#that are generally inconsequential

[bixels]

I've been making the transition these past few months, but I think I'm gonna just move back to Tumblr. My Twitter's follower-base has reached a point where I can't tweet anything casually opinion-related without it overflowing like a toilet. I post a short thread on my gripes with color design in anime and I'm getting QRT'd with "kill this guy with hammers" reaction gifs. Like, damn, this isn't fun anymore. It's not fun to talk about stuff on Twitter in general anymore. I wanted to post some ship dynamic doodles sometime there, but I know I'm gonna get weirdly aggressive takes and reactions. Monkey's paw curls, but I don't particularly like having that many followers.

[aroaceleovaldez]

i would like to say my ideal PJO adaptation (if i was being physically forced against my will to have to pick a live action adaptation over an animated one for some reason) would be a combo like writing of the musical + casting of the show + visuals of the movies

BUT the show actually does have the playwright for the musical as one of the major writers for like three episodes and that did nothing for it. so...

[st-just]

Okay there's many popular fandom tropes that I Do Not Vibe With,but one of the ones that just most makes me go 'what a fucking waste' is the tendency for people to look at a dynamic, like, centered and based around a betrayal or hatred born of curdled love or frayed ties or being tragically at odds because of their most strongly held principles and then go 'yeah but what if every single fanwork you ever see in your life were vaguely sketched AUs where nothing ever went wrong and we replaced the central dramatic motor of the entire thing with quirky cafe dates or having fun at a waterpark or something?'

[not-poignant]

Do you have any advice on how to write more words on a regular basis? I find it difficult to write regularly but am fed up of only being able to produce sporadically in small amounts. Whenever I sit down to write it feels like I'm feeding gravel into a blender (if that even makes sense). I've tried getting advice from others and am told to just "stop trying to write then". But I can't because I want to write. Writing is all I ever think about. It feels like oxygen to me and when I'm not doing it (or thinking about doing it) I feel like I'm dying inside. But damn, I just wish it wasn't so difficult.

I really want to finish my stories and I know I could if I just wrote regularly but I don't know why that's so hard for me to do.

Hi anon!

I might have some thoughts on this because I certainly never used to write as much as I do now!

Firstly, I'll get this one out of the way now, if you have money to spend, join 4thewords - ignore this if you don't have it. But this gamifies writing in a genuinely fun way. Each monster you kill gives you loot, and fulfills quests that give you more loot, that opens more worlds and more options that give you clothing / house furniture and more. This was - given how much more productive it made me - a game changer re: writing more.

If you don't have money to spend, let's ignore that and go to other methods.

If you want to write more, the answer isn't to stop writing, it's to write more. The best time to hear 'it's time to stop writing' is if you're burnt out, or you hate everything about it. It sounds like you don't hate everything about it, you just wish it was a bit easier.

Decide what you want regularly to mean. I don't have a daily writing habit - I don't write every day! I'm too sick to, so i have a monthly minimum wordcount instead of a daily minimum wordcount and try and hit it by about week 2/3. Regularly for you might be once a day. Once every two days. Or it might be 'I have to write this many words a month.'

Find a way to track the words you're writing. The only way you can accurately see how much you're writing is by tracking those word-counts! Because you will have days where you feel like you wrote nothing and actually wrote a fair bit, and days where you feel like you wrote a fair bit and sadly wrote...hardly anything, lol. But it's also the best way to see yourself achieve more as you increase your wordcount.

Let's also talk about flow. Sometimes you don't get to feel 'flow' - that feeling of the words coming out easily onto the page, and you have to kind of struggle for every sentence. Are you okay with writing more knowing that this is actually normal for many writers, and the gravel blender feeling might not go away? It will over time get easier to write more words, but it might mean more of that gravel blender feeling. Flow is not predictable, and is often story and scene dependent. Chances are you will have more times feeling writing flow, I just want you to be honest with yourself in case it doesn't happen the way you wish.

From there, it's a combination of developing the discipline (which is like exercising a muscle - start small and grade upwards, don't aim too high at first, consistency is better than bursts), and finding the tricks that help you.

Look at how many words you think you could write a week. Let's lowball and say about 100 words a week. When you assess this for yourself, always undershoot, don't round up! 100 words is like... a long paragraph worth of words.

The following week, depending on if you want a daily / once every two days etc. habit, you'd aim to write 150 words that week. A paragraph and a half.

The week after you'd aim for 200 words.

You might find in week 2 it was easy to write 1000 words, great! But the week after you're still only aiming for 200 words. Don't base scaling up on the bursts / writing sprints - they'll lie to you. If you want consistent discipline, base your increases on the low days. If you reach a week where 200 words feels impossible, aim for 200 words the following week, if it's still impossible, go back to 150.

Now for you it might be... 500 words in week one, 600 in week two, 700 in week 3 etc. It might not seem like much, but you'd be surprised how quickly you start scaling through those numbers with practice.

Increasing writing output is a numbers game. And it's a patience game. And it's a 'being forgiving and gentle with yourself while also being a little bit stern with yourself' game.

Here's the thing no one tells you (except for NaNoWriMo every single year) re: increasing your wordcount.

Those words don't have to be good. They don't have to be good in fact it's better if they're not.

You're just getting used to the feeling of writing more. Not writing more good words, that will come naturally with time. You're getting used to sitting in front of a document for longer, thinking of more sentences you don't necessarily love (it's better if you don't! Write the bad ones!) And this is what I mean by it's a numbers game. Getting better at writing happens the more you do it anyway, so you can just focus on 40 bad sentences.

The trick to letting yourself write badly? That one is just...gritting your teeth and screaming through them while you go 'AHHHHH' in your head and let those suckers loose. Or whatever version of this that you have.

Because here's the thing, it's actually pretty easy to write 1000 words of inconsequential terrible story that no one's going to read. I mean 'pretty easy' - it's easier than writing the stories and characters you love the most and are so invested in, it's hard to write the sentences because you want to do justice to it all. That's fucking stressful, friend, and increasing writing output is just better if you're not always a) doing it on those stories or b) invested in writing those stories well in those early draft/s.

But once you're used to writing more words of stuff you don't love, it becomes easier to write less words of stuff you do, and chances are that will still be more than you're writing now. <3 Some of my stories are really easy to write, and some are way way harder. A chapter of The Ice Plague took as much time as three chapters of Underline the Black. So story is important here too. But also the point is basically that... you don't have to scale up your writing output with the stories you're most invested in, but need to be at a certain standard of writing. You can scale it up any time, with any kind of story - anyone can do this. Increasing your wordcount is a matter of like... easy methods that are less easy to implement irl because of the psychology around letting yourself write badly, and letting yourself validate the time / put the time aside to do that.

And here's the other thing - find a ritual that helps you. Whether it's brewing some tea before writing. Setting up a little space. Putting on some music or a noise generator specifically for writing. Listening to Lo-Fi Girl or Synthwave Boy. Whether it's writing a few words on paper first, or changing the font. Eventually you will have a Pavlovian response to the ritual, and every little bit helps.

As for the psychology, this is why you lowball. You make it as easy as possible. 'God writing 1000 words seems really hard oh but I only have to write a sentence today, cool, I can do that.'

The thing about lowballing is that on the good days, you will write way, way more than your goal. Which means a) you're done for the week if that happens if you want to be done and b) when you're back to feeling exhausted and like GGHGHGHGHHHHH about writing, you're still back at that initial lowball wordcount.

On my worst days, I lowball to like, 5 words, 10 words, and just write 5 / 10 / 15 etc. down on a piece of paper and cross them off. 30 words can be a sentence. 10 words can be a sentence. It feels nice to cross off numbers on a sheet of paper and see the increasing words. I can almost always get to 500 words with that method, and I think you could definitely get to 100.

Anyway the TL;DR

Consistency is way more important than quality

Don't be surprised if you don't find 'flow'

ALWAYS lowball when you're developing an increase in words

Figure out what 'regular' means to you (daily / weekly / etc.)

Make a ritual

Focus less on the stories you love most when developing this habit

If you have a bad week, just go back to the previous wordcount goal. And keep doing that, this won't be a linear process!!!

...It didn't need to be this long I'm so sorry anon idk why I'm like this.

I wish you all the best! I 100% disagree with the folks telling you 'just stop writing then.' I'm like nope, embrace the gravel blender, eventually you'll end up with smooth sand in an hourglass, I promise. <3 You just might have to add more gravel sometimes. ;)

[dbphantom]

I gotta admit I will never see the appeal of games like Phas/mo/pho/bia and Let/hal/Comp/any and I'm convinced people only play them because they follow the S/C/P/Back/roo/ms style of "rules horror" not because they are fun

[isfjmel-phleg]

😶

[fishofthewoods]

its been done before so many times but i just love a traditional high fantasy setting with Magical Immortal Elves where the elves don't die when they reach a certain age, but they just.... get too weird for shorter-lived species to understand or communicate with them. I like the idea that once elves get old enough theyd just sort of sit down and stop experiencing time in a way that makes sense, and some of them would probably just become like... permanent fixtures in the landscape. Like a human visitor comes to another human village and they're all like oh yeah that ethereal being over there? thats Threamenthithlirieth. Yeah shes been contemplating the lichens on that rock for six generations. Yeah my great-grandpa told me that his great-grandma told him that back when the village was being founded she just sort of showed up. Yeah she hasnt moved since, Jorgen's parents built a roof over her like ten years ago because she kept getting rained on and we think she liked that because flowers keep blooming around her and when you go near her you can hear an angelic voice humming. Yeah its sort of odd but hey the ambient magic from having a high elf around makes our crops grow great and she seems to be fine having a village around so it all works out.

[wildflowercryptid]

sometime you gotta project your interests onto your blorbos. i think florian would be a persona enjoyer and his favorite in the series would be persona 3.

[vaugarde]

i have to clear out storage on my phone. i feel like that one image thats like "Help me budget! $1 for food $5 for gas $500000000 anime figurines $50 bills. please i am losing so much money" "stop buying figurines" "fuck you" except its storage space and its all gliscor images

[death-rebirth-senshi]

See, the thing is it's not that odd to see Trumpers with a "I'm voting for the felon" sign because they don't actually believe he's a felon, or at least not a felon felon. They believe that the courts (lefties/commies/etc.) are just out to get him, and he's the brave underdog that's fighting back. There's no real hypocrisy going on when they support the police, because supporting the police means going after the "real" criminals.

[mars-ipan]

gotta say i've been in quite a few fandoms but i don't think any of them are quite as unabashedly queer as the gomens fandom is. it's very comfy here

[petpetpinixy]

trying to not be upset about something so silly but there were some neopets plushies exclusive to a convention recently and i'm so sad i can't add them to my collection................. i'm the neopets plushie collector why would they do this to me

[mossflower]

monkeys paw type situation

[captain-lovelace]

Having thought about it for a couple of days I think the disproportionate degree of uproar about egg jokes being invasive or whatever seems overwhelmingly like a case of people interpreting trans women in the worst possible way

[knowlesian]

the moment when the urge to tell someone how they are being Terribly, Horribly Wrong On The Internet meets the knowledge that doing so is supremely unhelpful and unlikely to change hearts and minds

[franeridan]

alright here's the current theory. Roger was genuinely just a dude. Just some guy. He was definitely strong in his own right and had a good ass crew and ship, but what everyone who's known him keeps on saying whenever he's brought up is true - everyone keeps calling him a monster but he really was nothing special, probably very strong but no more than anyone out of the rocks pirates, and definitely no more ruthless. He had honest to god infants on his crew, he was just some guy going on an adventure.

but during Robin's backstory the ohara archeologists say this: the poneglyphs were written to recount the hidden history, and the hidden history is about a war between the world government and an island that is no more. So why would have four of those been used to give the coordinates for laugh tale? because laugh tale is the island the world government was at war with. And Roger found Oden, and read the poneglyphs, and found laugh tale, and that's why the world government called him king of the pirates and made a show of hunting him down and then killing him where everyone could see, because he'd found out the truth they'd been keeping hidden for eight hundred years

so the theory is that his speech right before he died was his last fuck you to the government. He told the whole world that there was a treasure (and there probably is), and that it was on laugh tale, and they could and SHOULD look for it - so now the government killed one dude who found out the truth, but in exchange for that, if before there were only the archaeologists and the particularly curious to worry about, now there's the whole of the ruthless and lawless and fearless and greedy side of the world's population looking for that very same thing they've been doing their best to hide. And that was a very funny thing to do on Roger's part, imho. Like, after that I'd call him king too tbf