#genre: short story

[haveyoureadthispoll]

[thatstudyblrontea]

A lone woman is troubled with such dreams and such thoughts that she's afeard of herself sometimes.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, Young Goodman Brown

[blaithnne]

Local big sister experiences emotions, more at 6

Been wanting to do one of these with Lauren for AGES, but I never got round to it. Then I saw the Lydia and Phinium expression sheets on @littledigits’ website and I felt inspiration like never before.

The funniest struggle I have with Lauren’s design right now is that she nose too big for she got damn face. Literally, Hilda characters noses take up a fairly small portion of their faces, and her’s took up WAY too much, leaving little room for her to make facial expressions. But I struggled to find a fix because when I made the nose smaller it just didn’t look like Lauren anymore, so I took this as an opportunity to work on that!

She still has a larger nose than most characters, starting higher up (like her grandad!) and ending lower down (but not quite as low as before). I also made her eyes a little smaller and with a shape similar to Lydia’s (though you can see in some of these I hadn’t quite landed on that yet and her eyes are a bit too big), which works both as a nod to her parentage and because I think it makes the nose look bigger. This still doesn’t leave as much room for the mouth as most other characters, but that’s okay — Lauren is a very private person who keeps her feelings close to her chest, I think it works for her to have subtler expressions, adds to how guarded she is! Oh and I also updated the shape of her hair slightly, just to make it a bit more style accurate.

These changes are pretty small on their own, but I think combined they work well to make Lauren feel a lot more…alive? Far less stiff, anyway. I think she also has a more unique facial structure now, instead of just “what if Johanna was 90% nose”. She’s still got a big old nose and I love it but now she can emote, yay!

This is really all just concept stuff, I’m hoping to get a new fullbody style-ref for Lauren out soon! Now that I’ve improved the main issues I had with her face in the last ref, now it’s onto the silhouette! I want her to read as more of a strong character (though it comes across decently in her current ref, I wanna push it more without being as exaggerated as Ahlberg, which is. A challenge for me lol), streamline her silhouette, and finally make her taller than Johanna like she’s always meant to have been <3 I made her shorter for so long because I thought it would help her read better as her daughter but you know what? That’s dumb actually, she’s tall.

ANYWAYS, thank you for listening in on the annual Lauren redesign, and to the artists behind the show for posting so much amazing inspiring show stopping concept work for free because it makes my autism worse /pos

[yasmeensh]

Paleolithic Media Catalogue

Hello everyone :) Short story first: When I began brainstorming for my prehistoric story, I started wondering what other prehistoric fiction there is out there. I was not familiar with it and have not seen much. That's when I started my grand literature review and began a search for what fiction exist out there. I wanted to know what kinds of stories are being made with this time period. What are the common themes or recurring ideas (I found lots of humans and dinosaurs works. And time travel). Since I've had a growing collection on my computer, I decided I should keep on enlarging it and put it online. It's nowhere near complete. I'll slowly keep accumulating the collection as I find more. I only have fiction books and comics right now. I still need to work on the film section.

You can access the blog here!

***

As for where I am in my reading, the one's I've finished reading are Earth's Children series (book 1-4. Dropped it afterwards lol. I made a post on with fanart) Dance of the Tiger and it's sequel Singletusk (They were good! I'll upload my review on the blog), and Sisters of the Wolf (It was ok!). I got my hands on The Inheritors and excited to start reading it. I REALLY want to read the Shiva trilogy, but I found no PDF online... and it's out of print :( There is certainly old copies on ebay. And I want to read Chronicles of Ancient Darkness. There seem to be lots of good books out there.

[liquidstar]

crazy take: aside from actual lesbian romance stories, obviously, nothing passes the bechdel test better than moe "cute girls doing cute things" anime. its always just a group of girls, few to no named male characters, boys and dating are hardly ever brought up beyond the abstract, if at all. like we're focusing on the girls hanging out rn, we dont need to worry abt that shit. mugi just ate mio's strawberry.

[waitineedaname]

I really love how much mp100 stands out against other shows of its genre with its finale. there isn't some final boss, there's no grand fight between good and evil. it is, like the show has always been, about emotions and self acceptance. the finale barely involves fight scenes in the traditional sense, like I wouldn't call the encounters with teru and ritsu fight scenes since neither of them intend to hurt him, and even the fight with the suzukis ends not with someone being defeated but rather with an emotional break through. the final conflict is resolved not with violence and defeat. it's resolved with honesty and compassion and self-love. I can't get over how deeply kind this series is

[no-s-estelle]

I've been gnawing on The Librarians like a dog on a bone ever since I finished the series a few weeks ago, and now I have Thoughts:

I hope the new show explores more of the library's history and the magical universe around the library. There's so much potential for Lore there, and so many implications the show never touched on. The library's existed for over 2000 years, but all the Librarians we see are white Europeans/Americans? (Besides Ezekiel) Technically Charlene and Judson as the original Guardian and Librarian must have been ancient Roman, Greek, Egyptian maybe, but that was never explored. The library went from Alexandria to the New York Metropolitan Library? Where was it in the interim? It could have literally been anywhere in the world! Show me the library in tsarist Russia, or Edo Japan, or the Incan empire. Or at least mention that the library spent time anchored there. You have 2000 years of history to play with, ffs.

And then in the earlier seasons the show implied the existence of a whole magical society, and then barely did anything with it. Show me how the library as an institution impacts the magical world, beyond just collecting and locking away artifacts! Give me more librarians mediating disputes between pissed off dragons, except we don't have the CGI budget for actual dragons so they're just guys in fancy suits! What happened with the lake forum??? I kept waiting for that to be a bigger storyline, and it never went anywhere, even though Cassandra kept using magic. It felt like an unfired Chekhov's gun. Just. Just give me lore, please.

From press releases, it looks like the new show is going to at least start off in Serbia? Or just generic Central Europe? So I'm interested in what they do with that. Idk, I mostly want them to really lean in to the world-wide storytelling potential, even if they shoot it all in Oregon. I believed the same one forest in British Columbia was 50 different alien planets for Stargate; I'll believe Oregon is China or Japan or West Africa or wherever they want me to believe it is.

[mumblingsage]

If I was feeling slightly smarter or more distractable today I'd write a coherent post about how short stories and poetry have often been written by marginalized writers who find short-form work more accessible given the demands on their time and other resources. This does not mean disabled writers, working-class writers, writers of color, women writers, etc don't write novels (and some fucking brilliant ones too)! But one concrete way we might all make the publishing world more inclusive is to read short story and poetry collections, buy them and review them, and generally encourage them as vibrant art forms.

I like novels a lot myself and don't want to come off as hard on them here. But many writers and readers regard the novel as the only form worth doing (even the only form possible -- witness confused reviewers of short story collections wondering why each "chapter" is about a different set of characters in a different place or time period). To what extent, we might wonder, does the infamous challenge of writing a novel in a month grow out of or feed into an over-valuation of writing that meets a certain length requirement?

[specialagentartemis]

My favorite genre of sci-fi is “small research team goes to a distant plant/star/space station/black hole/etc to study something weird there, and then the weird thing there Wrecks Their Shit.” Can’t get enough of it. “Small research team goes to a deep undersea research station” and “small research team goes to a deep Antarctic research station” are also very good variants of this as long as they get completely rekt by a weird mysterious alien thing there. I love it every time.

It is also important to note that these stories can range from “TPK” to “lone survivor” to “a few losses but most of the main characters come out of this harrowing ordeal alive, if changed” to “everyone survives this harrowing ordeal and they have a new friend now!” but the more characters survive the better the story better be. If it’s a TPK/lone survivor I eat this up and will love it no matter how bad it is (Underwater (2020) starring Kristen Stewart I am vaguing you here. Stupid movie. Saw it on the big screen and loved it). But if most/all of the cast survives, the writing and the story and the characters better be goddamn amazing (All Systems Red by Martha Wells and Wolf 359 by Gabriel Urbina and Sarah Shachat I am vaguing you here <3 )

[igarbagecannoteven]

hi!! just read your cake at the craft store fic and thought I'd introduce myself on here :) you're a talented writer and seem like a lovely person!

oh my gosh thank you so much! that's so sweet of you 🥰i'm so glad you enjoyed my work! (and thank you so much for the lovely comment on ao3!) also love your handles on both ao3 and here, i'm a big fan of herons myself 😊

[haveyoureadthispoll]

The visionary writer and director of Get Out, Us, and Nope, and founder of Monkeypaw Productions, curates this groundbreaking anthology of all-new stories of Black horror, exploring not only the terrors of the supernatural but the chilling reality of injustice that haunts our nation. Featuring stories by: Erin E. Adams, Violet Allen, Lesley Nneka Arimah, Maurice Broaddus, Chesya Burke, P. Djèlí Clark, Ezra Claytan Daniels, Tananarive Due, Nalo Hopkinson, N. K. Jemisin, Justin C. Key, L. D. Lewis, Nnedi Okorafor, Tochi Onyebuchi, Rebecca Roanhorse, Nicole D. Sconiers, Rion Amilcar Scott, Terence Taylor, and Cadwell Turnbull.

[thatstudyblrontea]

Young Goodman Brown | ★★★.75/5

I had to read this for my Anglo-American Literature class, and I chose it as the Titled After the Protagonist prompt of the Tackle Your Classics reading challenge, and the Short Story entry of the 2023 Genre Bingo. It was a quick read, a good way to spend an evening.

This short story serves as an allegory of the every man's journey towards evil, of the corruption of morals that the author deems intrinsic to New England's society, and to Man's nature in general. It read as a cautionary tale – a very well written one, with interesting images and figures of speech, a well executed plot, and good pacing – whose absolute pessimism, however, lead to a flattened and one-sided worldview that fails the contemporary reader. I don't believe that saying something along the lines of "actually, clergymen and seemingly innocent people can be just as bad and corrupted" is as much of a astounding concept to read nowadays. I feel like very few works of this kind manage to be as striking nowadays as they were at the time they were written. And this one didn't pass the test, for me.

[agirlnamedbone]

Meghan Lamb (Hobart, 2012)

[aimfor-theheart]

sci fi and fantasy genres are really for minorities and while i’m not surprised white cishet men in particular have dominated and claimed those genres as theirs, it’s so like….frustrating watching them butcher the genres again and again. ceaselessly. without an ounce of self awareness.

[deadpanwalking]

Arthur Conan Doyle or Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie's a much better writer than ACD, but Holmes is by orders of magnitude more memorable than Poirot and Marple put together.

[illiaccrest]

As if I needed more distractions I finally designed a partner to go with my bird knight! I wasn't really sure what to do with this guy but when I started drawing his face I got this feeling that he should be short, buff and quiet like Link in BotW lol.

My idea so far is that this guy is a mage knight for an evil empire but he leaves them for a bird and they fight for justice?? And fall in love along the way 👍