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some of the best writing advice I’ve ever received: always put the punch line at the end of the sentence.

it doesn’t have to be a “punch line” as in the end of a joke. It could be the part that punches you in the gut. The most exciting, juicy, shocking info goes at the end of the sentence. Two different examples that show the difference it makes:

doing it wrong:

She saw her brother’s dead body when she caught the smell of something rotting, thought it was coming from the fridge, and followed it into the kitchen.

doing it right:

Catching the smell of something rotten wafting from the kitchen—probably from the fridge, she thought—she followed the smell into the kitchen, and saw her brother’s dead body.

Periods are where you stop to process the sentence. Put the dead body at the start of the sentence and by the time you reach the end of the sentence, you’ve piled a whole kitchen and a weird fridge smell on top of it, and THEN you have to process the body, and it’s buried so much it barely has an impact. Put the dead body at the end, and it’s like an emotional exclamation point. Everything’s normal and then BAM, her brother’s dead.

This rule doesn’t just apply to sentences: structuring lists or paragraphs like this, by putting the important info at the end, increases their punch too. It’s why in tropes like Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking or Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick, the odd item out comes at the end of the list.

Subverting this rule can also be used to manipulate reader’s emotional reactions or tell them how shocking they SHOULD find a piece of information in the context of a story. For example, a more conventional sentence that follows this rule:

She opened the pantry door, looking for a jar of grape jelly, but the view of the shelves was blocked by a ghost.

Oh! There’s a ghost! That’s shocking! Probably the character in our sentence doesn’t even care about the jelly anymore because the spirit of a dead person has suddenly appeared inside her pantry, and that’s obviously a much higher priority. But, subvert the rule:

She opened the pantry door, found a ghost blocking her view of the shelves, and couldn’t see past it to where the grape jelly was supposed to be.

Because the ghost is in the middle of the sentence, it’s presented like it’s a mere shelf-blocking pest, and thus less important than the REAL goal of this sentence: the grape jelly. The ghost is diminished, and now you get the impression that the character is probably not too surprised by ghosts in her pantry. Maybe it lives there. Maybe she sees a dozen ghosts a day. In any case, it’s not a big deal. Even though both sentences convey the exact same information, they set up the reader to regard the presence of ghosts very differently in this story.

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We don’t talk enough about how fanfiction writers love to give character large amounts of non-specific paperwork they hate doing

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The emotional connection between a writer/artist and a really obscure song that they associate with their characters is immensely powerful and cannot be explained

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If you ever tagged me to do one of those tag game thingies and I never did it:

1) Thank you, seriously. Those are fun and being included shows that my followers care enough to want to learn more about me.

2) Very sorry about that, it’s extremely likely that I said to myself “Cool! But I’m busy at the moment, I’ll have to do this later today or tomorrow” before proceeding to just straight-up forget, now it’s too far back in my notifications and/or your blog to find again.

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today’s random feilan lore: soulmates! they are real! …well, for a given measure of ‘real.’

as a reminder, fairies in my world all have an aura: the visible pattern of color that manifests in any magic they perform, and typically influences the patterns on their wings as well. your aura is how your internal magic visibly presents itself, and your internal magic is essentially a reflection of your soul. auras are completely unique to the individual, because they are so closely tied to your identity and sense of self. some colors and basic patterns are more common than others, since all auras have at least bilateral symmetry and only so many colors exist on the visible light spectrum and your magical element also affects your aura, but everyone is at least a little different. auras change during evolutions to reflect not only a fairy’s growing magical strength but also their developing personality! even identical twins don’t have identical auras—actually, it’s common for twins’ auras to be very distinct from each other. the ravenhart twins are a great example of this! violet’s aura is dark bruise-y purple and black with only one line of symmetry, and lavender’s is mostly pale silvery purples with a few highlights of green and much greater radial symmetry. this is a handy way for parents of twins to quickly and easily tell them apart, if somebody has a lens on hand to make the auras visible.

so a soulmate, in feilan, is someone whose aura perfectly matches yours. what “perfectly matching” means is debatable, and this is where we get regional folklore on the topic. some folks believe your soulmate’s aura will be completely identical to yours in every way—color, patterns, details, everything. others believe that soulmate auras perfectly share a pattern in complementary or similar colors, others believe that soulmate auras perfectly share a color palette but the patterns can vary, still others believe soulmate auras are perfect inversions of each other. the most common variant on soulmates is “identical color palette and same or very similar pattern, but different use/arrangement of colors within the pattern.” there are a lot of minor variations on the theme. everyone’s fairly certain they exist, though!

really, none of the myths are entirely wrong—though i’d fear those people with completely identical auras, because depending on their temperament they might be TOO similar to each other and wind up mortal enemies instead. the fully-identical auras are also the least likely to exist in reality, because the odds of two people truly being THAT similar are astronomical. even if you do find an ‘identical’ aura to your own, if you look closely enough there will almost certainly be some very minor variation—a slightly thinner line in the pattern, or a slightly different shade of one color, or something like that. these kinds of very-close-but-not-quite matches are NOT (usually) considered soulmates, that’s actually an unlucky sign in a lot of stories and that person might be seen as your fated rival instead. by existing and meeting you, they ‘steal your luck and shadow your destiny,’ and superstition has it that this inevitably leads to conflict. seeing someone with an aura that close-but-not-quite to yours can be unnerving, it’s like looking in a mirror and the eye color’s off.

but because your aura is a representation of yourself, somebody whose aura ‘matches’ yours in some way is very likely to get along well with you! it’s a strong sign of compatible personalities. there are matchmakers in some regions who make a business pairing people with “good aura matches,” and although they almost never see “true” soulmates, the rate of success for that kind of thing is surprisingly high anyway. people with compatible auras often get this vague feeling that they were meant to be together, and true soulmates especially do. they feel at home in each other’s company. in a way, the universe made them to suit each other and they can tell! though it should be noted that there’s no compulsion here, and nothing inherently romantic about it either, just a magical reflection of significant compatibility in these people’s personalities and interests. it’s also theoretically possible to have multiple soulmates! you’re just statistically unlikely to meet more than one in your lifetime, because they are already so rare as to basically not exist. (and most people don’t travel that much, so if your soulmate lives across the country or on another continent, you’ll probably never know they exist.) in modern feilan, a country around the size of mexico, there are exactly two pairs that could be considered true soulmates and one of them is pretty debatable. this is already more than usual.

other perks of soulmates: when someone’s aura is particularly compatible with yours, it makes partnered magic easier, stronger, and more effective! i don’t talk about partnered magic much because it’s a fairly niche practice—it’s only useful in very specific situations, and for most people it’s very impractical to use, you only really see it in the occasional religious ritual and in hospitals. TLDR; with partnered magic you open up your aura to another person or persons in a way that lets you combine your strength for stronger spells, offer your magic as fuel for each other’s, or cast unusual spells that require multiple simultaneous incantations (very old-fashioned magical construction work uses this, so does a lot of warding magic). it’s most common in hospitals because using your coworkers as batteries makes high-powered trauma healing much easier. usually the best healers are weaker fairies because healing requires precision and a light touch, strong magic is like a claymore where the work needs a scalpel, but when you’re trying to fix a disembowelment you need a lot of juice. the kinds of people well-suited to finicky telekinetic surgeries or isolating and controlling infections (which happens at the cellular level even if they don’t scientifically know that yet) don’t have that much firepower by themselves, and partnered magic compensates well.

the reason partnered magic sucks is that it requires a lot of ritualized incantation and gesture to ‘sync up’ with your partner and forge a safe connection for magic to pass through without harming or overwhelming each other. it’s a whole endeavor, it’s not something you can spontaneously do whenever or wherever, it requires several minutes of preparation AT LEAST… but closely compatible people have a much easier time of it, and when you are part of a “true soulmate” pair, you can completely skip through most of the clunky synchronization process because your magic naturally wants to work together! all you have to do is be physically close to each other and let it happen. true soulmate pairs are supposedly able to even do this in active combat, and soulmates empower each other exponentially in partnered work relative to most people, so the idea of a true soulmate pair on the battlefield is terrifying to many people. especially if either member of the pair is stronger than average to begin with.

there’s never been a CONFIRMED recorded soulmate pair among royalty (despite various claims about calama&cyrenna, cyrenna/iyanara, iyanara/various other historical figures—their auras are historical record, people just like to romanticize). this is objectively a good thing, because soulmate royals would be a fucking nightmare if they decided to have beef with someone. individual high royals by themselves are a nightmare, they don’t need force amplifiers making them even more of a menace. soulmate pairs are popular both as heroes in fiction, and as villains too dangerous for anyone but the brave heroes to defeat. there’s a reason. thankfully, most normal people never feel the genuine need to murder other people, so this is a fictional trope in feilan still!

so yeah, that’s soulmates. the two canon soulmate pairs aren’t relevant to the plot of the books, none of the protagonists are involved, they’re just interesting side characters who exist in my head. the pair that definitely counts are expies of my D&D characters jube and marigold, lol. i’ve posted about those two before i think. they’re soulmates of the “identical color schemes, similar patterns, different color layouts” variety. jube is pink on the inside and orange on the outside, marigold is orange on the inside and pink on the outside. their patterns aren’t perfectly identical, but they’re very similar, and viewed next to each other these two’s auras are very obviously a matched set. the “debatable” soulmates are debatable because they perfectly share a pattern down to some really tiny unusual details, but their colors look hideous together and have almost no overlap, so it’s hard to notice the pattern-matching unless you look for it. they were pointed to each other by one of those matchmakers, and they’re not romantically into each other, but they’re very close friends and that’s worked out great for them so far. you go, random irrelevant rinali civilians, have a cookie.

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dissertation writing advice

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genuinely something so delightful about getting obsessed with your own characters. what do you MEAN I can turn my headcanons for my characters into Official Real Lore. that's so fucking cool are you serious

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there are some things a character should not be able to tell us about themselves EVEN with a gun to their head. depending on the character that could even expand to include "most" things

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memes are fun and relatable and all that, but don't let them discourage you. all of that stuff that doesn't make it into the final product is part of how the final product gets made

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the jube fic continues… she’s so stupid you guys…

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the problem with having an evil mastermind manipulator oc is that i am not particularly good at being any of those things

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people might think creating OC lore involves a lot of thinking & planning, but in my personal experience, OC development is more like a divine vision from a god slamming you over the head with a mallet while ur doing the fuckin dishes or folding laundry

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New writing rule: Checkov’s friend

If you introduce a named character with a relationship to a protagonist, their character arc must be resolved in a way that feels reasonable and satisfying

Which is to say: they can’t just dissappear when they’re no longer a convenient plot device

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“so, gods of iliginia/feilan, what exactly do you guys do to be worthy of respect from the mortals?”

kariel: i roam the eastern hemisphere of iliginia where an ancient superweapon punched holes in the planet to the core, and use my elemental powers to hold the planet together! i am humble and avoid mortals while doing this so nobody really knows! this is why i am rarely heard from in the nation of feilan specifically!

immaline: i maintain an archive of ancient knowledge on an entirely different planet where my power and presence keep known-to-me malevolent forces from targeting and destroying iliginia! this is why nobody has seen me in living memory but it’s very important!

faiana: i oversee the afterlife and maintain the borders between it and the living world, while making sure that the raw magical energy inside dying fairy souls doesn’t congeal into masses of deadly poison and obliterate civilization! this is why i am rarely sighted in feilan by anyone except the descendants i occasionally check on out of curiosity!

harmonine: i, uhhhhhh, i harangue faiana about ten thousand year old grievances while she’s working? and menace my descendants by sending vague unhelpful prophecies that i’ll get really pissed off if they do anything about?

…all i’m saying is, certain individuals in the iliginian pantheon are pulling more weight than certain others.

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stolen from that social media site gay millennials and grumpy boomers use

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