Writeblr ~ Les Contes de Rhéio

me: yeah, i posted on tumblr

publisher: .........tumblr?

me: that's where the gays are.

publisher: And what is your marketing strategy on... tumblr?

me: idk, i shitpost at 2am?

publisher: .....and it works?

me: depends on what the gays find funny at that point in time.

publisher: Could I have a link to your tumblr?

me: .......absolutely not.

publisher: I've been looking into tumblr, have you thought of using Blaze to promote your book?

me: NO

publisher: But it seems like an efficient way to get this in front of more eyes-

me: people on tumblr hate Blaze.

publisher: There is no algorithm and you can't pay to promote a post? I don't understand how anyone advertises anything on tumblr.

me: That's the best part. They don't. They can't.

(trying to make him understand that we do not control the attention. We just have to show something shiny and gay enough and if people are interested, they'll reblog.)

in terms of cleanliness, dirty clothes harbor fleas, lice, and bacteria, which can turn a scuffed knee into a septic leg into a cause of death if you’re not careful. in terms of mending, a proverb from the period in question expresses it best: “a stitch in time saves nine.” a small tear or threadbare patch can unravel an entire garment if you don’t mend it early, and in a time when cloth production is so labor intensive and the margins of survival (for ALL classes but ESPECIALLY the working class) are so thin, the added effort of making a whole new coat when you also need to be weaving cloth for the market, mending the fishing nets, and preparing the winter blankets might be the straw that breaks your household’s back.

Hello friends! I've gotten a few questions/praise around my work ethic so I thought I'd share how I go about it. This might be helpful for some, but my biggest advice is find what works for you!

First off, I just have a lot of free time. I'm currently (voluntarily) unemployed and living off of my savings and a few friends whom I do commissions for and they tip extra the lovelies <3

I don't pay a lot in rent because of a tiny apartment and I don't eat/splurge a lot, but I'm still not earning a positive income so I'll probably have to get at least a part-time job eventually.

If you're curious, I have a glorified bachelor degree in game development (which is really just a software engineer with extra steps) that I completed a year ago. AI came out during that time and now the job I studied for has become flooded with work I find ethically disgusting... so I won't do it! I decided I'd much rather be creative for a 'living'.

Anyway, all that is to say that I'm pretty fortunate not to be bogged down by a job. That of course doesn't mean I don't have other obligations or a social life that needs maintaining ^^

All that aside, here's how I work:

Whenever I know I have an hour to spare, I'll start a 25 min timer on the dot, open choicescript (I use Visual Studio as my IDE), and get to writing. Unrelated but I listen to a lot of rain/waves/fire crackling or acoustic guitar/piano in that time.

If I'm doing a new section I'll often speed write to get a basic structure down. I can get around 500-700 words in during that 25 min timer. This is very unpolished, focused entirely on getting basic descriptions and dialogue down and never backtracking to fix typos or the like. I won't try to 'mask' characters emotions, stating outright what they feel and I also don't focus on details or pacing. I like to call this manuscripting since dialogue and actions are the only importance. If I get stuck on a small section/branch, I merely comment TODO and move the fuck on.

If I'm not speed writing, I'm editing and coding. This is slower on the word count and requires a little more brain power, but it ensures the writing stays competent lmao. Sometimes writing Den will have left comments of ideas/branches/tone that editing Den will have to take a critical look at and go... that's brilliant! But also fuck no you dimwit that would be too much work *sigh*

On the organisational front I have all the major story beats for each chapter and a few key scenes. Before I write any chapter I'll map out the scenes I want in more detail. Chapter 2 has performance night as a major scene... plus five other major scenes (including the Stagebound finale). These are interchanged with smaller scenes at school, at home, or with Dr. Henriksen. By my estimation... this chapter will be a behemoth! Probably well past 100k words, but who cares, more content for you to (hopefully) enjoy!

Anyway, when the timer is up, I have the remaining 35 minutes to do whatever the fuck I want. Sometimes that's answering asks (I do this a lot on the go too), playing a game, or watching a video. This keeps me sane and recharges me to jump back into writing when the next hour rolls around ^^

This is just what I found works for me. Also word count isn't everything, but I just like to have a tangible goal for each week because it keeps me going.

Staring at the ceiling, unable to move, unable to think, unable to do anything.

Crying and screaming, not being able to deal with it anymore, but also not being able to get away from it.

Breathing through it and feeling some relief. Okay. I can do this. I'm still in control. I can still handle this. Just breathe. Just focus on your breathing.

Breathing through it and feeling no relief at all. Slowly losing your grip on your coping mechanisms. Decending into panic and desperation. Hyperventilating.

Doing okay with the pain until one small extra thing suddenly completely sends you over the edge.

Rocking back and forth. Trying to sooth yourself and distract yourself. Fidgeting. Biting your lip. Bitting your nails.

Pulling on your hair to create new pain to distract you from the existing one.

Getting dizzy and nauseous just from the pain.

Drifting in and out of consciousness. Welcoming the softening edges of the pain as you're slowly drifting off.

Constant chronic pain that might not be that severe but becomes completely overwhelming to your mind simply because its always there.

Sharp unexpected blunt pain that suprises you and makes you yell out, all of your brain consumed by the sudden wave of agony as adrenaline rushes through your system and you're awareness completely shrinks to the sensation or the injury.

start / begin ➙ they either do or don't do an action, even if it is interrupted

somehow ➙ find a way to describe it or, if it matters that they don't know how something happened, make it its own sentence. somehow is very lackluster

that ➙ if the sentence makes sense after you remove it, do it

useless modifiers (really, very, certainly, probably, actually, quite, ...) ➙ emphasis on useless: many can be helpful, but many are not

dialogue tags ➙ don't cut them always, but you can leave them out or replace them with action tags for more variety

down / up ➙ often times they are not needed (I sat down vs. I sat)

wonder, think, realize, understand, feel ➙ especially in narration, these are signs of telling, not showing. Instead of "I wondered where he was." you can write "Where was he?"

"There is/was..." ➙ very formulaic and getting rid of as many as possible will make for more variety in sentence structures

Find your own! Every writer will have individual habits, so when you are proofreading your stuff, try to notice your own patterns. Feel free to add onto this post :)

Disclaimer: these words definitely can be very useful when they are used intentionally, especially if they are not overused. When I say to "cut" these words, I mean to question whether they are strengthening or weakening the sentence in every instance.

[ survey.gendercensus.com ]

The 13th annual international gender census, collecting information about the language we use to refer to ourselves and each other, is now open until 13th August 2026.

It’s short and easy, for most participants it takes 5 minutes or less.

After the survey is closed I’ll process the results and publish a spreadsheet of the data and a report summarising the main findings. Then anyone can use them for academic or business purposes, self-advocacy, tracking the popularity of language over time, and just feeling like we’re part of a huge and diverse community.

If you think you might have friends and followers who’d be interested, please do reblog this blog post, and share the survey URL by email or at AFK social groups or on other social networks. Every share is extremely helpful!

Survey URL: https://survey.gendercensus.com

The survey is open to anyone anywhere who speaks English and feels that the gender binary doesn’t fully describe their experience of themselves and their gender(s) or lack thereof.

Thank you so much!

[ Link to survey ]

PS: You can see some regularly-updated statistics about incoming data here, with lots of demography and graphs to peruse!

people who write things other than fanfics (as in OCs)

how do you like...get started

i have concepts i have my barebones characters but aside from that i'm like howwww do i start where do i pull the first thread from

Sometimes I have a certain scene in mind when I get started, so I'll build around that scene. I'll start by writing it, then consider how the story got to that point in time, and what happens after it. Sometimes that helps me a lot, too.

If you have a general vibe for the story, maybe consider the different themes or topics you think would best fit the idea you have in your head, and build stories from there.

And, of course, if you have characters but no idea what to do with them, one of the more fun ways to get some ideas is to listen to songs that remind you of your characters and see if you can't glean some inspiration from them whether in regards to further developing your characters or their stories.

My starting point is always a scene, and generally I try to develop what happened before and/or after. As characters add up, I develop them by having them talk to each other, to themselves and little by little I get an understanding of who they are.

While I’ve never fully analysed the beginning of my process, it’s pretty obvious I’m systematically answering certain questions. How did we get to that point? Where do we go now? How their past impacts my characters current lives and helps to connect or on the contrary hinders their relationships? I also seek points of tension and conflicts between the various characters/factions. Why do they agree? Why can’t they agree? Where does their inability to understand each other come from?

I used to use Google docs, but the white mode only was really annoying me (tires my eyes), so I swapped to Ellipsus (which I genuinely love and recommend), but it was bothering me a bit that I need wifi in order to use it, so now I switched to LibreOffice Writer, which I do like.

It very much has a Microsoft Word feel, but is open source and you need no accounts to use it. It's local on your device, so no AI can scan it, and no wifi is needed.

But I also DO use Notepad too hahaha - Notepad is beautiful and I will hear no slander! sometimes you just gotta have the simple expedient of not wanting your fic to end up being network traffic away from home, and a little perfectly un-cloud-linked, simple monospace font is exactly what you need.

In gdocs do all my initial edits in a serif font, then switch to a sans-serif font for another several edit passes, then reach out to my beta. Lastly I add all my formatting html myself, and then put the draft into AO3's plaintext editor and I read it through again on both my phone and on a desktop to see if I like the way everything is situated.

Unfortunately, wishful thinking aside, google docs simply does not yet have a competitor that can match it in portability (or USABILITY) across devices, and I write on my phone, my home laptop, my tablet outdoors, and workstations at my university.

Ellipsus is a project that started out very promising and has quickly turned into something concerning, unfortunately.

The choice to use markdown is... odd. I’m not really sure why they’ve gone that route for something that is geared towards creative writing, but... yeah. The interest in markdown that the internet currently has cannot go away fast enough for me.

And it definitely still feels like a project in beta. The UI is so fucking awkward. There’s the floating top header that shows the word count and has the focus mode and timer buttons, but it comes and goes with how you scroll and it’s so fucking annoying. And you can’t change its behavior! >:\

On desktop, you end up with this weird amount of space being used that doesn’t need to be. The bottom of the page has a floating widget for formatting that hovers way too high above the very bottom of the page, leading to your writing getting covered up by it and eventually going down past it — just, what in the fuckity? And why do I need this if I have the sidebar buttons to format via and vice versa? Why can I collapse the sidebar, which has things other than the formatting stuff, and not do anything about that stupid floating footer???

I hate this! The desktop UI genuinely has kept me from using Ellipsus more than I had wanted to in the past. The rolling out of monetization when they’re clearly too small to properly support it has left a bad taste in my mouth, too.

And now there’s hush hush speak about how some of their investors are AI companies. This is really curious given Ellipsus’ stance on AI and scraping.

An example of how this has helped me was in this section here; the first photo is the first draft and the second is the final version of this scene. I mostly used The Emotion Thesaurus for this; the emotion being conveyed here is relief and relaxing after suppressing stress for a long time, but S himself isn’t really aware of his own emotional state here and I could not use those words to describe what he was feeling inwardly. So instead I used what he feels in his body and his surface rationalization, and it just reads so nicely this way imo.