Impressive.

Majid sighed, looking over a map of the world, looking at all the crosses that dotted it. So many sights, so many similarities. Why was this place so different? Why were they all so far apart and so similar?

“How possible is it that, maybe, this was from a more ancient and advanced civilization?” Majid asked, still pondering ideas. “The statutes found already seem to indicate that something used to run through them, maybe some kind of fluid? Like oil?”

“I hardly doubt anyone back then was able to cultivate oil like we can now, let alone use it for whatever they need their statues to do.” Gervais placed the metal cup down, standing as he began to walk over towards a smaller desk full of ledgers and books. He opened one more up, looking over at the path they had taken. They were in the middle of a big dune, the nearest village being 4 kilometers away. They had a camp set up outside, with around 30 labourers who came from the village to aid with the mission. The 14 main members of the expedition were a mix of soldiers, archaeologists, rich men who paid for the trip, guides, and then himself, the keeper of the books of research and other important information.

He scoured around, inspecting where they came from and making sure the route would be okay for when they had to return back to the port.

“What god do you assume this is?” Majid asked, looking over at one of the statues recovered from outside. It was taken inside so it could’ve been dusted and it’s writing examined. None of the translators could even understand it. “It doesn’t look like it’s from any local faiths around this area. No one seems to recognise it.”

Gervais looked behind, sighing. That question perplexed him just as well.

It was a rather tall statue, standing at around 6 feet. It wore a strange robe that covered their entire body, hiding their feet. One arm was down by their side, as the other appeared to be outstretched but had been broken off halfway. The overall figure looked human in nature until you got to the head.

Instead of a head, it looked like someone had placed a squid upon the neck, as if it were a mask or some kind of hybrid. It’s brow (if you could even call it that) looked angry, almost commanding.

Gervais gulped, wondering what kind of creature this was. No kind of being appeared in any kind of historical text. Not Christian, not Judaism, not Hindu, not Islamic, and upon further research, not even a local faith in the region.

“We can only assume it’s a local faith that we haven’t ever heard about or one that’s dead. I cannot imagine who would want to worship one of...those things.” He noted, going back to his research as Majid got a closer look at the figure.

“We found more last night, they all look different in some way,” he added, trying to piece it all together. “Some were shorter, some were taller. Some had different expressions. Some appear to have bosums actually.”

“Did you really have to check all of the statues chests to realize that?” Gervais asked, raising an eyebrow and letting out a small smile.

“Ahh, so that’s what you look like when you smile.” Majid joked back, chuckling as he went back to his work. Gervais’ smile vanished swiftly, as he went back to his own work.

“I trust you two aren’t just messing about down here aren’t you?” A sudden voice said, causing the two men to jump and turn to face their superior.

The man was wearing tan coloured shorts with a short sleeved shirt on, his socks almost reaching to his knees and his boots were coated in layers upon layers of mud, dirt, and sand. His moustache took the centre stage however, seeing it was the only piece of hair on his head he could actually take care of.

“A-ah! No monsieur! Me and Majid were just having a brief jest. We were discussing the nature of these statues-”

Mathéo lifted an eyebrow “You mean the Gens de calmar?”

Majid and Gervais did their best to hide their cringe at their superiors' new name for the artifacts.

“Y-yes monsieur,” Gervais continued. “We have done more research but nothing at all comes up. No religious documents reference this site whatsoever.”

“Ah-that is where you are wrong my apprentice!” The superior replied, looking as smug as ever as an assistant wandered over towards a desk, placing down what looked like an old tablet, like the rosetta stone. However, it lacked any known language writing, and appeared to be mostly made up of pictures.

The men gathered around it, Gervais trying his best not to grope it and explore all of it’s details. Majid placed a hand on his shoulder, knowing fully well he’d damage another artifact at this rate.

“What’s even going on in this picture? It’s such an old form of art.” Majid said, asking the questions Gervais wanted to ask. “It appears to be similar to some old cave art I’ve seen before in Algeria, but there are some things I cannot recognise.”

The tablet itself appeared to be depicting a scene, with a bunch of smaller figures bowing and offering objects towards much larger figures, with lines coming out of their faces. Maybe this was a simpler way of drawing the statues? Were they offering gifts or tributes?

“Labourers found this in an old, blocked off room. It was massive, bigger than any room we have encountered before in this place. It was placed on the floor as if it were discarded by the people who last used this temple.” Mathéo replied, twisting his moustache as he looked over the table at the tablet. “It appears to be written in different forms of text, though it appears impossible to fully translate it. None of the translators could even work out what it meant.”

“...however,”

“However what, monsieur?” Gervais asked, head popping up along with Majid’s.

“If you flip the tablet over, there appears to be one small block of text written in something recognisable.”

Majid and Gervais took hold of the tablet, being careful on flipping it around and placing it flat onto the table. There it was, a small block of text surrounded by multiple blocks of unrecognisable text . Gervais still didn’t understand, but Majid’s eyes widened.

“This is Old Arabic!” He exclaimed, pointing at it and trying to read it. “It’s...very old, I can’t understand fully but, it appears to be so!”

Mathéo looked rather smug, as if he was the one who had discovered this fact. He wandered around, placing a hand on Gervais’ and Majid’s shoulders.

“Gentlemen, I believe we may be coming close to understanding this mystery. If we understand what this means, then perhaps we can understand what the other boxes mean,” He patted both men on the back, turning around as he reached over and grabbed a wooden pipe with his initials on. “I hope you two get back to doing your research, I want at least some of that text understood by sundown. We might be able to understand much, much more about the main room, and unlock its secrets”

Majid turned back, seeing his superior leave in such a pretentious fashion. He couldn’t help but scowl a bit, right before diving back into reading the box.

Gervais turned back around as well, eyebrow cocking up as he saw Majid looking deeper into the text. 

“Can you read anything?” He asked, turning around and leaning on the table as he watched Majid research.

“I feel like I should be able to, it’s not hard to understand it’s just,” he paused, attempting to think of a way to explain his emotions. “It’s like if, you were to read something from, er, the old Franks. You’d be able to understand some words but the rest just appear...strange.”

Gervais nodded, going back to his desk and his journal. He’ll log this down as well, it made sense too.

“...Meshalt Segleell…”

“Hrm?” Gervais looked back at Majid, looking confused. “What did you say?”

“That’s something I can read but...I don't know if it’s a word or a name. It doesn’t sound native to the region at all!” He was perplexed, still looking at other lines on the text as Gervais turned to carry on his journal entry.

Maybe the heat is getting to my brain. Maybe I

Monsieur Leroy found something, just now. A black stone tablet of drawings from a bygone age. On the back of it? A multitude of unknown languages, with only one being legible. Monsieur Karim is studying it as I write this. He has deciphered something but it’s unsure if it’s a name, a place, a language or anything for that matter! We shall keep going until nightfall.

I can just sense treasure. I wonder how Maylis is doing.

…126 years later…

Adam was sitting at his desk, buried under books. It was a Saturday so no one was in for classes. He figured he’d use this time to understand what he was given. A laptop was open besides him as he read on and on through journal entries.

“Is this the last one?” He asked, reading the document over and over in order to try and find anything he had missed.

“YES.” The voice from the laptop said. “UNFORTUNIATLY I WAS UNABLE TO RECOVER ANY MORE. BUT I AM IN THE PROCESS OF FINDING MORE.”

He leaned back on his chair, placing the aged document down as he looked over at the photograph he was given as well. It was just as old as the document, featuring a picture of a black tablet with a drawing on one side and writing on the other. It wasn’t unusual people would ask for his services in translating old texts, but this one felt very different.

“How many people did you say survived that expedition?” Adam asked once again, getting out a magnifying glass as he looked over on the photo. An area of it was circled in a red marker. Inside the circle appeared to be a box of text that looked like Old Arabic. Why was this important?

“DOES IT MATTER?” The voice replied. A brief pause followed. “THE VILLAGERS WERE UNHARMED, BUT 10 MEMBERS OF THE EXPEDITION PERISHED AND THEIR BODIES WERE NEVER FOUND.”

“Did this Gervais fellow survive?” Adam asked.

“DO YOU ALWAYS ASK A LOT OF QUESTIONS TO YOUR CLIENTS?”

Adam held his mouth closed. He looked over the laptop. His camera was on but his client’s wasn’t. It was expected really, people did like to remain anonymous after all. But no one ever really used a voice scrambler.

“EVERYTHING HERE SHOULD BE OF SOME ASSISTANCE. THAT IS ALL YOU SHOULD KNOW.”

“...I understand. I just can’t fully wrap my head around why I need all of this just to find one person? Like, can’t I just-”

“THEIR BLOOD IS HARD TO GET. THE INFORMATION HERE SHOULD EXPLAIN THE BEST WAY TO EXTRACT IT. MY SUPERIOR SUGGESTED THAT YOU ARE THE BEST WAY TO GET WHAT WE DESIRE.”

“So, what, am I just supposed to read this and just find a way to use a syringe on them?? You’re not helping me out here.”

The voice on the laptop paused. It gave Adam enough time to look back at the photo, and then look over at the transcript of the box, which was besides the photo.

“IT’S MORE COMPLICATED. MY SUPERIOR SIMPLY WANTS TO KNOW HOW TO PROPERLY ‘DEAL’ WITH THE BLOOD. YOU PROVIDE ME THE INFORMATION AND THE BLOOD, AND YOU GET PAID.”

“What kind of being is this again? A demon? A super demon??? How am I supposed to do this without dying exactly?”

“THE BLOOD CAN RUN IN THE FAMILY. IT DOESN’T HAVE TO BE PURE. AS LONG AS IT’S CONNECTED WITH HER. SHE’S ONE OF THE ONLY ONES MY SUPERIOR HAS DETECTED ON EARTH.”

Adam sighed, knowing that whilst the job was going to be hard, at least the money would be worth it...right?

“I’ll see what I can do.” Checking the time, he realized he should probably end the call soon. He was feeling hungry, and would work better without this guy’s annoying voice app distracting him. However, he paused, seeing something on the pile of documents. He reached over and picked it up. It was a similar photo, but it was a better close up of the text itself. 2 words appeared underlined. He looked back at the transcript, his eyebrow rising up curiously.

“Say, one more question about this...job. Err, this thing you sent me. It appears there was a translation error of sorts. What does this mean exactly?” He held the picture up to the camera, awaiting a response. “Segleell appears to be right, it’s the other word I’m wondering about.”

Seconds passed.

“THERE WAS A MISTRANSLATION. SORRY ABOUT THAT. THE CORRECT TRANSLATION IS  KRISTA SEGLEELL.”

“THAT IS ALL.”

[adobe-outdesign]

The Big Grand DCTL Review/Critique

In my previous liveblog I said that I’d do an overall review/rating kind of thing to summarize my thoughts on the book, so here you go.

No Spoilers: So I’ll preface by saying the book isn’t bad. It has it’s... moments, but it’s pretty enjoyable overall. The FNAF books, for example, were fun to read but they were also a hot fucking mess. This is not a hot fucking mess  - it has its flaws but it’s pretty decent over all.

Spoilers below the cut:

The Canon-ness of the Book

I would like to say first off that I really don’t think this book is meant to be 100% canon - not to say it isn’t canon, but I don’t think it’s supposed to lie up with the games perfectly.  It was approved of by Kindlybeast, but they didn’t write it - Adrienne Kress did, they just helped to develop it.

To explain better: There are a lot of contradictions in this book with the main lore. Some are more minor and could potentially be waved away, but others are extremely glaring. Here’s a short list of the ones that come to mind:

In the book, the Ink Machine is secret and almost no one knows about it. In the game everyone knows and actively complains about the machine on a daily basis. In the Employee Handbook, there’s even a memo from Joey proudly introducing the Machine to everyone.

The book claims you put ink into the Machine and it changes it in some way (effectively running on ink). In the game, it seems to produce ink itself - Joey’s memo kind of indicates this, as does the blueprints, and Wally’s “who really needs that much ink anyway” makes less sense if they’re putting ink into the machine rather than it making the ink.

Plus on Thomas’ board he has a list of the gallons of ink produced each day, with the highest amount written with exclamation points - if it ran on ink this doesn't make sense, as to get 423 gallons of ink he would’ve had to have put 423 gallons of ink into the thing to begin with.

Sammy is wildly OOC in this, as he’s basically a feral asshole throughout the thing, while in canon his merch description calls him a “decent person” and he generally seems agreeable most of the time, except for when he’s annoyed. The book even claims he doesn’t refer to women by their last names, while Susie’s tape tells us the exact opposite (as according to her he referred to Allison as “Miss Allison Pendle”).

Bertrum is also OOC in this - in canon, he’s extremely egotistical and hates Joey for multiple reasons. In the book, they’re buddies (even hugging each other) and Bertrum seems more humble. He doesn’t even correct Joey on calling him “Bertie”, when he had an entire tape about how much he dislikes being called that in the game.

The timeline for this part is also very wrong - it’s treated as if they just met (which could explain why Bertrum doesn’t dislike him yet)... but Bendyland was in progress for years before the studio went to hell, and he even has his BATDR tape (wherein he’s actively disliking Joey) dated years before this book takes place.

This also makes it kind of impossible for him to be the octopus ride like in canon, because he literally just joined the studio when Joey started killing people (and keep in mind that designing and building a ride like that would have taken at least a year or two).

The ink is, for some reason, somewhat alive, able to move around on it’s own and possess people. This was never indicated in the game, ever.

Buddy wakes up as Boris. In the game, stuff like Grant’s tape indicate the ink creatures wake up and then transform (the files even have an unused transformation tape from Wally, who’s likely our Boris). You can kind of headcanon around this one if you try though.

At the end, Norman and a few background characters die. Joey says he didn’t use the machine on them because they had been infected by the ink for too long and didn’t have souls any more. This means that, according to the book, The Projectionist cannot exist (as Norman wouldn’t have had a soul to use and Joey outright says he couldn’t/didn’t use the machine on them in the first place).

Some of these are pretty minor, but some of them are extremely glaring and even casual gamers would pick up on this stuff.

Basically, we have two options: Either Kindlybeast doesn’t know their own story/characters too well, or they didn’t require this to line up perfectly with the games. Except the first option doesn’t make sense, because they’ve recently published stuff that contradicts what’s said in this book in favor of matching the actual lore from the games, proving they do know their own story.

For ampel, Bertrum’s BATDR tape, which lines up with the game’s lore and corrects the mistakes in DCTL, was released in March - long after this book was in production. The thing about the Ink Machine being secret was also disproved in the recently-released Handbook, which instead says they employees do know about the Machine, just like they do in the game. So Kindlybeast do know these things don’t line up with canon.

I think basically they approached Adrienne and were like “hey, can you write a prequel novel based on our game?” and while they offered her some guidance, she mostly just did her own thing based off of it (she even said it felt like working on fanfiction while writing it) and Kindlybeast liked it and published it. It’s an adaptation of the game and its lore, done by a new person - things tend to change in adaptations. I don’t think they needed or cared if it lined up like puzzle pieces, they just wanted a good story, which they got. It is canon... but it’s also not, if that makes sense.

So for our intents and purposes I’d consider this semi-canon - take what you can as canon (which is most of it, as the most major contradictions also tend to be the shortest scenes) and ignore the stuff that doesn’t line up with canon, unless otherwise stated by Kindlybeast or confirmed in BATDR.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Overall, I’d say this book is about 70% good and 30% bad. When it is good, it is really, really damn good - but when it’s bad it leaves an awful taste in your mouth that’s hard to get rid of.

The Good:

Like... the majority of the book, really

Buddy and Dot are wonderful characters with strong personalities. They’re super likeable, bring some much-needed heart into things, and have great chemistry.

While some of the aforementioned characters are majorly OOC, the ones that are in-character (Joey and Norman are good examples) are amazing - every scene with them is gold and the book really fleshes out their personalities.

Some of the new lore tidbits are great, and help explain some things in the game (like how Lost Ones are created) or are just interesting (like Sammy drinking the ink and the idea of the ink being able to infect people, which sounds like something that could have directly come from the games).

The book goes into way more depth about what being a cartoon/ink creature is like, which is some much-needed exposition and is extremely interesting.

It also has a ton of heart and good intentions. I was worried about it being overly dark, but if anything it has far more sweet moments than depressing ones.

The Bad:

The contradictions I mentioned above. Some of them are easy enough to ignore, but some are incredibly jarring and take you out of the story (and make it impossible to take it as 100% canon without breaking the space-time continuum).

I kind of mentioned it above, but the stuff with the ink being alive and possessing people comes right the fuck out of nowhere, has nothing to do with the game lore, is completely tonally dissonant to BATIM as a whole, and literally has nothing to do with the plot of the book, like, at all. It feels like a few pages from a Venom novel got mixed in with the early draft and no one remembered to remove them before publication.

The racist shit - it’s only like 1% of the book, but when that 1% of the book ruins a really good character it’s a pretty big deal.

A random NPC dies for no reason and this death has more relevance to the plot than Norman, who dies off-screen.

Also consider: They could’ve found Norman first, Buddy runs off to get back to his house, Norman follows and gets killed via neck snap. Fixes both problems at once.

There’s very little tension during the horror moments because we already know Buddy will die but not until the end and that Dot will live.

The Ink Demon acts more like an xenomorph than the Ink Demon in this - his behavior is bizarre and it feels pretty generically horror movie monster-ish compared to how he acts in the game.

The Ugly:

The B-plot with Buddy’s grandfather should have been cut. I know that sounds harsh, but really think about it: what effect did it have on the plot? It only crosses with the A-plot twice, and both times nothing came out of it. It gives Buddy a chance to learn how to draw and he goes through some character development, but I find it hard to believe that couldn’t have been accomplished by expanding the A-plot.

The main problem is that A) this is a BATIM novel so we want to see the studio, not Buddy’s relatives at home, and B) it makes it kind of slow towards the middle, wherein the stuff with the studio barely progresses while we keep cutting back to the B-plot.

I didn’t dislike reading it or anything, but it makes the plot flabby, and slicing it out would’ve given us much more time in the studio and the characters we like rather than trying to juggle two plots at once, effectively streamlining it and making for a more cohesive story.

The ending (like the last 5 chapters) is a hot mess in multiple and varying ways:

Sammy shows up and... gets knocked out by a projector. Which is funny, but it amounts to nothing plot-wise and makes Sammy’s whole appearance kind of pointless

Killing off a bunch of characters, one of which was a main character, off-screen

The weird Venom shit that has nothing to do with the plot of the books or the games and amounts to nothing

Bendy acting fairly OOC, especially with how he goes about killing people 

Buddy grabs the idiot ball bard by trying to drown a creature made of ink in ink, then standing right near the spot so he can be grabbed and killed

Not only does the “can’t use them because they had been infected for too long and no longer had souls” thing not only raises the aforementioned plot hole with the Projectionist, but it raises a plot hole in the book itself: When the other are exposed to the ink they die, but when Sammy drinks the stuff he turns into a Lost One. Which one is it?

Keep in mind that that was more bullet points in those 30-some pages than I have for the entire rest of the book

There are only like... two actual horror scenes in the book, and one of those is the climax. While it makes sense that too much couldn’t have happened before the ending, it feels like there could have been more than that.

Not all of the characters from the games appear. I know it’s a tall ask but it’s also easy to see how they could have been integrated, and some of them could have easily taken the roles that were given to NPCs instead.

I feel like this book would be more engaging as a non-fan, as the plot tends to progress like a mystery, with you learning a bit more about what’s happening with every scene in the studio... except as a fan you already know what’s happening, so there’s little to keep you engaged until you get into that nice juicy lore at the end.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s lots of little details that tell us new info and the character interactions are great, but a lot of the scenes are just like “Surprise, Sammy is crazy!” and it’s like thanks, we already knew that. The mystery is supposed to build and move the plot forward, but there’s effectively no mystery.

Overall Rating

I’m worried this review is going to come across as overly negative, as it’s much easier to critique what’s wrong than it is to say “this part was good!” like 200 times. But all of the stuff I was talking about that’s an issue? That’s like... 30% of the book, maybe less. Some of the most problematic scenes you could literally remove and loose nothing plot-wise (which is frustrating but you know). The bulk of the book is very good, the lore stuff when handled correctly is amazing and it even provides some extra answers that we didn’t have before, and the characters are great.

Overall, I’d give the book a solid... 7/10, I think. Not perfect, but pretty damn decent all around. If you’re a fan, I’d highly recommend picking up a copy if you haven't already.

[cardandpixel]

RocketBook Flip - a rare review and it’s not a game!

Before I go any further, I feel I must point out that I don’t have any financial connection to RocketBook whatsoever – this isn’t a piece that was requested or courted by RocketBook or affiliates and I’m not receiving any reward or sponsorship either in product or direct payment for this article. I just like the damn thing and love it when an innovative piece of tech (in this case quite low key) just works. Hi I’m Paul, and I have a bit of a problem with notebooks – A4 lined, sketch, reporters, Black & Reds (ohhhh the sheer number of B&Rs), goofy ones, serious work ones, battered ones, pristine ‘for best only’ ones – and they all fill at an alarming rate. I make notes on everything. Working as a sound engineer and designer, there’s always mix notes, soundscape plots, ideas, VO notes and scripts, SFX ideas etc etc. At home it’s a very different story – it’s much worse. Game notes; blog notes; hurriedly scribbled quiz questions spurred by watching another episode of Mental Floss’ 500 facts about cheese; RPG notes and story ideas; my own script writing; world building; sketches; other creative ideas; song/music notes and ideas; and that’s before we get to to-do lists; and the dreaded ‘things I must remember’. So my journal life is many, varied and plenty. The usual issue is… ‘what frakking journal did I put that amazing idea in????’, and that’s way before we get to the utter horror that is possibly losing a whole journal or forgetting to bring one home from work. I’m 53, I forget more than I recall, and journals help bring some semblance of order to a massively chaotic and fertile brain. What I’ve needed for a long time is some way of organising all this info or centralising it in some way. Sure I’ve looked at apps – I used Things, Evernote, Notes, and One Note for years, and they are really, really good, but they relied on either having a charged device exactly when I need it (yeah – me too) or net access, which for a new-ish theatre, is surprisingly a bit of an issue at work. And the most important part – I actually enjoy the physical act of handwriting long-hand. I still write actual physical letters to people, it’s adorable and a bit creepy in this age, but I call it charming and leave it at that. Handwriting, for me, allows me time to think and process in a way that typing just doesn’t. Handwriting is slower, I rarely cross anything out, and so I always have the whole of the thought. So what I’ve ideally wanted for years, was a reliable way of organising all my notes and storing them electronically so I have access even without the actual journal, with OCR so they’re editable, and still being a tactile handwritten experience. I’m naturally a sceptic (I actually subscribe to Fortean Times – yeah – I card carry!) and so online ads and particularly FaceAche ads are a field day for critical thinking triggers. I don’t think I’ve ever received from Wish, exactly what I ordered from Wish. And so when an ad from RocketBook constantly kept popping up on my timeline a few weeks ago, I was naturally “it’ll never work” But their website looked legit enough – they had a dedicated UK shop, it was relatively steep to buy in but not so wild that if it didn’t work I wouldn’t be crying too much about the money wasted, and at the end of the day it was a 10th the price of a ReMarkable 2 which is actually what I thought would solve my problem. I’m furloughed at the mo and though I could argue the case for £300+ notebook (test me, I could), I just couldn’t justify it now. And RocketBook had a good summer intro offer. I ordered on the Wednesday, and the impressively glitzy and graphic-design-playbook poly package was dropped on my doorstep just 2 days later by my cheery postie who yelled up the drive “Package for ya, looks very exciting!!!!” I like that our postal service is still invested in the hopes and dreams of their customers. It was exciting. All the instructions for getting started with my new Teal RocketBook A4 Flip were right there before you even open it. The main body houses the pad and a cleaning cloth, and a clever little side pocket houses the supplied Pilot Frixion pen.

RocketBooks come in several models, all configured slightly differently. I have the Flip which is a top spiral-bound softback pad with 21 double sided ‘pages’ giving 42 pages in total. The Flip has lined paper one side, and dot paper on the reverse (great for D&D maps, impromptu tables, mixer channel plots etc)

DELIVERY & FIRST IMPRESSIONS The pads are nicely made, with sturdy covers (available in some really nice colours too) and a solid, thick plastic ring binding. Initially, The RocketBook does feel a bit odd. Its ‘pages’ are actually a synthetic polyester blend and feel quite shiny to the touch. The sort of surface you just instantly feel is not going to be great for ink! Each page is edge-to-edge lined or dotted with a heavy black border. At the bottom is a prominent QR code used for scanning and some very feint icons. These 7 icons are the key to the ease of use of the RocketBook series. But more later.

THE APP

The pads work with a companion app, that is absolutely free and available for Apple & Android. In fact, RB even do downloadable printable pages so you can try the whole system absolutely free before you buy – I didn’t, I just bought one, y’know. The app allows you to set up your destination locations, your preferences and does the actual scanning. Just one quick note, I have the app on both my phone and iPad and had to set-up the app the same for both, there appears to be no way of swapping preference settings between devices, though I can see why this may be intentional.

Currently, the RocketBook allows you to choose from the following locations to send files to: GoogleDrive, box, EverNote, DropBox, slack, OneNote, iCloud, OneDrive as well as simply to an email (or multiple) addresses and iMessage. Impressively, these are not fixed either, so you could choose your 7 destinations to be 7 email addresses of team members. These 7 locations are the icons at the bottom of each page. To select a destination for your file, you just make a mark in that icon box (tick, circle, something unsavoury) and that page will be sent to whichever you select. This makes the system very flexible indeed as not every page is necessarily sent to every destination. You always decide every time you fill a page. Change your mind on a second revision? No problem, add or change icons at any time and re-upload.

There’s a really handy table on the inside front cover for you to note what icon sends what where. This is also wipeable, so can be changed anytime.

I have mine set by default to:

Rocket > main email address (either as PDF, JPG, OCR embedded or as separate txt file)

Diamond > GoogleDrive (you can specify exactly what folder too)

Apple > iMessage

Bell > OneNote

That actually still leaves me 3 spare: shamrock; star; and horseshoe.

The app took me maybe 20mins to set-up, that included decision time for destinations and setting up a few target folders. It also included a few ‘test firings’. I didn’t get everything right first time and a few things didn’t send, but crucially, a tiny bit of digging revealed very simple troubleshooting (including the aforementioned issue with no sync’ing of phone and iPad), and all in I was finding the files in all the right destinations within about 30 mins. The website, FAQs and community are immensely helpful with any other issues as well. I had a tiny issue with OneNote seeming to take ages to sync, but I think that’s an issue with my OneNote settings, everything else was almost instantaneous. You can also handily set the app to auto-send as soon as it scans, or allow for manual review.

CLEAN UP ON AISLE ROCKETPAD The main reason I wanted to look at the RocketBook was the issue of reusability. My journal shenanigans are by no means the biggest ecological disaster on the planet, but if we are to believe Tesco (who probably issue as many receipts at our local Tesco Express in a day as journals I’ve ever used), every little helps. If I could find an ecologically better solution, I should at least take a look. The RocketPads work by partnering with Pilot pens called Frixion. The really clever bit is RB’s paper technology and how it works with the Frixion ink. At present, the pads only work with the Frixion pens – except the RB Colour which works with Crayola’s dry-erase crayons. When you write on the ‘paper’ with a Frixion pen, it remains wet for a few seconds and then dries pretty quickly. There’s no smudging whatsoever in transit, which is pretty cool. From then on, it may as well be permanent, until you have transmitted your page and decide you don’t want the text anymore.  To wipe the page clean, you can dampen the supplied cloth and just wipe the surface clean, it’s weird but it works! But then damp cloth in your bag? So I use kitchen roll to dampen, then wipe dry with theirs. Others even have an adorably kitsch spray bottle in their kit. RB reckon if you are not going to use the pad for a few months, to clean the pages as the ink can get trickier to shift after a long time, but for day-to-day use, I’ve tried writing and wiping well over 20x and the page hasn’t become discoloured or tarnished at all. The only pad different in the range is the Wave which cleans by microwaving! Do NOT do this with any of the others, bad things will happen. The ink doesn’t take scrubbing or any time to come up, I clean my pages in about 10-15s. The page can feel a little tacky when it’s damp, but leave a minute or so and the page will be back to normal. RB do say that odd things can happen if the book is left near a heatsource or in a hot car, vis-à-vis, the ink can completely disappear horrifyingly enough. They say that putting the pen or the pad in the freezer for a little while will actually restore the ink, but I’ve not tried it yet so can’t confirm or deny how that goes. Handy for spies in hot countries though, so there’s another target market. If you are always going to send your pages to the same places, then don’t erase the marked icons, and the page is ready for new notes straight away, otherwise, scrub them too.

I CAN’T READ YOUR WRITING – ARE YOU A DOCTOR? Initially, the RB pads send their files as scans of the pages in high contrast monochrome (colour is available) when you snap the page in the app (which auto-frames for you and takes maybe 10s to capture). The formats are either as images or PDF. If that had been it, I would have been quite happy, but the RB pads have another trick up their sleeve. Firstly, they have a function called ‘Smart Titles’ which allows you to name your files directly from the page by writing a filename between double hashtags ie ## this is my scrawl 24/8/20 ## and the file will pop up in your destinations with the filename “this is my scrawl 24/08/20” – this is insanely handy – there’s no protocol except your own and the hashtags, and it makes your files super easy to search. You can even send groups of pages as a single PDF. But the notebooks go even further. They actually offer full searchable OCR which the app can be set to send embedded in the PDF or image, or more usefully, as a companion separate .txt file. Now, my handwriting isn’t the neatest, but it’s not bad so I was prepared for some editing to be necessary, but impressively again, the OCR was about 90-95% accurate. In a page of text it missed maybe 3 or 4 words and even those not badly. This is all considering their full OCR is still only in beta! It gets confused with diagrams on the page, but that’s to be expected.

Text Generated by OCR: ## Blog post och test Aug 2020 ## This is a little demonstration of the OCR capabilities of the Rocket Book pads and app. I've told the lovely people that the hit rate is about 90-95% so please dant let me down here flip pad. Hopefully the file name will also prove another point further up in the section and not make me look like some charlatan or snake-oil salesman.Hope you enjoyed this demonstrahen, now go away and leave me to write the next great novella.Bye!

HOW MUCH? On average, I pay anywhere from £4-8 for a decent A4 notebook/journal, so at £30-37 (dependent on model), the RocketBook pads are not a whim purchase. That said, I get through a lot of journals in a year, and given that I would expect to easily get 2-3 years out of a RocketBook pad, then I’ve saved money. Will it replace all my notebooks? No. You need to be thinking of carrying this round as a kit: pad, Frixion pen (at least 2), and cloth.  RB do a series of portfolio sleeves for the pads but it does push the price up a bit still, but for a rep, engineer or salesperson, this still makes sense. They’re less bulky than a normal A4 pad too. What I would say is Tesco and Sainsbury’s currently stock Frixion pens and at much better prices than buying them from RB directly, I just paid £3 for 3 pens on offer at Tesco compared to £10 from RB. You get one pen with the pad, but you’re going to want more soon, so stock up next time you’re shopping for truffle oil crisps. If you use whiteboards a lot, RB also have you covered. Instead of the pad, £16 will get you a 4 pack of ‘beacons’ – little self-adhesive triangles that effectively do the same thing as the QR code in the pad. You don’t have the icon options obviously, but if you’re looking to distribute quick meeting or group notes, this would be a boon. CONCLUSION Considering this was a fairly speculative purchase on my part, my early experiences with the RocketBook Flip have been really impressive. The flexibility, the ability to store every page in a different location if you really wanted to make it fantastic for organising my notes, which can save me hours of finding the right ^^$&^$&$ notebook in the first place, then scouring that for the one paragraph I was looking for etc etc. The searchable text facility, in-app history for re-sending etc and last but no way least, functional handwriting OCR, makes the RocketBook not only novel, but actually useable! Would I buy another? As a second notebook – yes. I look forward to seeing what the actual longevity of the product is once I come off furlough and start cramming my day bag with all my junk and a notepad again, but yes, I’d probably just have one at home, and one for work, but make the last 5 mins of each day, scanning and sending work notes so I have them with me wherever. Impressively, the RocketBook Flip just works and it works well. ‘Er Across The Table has already sold several folk at her work on the idea and she doesn’t even have one herself yet! I love it. It’s taking a little adjusting to, but it’s all good. The most important thing though is the writing experience, and I have to say, the combination of the Frixion pen/ink and the polymer technology of the Flip, again, just works. It’s smooth, doesn’t skip or smudge for me (I know some right to left users and left handers have reported some issues) and feels great to write on. If anything I have to slow down a bit as the contact is so smooth that your writing can get a bit ahead of you! RocketBook have produced a cracker of a product. It might not seem like much, but if practical working journals are your thing (ie not create and keep things) then I can highly recommend the RocketBook series.

[midnightmarginalia]

Ho fuck this is long

Ok so like. I made a fucking mistake. I wrote an essay for my creative non-fiction class. We had to write a Lyric Essay. simple enough. it's whatever. I transcribed parts of my journal. it was fun. HOWEVER, I made the mistake of telling the class that I did some heavy editing to get rid of some unconventional grammar I use cuz internet, ya know? this was 3 days ago. jump to today. I wrote a 7-page essay trying to briefly explain SOME of the grammar conventions that have evolved alongside the internet. I had to explain this to a group of 40+ year-olds. so NOw I present this to you, o Tumblr. for the love of god let people read this and add to it, I spent eternally too much time on it 

So "Internet English" or "New English" is a linguistic phenomenon that centers on conveying tone and different connotative meanings through informal writing. Linguist Gretchen McCulloch actually released a book on this called Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language.  Her book actually is really interesting (I highly recommend it) and covers some of what I'm going to be talking about today. In the first section, she compares the process of learning literacy to be similar to learning how to talk solely through exposure to formal writing like speeches, screenplays, audiobooks, etc. You miss all the nuances of informal speaking. Well, the same is true for written language. Before the Internet, informal writing was extremely hard to come by and even harder to study; even letters, postcards, secretive notes and the like were still written fairly formally because there were no mass text-based communication practices. Now, we have this vast intangible library of infinite knowledge and human interactions, making the necessity of informal writing more prominent. As such, internet users, especially people from my generation, have evolved a subset of written English to better express connotative meaning through the use, abuse, and misuse of capitalization, spacing, spelling, punctuation, incomplete sentences, and more. Let me show you a little of what I mean.

Capitalization

Capitalization is a common convention used to convey emphasis, although which type of emphasis that is changes based on how the capitalization is used.

Random Capitalization is meant to grab Attention and express that Something is Very Important or should be Stressed by Your Inner Voice when reading.

ALL CAPS IS MEANT TO SIGNIFY A VAST INCREASE IN VOLUME, THOUGH IT IS OFTEN INTERPRETED AS SHOUTING. THIS IS NOT ALWAYS THE CASE.

a crescENDO IS MEANT TO SPECIFY VOLUME AND/OR IMPORTance for one segment. It is often used to EXPRESS GROWING EXCITEMENT!

CaPiTaLiZiNG a RanDoM AsSoRTmEnT oF LetTerS ConVEyS SaRcAsM oR a MOcKinG TonE.

I cannot really articulate why but this, thIS, tHIS, and THIS are all different. This is called Varied Capitalization and can apply to any word, though I most often see and use it with articles.

not capitalizing anything in a sentence is an excellent way to express a monotone voice that seems very apathetic towards everything and everyone. "oh look. john and i went to the store. how exciting."

Spacing

Spacing Conventions are less common, and ultimately there is only one that I find noteworthy. Spacing out letters in a word like r e a l l y conveys that the word is significant. It takes up more space than really and thus needs to be stressed. It is also important to note that this convention is often coupled with full capitalization. There is a significant difference between "I am really hungry" and "I and r e a l l y hungry" and "I am R E A L L Y Hungry"

Spelling

Spelling, like Spacing, is less varied than some of these other conventions. The most common spelling convention you are likely to encounter is the Intentional Misspell. This is used to express one of two things; you can discern which by the context of the rest of the message. It can be used to display excitement. The misspell conveys a kind of excitement that interferes with dexterity, like how your hands shake after a jump scare: "gyus I just swa A Quiet Place  an d it s one f thr svsriest movis I've ever seen." The other emotion the Intentional Misspell can convey is much more subtle and complicated. It is the sense of false apathy. it is nit uncommun to putf a typo in everyr other werd or so to shwo yu don't realy give a fukc but yiu actually do. This is much harder to discern and your best bet on understanding this half of the convention is context clues.

Punctuation and Lack Thereof

Punctuation is, in my opinion, the best, most diverse option for conveying a specific kind of tone. There's a lot to cover here, so I will do my best to keep it brief.

A full stop is a short sentence with a period. It is meant to be read in a scolding tone. The usage of this is especially important in text message and chatroom settings because you can signify the end of a sentence by sending the message. A good rule of thumb for the tone is that the shorter the message, the more scolding the tone.

Putting. A. Period. Between. Words. Conveys. That. The. Matter. At. Hand. Must. Be. Taken. Seriously. This is simply the act of emphasizing each word with a full stop.

not having any punctuation or capitalization at all makes for a very fluid reading experience yes the sentences can get mixed up but those who read and write this way regularly can discern separate trains of thought if you've noticed the lack of capitalization you may recognize one of the earlier discussed conventions it is important to note however that the monotone voice of that convention disappears with the punctuation

Question marks now signify an upturn in the voicing of a statement rather than forcing something to be a question. now you may be asking yourself "why would they do this." The only answer I have for you is "it just seems right?" the upturn signifies a tentative statement while the flat delivery of the question signifies frustration or bafflement.

Punctuation Frequency is meant to signify the amount of severity accompanying the statement. This is exclusively used with question marks and exclamation marks. A common example is extending the simple “what?” to “what???????” Notice the difference? The same thing can be done with exclamation points. Note the increased excitement between “The baby was born today!” and “The babe was born today!!!!!!!!!!!” These, of course, can be amplified even further by incorporating some of the other conventions we’ve discussed previously.

Exclusive Punctuation is a convention most commonly found in messaging systems, but it is still important. “???” is an expression of pure confusion. If you were to receive this message, that whatever you sent the person prior has left them amazed, confused, flabbergasted, awe-struck, bewildered, and more. On the other hand “!!!” is an expression of pure excitement and glee. The best description I’ve seen for this is that it is a noise of happiness.

While there are dozens more grammatical conventions, these are the primary ones that a vast majority of people will use. It is time to move on.

Ellipses

Yes. This is punctuation. But it elicits its own category. Ellipses are great tools for signifying that there is more to this statement than meets the eye. However, there are now multiple types of ellipses that have different meanings.

Periodic Ellipses or Hard Ellipses are just that. Hard. Say I were to text someone “Hey can we talk after class...” The ellipsis generates a cold tone that has some worrying connotations. Something important to note here is that the length of the ellipsis can signify severity, though after a certain point it becomes superfluous and silly. The only friendly usage of a Hard Ellipsis is the Two-Dot Ellipsis. “Hey can we talk after class..” is far far less sinister than “Hey can we talk after class…”

Commatic Ellipses or Soft Ellipses are just that. Soft. Instead of being composed of periods, these ellipses are composed of commas and have a vastly different meaning. These are meant to convey either worrying or flirtatious tones. To go back to our previous example, “Hey can we talk after class,,,,,” is going to be read in a flirtatious manner. However, “Hey can we talk after class,” is going to be read worryingly.  The trick to discerning the different tones is the length of the ellipsis. Three commas or less conveys a worrisome tone, whereas five or more conveys a flirtatious tone.

Sentence Structure

Look! We’re almost done! There are many people who will play with sentence structure to convey meaning but the most widespread practice is the Incomplete Sentence. This one is actually fairly straightforward. Leaving a sentence incomplete expresses exhaustion (either emotional or physical) and adds a sense of trailing off in the speakers voice. I mean, have you ever started a sentence and then just

Noun/Verb Dichotomy

Ok last one. This one is also pretty straight forward, though still quite complex. The Noun/Verb Dichotomy is simple the act of using a noun in place of a verb to get your point across. For example, a more expressive (and in my opinion more accurate) way to say “I like to get a midnight snack at 2 in the morning” would be “I like to velociraptor around my house at 2 in the morning.” The second conjures such a specific image that it can more concisely convey the actions and emotions being done. The possibilities are endless. This opens up the door for someone to sentence how they want. Although many people will get a headache and want to clothesline into a wall. These all make sense to a native speaker of this kind of english because, while our brains do brain logically, english doesnt logic englishly so the brain brains by itself to logic the english!

So that is my mini-lesson on Internet English. please remember I haven't even begun to scratch the surface of what’s changed.

[writingbetty]

Planning A Novel

disclaimer: I know that there are a million ways of planning a novel, this is just some tips on how I planned ‘finding hallie’

FINDING INSPIRATION 

finding inspiration of a novel is often one of the hardest parts because you need to find the idea that sparks you novel. here’s some ways to help find that spark

consume a lot of art. whether it be other novels, actual art, films, tv shows, music, the more you watch and emerge yourself in the creative world the more likely it is that you will discover your own story

scroll through the internet. similarly I find scrolling through writing communities online whether that be on tumblr, youtube, blogs is so helpful in finding direct advice but also reading other people talk about their own stories will really spark ideas in your brain

people watch. no seriously. other people will always provide new inspiration for characters

write down all your ideas. if you write everything down you will be able to connect ideas and thoughts until you find the one amongst the madness

think about what you’re passionate about. if you know what you want to write about - whether this be some themes or genre or character or plot - you need to make sure this is something you are passionate about so that you will have the motivation to write the novel

think about your life and experiences. I don't necessarily mean write your own personal story exactly but take ideas, themes, feelings from your own life and make them more dramatic, connect them together, play around with them until you find your new novel

CREATING CHARACTERS

so once I've got a rough idea in my head and I've jotted done some rough plot points I start working on building my characters. I tend to write contemporary ya fiction so a strong character base is really important for me but other genres might require more world building first

form an image of your character in your mind. this doesn't have to be physical or precise just try and get to grips with who your character is - no details required - just imagine them

figure out names. this is own of my favourite aspects of planning a novel, honestly, my internet search makes me look like a pregnant mother to be the amount of baby name sites I go on. but baby name sites are so useful and the majority of them will have specific lists for different types of names or you can google lists for names from other eras / places to ensure that the name fits the character. you don't won't a grandma to be called something very modern like Brittany or to choose a name with strong heritage and origins but then not have that link to your actual character. also search for meanings of names, they don't have to always match up to your character but its best not to have a name that means the complete opposite to their personality - unless this is your desired effect

create a character chart. this is where your character comes to life. my favourite of these charts is this one because there’s so many questions (feel free to only answer some of them, sometimes not everything is relevant). these charts transform just a name and an idea into a fully fleshed out character and in doing so can help you with plotting their motivations and actions. it also helps to keep a record of this chart so that when you get around to writing you don't make continuity eras

create minor characters. once you have the main characters and there families you need to create friends and acquaintances - think teachers, colleagues, people who they see everyday. some of these will merely need names, some might also need a little personality descriptor. it isn't necessary to make an entire character chart but I would advise keep a track of their names and any traits that you decide upon which you can add to once you start writing to avoid continuity errors.

DETAILS

after character creation, it’s time to decide on the details of your novel and the context that the story occurs in. this can be relatively quick if you’re writing a novel set in the present day, in the real world, but with any new setting or different time period, this can become the most crucial step of planning your novel. 

setting is always a good place to start. for me this doesn't take long as I prefer to write stories set in a contemporary setting and hence the worldbuliding stage doesn't require a lot of time or imagination. but you still have to decide on main locations: school, home, towns. you can map things out or you can use places you already know 

all these locations need names. deciding on names for the main settings of your novel really makes the story come to life and feel real. for towns I like to look up some common prefixes and suffixes of real towns and then mix and match them to create something new. for schools, think about the names of schools you already know for instance my high school was merely named after the town so that reflects in my novel.

I wish I could talk about world building. but I know that I am not the best person to turn to for advice go check out blogs with a more fantasy based style for detailed tips on creating new worlds for your novel.

think about your characters. how old are they? what school year are they in? what would be going on in their lives at this point? don't write a story with 16 year old characters who don't face exams or start your story in the summer and keep them at school without any holiday. figure out the time that your story should be set and the context that that means your characters are living in. 

OUTLINING now you have any idea, a rough plot, characters and a setting, it’s time for the final stage of planning: outlining. this isn't something that everyone likes to do but I find it really useful for keeping my story on track and knowing where I'm heading. you can do this in as little or as much detail as you like, it’s up to you. 

start small. I like to blurt all my ideas out onto the page in a somewhat logical order before I have any of the details in there. this means I have the important points, the big twists and turns and the events that I know must happen.

connect the dots. now you have the big picture set, its time to get into the details of how you get from A - B. for me this always helps to make sure the story makes sense and flows and prevents me from starting to write and then struggling to figure out how to actually get my character to the point of the next moment.

gradually get bigger. I continue this process until I have a full storyline planned out by just adding more points in and then connecting the smaller dots together. this way I have the details of the plot sorted before I begin to write.

plan your chapters. I then try and organise this broad points into paragraphs and decide exactly when each one will appear and how much space it will take up in the narrative as well as how I will tell it. if you have multiple POVs this is a good time to assign the plot points to the characters. this doesn't have to be in mass detail, I like to leave a bit of ambiguity in my plan so that the writing process remains fun and exciting. 

TIME TO WRITE

now you’ve planned out your novel, it’s time to write. you don't have to always stay rigidly attached to your plan, let your characters control their own story if necessary but remember to update your plan after any changes to avoid coming across big issues later on. 

I hope this was useful, if you want me to do a similar post on my writing and editing processes please like and reblog, thank you

[ginnyzero]

Crafting a Believable Setting

World building. The setting, the place where the story takes place can be just as influential for the mood and tone of your story as the conflict, characters and plot. There are a lot of other blogs with advice and tips and lists and questions enough to make your eyes glaze over.  I'm covering the very tip of the iceberg here.

Becca and I have been doing a lot of world building lately for a project we're working on together. In fact, we're so excited about it, we're talking about creating a blog just give newsy/chatty updates about said project. And a huge part of that blog is going to be about the setting of our imaginary world. It means I've been thinking about it a little bit.

The first thing when you're discussing building a world is to decide your genre of story. The type of story is going to set the framework for how the world works (to a certain extent.) A historical romance, a fantasy, a dystopian speculative fiction and science fiction are all going to play with different rules. The genre is going to partially influence the technology of your story, the government, and the visual appearance.

For example, in the Lone Prospect, I decided that I wanted my story to be a science fantasy. The fantasy aspect of my story is the inclusion of werewolves. I use "science" to determine how werewolves change using the ever popular "it's a virus" trope. (Actually, the first werewolf movie was a science gone wrong movie and not a magical curse. The more you know.) And it's partially post apocalyptic, because it is set in the future after there was a huge war and the entire landscape of the world has changed. And it's has science fiction style technology, floating cars and transports that don't rely on propeller engine. There are 'tractor' beams and anti-gravity fields and computers that fit in your ear and project holographically from a pair of glasses in front of you. All of this was determined by the genre, science fantasy.

Whereas, in the Dawn Warrior, I chose to make it a pure fantasy story. The world is a medieval type world with dragons, fairies, and magic and lots of forests. So when it came to trying to define the setting, it wasn't nearly as complicated as the Lone Prospect's world.

The second thing I try to do is only define enough of the setting as the story needs. I love a complicated world as much as the next person. (See Star Wars and Lord of the Rings.) However, I'm writing a book. I'm not making a movie! (Though I'd love a movie of Heathens, that would be hysterical.) There comes a point where I know I'm writing soft science fantasy (or in the Dawn Warrior's case, low fantasy) and I don't have the room or the words for pages and pages of scenery porn. I don't need to know the complicated levels of government or the entire map or what everything looks like because it's not important to the story. I'm not going to be using that information right this minute. There comes a point where you have to stop poking at the world and write the book. If you know what the setting looks like for what you're working on at that moment, stop and get writing.

(Though for the Heathens universe, I'll admit I do know a lot about the setting, because I'm using a teaspoon to empty out a lake in the amount of stories I want to write for it. Let us hope I don't burn out on werewolves making explosions.)

In some cases, the next thing I try to do is define the visual aesthetic of the story. In the Lone Prospect, I knew that I wanted Jasper to bring back memories of the old wild west/small town turn of the 20th century America. Brick buildings that aren't more than four stories high, covered sidewalks, lots of trees and statues in the town square. Little mom and pop shops and restaurants, chain boutiques hidden with hokey wooden signs. I wanted it to feel familiar to readers now and to feel safe. That Jasper is a haven from the craziness of the post apocalyptic world. It's even set in a valley surrounded by 'hills.' But because of this, Jasper is also as much of a cage and prison as it is a place to be safe. It's easy to get comfortable there and ignore the troubles of the outside world. It's not easy to escape and can be put under siege.

Jasper also contrasts with Rapid City, a place with steel and glass skyscrapers and the City, which as even larger buildings and multiple levels of traffic. I wanted to merge the idea of the Core Words on Firefly, the cities in Dredd and to some extent Coruscant from Star Wars.

The visual look of your world and the way you describe it, whether it's clean or dingy or rusted or gleaming can give the reader in a few short words how they should feel about this place you're dropping them into. Should they feel comfortable or edgy or uneasy.

I am not afraid of using real places to base my settings on. We've got a huge world and there are so many beautiful places in it. By using real places with photographs and visits for reference, you can make the setting of your world feel that more tangible and realistic to your reader. And if your setting is in modern or contemporary times, or even to some extent the past, you can use details of the city and it's history, reputation, interesting facts to add spice to your story.

I chose South Dakota for the setting of the Lone Prospect because I've been there. I've seen lightning walking over the golden plains that are dotted with herds of buffalo. I've been to the badlands. I've seen the Black Hills. I have pictures of it. I have emotional memories associated with the area. I know a bit of the history. I try to use that to make my story better.

Then I try to define my tech. Is it science fiction and may I have lasers and tractor beams and guns that set to stun? Or is it fantasy and I have cross bows and ballista and swords for weapons. If it's a historical setting, what era is it in? When did they get gas in that area or electric? What types of things would they use to wash clothes or bake bread? Did they ride horses or where there the bicycles and automobiles? These will add more interesting details to your story. And depending on how 'hard' your science fiction is, (are you Star Wars/Star Trek or are you Asimov?) will determine how much you have to go into how your faster than light or warp drive engine works. (There is a reason I write soft science fiction.)

When I wrote the Lone Prospect, I borrowed from everywhere I could think of to create my world. Taking things that I hoped were coming in the near future and mixing it with things I'd seen in movies and read in other books to try and make a level of technology that felt simultaneously futuristic and realistic to my post apocalyptic setting. My biggest sticking point with making my technology was say, if I got a television show or a movie, could it be done on a lower budget scale.

With the Dawn Warrior on the other hand, it was a pure low fantasy novel without any major battle scenes that would require me to trot out the big medieval weapons. And since Roxana buys her bread already baked, I didn't really need to think too much about technology. (Though I know a bit about medieval technology.)

Lastly, at least for this world building post, I tend to think about the government. Granted, I don't write dystopian stories. If you write dystopian fiction then the government  and how it affects the culture will probably be the first thing you think about, see the Hunger Games, Divergent, or the Handmaiden's Tale for examples. However, I don't write that type of fiction and I need to know what type of government I have in a general sense to know how it's going to affect my characters. Is it a monarchy? Is there a king? Is it a republic or a democracy? Will there be voting? Who can vote? What types of laws are there that my characters may or may not be breaking?

Another instance where knowing about the government is handy is if the story revolves around the government and politics itself. (This is where the prequels of Star Wars went wrong. The story was about politics and the fall of the Republic and we were off watching pod races.) Who are the movers and shakers in the system? What are the political alliances and how are they shown? There are a lot of both political power maneuvering and personal stories and conflicts that can be written if the story revolves around the people in power and the government. Honor Harrington is a good example of how a story can be written around politics.

This is a good general start to building a setting for your story. After this it is thinking about culture and putting in characters. (Culture is probably a post to itself!) I think the most important thing to remember is to only flesh out as much of the setting as you need to write the book. The book isn't going to write itself!

[starchild--27]

85 questions

I was tagged by @kafkascupcake .  This will be fun, so thanks ^^

rules: answer 85 statements about yourself, then tag 20 people

last

1. drink – water with lemon flavour

2. phone call - my hair dresser (if i ignore the fact that i accidently called my dad a few momnets ago when i wanted to look up my last phone call - ofc this had to happen xD)

3. text message - i told some kid from my spanish class tht we didn’t have spanish class last week

4. song you listened to – Californiacation by Red Hot Chili Peppers

5. time you cried - three days ago i think, but i waas at the verge of crying yesterday evening  

6. dated someone twice? – nope. i never dated anyone 

7. kissed someone and regretted it – nope

8. been cheated on – no

9. lost someone special – i’m so grateful to say that i never lost anyone in my life and i am so afraid of the day this will happen to me

10. been depressed - kind of. i have my depressed moments but everyone has at some point

11. gotten drunk and thrown up – never, i’m not drinking much 

fave colours

12. navy blue

13. black

14. metallic shades of basically every colour

in the last year have you…

15. made new friends – i’m always careful with the word friend when it comes to my real life, but let’s say i got to know some people better that have been around for a longer time but i never really interacted with. on the internet things are a little different, so i can say i’ve interacted with a lot of people here and i can’t help but treat them as friends 

16. fallen out of love – not in the last year

17. laughed until you cried - multiple times xD

18. found out someone was talking about you – i really don’t know and i hate that i can’t say this wouldn’t bother me because i really want to know what people think of me - just to be able to understand why they treat me how they do. 

19. met someone who changed you - oh, i really don’t know. i think i didn’t change that much in the last 365 days

20. found out who your friends are – it was a little more than a year ago, but yes i did.

21. kissed someone on your Facebook friends list – i don’t even have facebook

general

22. how many of your facebook friends do you know irl – since i don’t have facebook i’ll do this for instagram and there it is probably a minority since i follow countless art pages, celebrities, fanpages, animal pages, political pages, people i don’t know in real life, …

23. do you have any pets - yes - a black cat with the name Black Pearl, which we gave him before i even knew about the song by EXO ^^ his name referred to the ship from Pirates of the Carribbean first xD

24. do you want to change your name – i did in the past, because my name is very rare where i live. but i started to like it after some time. the great thing is that it’s meaning differs since no one really knows it’s true origin. 

25. what did you do for your last birthday - i invited my two best friends but one happened to be sick at that day (ㅠㅠㅠㅠㅠㅠ) so we were only two but it was great anyway. since i was born the day after walpurgis night we went to the bonfire and spent some time there

26. what time did you wake up today – 7 am but i slept in again and got at 11:20 

27. what were you doing at midnight last night – reading or sleeping, i don’t know for sure

28. what is something you can’t wait for – vacation with my family and the summer holidays in general (school was … much in the last weeks.)

30. what are you listening to right now – the sound of me slamming my fingers on my laptop’s keyboard while writing this lol

31. have you ever talked to a person named tom – i did, in fact to more than one

32. something that gets on your nerves – that i have to go to school for one more year (i hate this place wholeheartedly) but i don’t know what to do with my life after graduating 

33. most visited website - tumblr and youtube

34. hair color – my natural hair colour is brown but i dye it ginger red and i love it

35. long or short hair – pretty long actually, but i have curls so it’s pretty hard to notice how long 

36. do you have a crush on someone -  if we ignore my celebrity crushes then … i don’t know…probably no. i’m not sure about this one boy though but…yeah, i don’t really know him that well and i probably only like the idea i have of how he could be. (this is btw so typical for me xD)

37. what do you like about yourself – don’t get me wrong, i know it sounds tragical and sad, but i don’t have something i like 100% about myself. i am used to it though because i’ve been this way since forever, having high standards for me (and for others probably too, which is very unfair from me) but the closest to 100% is my talent for music.     

38. want any piercings? – only at my ears

39. blood type – A positive

40. nicknames – the most common nickname for my name is Selmi but hardly anyone except for my mom and my sister calls me like that anymore. other than that i have the feeling my friends and i don’t have nicknames but more like pet names for each other. like, i was called “Flauschebausch” (in english “Fluffpuff”) not that long ago (it referred to my hair). i would also count “squirrel”, “the stars” and all that stuff as nicknames but we don’t really call each other often like that in person xD     

41. relationship status - single 

42. zodiac - Taurus (but most of the stuff people say about tauruses are not 100% true for me)

43. pronouns - she/her

44. fave tv shows – lately i finished Game Of Thrones and i liked it so damn much, especially the ending (i really don’t get why it was so hated, but i’ll not explain further - i don’t want to write an essay here xD). i also enjoy watching Gilmore Girls from time to time, but hardly anyone in my generation knows it. and since i read it at @kafkascupcake ‘s post for this tag i just remembered how much i liked Memories of the Alhambra too (gosh, how i waited for every episode to air … i still remember this impatient feeling so well)

45. tattoos – i’m not allowed to have any yet but i’m thinking about getting smaller ones later since i think tattoos are pretty. buuuuut i’m also afraid because i can’t really imagine the pain

46. right or left handed - right

47. ever had surgery – yeah. unspectecular story tho.

48. piercings - only earrings but one of my friends and i plan on getting helix piercings soon (originally this was planned to be done before last christmas but we never found time)

49. sport – no no no no no. i hate it. i always did. i did some horse riding in my childhood but that’s it. i’m just not able to coordinate my body so a fail at basically every kind of sport. and i am easily frustrated when i fail at something so i never really tried to ace sports.  

50. vacation – my last vacation was when i visited Berlin with my two best friends and m next vacation will be in Denmark with my family

51. trainers – Converse Chucks, always and forever

more general

52. eating – i used to be a very picky eater but it gets better with every year. lately i really like spicy food. but i also have a terrible sweet tooth. i am surprised how i am still like super slim …

53. drinking – a trait i inherited from my dad: i love milk. but i also like juices, tea, coffee (with milk ofc xD) and plain water too

54. i’m about to watch – Avengers Endgame. like today. in 2 hrs.

55. waiting for – my train ride to the next bigger city for seeing endgame. and for me getting an idea what i want to do with my life

56. want – to travel and to make music. my two passions

57. get married – i don’t think it’s necessary for a happy relationship but it depends on the person. to be honest, i like the thought of getting married but i totally understand if someone doesn’t like it.

58. career – the biggest question mark in my life rn

which is better

59. hugs or kisses - hugs. i can’t even explain why. but hugs.

60. lips or eyes - i thinj i look at the eyes first. but i am damned if a person has beautiful lips too

61. shorter or taller – taller

62. older or younger - not important

63. nice arms or stomach – yeah ofc stomachs are great. but let’s be real here: i’m a swooning bitch for nice arms.

64. hookup or relationship – relationship. i am a hopeless romantic

65. troublemaker or hesitant - i am an overthinker, which makes me the epitome of hesitant.

have you ever

66. kissed a stranger – never kissed anyone lol

67. drank hard liquor – only mixed with juice

68. lost glasses - yeah. wasn’t cool.bc without glasses i am literally blind

69. turned someone down - kind of.

70. sex on first date - no

71. broken someone’s heart – i hope not.

72. had your heart broken – yip. my first heavy crush was not that happy. but i am over it since the guy was and still is a jerk and i don’t even know why i fell for him anymore

73. been arrested - no

74. cried when someone died - yes

75. fallen for a friend – never

do you believe in

76. yourself – depends on the situation.

77. miracles - there are moments in which i do

78. love at first sight - yes

79. santa claus -  no

80. kiss on a first date – yeah.. i think itmight happen xD

81. angels - who knows? it would be great though.

other

82. best friend’s name - deer of the sun @swiftfeatherscorner and cat of the moon @fille-de-janvier xD i don’t know if they’d like to have their real names published here but here you ahve their tumblrs

83. eye color - i looked it up someday and it’s called glasz - a strange mix between green, blue and grey with some golden dots and marks. depends on the lightning which colour is stronger.

84. fave movie – impossible to tell.

85. fave actor – also impossible to tell. there are so many good actors in this world

i’m not even sure if 20 people will read this so i’ll just tag everyone who has time to answer 85 questions xD

[suzanneshannon]

A Community-Driven Site with Eleventy: Building the Site

In the last article, we learned what goes into planning for a community-driven site. We saw just how many considerations are needed to start accepting user submissions, using what I learned from my experience building Style Stage as an example.

Now that we’ve covered planning, let’s get to some code! Together, we’re going to develop an Eleventy setup that you can use as a starting point for your own community (or personal) site.

Article Series:

Preparing for Contributions

Building the Site (You are here!)

This article will cover:

How to initialize Eleventy and create useful develop and build scripts

Recommended setup customizations

How to define custom data and combine multiple data sources

Creating layouts with Nunjucks and Eleventy layout chaining

Deploying to Netlify

The vision

Let’s assume we want to let folks submit their dogs and cats and pit them against one another in cuteness contests.

Live demo

We’re not going to get into user voting in this article. That would be so cool (and totally possible with serverless functions) but our focus is on the pet submissions themselves. In other words, users can submit profile details for their cats and dogs. We’ll use those submissions to create a weekly battle that puts a random cat up against a random dog on the home page to duke it out over which is the most purrrfect (or woof-tastic, if you prefer).

Let’s spin up Eleventy

We’ll start by initializing a new project by running npm init on any directory you’d like, then installing Eleventy into it with:

npm install @11ty/eleventy

While it’s totally optional, I like to open up the package-json file that’s added to the directory and replace the scripts section with this:

"scripts": {   "develop": "eleventy --serve",   "build": "eleventy" },

This allows us to start developing Eleventy in a development environment (npm run develop) that includes Browsersync hot-reloading for local development. It also adds a command that compiles and builds our work (npm run build) for deployment on a production server.

If you’re thinking, “npm what?” what we’re doing is calling on Node (which is something Eleventy requires). The commands noted here are intended to be run in your preferred terminal, which may be an additional program or built-in to your code editor, like it is in VS Code.

We’ll need one more npm package, fast-glob, that will come in handy a little later for combining data. We may as well install it now:

npm install --save-dev fast-glob.

Let’s configure our directory

Eleventy allows customizing the input directory (where we work) and output directory (where our built work goes) to provide a little extra organization.

To configure this, we’ll create the eleventy.js file at the root of the project directory. Then we’ll tell Eleventy where we want our input and output directories to go. In this case, we’re going to use a src directory for the input and a public directory for the output.

module.exports = function (eleventyConfig) {   return      dir: {       input: "src",       output: "public"     },   }; };

Next, we’ll create a directory called pets where we’ll store the pets data we get from user submissions. We can even break that directory down a little further to reduce merge conflicts and clearly distinguish cat data from dog data with cat and dog subdirectories:

pets/   cats/   dogs/

What’s the data going to look like? Users will send in a JSON file that follows this schema, where each property is a data point about the pet:

{   "name": "",   "petColor": "",   "favoriteFood": "",   "favoriteToy": "",   "photoURL": "",   "ownerName": "",   "ownerTwitter": "" }

To make the submission process crystal clear for users, we can create a CONTRIBUTING.md file at the root of the project and write out the guidelines for submissions. GitHub takes the content in this file and uses displays it in the repo. This way, we can provide guidance on this schema such as a note that favoriteFood, favoriteToy, and ownerTwitte are optional fields.

A README.md file would be just as fine if you’d prefer to go that route. It’s just nice that there’s a standard file that’s meant specifically for contributions.

Notice photoURL is one of those properties. We could’ve made this a file but, for the sake of security and hosting costs, we’re going to ask for a URL instead. You may decide that you are willing to take on actual files, and that’s totally cool.

Let’s work with data

Next, we need to create a combined array of data out of the individual cat files and dog files. This will allow us to loop over them to create site pages and pick random cat and dog submissions for the weekly battles.

Eleventy allows node module.exports within the _data directory. That means we can create a function that finds all cat files and another that finds all dog files and then creates arrays out of each set. It’s like taking each cat file and merging them together to create one data set in a single JavaScript file, then doing the same with dogs.

The filename used in _data becomes the variable that holds that dataset, so we’ll add files for cats and dogs in there:

_data/   cats.js   dogs.js

The functions in each file will be nearly identical — we’re merely swapping instances of “cat” for “dog” between the two. Here’s the function for cats: 

const fastglob = require("fast-glob"); const fs = require("fs"); 
 module.exports = async () => {   // Create a "glob" of all cat json files   const catFiles = await fastglob("./src/pets/cats/*.json", {     caseSensitiveMatch: false,   }); 
   // Loop through those files and add their content to our `cats` Set   let cats = new Set();   for (let cat of catFiles) {     const catData = JSON.parse(fs.readFileSync(cat));     cats.add(catData);   } 
   // Return the cats Set of objects within an array   return [...cats]; };

Does this look scary? Never fear! I do not routinely write node either, and it’s not a required step for less complex Eleventy sites. If we had instead chosen to have contributors add to an ever growing single JSON file with _data, then this combination step wouldn’t be necessary in the first place. Again, the main reason for this step is to reduce merge conflicts by allowing for individual contributor files. It’s also the reason we added fast-glob to the mix.

Let’s output the data

This is a good time to start plugging data into the templates for our UI. In fact, go ahead and drop a few JSON files into the pets/cats and pets/dogs directories that include data for the properties so we have something to work with right out of the gate and test things.

We can go ahead and add our first Eleventy page by adding a index.njk file in the src directory. This will become the home page, and is a Nunjucks template file format.

Nunjucks is one option of many for creating templates with Eleventy. See the docs for a full list of templating options.

Let’s start by looping over our data and outputting an unordered list both for cats and dogs:

<ul>   <!-- Loop through cat data -->   </ul> 
 <ul>   <!-- Loop through dog data -->   </ul>

As a reminder, the reference to cats and dogs matches the filename in _data. Within the loop we can access the JSON keys using dot notation, as seen for cat.name, which is output as a Nunjucks template variable using double curly braces (e.g. ).

Let’s create pet profile pages

Besides lists of cats and dogs on the home page (index.njk), we also want to create individual profile pages for each pet. The loop indicated a hint at the structure we’ll use for those, which will be [pet type]/[name-slug].

The recommended way to create pages from data is via the Eleventy concept of pagination which allows chunking out data.

We’re going to create the files responsible for the pagination at the root of the src directory, but you could nest them in a custom directory, as long as it lives within src and can still be discovered by Eleventy.

src/   cats.njk   dogs.njk

Then we’ll add our pagination information as front matter, shown for cats:

--- pagination:   data: cats   alias: cat   size: 1 permalink: "/cats//" ---

The data value is the filename from _data. The alias value is optional, but is used to reference one item from the paginated array. size: 1 indicates that we’re creating one page per item of data.

Finally, in order to successfully create the page output, we need to also indicate the desired permalink structure. That’s where the alias value above comes into play, which accesses the name key from the dataset. Then we are using a built-in filter called slug that transforms a string value into a URL-friendly string (lowercasing and converting spaces to dashes, etc).

Let’s review what we have so far

Now is the time to fire up Eleventy with npm run develop. That will start the local server and show you a URL in the terminal you can use to view the project. It will show build errors in the terminal if there are any.

As long as all was successful, Eleventy will create a public directory, which should contain:

public/   cats/     cat1-name/index.html     cat2-name/index.html   dogs/     dog1-name/index.html     dog2-name/index.html   index.html

And in the browser, the index page should display one linked list of cat names and another one of linked dog names.

Let’s add data to pet profile pages

Each of the generated pages for cats and dogs is currently blank. We have data we can use to fill them in, so let’s put it to work.

Eleventy expects an _includes directory that contains layout files (“templates”) or template partials that are included in layouts.

We’ll create two layouts:

src/   _includes/     base.njk     pets.njk

The contents of base.njk will be an HTML boilerplate. The <body> element in it will include a special template tag, , where content passed into the template will render, with safe meaning it can render any HTML that is passed in versus encoding it.

Then, we can assign the homepage, index.md, to use the base.njk layout by adding the following as front matter. This should be the first thing in index.md, including the dashes:

--- layout: base.njk ---

If you check the compiled HTML in the public directory, you’ll see the output of the cat and dog loops we created are now within the <body> of the base.njk layout.

Next, we’ll add the same front matter to pets.njk to define that it will also use the base.njk layout to leverage the Eleventy concept of layout chaining. This way, the content we place in pets.njk will be wrapped by the HTML boilerplate in base.njk so we don’t have to write out that HTML each and every time.

In order to use the single pets.njk template to render both cat and dog profile data, we’ll use one of the newest Eleventy features called computed data. This will allow us to assign values from the cats and dogs data to the same template variables, as opposed to using if statements or two separate templates (one for cats and one for dogs). The benefit is, once again, to avoid redundancy.

Here’s the update needed in cats.njk, with the same update needed in dogs.njk (substituting cat with dog):

eleventyComputed:   title: ""   petColor: ""   favoriteFood: ""   favoriteToy: ""   photoURL: ""   ownerName: ""   ownerTwitter: ""

Notice that eleventyComputed defines this front matter array key and then uses the alias for accessing values in the cats dataset. Now, for example, we can just use to access a cat’s name and a dog’s name since the template variable is now the same.

We can start by dropping the following code into pets.njk to successfully load cat or dog profile data, depending on the page being viewed:

<img src="" /> <ul>   <li><strong>Name</strong>: </li>   <li><strong>Color</strong>: </li>   <li><strong>Favorite Food</strong>: </li>   <li><strong>Favorite Toy</strong>: </li>   <li><strong>Owner</strong>: </li> </ul>

The last thing we need to tie this all together is to add layout: pets.njk to the front matter in both cats.njk and dogs.njk.

With Eleventy running, you can now visit an individual pet page and see their profile:

Fancy Feast for a fancy cat. 😻

We’re not going into styling in this article, but you can head over to the sample project repo to see how CSS is included.

Let’s deploy this to production!

The site is now in a functional state and can be deployed to a hosting environment! 

As recommended earlier, Netlify is an ideal choice, particularly for a community-driven site, since it can trigger a deployment each time a submission is merged and provide a preview of the submission before sending it for review.

If you choose Netlify, you will want to push your site to a GitHub repo which you can select during the process of adding a site to your Netlify account. We’ll tell Netlify to serve from the public directory and run npm run build when new changes are merged into the main branch.

The sample site includes a netlify.toml file which has the build details and is automatically detected by Netlify in the repo, removing the need to define the details in the new site flow.

Once the initial site is added, visit Settings → Build → Deploy in Netlify. Under Deploy contexts, select “Edit” and update the selection for “Deploy Previews” to “Any pull request against your production branch / branch deploy branches.” Now, for any pull request, a preview URL will be generated with the link being made available directly in the pull request review screen.

Let’s start accepting submissions!

Before we pass Go and collect $100, it’s a good idea to revisit the first post and make sure we’re prepared to start taking user submissions. For example, we ought to add community health files to the project if they haven’t already been added. Perhaps the most important thing is to make sure a branch protection rule is in place for the main branch. This means that your approval is required prior to a pull request being merged.

Contributors will need to have a GitHub account. While this may seem like a barrier, it removes some of the anonymity. Depending on the sensitivity of the content, or the target audience, this can actually help vet (get it?) contributors.

Here’s the submission process:

Fork the website repository.

Clone the fork to a local machine or use the GitHub web interface for the remaining steps.

Create a unique .json file within src/pets/cats or src/pets/dogs that contains required data.

Commit the changes if they’re made on a clone, or save the file if it was edited in the web interface.

Open a pull request back to the main repository.

(Optional) Review the Netlify deploy preview to verify information appears as expected.

Merge the changes.

Netlify deploys the new pet to the live site.

A FAQ section is a great place to inform contributors how to create pull request. You can check out an example on Style Stage.

Let’s wrap this up…

What we have is fully functional site that accepts user contributions as submissions to the project repo. It even auto-deploys those contributions for us when they’re merged!

There are many more things we can do with a community-driven site built with Eleventy. For example:

Markdown files can be used for the content of an email newsletter sent with Buttondown. Eleventy allows mixing Markdown with Nunjucks or Liquid. So, for example, you can add a Nunjucks for loop to output the latest five pets as links that output in Markdown syntax and get picked up by Buttondown.

Auto-generated social media preview images can be made for social network link previews.

A commenting system can be added to the mix.

Netlify CMS Open Authoring can be used to let folks make submissions with an interface. Check out Chris’ great rundown of how it works.

My Meow vs. BowWow example is available for you to fork on GitHub. You can also view the live preview and, yes, you really can submit your pet to this silly site. 🙂

Best of luck creating a healthy and thriving community!

Article Series:

Preparing for Contributions

Building the Site (You are here!)

The post A Community-Driven Site with Eleventy: Building the Site appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

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A Community-Driven Site with Eleventy: Building the Site published first on https://deskbysnafu.tumblr.com/

[aion-rsa]

Best DC Comics to Binge Read on DC Universe

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With an enormous swath of the world involved in varying degrees of social distancing, many of us suddenly find ourselves with a lot of time on our hands. Never fear! There are more options for streaming comics than ever before, and that means we have access to more of comics history, more hidden gems and epochal runs than ever before. But the variety of options to read can be daunting. That’s why we’ve put together a recommendation list of some of our favorite comics binge reads to help you through quarantine.

DC Universe rolled out in 2017 as the first full-service entertainment streaming platform – old shows, old movies, new shows, new movies, and a huge library of comics. And while a lot of the excitement over the platform has been about that original or new shows (justifiably! Harley Quinn and Doom Patrol are amazing!), it also gave us access to a staggering catalog of old comic books. 

If you’re coming to a comic streaming service like DC Universe, chances are you don’t need us to recommend the hits. Nobody who watches the CW shows needs to be told that Crisis on Infinite Earths is worth reading. Likewise Batman: Year One, or All-Star Superman or The Great Darkness Saga. We’re going to skip over some of the obvious ones and point you towards hidden gems, stories you might have otherwise skipped over but for a trusted recommendation. We are also looking for monster runs that will keep you occupied – you can read six issues in one sitting. Some of these might take you an entire round of social distancing to finish. 

A quick note about the reading guides: Many of them may have their own separate entry under DC Universe’s reading lists – those are helpful, but these are definitive. We will occasionally link to non-Den sources, but if you like what you hear, you should be encouraged to find your own best path. A lot of these stories wend through crossovers that are of varying degrees of relevance to the main books. It’s your call if you want to read the whole thing.

The Death and Return of Superman

The Death of Superman Reading Order

I know I said we wouldn’t talk about obvious must reads, but I feel like The Death of Superman (and it’s aftermath, World Without a Superman, Reign of the Supermen, and Kal-El’s inevitable return) should be on here. They can’t really be recommended enough. 

“The ‘90s” are often maligned as a wave of gimmicks and stunts, and killing the most important comic character in the history of superhero books definitely qualifies as a stunt. But what made The Death of Superman stand out (and several other ‘90s DC events, to be honest) is that it was actually very good. This era of Superman comics is actually a hidden gem – Clark is a joy, and all the weirdness and fun of the Superman universe is in full swing, like Cadmus, Mxyzptlk, and a truly bizarre (but surprisingly good) Justice League roster.

Read more

Movies

Men of Steel: 11 Actors Who Have Played Superman

By Mike Cecchini

TV

How Brandon Routh Returned as Superman for Crisis on Infinite Earths

By Mike Cecchini

The four writers – Jerry Ordway, Louise Simonson, Roger Stern, and Dan Jurgens – move pretty seamlessly between them on the main Superman books, and the art teams (Jon Bogdanove, Jurgens, Butch Guice, and Tom Grummett especially in the Death story) do amazing jobs of telling the story. Don’t be fooled by how gimmicky this feels, The Death and Return of Superman actually lives up to the hype.

Batman & Robin

Batman & Robin #1-17, Annual #1, Batman #17, Batman & Robin #18-32, Robin Rises: Omega, Batman & Robin #33-37, Robin Rises: Alpha #1, Batman & Robin #38-40, Annual #3

The Pete Tomasi/Patrick Gleason run on Batman and Robin never got the love it should have, because it ran parallel to two of the most high-profile Bat-comics of all time in Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo’s Batman, and the back half of Grant Morrison’s story in Batman Incorporated. But in ten years, people are going to be looking back at this as a classic. 

Read more

Comics

True Detective Creator Outlines What His Version of Batman Would Be Like

By John Saavedra

Movies

The Batman: Release Date, Cast, Villains, and More Details About the DCEU Movie

By Rosie Fletcher and 2 others

This is a controversial claim, but if you read this run, I think it holds up: Pete Tomasi writes the best Damian Wayne. He’s the right mix of arrogant little shit and not-actually-as-competent-as-Batman, and he actually learns lessons in this run that feel earned. He also dies during these stories, and Tomasi gets the chance to explore Bruce’s way of grieving, as well as drop in a series of guest stars that includes the best Two Face story I’ve ever read. Gleason and inker Mick Gray are utterly incredible, and do as much with one sixth-page panels with heavy inks and silhouettes as many art teams do with full page splashes. It’s a great, underrated run that I think you’ll love.

Wonder Woman

Wonder Woman (2006) #14-44, one story in #600

Oh my goodness Gail Simone’s Wonder Woman is exactly, precisely what I want out of a Wonder Woman comic. To me, Diana’s comics are an exception in that they should be as focused on how to avoid fighting as they are on the action. This run does that perfectly: she isn’t a belligerent meathead looking to stab everything in sight (but she does spend a little time with a neat Conan analogue, while we’re on the subject). She’s truly an agent of peace who then periodically has to kick some ass.

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Movies

Wonder Woman Wasn’t Always Set During World War I

By Kayti Burt

Movies

Wonder Woman 1984: Who Is Maxwell Lord?

By Jim Dandy

The art is really good – Aaron Lopresti and Bernard Chang handle the bulk of it, and the storytelling and pacing are really well handled, but the panel borders stand out as especially interesting and visually entertaining. The guest stars are great – Black Canary brings Diana to Roulette’s fight club for a couple of issues, and there’s a big Power Girl punchup later in the run. This is just excellent, excellent Wonder Woman storytelling.

Suicide Squad

Suicide Squad on Comic Book Herald (end at issue #66)

John Ostrander, Kim Yale, and (mostly) Luke McDonough’s original Suicide Squad is a revelation. The concept is almost overdone at this point, and is a little bit ruined by putting big names like Harley Quinn on the team, but taking a batch of nobody villains and putting them on suicide missions to earn their freedom actually sets serious stakes, and this book does everything it should with those stakes. This is politics and espionage and force projection all wrapped into a story that makes the DC Universe feel more complete. 

Read more

Movies

Suicide Squad 2 Cast, Release Date, News, Story, and More Details

By Mike Cecchini

Movies

The Many Deaths of The Suicide Squad

By Marc Buxton

Beyond the plotting, though, there are so many great characters that come out of these books. Amanda Waller is one of the single best characters in all of DC Comics, and this is the run that made her the badass who can face down Batman in the shower without flinching. Punch and Jewlee are hilarious running gags. Deadshot gets some incredible work. Hell, even Captain Boomerang gets multiple dimensions added to him (without ever losing his core concept: he’s a giant asshole). I promise you, I’m underselling how good this era of Suicide Squad is.

Legion  of Super-Heroes

Legion of Super-Heroes Secret Files & Origins #2; Legion of Super-Heroes (1989) #122-125 alternating issues with Legionnaires (1993) #79-81; Legion Lost (2000) #1-12; Legion Worlds (2001) #1-5, The Legion (2001) #1-26, Legion Secret Files & Origins 3003; The Legion #27-33

If you loved Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning’s Marvel space work, when you read their Legion of Super-Heroes, you’ll be baffled at how Guardians of the Galaxy ended up on the big screen and not this. 

The Legion of Super-Heroes is generally regarded as…not the most newbie-friendly superhero team in the world. Fair or not, this run of Legion comics is incredibly accessible and does as good a job integrating them into the larger DC Universe as any I’ve read. It’s also exactly like DnA’s Marvel cosmic work, in that it is wonderful space opera that happens to have superheroes. The first batch of stories deals with a wave of catastrophes hitting the galaxy in quick succession. Legion Lost has a group of Legionnaires get thrown outside of the galaxy as they’re trying to fix one of the first catastrophes. Legion Worlds serves as a series of check-ins with popular Legionnaires left behind in the United Planets and is a really effective way to hook you into the 31st century of the DC Universe.

And finally, The Legion is an outstanding team book following all of those. Legion Lost is an unquestionable highlight; Olivier Coipel’s art is incredible, and the story will make you launch your tablet/phone/computer across the room at a couple of twists. This run is incredible comics. 

Justice League International

…you don’t have to read all of this, but if you feel like going for it, do it. You can stop at the red dots, though.

The Bwa-Ha-Ha era is half-superhero comic, half-workplace comedy, the template for greatness to come in Legends of Tomorrow, but a great superhero work in its own right. It’s an era of Justice League that takes itself (and its villains, and its stakes) much less seriously than just about any other era of the last 40 years. If you were raised on the post-Morrison “New Olympus” era of the League, the tone shift might be a little jarring. But that tone shift is part of what makes Keith Giffen, J. M DeMatteis, and Kevin Maguire’s run on Justice League special.

There are so many really good characters in this book, but one of the best parts is how much it does for both the League staples like Martian Manhunter and Batman, alongside the…less substantial…characters. Blue and Gold (Beetle and Booster, respectively) got their start here, and that one panel where Batman knocks out Guy Gardner that gets shared around the internet once a year is from this era.

Read more

Comics

Justice League Keeps Building the Wider DC Universe

By Mike Cecchini

Comics

New DC Universe Timeline Revealed

By Mike Cecchini

And besides being great comics, this run is also the favorite Justice League of a disproportionate amount of current comics writers, giving it an outsized influence on not just current books, but the rest of pop culture that superheroes have taken over – Wonder Woman 1984 is probably going to owe a HUGE debt to the Max Lord created by Giffen, DeMatteis, and Maguire.

Deathstroke

Deathstroke: Rebirth #1; Deathstroke (2016) #1-18; Titans (2016) #11; Teen Titans (2016) #8, Deathstroke #19-20, Teen Titans Annual #1, Deathstroke #21-42 (and when they go up, read The Lazarus Contract crossover and through issue #50 of the main series)

Priest’s Deathstroke is the best book that came out of DC Rebirth. Under normal circumstances, Slade Wilson sucks. He too often falls into a murder daddy archetype, a super cool anti-hero who goes big on the violence and the dysfunction as background statuses, and not as relevant parts of his story. Priest turned all that on its head and turned in a 50 issue run (plus a couple of specials, annuals and crossovers) that was about a father who loved his kids and didn’t know how to tell them, who also happened to be a top shelf mercenary and supervillain. 

Read more

Movies

Deathstroke Solo Movie Details Revealed by Gareth Evans

By Kirsten Howard

TV

Deathstroke: The Most Versatile Villain in the DC Universe

By Marc Buxton

That’s not to say there isn’t some super cool ass-whipping in it. Batman and Damian Wayne are recurring characters, as Priest sets up a mystery that might undo Damian as a character and gives more depth to Deathstroke’s issues with the Teen Titans. There’s an entire arc dedicated to him fighting various aspects of his own personality, personified in other villains from the rest of the DCU.

And it’s all so clearly and aggressively Priest – it has all the same style as his iconic Black Panther run, but with different storytelling to fit Slade’s tale. This is one of my favorite comics from recent years. 

Starman

Starman Reading Order on ComicsBackIssues

For about three quarters of my entire life, DC had an absolute stranglehold on legacy in superhero comics. The entire DC Universe was littered with stories about someone new picking up an old cowl and an old title and having to grow into that role, whether it’s Jason Todd as Robin, Wally West as Flash, Dick Grayson as Batman, Kyle Rayner, Connor Hawke, Tim Drake, Stephanie Brown. The list is nearly endless. The thing is, it’s a really good story archetype and an excellent use of shared universe superhero trappings to give heft and depth to stories that are otherwise not really allowed growth. 

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TV

DC’s Stargirl Reveals Justice Society of America and Villains

By Mike Cecchini

Comics

Inside the Return of the Justice Society of America to the DC Universe

By Mike Cecchini

No comics did it better than James Robinson and Tony Harris’ Starman. It tells us the story of Jack Knight, the extremely Gen X son of golden age Starman Ted Knight. Ted is retired and passed his cosmic rod onto his son David, who gets murdered at the end of the first issue. It’s a hit on Ted’s whole family by one of his old villains, and Jack has to take up the rod to survive. Then he gets thrown into the mythology of the DC universe explained through the Starman legacy. It’s beautiful, fun, sad, meaningful, and heartfelt, and I bet you $1 that you cry at least once. 

The Question

The Question (1986) #1-15, Detective Comics Annual 1988 , Green Arrow Annual 1988 , The Question Annual #1, The Question #16-24, Annual #2, #25-36

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Comics

The Question Bounces Through Time In New DC Series

By Jim Dandy

Everyone jokes about how much of scenic Gotham City is abandoned amusement parks and chemical plants, but Gotham City is a family-friendly resort compared to the Hub City of Dennis O’Neill and Denys Cowan’s The Question. “Atmospheric” doesn’t even begin to describe this run.

It takes The Question, a character created by Steve Ditko, co-opted and pastiched as Rorschach by Alan More and Dave Gibbons in Watchmen, and introduced him to the DC Universe proper by putting Vic Sage through a spiritual ringer. Everything about this book is incredible – Vic is a terrific character; his supporting cast is thoroughly real; the book ties into the greater DC Universe really well (via Richard Dragon, Lady Shiva, and the annual crossover in the middle with Batman and Green Arrow).

But the real star here is Hub City, a love letter that’s also hate mail to mid-80s urban blight as scenery. And Cowan and inker Malcolm Jones III’s art – it’s tremendous.

Orion

Orion (2000) #1-25

I’ve been a fan of Walt Simonson’s Thor since I first read it, because it’s obviously incredible. But I didn’t realize until Thor: Ragnarok and DC Universe came out that Simonson might be the best comic creator to follow up on Jack Kirby’s ideas of all time, and it was Orion that really did it for me.

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Simonson puts Orion, son of Darkseid raised on New Genesis by Highfather as part of the peace treaty between the two factions of New Gods, on his prophesied track to kill Darkseid, and finishes it pretty early on. The fifth issue is just Simonson drawing a huge blowout fight between the two, and it’s predictably gorgeous. But he sticks with the story past that battle and digs deep into Orion’s character, the mythology of the New Gods, and some of Kirby’s best creations (the Newsboy Legion has a running subplot and it’s awesome). It also has backups from some of the biggest superstars in comics (Frank Miller and Dave Gibbons, among others). This is a hefty run of comics, but you won’t be able to put it down.

The post Best DC Comics to Binge Read on DC Universe appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[timobook]

Pro IronPython

Pro IronPython: Explore the combination of the poppular Python language with the powerful Dot NET framework Download Introduction Is This for Me?  IronPython and the .NET framework are very approachable to new developers. The tools are free, and there is an overabundance of both documentation and skilled developers who are happily sharing their knowledge with the world. The barrier to entry is supremely low these days. If this is your first programming book, so be it! Come along for the ride. You’ll see both sides of the programming fence, for you’ll find examples here in IronPython and C# as well as an entire chapter devoted to getting the two to play happily and nicely with one another. I also cover many basic programming fundamentals as well as the advanced stuff. You’ll get exposed to multiple languages and the .NET framework by the time we’re through. If you’re already versed in Python but not in .NET, you might just find that you can get your programming tasks done a lot more easily with the tested and powerful .NET framework behind you. If you already know both IronPython and .NET, this book should make for a good reference of various tricks and techniques, particularly in the realms of language integration and web development. An Overview of This Book Being an IronPython developer can mean a lot of things. You could write software to be run via the command line, as a Windows Forms application, or as a web application. That means we have a lot of ground to cover. We need both to address IronPython syntax as well as to look at how it fits into the larger .NET framework. Chapter 1: Introduction to IronPython  The introductory chapter provides you with a little background on Python and IronPython as well as on the .NET framework itself. We’ll look at what constitutes a dynamic language and contrast it with a static one. Then we’ll get ourselves a copy of IronPython and immediately try our hand at a sample and see how the language works. Chapter 2: IronPython Syntax IronPython has a rich but straightforward syntax and many built-in functions that make your life easier as a developer and ensure you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. This chapter looks at that syntax but does not yet cover interaction with the larger .NET framework. In fact, it will become apparent that you can actually write entire IronPython applications that don’t really make use of the framework at all, allowing Python developers to ease into the .NET world quite easily and gradually. Chapter 3: Advanced IronPython As with most programming languages, you can use the simplest syntax to express the most complicated ideas. In this chapter we’ll expand what we know and look at more complex data constructs, base classes, and object-oriented design principles. Chapter 4: IronPython Studio This chapter focuses on IronPython Studio and how you can use it to speed your development process. Up until this chapter the code has been entered entirely using the command-line IronPython interpreter. It’s time to kick things up a notch and begin working with the Integrated Development Environment and also to begin working with Windows Forms applications. Chapter 5: Mixing and Mingling with the CLR  It’s difficult to really know and understand a language until you’ve built something with it, hit some walls, and learned how to take an application from design to implementation. In this chapter we’ll begin making heavy use of the .NET framework and build the distant cousin of a very familiar application from the ground up. We’ll pay special attention to points where the .NET framework can save us time and energy, especially when coupled with the IronPython Studio IDE. Chapter 6: Advanced Development One of the coolest things about IronPython is how easily it can be used with other .NET languages. This chapter is all about how to employ IronPython as a scripted plug-in manager in a C# application. The plug-in system is designed to be straightforward and simple, and it should prove to be a good starting point for your own improvements and customizations. It can really save you endless hours of work if the need arises for extensibility in an existing application (or if you just want to add something neat like that at the very beginning). Chapter 7: Data Manipulation This chapter covers communicating with SQL Server and how to use Structure Query Language (SQL) to work with the database via IronPython code. I’ve also provided advice on how to protect yourself and your users against malicious entities who might try to use specially crafted SQL to circumvent your security Chapter 8: Caught in a Web  If you’re interested in web development, search engine optimization, and standards compliance, this chapter will be of special interest because it provides insight into all these areas and how IronPython helps you achieve the results you want. You’ll find useful tips like how to do cross-page PostBacks, how to prevent arbitrary code injection, and more. Chapter 9: IronPython Recipes  This final chapter provides a lot of varied snippets for many aspects of console, desktop, and web development, ranging from design patterns to search engine optimization tips, along with a final message for readers who kindly explored IronPython with me. Via TimoBook