Pieces of my Mind

“For most dialogue, use a comma after the sentence and don’t capitalize the next word after the quotation mark,” she said.

“But what if you’re using a question mark rather than a period?” they asked.

“When using a dialogue tag, you never capitalize the word after the quotation mark unless it’s a proper noun!” she snapped.

“When breaking up a single sentence with a dialogue tag,” she said, “use commas.”

“This is a single sentence,” she said. “Now, this is a second stand-alone sentence, so there’s no comma after ‘she said.’”

Anyway I was bitching about how hard it is to come up with feasible planets in Star Wars because sometimes you need a new planet from scratch and sometimes you need to know more about a planet than the 'has jungles, is probably a moon technically' than Wookieepedia will give you, and they're like 'oh yeah I can do something about that'.

So they've written (in Matlab but they swear it will run as a .exe as well and I may be conscripted to embed it as a web tool at some point) a star system generator.

You input what you know about the planet (ecosystem, population, sun colour, does it have liquid water, does it have a moon or moons, is it a moon or moons, temperature averages, atmosphere, you get me) and it will give you the... everything else about the star system, in obedience to real-universe physics. And if you input nothing you get a randomly generated star system.

And I’m like oh I know people who will be into this with a vengeance, and they're not on Tumblr, so this is me seeing who exactly would be keen on, and I cannot stress this enough, a real-physics comprehensive star system generator.

You are:

Letting me know that my character/fic is important to you, which is so very important to me.

Making me think deeper about my character and therefore expanding his/her personality or backstory.

Making me think about my character which helps me to overcome writer’s block.

Encouraging me in my writing (which, let’s be honest, it’s a battle)

Letting me know that I am seen and that I’m not doing this for nothing.

So thank you, and don’t ever feel like you are wasting my time by asking me anything about anything.

"I feel dead inside all the time and nothing helps!" - character who does like, regular introspective thinking and is aware of the concept of mental health.

"Leave me the fuck alone I'll be fine once I get over my stupid shit." - repressed character.

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: ウマ娘 プリティーダービー | Uma Musume: Pretty Derby (Video Game), ウマ娘 プリティーダービー | Uma Musume: Pretty Derby (Anime) Rating: General Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Manhattan Cafe & Nice Nature, Agnes Tachyon & Manhattan Cafe (Uma Musume) Characters: Nice Nature (Uma Musume), Manhattan Cafe (Uma Musume), Agnes Tachyon (Uma Musume), Smart Falcon (Uma Musume), original trainer character - Character Additional Tags: Not Canon Compliant, or rather, it’s a mix of canons, Unusual Friendships, The power of SCIENCE!, the power of FRIENDSHIP!, The power of FREAKING GHOSTS!, Team Dynamics, Nice Nature’s self-worth issues, Manhattan Cafe’s haunting issues, Agnes Tachyon’s … Issues, Smart Falcon doesn’t have many issues, THANKFULLY, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, as things develop, i have a plan, but I’m also winging it Summary:

“Would you mind getting a Teammate?” “A kohai… for me… What do you think?” It would mean changes. But it might also be… interesting.

This is still a bit unpolished, but since the friends I tapped for feedback haven't gotten back to me in the arbitrary timespan of "before I get impatient", I'm posting it here anyway.

The room was quiet this evening. Just how I liked it best, really. I could relax on the couch with a cup of coffee in my hand and a book in front of me. 

The curtains kept the afternoon sunlight from disturbing the comfortable gloom of my corner, while still providing enough light to read without needing my standing lamp. 

With the laboratory half of the room thankfully devoid of its usually energetic proprietor, the only one keeping me company was my friend, whose shadowy form was currently silently perched on Tachyon’s office chair, gently rotating.

It was the kind of relaxed afternoon I had been hoping for when Trainer had told me I should take the week off training and focus on resting. 

So, of course, I was mildly irritated when I heard my phone buzzing in my bag. 

I ignored it, but it didn't take long before another short burst of noise signalled another message arriving. 

A sigh escaped me as I rose, unwilling to wait for an inevitable third, fourth or fifth message or, goddesses forbid, a call. 

The list of people who would write to me on my day off was rather small, after all, and most of them were not the type to let silence go unanswered. 

Surprisingly, mercifully, the phone remained silent even until I had fished it out and unlocked it. The two messages, it turned out, were from one of the few people who could be relied on to restrain their texting to only the essentials. 

The cheerful face of a human woman with brown-blonde curls and a wide grin greeted me, a selfie with Tracen’s main turf course in the background accompanying the first message: ‘I figured I’d take the opportunity to check out the newest round of tryouts, this year’s Fungs are a really talented bunch!’ 

Nearly three years under her care had left me with plenty of practice reading the romaji that she insisted on using instead of learning how to use a japanese keyboard, and I only had to pause for a moment over the english slang she’d injected, but the second message made me freeze for an uncomfortably long time. 

‘Would you be okay with getting a teammate?’ 

A teammate. The thought was a strange one. I’d had plenty of training with Agnes Tachyon, Dantsu Flame and Jungle Pocket. Even Fuji Kiseki had recently joined us a few times, under Nabe-san’s watchful eye. 

But training with friends was something else than having a Team, of that I was sure. It would mean changes. It would mean someone new in my life, someone who would be here not for me but to learn what I learned, be guided by the hands that guided me. It was scary, the thought that someone else I don't know might be suddenly so close… 

But it might also be interesting? 

The sudden presence of my Friend by my side made me look up. Her form was indistinct in the half-light, and despite looming like she had been reading over my shoulder, she was now turning away from me, denying me a look at her face, as always. 

“What do you think? A kouhai for me…” 

She shrugged, as if saying ‘What are you asking me for’. But then she faced in the direction of the training field …. 

she ran ahead, disappearing through the wall with an excited laugh. 

A tiny smile twitched across my lips, and I returned my eyes to the phone screen as I settled back down on the couch and tapped the reply field.

On the other side of the campus, a young foreign woman with blonde-brown hair and a trainer’s badge laid her phone down on the grass next to her as she watched her fellow trainers begin flooding the field. She smirked quietly at some of her colleagues tripping over themselves or each other in their haste to introduce themselves to this season’s young hopefuls, most of whom were eagerly waving at the crowd or posing to draw as many eyes as they could, especially from those of her colleagues who were avoiding the rapidly forming crowd around today's brightest star. 

Tokai Teio had drawn so much attention with her incredible run and her adorable antics before and after that, despite an unusually large turnout of trainers, the other prospective trainees would only have slim pickings, at least until Teio made her decision. 

A ‘ping’ sound drew her attention back down to her phone, and her smirk became an astonished smile as she read the unusually wordy reply from her first (but hopefully soon not only) trainee: ‘I look forward to it. Good Luck.’ 

With that, Trainer Jeanne jumped up, patted some grass off her pants and made her way down to the one student who had caught her eye today. She went past what was now starting to form into an almost orderly queue and past a few colleagues that had already abandoned the effort and were heading towards some of the other, less embattled Umamusume. Her own target, however, was just past where Teio was holding court, still standing alone by virtue of being in the metaphorical shadow to the young Monarch’s brightness. 

And isn't that a nostalgic thought… 

Jeanne’s smile grew wider as the young Umamusume became aware of the trainer heading her way with clear intent to scout. 

The girl brushed a few strands of strikingly rust-coloured hair from her brow and put on one of the best customer service smiles the Trainer had ever seen. 

the minute you say a number your readers can check your math and you cannot do math better than your most autistic critic. i guarantee. don't let your readers do any math. when did something happen? awhile ago. how many bullets can that gun fire? trick question, it shoots lasers, and it shoots em HARD.

How fast do those projectiles shoot?

Very, the guns are long and new.

How much punishment can those ships take?

Not as much as we thought, the enemy weapons are unknown!

How long ago did mankind start colonizing space?

Many generations before earth was blockaded and quarantined.

How long ago was that?

reasons for this:

basically TvTropes breaks down stories mechanically, using a perspective that’s not…ABOUT mechanics. Another way I like to put it, is that it’s an inductive, instead of deductive, approach to analyzing storytelling.

like in a literature or writing class you’re learning the elements that are part of the basic functioning of a story, so, character, plot, setting, et cetera. You’re learning the things that make a story a story, and why. Like, you learn what setting is, what defines it, and work from there to what makes it effective, and the range of ways it can be effective.

here’s the thing, though: everyone has some intuitive understanding of how stories work. if we didn’t, we couldn’t…understand stories.

TvTropes’s approach is bottom-up instead of top-down: instead of trying to exhaustively explore the broad, general elements of story, it identifies very small, specific elements, and explores the absolute shit out of how they fit, what they do, where they go, how they work.

Every TvTropes article is basically, “Here is a piece of a story that is part of many different stories. You have probably seen it before, but if not, here is a list of stories that use it, where it is, and what it’s doing in those stories. Here are some things it does. Here is why it is functionally different than other, similar story pieces. Here is some background on its origins and how audiences respond to it.”

all of this is BRILLIANT for a lot of reasons. one of the major ones is that the site has long lists of media that utilizes any given trope, ranging from classic literature to cartoons to video games to advertisements. the Iliad and Adventure Time ARE different things, but they are MADE OF the same stuff. And being able to study dozens of examples of a trope in action teaches you to see the common thread in what the trope does and why its specific characteristics let it do that

I love TvTropes because a great, renowned work of literature and a shitty, derivative YA novel will appear on the same list, because they’re Made Of The Same Stuff. And breaking down that mental barrier between them is good on its own for developing a mechanical understanding of storytelling.

But also? I think one of the biggest blessings of TvTropes’s commitment to cataloguing examples of tropes regardless of their “merit” or literary value or whatever…is that we get to see the full range of effectiveness or ineffectiveness of storytelling tools. Like, this is how you see what makes one book good and another book crappy. Tropes are Tools, and when you observe how a master craftsman uses a tool vs. a novice, you can break down not only what the tool is most effective for but how it is best used.

In fact? There are trope pages devoted to what happens when storytelling tools just unilaterally fail. e.g. Narm is when creators intend something to be frightening, but audiences find it hilarious instead.

On that note, TvTropes is also great in that its analysis of stories is very grounded in authors, audiences, and culture; it’s not solely focused on in-story elements. A lot of the trope pages are categories for audience responses to tropes, or for real-world occurrences that affected the storytelling, or just the human failings that creep into storytelling and affect it, like Early Installment Weirdness. There are categories for censorship-driven storytelling decisions. There are “lineages” of tropes that show how storytelling has changed over time, and how audience responses change as culture changes. Tropes like Draco in Leather Pants or Narm are catalogued because the audience reaction to a story is as much a part of that story—the story of that story?—as the “canon.”

please note that yes many of these are concepts that exist elsewhere and a few are even taught in fiction writing classes but TvTropes just does an amazing job at displaying the range of things that can be done with them

legitimately so much of the terminology I use to talk about storytelling, and even think about it in my own head, i learned about from TvTropes

Willing Suspension of Disbelief

Watsonian vs. Doylist

Trope Tropes, for all the ways tropes are used, deconstructed, subverted, and played with.

The Oldest Ones in the Book, which is basically my favorite thing on the entire Internet

Punk Punk, for -punk subgenres

Sliding Scale of Silliness vs. Seriousness, Sliding Scale of Idealism vs. Cynicism

The Weird Al Effect is a fun one

Chekhov’s Gun, Chekhov’s Boomerang, Chekhov’s Skill, and further variations

Law of Conservation of Detail

Law of Conservation of Normality

Anthropic Principle

Word of God, Death of the Author

Sliding Scale of Fourth Wall Hardness

Mohs Scale of Science Fiction Hardness

Genre Savvy

Flashbacks and Chronology breaks down all the ways you can handle chronology in storytelling

Show, Don’t Tell is a very good breakdown of what is showing, what is telling, and how both can be used effectively.

Lampshade Hanging

Noodle Incident is just fun imo

Genre Title Grab Bag

Fridge Horror

Rule of Cool, and also Cool of Rule

The Smurfette Principle

The Hays Code - not a trope but a very good breakdown of how the Hays Code affected storytelling in film

I present to you: the floating ao3 comment box!

From what I've seen, a big problem for many people is that once you reach the comments at the bottom of a fic, your memory of it miraculously disappears. Anything you wanted to say is stuck ten paragraphs ago, and you barely remember what you thought while reading. This fixes that!

I'll give a little explanation on the features and how it works, but if you want to skip all that, here's the link.

Edit: Yes, this also works on mobile!

The extension is visible as a small blue box in the upper left corner.

(Side note: The green colouring is not from the extension, that's me.)

If you click on it, you open a comment box window at the bottom of your screen but not at the bottom of the fic. I opened my own fic for demonstrative purposes.

The website also gives explanations on how exactly it functions, but I'll summarize regardless.

insert selection -> if you highlight a sentence in the fic it will be added in italics to the comment box

add to comment box -> once you're done writing your comment, you click this button and the entire thing will automatically copied to the ao3 comment box

delete -> self explanatory

on mulitchapter fics, you will be given the option to either add the comment to just the current chapter or the entire fic

The best part? You can simply close the window the same way you opened it and your progress will automatically be saved. So you can open it, comment on a paragraph, and then close it and keep reading without having the box in your face.

The Empire was built by those who first threw off the yoke of colonial oppresion, who harnessed new technologies to strike back against the tyrants that ruled us all from distant Sol.

When the fleet of the High Marshal held orbit above Old Earth and laid the once grand palaces of the colonial overlords to rubble and ash, there began the Empire's reign. Three times did the High Marshal pause the bombardment to demand surrender from those below. Three times, silence answered. Three times the guns spoke again, until finally all governments, all military bases and all starports were ash and dust.

This is true.

Thus it is written in the histories, thus it stands on the stele in Memorial Plaza.

But there is another truth. One that begins earlier, when the Fleet first entered Sol and met the last defenders of the old regimes. Before battle was joined, dozens of messages were received, offering peace talks. Offering terms of surrender. Attempting to end the war with some measure of dignity.

When the Home Fleets of Sol were cooling wrecks in the outer belt, when the High Marshal burned for Old Earth, more messages were received. Offering vassalage. Offering unconditional surrender. Begging for mercy.

When the first missiles came down, they targeted not the palaces, or the starports or the mustering fields. They targeted the antennae and dishes and relays.

Three times did the High Marshal demand surrender that had already been offered. Three times he was answered with silence of his own making.

This is true.

Thus it was written in the secret histories, kept by those in his court who wished to wash their hands of this barbarous act. Thus it stands in the diary that has now been uploaded to every public library in human space.

This, too, is true.

The Empire was founded on a Lie.

A Lie told to make people trade one distant Lord for another, a Lie told to make a Hero of a Butcher, and to make his children rich on the spoils of those that came to believe it.

The Fall of the Subspace Empire, some say, began the same moment it's rise did.

1. Slow down at emotionally important moments.

Big emotions need space to land. If a scene feels rushed, pause the plot briefly to show how the moment affects the character.

2. Add reactions, not explanations.

Instead of explaining what a character feels, show it through physical responses, hesitation, or small actions that reveal emotion naturally.

3. Ground every scene in the senses.

If a scene feels thin, add one or two sensory details—sound, texture, smell, or temperature—to make the moment feel lived-in.

4. Let thoughts interrupt action.

A line of internal thought can deepen a scene without slowing it too much. Thoughts show stakes, fear, longing, or conflict beneath the action.

5. Expand consequences, not events.

You don’t need more things to happen—you need to show what matters. Focus on how events change relationships, decisions, or self-perception.

6. Strengthen setting where emotion peaks.

The environment should echo or contrast the emotion of the scene. Setting is not decoration—it’s emotional reinforcement.

7. Add specific details instead of general ones.

Underwriting often relies on vague language. Swap “they argued” for one sharp line of dialogue or a specific breaking point.

8. Let dialogue breathe.

Short dialogue exchanges without pauses can feel flat. Add beats—silence, gestures, interruptions—to give the conversation weight.

9. Show transitions between scenes.

If scenes jump too quickly, readers feel disoriented. A brief transition helps establish time, mood, and emotional continuity.

10. Clarify stakes early in the scene.

If readers don’t know what can be lost, scenes feel empty. Make sure the character wants something specific and fears losing it.

11. Use the “what are they feeling right now?” check.

After each major beat, ask what emotion is dominant in that moment. If it’s missing on the page, the scene is likely underwritten.

12. Expand scenes that feel “too clean.”