wortfinder

[wortfinder]

on a little hiatus right now. More enjoying the mainblog. But definitely around

Where are all the active writing blogs. I swear I follow everyone and three weeks later they abandon their writing. Whomst is active

[wortfinder]

@official-german-translationen

How I love that German has a rather long word for ‘car insurance’ but merely three letters for ‘existential despair and the meaninglessness of life’.

[wortfinder]

[wortfinder]

Editing with cats.

[wortfinder]

Look, I made another comic sans presentation. This time for my WIP The Book of Souls. Check out the first one, in case you missed it or check out the wip page for the trilogy.

Keep reading

[wortfinder]

I mean, between the butter and the strap-on ... that doesn’t make much of a difference, does it?

Thanks to my writerly friends @andtheotherwriter and @wortfinder and general madness I now have:

a chest hair chart

a list of my characters as food

a highly inappropriate head canon involving a strap-on

given the word butter a weird connotation

I love you guys, my life would suck without you!! <3

[wortfinder]

I am not saying which of those was me

Thanks to my writerly friends @andtheotherwriter and @wortfinder and general madness I now have:

a chest hair chart

a list of my characters as food

a highly inappropriate head canon involving a strap-on

given the word butter a weird connotation

I love you guys, my life would suck without you!! <3

[wortfinder]

Me too. Me too...:D

Antagonist as the Protagonist: Alternate WIP Summary Ask

I asked a few people this question last week as part of Storytelker Saturday, but the answers I received were so amazing that (thanks to a comment from @dove-actually) I’m now throwing it open to everyone.

Summarize your WIP from the antagonist/villains perspective.

I know this isn’t the easiest question as it could expose spoilers, but seeing as people rarely think of themselves as ‘the bad guy’, I find it fascinating to see how they justify their actions.

Reply to this post or send me an ask, as I really want to know! Even if we haven’t interacted before. And if you want to add a link to your actual WIP summary, do that too.

[wortfinder]

I feel tagged! 

For an alleged genius tactician, Quinn has an amazing amount of problems. Like that job he hates but can't get out of or that team he cares way too much for and somehow has to keep alive. When he is tasked to aid a bunch of terrorists, he must decide between loyalty and survival. Then his boss makes a vital mistake.

I tag:  @humanformdragon​ @wolveswingsandwrenches​ 

Antagonist as the Protagonist: Alternate WIP Summary Ask

I asked a few people this question last week as part of Storytelker Saturday, but the answers I received were so amazing that (thanks to a comment from @dove-actually) I’m now throwing it open to everyone.

Summarize your WIP from the antagonist/villains perspective.

I know this isn’t the easiest question as it could expose spoilers, but seeing as people rarely think of themselves as ‘the bad guy’, I find it fascinating to see how they justify their actions.

Reply to this post or send me an ask, as I really want to know! Even if we haven’t interacted before. And if you want to add a link to your actual WIP summary, do that too.

[wortfinder]

My funniest character is Nathanael. He’s a notorious mom friend with a big mouth and a careless attitude.  He’s a technomancer with a slightly skewed sense for legality and a French accent. He loves bagels and croques. Eating them, creating them. Cheese, of course. Computer games. Computers. A challenge. And what he loves the most is his friends. 

For a moment it looked as if Nathanael wanted to walk over, but then he turned away and gently pounded his forehead against the refrigerator door three times.  After the last time he rolled his head in her direction, his cheek pressed flat against the cool metal. "I swear we will do everything to keep this from happening,” he said, “but please do not let me live with the knowledge that you two died as virgins." "I'm not ...,” she stuttered. “Dariush ..." "Eheh." He raised a warning finger. “I don't want to know anything about your sex life. What you do in bed is your business and your business alone.” Lara just opened her mouth when he followed with a wink. "Just do something."

Ok, writeblr, I have to be honest. I’m just a little bit exhausted and I could really use a laugh. Tell me about your funniest character. What are they like? What kind of humor do they use? I want to hear all about them AND (extra challenge for those who are able/willing) see a little excerpt of their comedy in action. 

Reblog, comment, or send an ask with your answer. Anyone and everyone is welcome to join! 

 I tag every post with ‘writeblr conversations’ for those who want to follow or blacklist. If you want to be a part of the conversation every week, let me know and I’ll add you to the taglist!  @tjswritingstuff​  @gettingitwrite​@gooseandcaboose​ @julesruleswrites​ @dawnhorizons​ @kd-holloman​  @reininginthefirewriting @writingonesdreams​ @brb-writing @celstefani​  @kirstenmcwriter @no-negativity-writes @bardicfool @nemowritesstuff @wortfinder @katekyo-bitch-reborn @weareallfallengods @carnationwrites @seylaaurora @naavakaiho

[wortfinder]

Writing is 50% “I have no idea what I’m doing” and 50% “I am a genius”.

[wortfinder]

Fun little thing about medieval medicine.

So there’s this old German remedy for getting rid of boils. A mix of eggshells, egg whites, and sulfur rubbed into the boil while reciting the incantation and saying five Paternosters. And according to my prof’s friend (a doctor), it’s all very sensible. The eggshells abrade the skin so the sulfur can sink in and fry the boil. The egg white forms a flexible protective barrier. The incantation and prayers are important because you need to rub it in for a certain amount of time.

It’s easy to take the magic words as superstition, but they’re important.

[wortfinder]

I am the rare animal of ADHD without pronounced generalized anxiety. I got myself a lovely case of traumatic anxiety 1 1/2 years ago, but am now back on my baseline, or even better, because I got some therapy and could smooth out some bumps. But we DO exist. 

Tips on writing a character who’s ADHD

Courtesy of yours truly, an actual person with ADHD (who’s just slightly sick of bad ADHD characterisations)

We don’t ramble randomly, we infodump. I see a lot of writers writing ADHD characters as speaking these enormous, unbroken paragraphs on essentially whatever topic happens to be current, which isn’t how ADHD works. We might be long-winded at times (though really, not any more than non-ADHDers are,) but when it comes to those signature rambles, it’s about a topic we’ve hyperfixated on. Often, these topics seem random to NTs, but for us it’s very specific and topical. Often times, I’ll have only a handful of functioning hyperfixations at a time, and it’s usually something you can put under a specific header (cold war history/biology/etc., a particular band/genre, a specific show, and so forth.) My advice? Get a sense of your character’s hyperfixations before you write it in; Rick Riordan does a fantastic, albeit slightly heavy-handed, job of doing this with Leo Valdez in Heroes of Olympus. (another VERY IMPORTANT tip: just don’t write big unbroken paragraphs of rambling if you’re expecting me to actually read that shit. As an ADHDer it’s like physically painful for me to try and sift through that lmao)

We experience a wide range of emotions, and we experience them very strongly (AKA we’re not just balls of hyperactivity and joy.) Intense emotions are a hallmark of ADHD, which is why a lot of the time we seem super happy and energetic all the time to non-ADHDers. It’s a L O T more socially acceptable for us to express the intense happiness we feel, not so much the other emotions we feel just as intensely. Particularly for impulsive-type ADHDers, the main emotions we struggle to regulate are excitability, irritability, frustration, and dysphoria, all of which are emotions we’re taught from a very young age to be ashamed of and hide (which happens, in my experience, like this: you exhibit the strong emotion, you act in a way that is seen as unreasonably intense to non-ADHDers, and rather than learn to cope with the intensity of the emotion we’re taught to turn it inwards.) When we experience these intense negative emotions, we internalise it like we’re taught to, and our emotions appear more subdued to the people around us, though we still experience them intensely. We’ll typically close off and downplay our state if pressed, but in my experience we open up to people who we know to be ADHD/ND. That being said, we’re not always able to internalise it–especially (honestly, almost exclusively) when stressors pile up/when we’ve dealt with it for so long–and that’s when we explode. Because we experience emotion a lot more intensely than non-ADHDers, we almost always cry when this happens. I’m talkin’ ugly cry people. I’ve got hella information on the subtleties of a good ol’ fashioned ADHD-brand meltdown, which would make this post even longer than it’s already doomed to be, so if you’re interested in some tips on that feel free to shoot me an ask!

Our thought process is not random; we have highly-associative brains. Please. For the love of GOD. Stop fucking characterising us along that “OOH SQUIRREL” line of bullshit. I’ll come directly to your house and curse your shins to bump against every coffee table you encounter. Don’t fucking test me. Our thought process is highly-associative, which essentially means our brain makes more connexions between memories and thoughts when they’re being solidified, which results in memories triggering thoughts that wouldn’t occur to non-ADHDers. These links might seem tenuous when you don’t have a highly-associative brain, but they’re there, and they’re fairly evident on the part of the person with ADHD. And as a writer nota bene, don’t retroactively make these associations–in other words, don’t try to justify the link after it’s made just because a subject change is plot convenient for you. Try your best to make these transitions organic if you’re gonna include them. A good example of this is Jake Peralta in Brooklyn Nine Nine: he makes pretty sizeable leaps in topic, but the transitions always make sense.

ADHD is highly comorbid with other neurodivergencies. I’ve not met a single person with ADHD who is *only* ADHD; I personally have almost ten other neurodivergencies I’ve been diagnosed with. The most common comorbidities are: anxiety/depression (every ADHDer I know has at least one if not both of them,) autism spectrum disorder, and dyslexia. ADHD is a developmental disorder, which means our brains are fundamentally structurally different from NT brains, and this lends itself to the presence and development of other conditions. Don’t be afraid of including those other conditions/symptoms in your character’s story for realism! That being said, for the most of us, our ADHD is the most prominent condition we have, so we identify with it the most. The way we often see it, ADHD is the *main* condition, and the others feel like tag-alongs (this isn’t always the case and it isn’t always true, but that’s how we tend to interpret it.)

Our symptoms get worse when we get tired or stressed, but especially tired. When we’re stressed but reasonably rested/fed, we typically have the mental faculties to perform pseudo-neurotypically (we do decently well with controlling our symptoms,) though they might become slightly more pronounced. Lack of sleep/mental rest amplifies our symptoms and inhibits our ability to control them, most noticeably in our working memory (remembering/following instructions, immediate task completion, concentration, etc.) Just as NT/non-ADHDers become scatter-brained as they get increasingly stressed, so do ADHDers. The two main differences are that 1) it’s more pronounced and has a lower threshold, and 2) we (conveniently for you!) have a set list of symptoms that are going to react predictably to this.

We are very aware of our symptoms, thank you very much. While there will be times where my symptoms slip out and I’m not paying attention to them, nine times out of ten I’m very painfully aware of how non-NT I’m acting. When I simply can’t slow down my speech for the life of me, when I feel myself rambling about a hyperfixation, when I get stressed over something little and have an emotional outburst, I know. A lot of authors miss this, but ADHDers are very early made aware of why we’re perceived as different, and often times that’s done so at the expense of our self-esteem. Our ADHD doesn’t exist in a vacuum in our minds, and we’re very often self-conscious about how we’re socially read because of it. If you’re trying to get into the mind of a character with ADHD, that’s an important dimension to keep in mind. The self-consciousness factor is usually diminished when we’re around ppl who know that we’re ADHD, but when they show up around people we haven’t told we’re ADHD, we’re not usually quite so keen to share it. While this probably isn’t the same for all people with ADHD, it’s been my experience at the very least.

Anyhow this has been sitting in my drafts for God knows how long, so I’ll just release it into the wild. ADHDers, if you have any other tips, or want to share your experience, please feel free to add on!

[wortfinder]

On Representation, Diversity, and “have characters of color just don’t write about the experience of being a person of color”

Alright. I’m gonna piss a bunch of people off and also confuse a bunch of well-intentioned white people because I don’t think that you can write about a character of color without talking about the experience of being a person of color of a certain culture.

Seriously. There’s so many conversations celebrating how people have narratives where it “doesn’t matter” that one of their characters is a person of color and that their characters’ identity as a person of color “doesn’t affect the storyline” or whatever.

I’m going to cut right to the chase here: as a reader and storyteller of color, I’m not a fan of narratives where race doesn’t affect the story.

My race and culture and ethnicity ABSOLUTELY impact the way I perceive the world around me! For instance, many South Asian families bond with lively debates and discussions and lovingly roasting their family members. The way that I develop positive relationships, often with a solid dose of conflict and loudness and argument, is therefore fundamentally different from the way a white person would develop relationships; in fact, many white people are intimidated by how loud South Asians like myself are. We’re dramatic and loud and love jokes with wordplay! That’s just how it is and it means I form bonds with people differently.

I also have different values. White people are often more individualistic in culture, with more weird distant formal bonds with their parents (shit like referring to their parents by first name or, on the other end of the spectrum, calling their dads “sir”???) as opposed to the more comfortable and closer bond I have with my parents, where my family is all up in my shit literally all the time LMAO.

Literally white families are SO DISTANT to the point where white people consider practices like co-sleeping with your young child, something very common in South Asian families, to be child abuse?? Like, as if keeping your baby in a crib in another room where they’re not close to you and it’s harder to hear them isn’t dangerous but apparently suffocating a child while sleeping (which is very rare especially since co-sleeping is a practice that has gone on for MILLENNIA) is the bigger threat here??

White kids might perceive that as invasive or a violation of their privacy; I don’t perceive it that way because of the way South Asian families are structured. There’s a stronger emphasis on closeness with family. Of course, there are situations of kids being estranged or difficult family relationships or child abuse in South Asian families as well, but family is more valued in my culture.

The plants I put in my garden are different because of my identity; flowers like bela (Arabian jasmine) and bougainvillea and roses and gladiolus and marigolds and such things are what I’m fond of because of biases based on what my parents and grandparents like. I even once grew nenua (a type of squash). (I’m gonna get my hands on a raat ki rani soon I hope!!) And, of course, not every South Asian is partial to these flowers, but there’s definitely a cultural aspect as to why I personally like them!

The colors and patterns I gravitate towards are also different! I’m not a big fan of western “neutrals” and I find bright colors more appealing, especially because hey, those vibrant shades look better on brown skin! And GUESS WHAT, part of why the western world gravitates towards neutral colors in formalwear is because of colonialism and a disdain for the vibrant colors and dyes that colonized countries used. I love wearing jhumka earrings and statement necklaces and bright, vibrant jewelry as well. Now, obviously, this isn’t the case with every South Asian, but there is certainly some level of impact on these choices from my culture and upbringing.

Hell, even the food I eat is different! I drink chai in the evenings. I gravitate towards spicier dishes and better seasoning. I don’t eat meat other than fish/seafood and chicken and occasionally turkey because of cultural stuff, though ofc lots of South Asians are vegetarian and on the flip side lots of South Asians DO eat red meat and stuff.

And this isn’t even universal to ALL South Asians by any means, because my parents are specifically Hindu and from northeastern India and I’ve grown up in California! And there’s so many other details I could go into but for the sake of not writing a twelve-page essay I’m stopping here. 

Basically, my point is, I don’t want representation where race “doesn’t matter” to the story. Race impacts so many aspects of my life and how I perceive and interact with the world around me.

It’s ridiculous to me how so much “representation” is basically just starting with a default of a white character, making her brown, avoiding the stereotypes, and that’s….it. It doesn’t feel real. It doesn’t feel authentic to take away cultural impacts on your characters. People start with white western archetypes and tropes and try to mold them to fit characters of color, instead of starting off with an authentic character of color, and it really, really shows.

Especially because Tumblr and writeblr are such white spaces, and also because culture is usually picked up from the environment as opposed to online, the conversations centered around “representation” are always about “don’t do x stereotypes” as opposed to how to actually learn about other cultures and actually….write a character of color. So many of y’all only know how to NOT write a character of color as opposed to how to ACTUALLY write a character of color.

I see so many lists of tropes and things to not include in stories, and not enough things about values and family structures and food and fashion and ways of developing relationships and all that fun stuff that will shape who you are as a person.

And some of y’all don’t even TRY to, I dunno, engage with the culture of your character of color to actually write them. For instance, if you’re writing a South Asian character, go explore South Asian cinema! Go make South Asian friends who can tell you little details about their lives as they, y’know, exist and are your friend! In general, explore the movies and literature and music and dance types and food and drink and whatnot of the culture your character is from! Form relationships with people of those cultures; it’s the internet! I know this is a super white space but there’s PLENTY of poc on here! Make an effort, not just to avoid harmful stereotypes, but to write a character of color whose identity actually MATTERS.

When I’m reading escapist fantasy/sci-fi/romcom/etc. literature where characters aren’t being hurt by racism, I don’t want a story where RACE doesn’t exist, I want a story where RACISM doesn’t exist. I want cultural understanding, empathy, and compassion!

I don’t want a role a white character would play just switched out with a character of color.

For instance, in the movie To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, Lara Jean’s identity as East Asian is reflected in her fashion choices; book author Jenny Han lent inspiration for this. The Yakult drinks she likes, inspired by Korean tastebuds, plays a role in the story, too. These are details that don’t necessarily heavily impact the plot; it’s a fake-dating high school romcom. But they make a more real, fleshed-out character. They’re little details, little in-jokes and references, showing that the character’s race and culture actually MATTER to the story.

There’s a part in Pacific Rim where Raleigh Beckett, a white man, is frustrated with Mako Mori, a Japanese woman, for not going against the wishes of her father figure, Pentecost. When he tells her she doesn’t have to obey him, she responds, “It’s not obedience, Mr. Beckett. It’s respect.” This depicts her cultural understanding of family and respect; her relationships and her responses to things are impacted by her culture.

This is what I’m talking about! In order to write an actual character of color, you MUST write about their experiences to a certain extent. Of course, don’t make your characters of a certain culture a monolith in terms of personalities and responses and all that, but understand how they may be similarly impacted by their identities.

Now, don’t write a whole damn novel about a character coming to terms with their racial identity and coping with racism, but you absolutely MUST holistically incorporate their identity into your narrative.

Otherwise, it’s not actually representation. It’s you essentially writing a racebent white character. It’s you using a white default and trying to adapt it to totally different experiences.

[wortfinder]

What did RWA do, if I may ask?

I included a link to a thread that explains everything that is going on, but basically, the Romance Writers of America association has decided to side with ethical claims against Courtney Milan, because she fired back against racism in the genre.

Y’know, the thing an association that claims to be progressive and inclusive should want people to do. But yeah, nah. Certain authors were white—I mean—quite upset at Milan for calling out their racism, and this is apparently the hill the RWA has chosen to set itself on fire on. So go off, I guess.

[wortfinder]

Lemme get this straight; the RWA basically imploded over a couple of hack authors not taking criticism well?

“Hack” is… not quite the right word I’d use for a number of the authors involved. Some of them are bestsellers with rather long and profitable careers. But then again, there’s no accounting for the taste of conservative rich white women, their expendable income, and the droves in which they support other Nice White Ladies who hold, shall we say, certain values.

But yes, to put it bluntly, the RWA chose a racist hill to die on then nuked itself out of orbit with every new layer of scandal that’s been revealed since. I’m honestly not sure how they thought this was going to turn out, but whatever it was, they thought wrong.

If nothing else, the racists have come out of the woodwork in their droves to defend their own, showing their entire asses for everyone to see, which again, weird cliff to die on but I suppose if their victim complexes make them happy…