The Grand Olympic Library

The Need to Stay

To clarify, this work is not about cannibalism or kink. It is a response to a poem someone I was in a very bad relationship with wrote me, which is why it might seem confusing.

So if your story has a twist, don’t worry about whether or not people guess it! Just make sure it’s the sort of twist that would make the average reader:

A) feel very galaxy-brained for connecting the dots

B) shriek with joy and shout “I knew it! I was right! I knew it!” when the time comes for the Reveal

Dicelings, I'm blown away! I never thought a year ago when I started taking pictures of my (then much smaller!) collection of click-clack math rocks that over 3000 people would like it and want to hang around! But here you all are and I'm so honored!

So to give a little something back to all of you, have a giveaway!

Prizes:

There are two sets of prizes!

Set one:

A mini dice tray in a brown wood stain, with your choice of felt color!

(This tray has minor aesthetic flaws in the stain, because sometimes the wood doesn't take the color well. 🤷‍♀️)

You will also recieve three randomly choosen sets of dice from these sets!

Set two:

Set two will also include three randomly chosen sets from the above picture, as well as an 11 piece set of bubblegum dice!

Rules:

1. You must be following me. (It's a follower giveaway after all!)

2. A like and one reblog each count as entries. (So everyone can have 2 total entries.)

3. Entries can be made until 12pm PST on October 31st. Winners will be chosen and contacted on November 1st.

4. The first winner will get to choose set 1 or set 2, the second winner will receive the other option.

I give it MASCLES

And I wanna stress that when i say “top of the leg” i’m not talking about the crotch (please don’t flag me tumblr it’s an anatomical term) i’m talking about the point where the femur connects to the pelvis, which is higher up on the hips:

It’s easier to see what I’m talking about in this photo of a man squatting: 

So yeah if you use that measurement when using this technique you should get fairly realistically proportioned legs:

But remember! messing with proportions is an important and fun part of character design! Know the rules first so you can then break them however you please!

It is very important that the language in your novel reflects the time and place in which the story is set.

For example, my story is set in Italy. My characters would never “ride shotgun”, a term coined in US in the early 1900s referring to riding alongside the driver with a shotgun to gun bandits. 

Do your research! A free tool that I found to be very useful is Ngram Viewer. 

You can type any word and see when it started appearing in books. For example…one of my characters was going to say “gazillion” (I write YA) in 1994. Was “gazillion” used back then?

And the answer is…YES! It started trending in 1988 and was quite popular in 1994.

For example, did you know that before 1986 people never said “I need to”?Instead, they were far more likely to say “I ought to”, “I have to”, “I must”, or “I should”.

Don’t believe me?

Anyway, most people won’t notice subtle changes like that. But your reader will notice and be confused when characters in your medieval world use metaphors involving railroads and rockets.

One of the things you can do besides use Google Ngrams is to read books or watch movies written in the time period you want to set your story. The key here is that they can’t just be set in that time period, they have to have been made in that time period.