Hello darkness my old friend

(based on things that yours truly notices as an editor-in-training. This list is in no way complete, and will probably be added to as I continue to find repeated mistakes) 

Dialogue

Use beats in your dialogue to break it up. Even “said” can make a very effective beat between lines. 

(No beats: “It’s not lethal. Just highly dangerous with a good chance of being mutilated.” // Beats: “It’s not lethal,” he said. “Just highly dangerous with a good chance of being mutilated.”)

Note how the break allows a bit of a pause for ~dramatic effect 

thinking of dialogue, use punctuation and distinct speech patterns! “Life, uh, finds a way.” is an iconic line anyway, but Jeff Goldblum’s signature verbal tic gives it character. 

It’s okay if characters stutter. Don’t let the condemnation of stuttering characters as “cringey” in fanfic put you off. (and on that note, fuck cringe culture. Seriously. It saps all the fun out of creativity and fun is important.)

Start! A! New! Line! Whenever! Someone! New! Speaks!!

DO NOT FEAR THE WORD “SAID” 

Setting & Blocking

 Use the landscape and settings around your character, and always, always remember a scene’s blocking. Where is everything in relation to your characters? Have you left someone holding a coffee cup for the last three scenes? Did you lose a character somewhere along the way? 

using the contents of a scene is also great for fight sequences. 

Similarly, large character casts are hard to keep track of so don’t be afraid to break them up. Sending someone off somewhere else can create some nifty little subplots. 

Keep a personal note of how time passes. Trust me, it’s incredibly helpful to you as a writer and also for future readers. 

Characters

Character growth does not have to be positive. Sometimes characters fail or suffer or get their motivations twisted up, and they finish the book as a villain rather than a hero. 

All that matters is that a character changes throughout the plot in a way that readers can see; the sort of change they go through is entirely up to you. 

scrap the idea that someone has to deserve a redemption arc. They probably don’t deserve it, which is the whole point. So don’t be afraid to make your villains seem completely irredeemable. 

and you don’t need to redeem your antagonists in order to make them complex, sympathetic villains, anyway. Sometimes people get so stuck in their beliefs that they can’t see another way and it goes too far. Not everyone comes back from that. 

Also, motivations and goals can absolutely change. That’s okay. You just need to have something that drives your character so that your readers are rooting for them. 

Protagonists don’t need to be heroic. How you define the protagonists and antagonists in your story is based entirely on the morality in your story-world, NOT the moral ideas in the real world. What counts as a complex protagonist in a world torn apart by biological warfare will be very different than one living in our world. 

Prose & Grammar

simple prose is just fine and you don’t need to fluff it up for pretty quotes.

Remember to vary your sentence structures and length. Start smaller and build it up, drawing your reader’s attention. 

“And” and “But” are very valid sentence starters that are great for communicating the tone of internal narrative. You’re allowed to tweak grammar if that’s helpful for telling the story, it just needs to be accessible. Test out what you’ve written on other people. 

Hi everyone, Thank you for your support of our Vinculum iwaoi fanzine!! 

We’ve reached enough pre-orders to finance the printing, so thank you to everyone who ordered a copy!! 

We’d like to extend the pre-order period by one week, upon request, before we open PDF sales and start printing - so please continue to support us by sharing and reblogging our posts on Tumblr and Twitter!!

This means you can still preorder your copy until the 05.05.2019 midnight. 

Jonna Hyttinen on Instagram

I’VE JUST FOUND THE BEST THING EVER!

Want to find how long it would take to get to point A to point B on a map, by boat? I know Google Maps is great for car and bus, but how about sea travel?

Find the speed in knots (per example, a steamship from 1850 has a speed of 12 knots according to this site , enter the port city and voilà! 

Want to find the distance it’d take to get from London to New York during the 19th century, on a steamboat, and quickly? Tadaaah!

They even tell you the number of days at sea! And the seas/oceans you cross!

Happy writing, and good luck on the last days of Camp Nanowrimo April 2017!

Google BetaBooks. Do it now. It’s the best damn thing EVER.

You just upload your manuscript, write out some questions for your beta readers to answer in each chapter, and invite readers to check out your book!

It’s SO easy!

You can even track your readers! It tells you when they last read, and what chapter they read!

Your beta readers can even highlight and react to the text!!!

There’s also this thing where you can search the website for available readers best suited for YOUR book!

Hey there, lads, lasses and non-binary masses. It’s me, after 84 years. My plan was to vanish into thin air and disappear into a cave of shame and guilt for abandoning this blog but this is really a desperate situation. I may leave links to my stuff at the end but I’m not here for myself. 

PLEASE TAKE A MOMENT TO READ THROUGH THIS. IT’S REALLY URGENT.

My friend really needs help. She’s Portuguese like me and I’ve known her for about 16 years. She fled an abusive household at the age of 18 (2010). She had to endure an abusive mother, who would belittle her at any given chance and beat her up for no reason (with her hands, with broomsticks, throwing objects at her) saying that she would never have any friends because she was fat and fat people have no friends (she developed bulimia because of that which remains rather untreated because there’s no money for treatment and no support for mental illness unless you’re “dangerous” in this country) and making fun of her for liking girly stuff (which is incredibly weird, because she’s a cisfemale). Her brother would back her mother up and her father had Chronic Depression (as a side note, it’s ironic that her brother would say that depressed people were weak when his own father had that illness) and he wasn’t home often because he couldn’t stand his wife and he couldn’t stand the treatment his daughter was receiving. Her mother most certainly had Schizoid Personality Disorder, because my friend has it too and that tends to be genetic more often than not. Her mother was involved with Dark Magic and stuff like that (I understand if you don’t believe in it) but for a young child it was terrifying. The final thing her mother did was say she would rather see her dead than with another woman when she came out.

That’s the story in very broad lines.

She told me all this about two weeks ago after all these years because we lost touch for a while since we’re birds of a feather and tend to isolate when shit hits the fan. She’s been having it rough ever since 2010 because she never finished high school and has been jumping from shit job to shit job ever since. Her lovers have all been shitty and treating her like shit because despite all the shit she endured, this girl is a goddamn angel and she always puts everyone else before her and does everything for the people she likes, which could be okay, if she doesn’t seem to be under some sort of curse and always lands shitty girlfriends (I know, it’s not just cismen that can be trash, ciswomen can also be trash). The latest one is also mentally ill and has Borderline Disorder along with Depression and I’m not going to get into many details about what the disorder is about, but basically she’s not that bad of a person but she is very irresponsible and that’s what brings me to the point of this post and why this is so important and urgent. This girlfriend (who is now just ‘friend’ because they broke since it was clear that it wouldn’t work like that) had episodes and had to quit many jobs because of that to get some form of treatment (which in Portugal is still very hard to get if you’re not rich because there’s little to no awareness about Mental Illness and people tend to consider you either crazy or an attention whore or lazy and I’m sure that’s relatable to many of you, unfortunately). She’s currently in France to work as an Au Pair but she hasn’t gotten any money for her work yet and had an episode (because she didn’t take her medication with her and had no money to buy them there)  and they’re still in good terms and share the same flat.

However, my friend is currently unemployed and if she doesn’t pay her rent until the 8th, she will most definitely be evicted from the flat with nobody to turn to because she’s not on speaking terms with her relatives and extended family and her flatmate’s family can’t help either because they’re also poor and have helped as much as they could in the past. My friend and I live far away and she has her furniture and all stuff to take with her and absolutely no money and I really feel powerless and hopeless for her. I’ve been trying to help as I can for the last couple days but there’s really nothing much I can do because I’m also broke (but I live with my mum still and am still studying and shit, so despite my Little Issues, I’m about somehow) and she has no friends’ places she can crash at indefinitely. So, after this long ass post, which I hope you read and thank you dearly if you did, I want to share a couple links where you can send some form of support, if you can. Everything is welcome and equally appreciated! She needs around €500 (around $581) until the 8th to pay for the rent and avoid the streets. So, really, any help is very, very welcome

She’s mostly a cosplayer who makes her own costumes and takes part in competitions and she enjoys acting and drawing, even though she lacks confidence and has the aforementioned problems. Her art is mostly traditional and she enjoys drawing androgynous male characters (and she’s got shit on this website for it because apparently she can’t draw ‘men’ in ‘feminine’ clothes and positions :) ) In short, she’s one of my oldest friends and one of the strongest girls I know. She’s super talented and super hard-working and maybe I’m biased and whipped but this is genuinely how I feel. So, here are all the links to her stuff:

Instagram

Ko-fi Page

Paypal

Tumblr (she doesn’t post much because of the hate she got)

Twitter

And I guess that’s all. Please, don’t hesitate to contact me for further queries. I have her permission to make the whole story public and she’s really weary about this (I only knew about it all a couple weeks ago even though we’ve been friends since forever, so you see how she feels about all this stuff. I only knew about the mental illness but not in full detail) and it’s really a desperate situation. So please, if you can help her out, no matter how small the donation. Please do. Follow her if you appreciate her effort and work if there’s nothing else you can do and reblog this post, so that more people can see it and possibly help.

Thank you again for your time and I’m sorry I’m suddenly turning up after so long only to ask for help. I wouldn’t do this if it wasn’t so urgent and important. So please, I’m literally on my knees praying to everything out there that all goes well and at least this community will be understanding and helpful. Once again, thank you for your time and attention.