Homeworld Writes

Sticking a landing will royally fuck up your joints and possibly shatter your ankles, depending on how high you’re jumping/falling from. There’s a very good reason free-runners dive and roll. 

Hand-to-hand fights usually only last a matter of seconds, sometimes a few minutes. It’s exhausting work and unless you have a lot of training and history with hand-to-hand combat, you’re going to tire out really fast. 

Arrows are very effective and you can’t just yank them out without doing a lot of damage. Most of the time the head of the arrow will break off inside the body if you try pulling it out, and arrows are built to pierce deep. An arrow wound demands medical attention. 

Throwing your opponent across the room is really not all that smart. You’re giving them the chance to get up and run away. Unless you’re trying to put distance between you so you can shoot them or something, don’t throw them. 

Everyone has something called a “flinch response” when they fight. This is pretty much the brain’s way of telling you “get the fuck out of here or we’re gonna die.” Experienced fighters have trained to suppress this. Think about how long your character has been fighting. A character in a fist fight for the first time is going to take a few hits before their survival instinct kicks in and they start hitting back. A character in a fist fight for the eighth time that week is going to respond a little differently. 

ADRENALINE WORKS AGAINST YOU WHEN YOU FIGHT. THIS IS IMPORTANT. A lot of times people think that adrenaline will kick in and give you some badass fighting skills, but it’s actually the opposite. Adrenaline is what tires you out in a battle and it also affects the fighter’s efficacy - meaning it makes them shaky and inaccurate, and overall they lose about 60% of their fighting skill because their brain is focusing on not dying. Adrenaline keeps you alive, it doesn’t give you the skill to pull off a perfect roundhouse kick to the opponent’s face. 

Swords WILL bend or break if you hit something hard enough. They also dull easily and take a lot of maintenance. In reality, someone who fights with a sword would have to have to repair or replace it constantly.

Fights get messy. There’s blood and sweat everywhere, and that will make it hard to hold your weapon or get a good grip on someone. 

A serious battle also smells horrible. There’s lots of sweat, but also the smell of urine and feces. After someone dies, their bowels and bladder empty. There might also be some questionable things on the ground which can be very psychologically traumatizing. Remember to think about all of the character’s senses when they’re in a fight. Everything WILL affect them in some way. 

If your sword is sharpened down to a fine edge, the rest of the blade can’t go through the cut you make. You’ll just end up putting a tiny, shallow scratch in the surface of whatever you strike, and you could probably break your sword. 

ARCHERS ARE STRONG TOO. Have you ever drawn a bow? It takes a lot of strength, especially when you’re shooting a bow with a higher draw weight. Draw weight basically means “the amount of force you have to use to pull this sucker back enough to fire it.” To give you an idea of how that works, here’s a helpful link to tell you about finding bow sizes and draw weights for your characters.  (CLICK ME)

If an archer has to use a bow they’re not used to, it will probably throw them off a little until they’ve done a few practice shots with it and figured out its draw weight and stability. 

People bleed. If they get punched in the face, they’ll probably get a bloody nose. If they get stabbed or cut somehow, they’ll bleed accordingly. And if they’ve been fighting for a while, they’ve got a LOT of blood rushing around to provide them with oxygen. They’re going to bleed a lot. 

Here’s a link to a chart to show you how much blood a person can lose without dying. (CLICK ME) 

If you want a more in-depth medical chart, try this one. (CLICK ME)

- Short sentences. Choppy. One action, then another. When there’s a lull in the fight, take a moment, using longer phrases to analyze the situation–then dive back in. Snap, snap, snap. - Same thing with words - short, simple, and strong in the thick of battle. Save the longer syllables for elsewhere. - Characters do not dwell on things when they are in the heat of the moment. They will get punched in the face. Focus on actions, not thoughts. - Go back and cut out as many adverbs as possible. - No seriously, if there’s ever a time to use the strongest verbs in your vocabulary - Bellow, thrash, heave, shriek, snarl, splinter, bolt, hurtle, crumble, shatter, charge, raze - it’s now. - Don’t forget your other senses. People might not even be sure what they saw during a fight, but they always know how they felt. - Taste: Dry mouth, salt from sweat, copper tang from blood, etc - Smell: OP nailed it - Touch: Headache, sore muscles, tense muscles, exhaustion, blood pounding. Bruised knuckles/bowstring fingers. Injuries that ache and pulse, sting and flare white hot with pain. - Pain will stay with a character. Even if it’s minor. - Sound and sight might blur or sharpen depending on the character and their experience/exhaustion. Colors and quick movements will catch the eye. Loud sounds or noises from behind may serve as a fighter’s only alert before an attack. - If something unexpected happens, shifting the character’s whole attention to that thing will shift the Audience’s attention, too. - Aftermath. This is where the details resurface, the characters pick up things they cast aside during the fight, both literally and metaphorically. Fights are chaotic, fast paced, and self-centered. Characters know only their self, their goals, what’s in their way, and the quickest way around those threats. The aftermath is when people can regain their emotions, their relationships, their rationality/introspection, and anything else they couldn’t afford to think or feel while their lives were on the line.

Do everything you can to keep the fight here and now. Maximize the physical, minimize the theoretical. Keep things immediate - no theories or what ifs.

If writing a strategist, who needs to think ahead, try this: keep strategy to before-and-after fights. Lay out plans in calm periods, try to guess what enemies are thinking or what they will do. During combat, however, the character should think about his options, enemies, and terrain in immediate terms; that is, in shapes and direction. (Large enemy rushing me; dive left, circle around / Scaffolding on fire, pool below me / two foes helping each other, separate them.)

Cus when I look for fandom related stuff like 90% of the fan art and the fanfiction and the meta, zines, comics, etc. Like 90% of the shit that I’ve seen is created by women & girls.

And all that stuff take’s a lot of work and research and critical analysis and staring at reference photos for hours.

Female fandom is creative. Females create fanart, cosplay, fanwritings. Female fandom ALTERS canon, for the simple reason that canon does not serve female fandom. In order for it to fit the ‘outsider’ (female, queer, POC), the canon must be attacked and rebuilt, and that takes creation.

“Male” fandom devalues this contribution to fandom, because it is not the ‘right’ kind of fandom. “Girls only cosplay for attention, they’re not REAL fans!” “Fanfiction is full of stupid Mary Sues, girls only do it so they can make out with the main character!” “I, a male artist, have done this pin-up work and can put it in my portfolio! You, a female artist, have drawn stupid fanart, and it’s not appropriate to use as a professional reference!”

In the mind of people who decry the ‘fake geek girl,’ this fandom is not as worthy. It damages, or in their mind, destroys the canon. What is the point of memorizing every possible romantic entanglement of heterosexual white Danny Rand if someone turns around and creates a fanwork depicting him as a bisexual female of Asian descent (thus subverting Rand’s creepy ‘white savior’ origins)? When Danny Rand becomes Dani Rand, their power is lessened. What is important to them ceases to be the focus of the discussion. Creation and curatorship can work in tandom, but typically, in fandom, they are on opposite poles.

I made a quiz to see which AH member you are! Take it HERE.

honey: lipstick, a sweet voice, confident laughter, handwritten notes, tries their best, loves fashion and dogs, bright eyes like the sun, new cities, good grades

woodsmoke: tired souls, ticket stubs and street maps from places they’ve visited, bodies full of untold stories, missing the train, coffee, gentle words 

wisteria: dreamy evenings, freshly-baked cinnamon rolls, sipping tea, writing in a diary, thick, worn-out jumpers, handfuls of flowers, falling in love, book piles

saltwater: dark, tousled hair, ripped jeans, paintbrushes, lofty grins, swallowing hard, a little broken, trying desperately to be a good person

ink: soft aching hands buried in messy hair, tragic smiles, scribbling on dusty parchment, ancient ruins, attic windows, stars, cups of tea gone cold

“What cause?”

Hello! I have a link towards a page about this in my description but I wanted to make a post about this as well! More information under the read more :)

anon, there is always an alternate universe for everything, especially when i can ho it up. thanks for prompting me! i tried to make this more lighthearted than my Hot and Serious™ smut. ft. solavellan halamshiral sex, WITH A TWIST! ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

nsfw below the cut!

beauty in the moonlight

He makes sure no one sees him when he steals away to the upper floors, navigating the marble-floored corridors with ease. The door opens when he knocks; Ariala pulls him in, grinning, and kicks the door shut behind him. Before he can say a word, she’s fisted her hands in his tunic and pressed him against the wall, rocking up onto the tips of her toes to kiss him properly.

Solas groans and pulls her closer, hands tight on her hips, creasing the fabric of her dress. When she sucks his lower lip into her mouth, he parts his lips, lets her taste the sweetwine they have both, perhaps, overindulged in. Her hands cradle his face and he is warm and in her arms, and when their teeth knock together she pulls back with a giggly laugh, a sound he has only ever heard her make when drunk. 

He wishes, in that moment, that he had a vial and stopper - he could bottle that sound, quite literally, and enchant the vial to play it whenever he opened it. On and on it would loop, and he would never tire of hearing it. In the same way, he wishes he had a memory crystal, so he could preserve the sight of her smiles - the crinkles in the corners of her eyes, and the curve of her lips (plumped, now, and red from their kisses) and the light in her eyes.

She keeps laughing, and eventually her thumb lifts, wiping at his mouth. Solas kisses the pad of it, and she grins at him. “Solas, arasha, I’m trying — you have lipstick on your face, love —”

She had descended the palace’s marble stairs in a dress styled after those of the old Dalish kingdom, her vallaslin and back tattoo and ears on full display for the gathered humans, and she had been so unafraid even trapped in this pit of vipers.

He has never loved her more.

He does not stop kissing her fingertips, and even as she scolds him she giggles, eyes too-bright and too-beautiful. Eventually she cleans him of all evidence of her lipstick and grins at him.

“Want to do something fun?” she asks him, but kisses him again before he can reply.

When he breaks the kiss, breath catching as he tries to steady himself, she rests her forehead against his, grinning. She laughs again, wipes at the skin above the left corner of his mouth, and he almost sucks the point of her finger into his mouth. Void, he has not been like this since — he cannot remember.

“What did you have in mind?” he asks, and she kisses his nose, stepping outside the circle of his arms. She disappears behind a divider and returns a moment later, chucking a bundle of clothes at him.

“Get dressed, arasha, and I’ll show you.”

extremely time consuming. Remember someone actually took time out of their life to create that, time they could’ve used to, idk, sleep, for example

entertainment you’re consuming for free. I can’t stress this enough: you’re enjoying someone else’s craft for free. You paid exactly zero money to look at/read/watch it.

S H A R E D  with you, not made for you. This is the most important point: someone created that, put it online and you found it. No one forced you to consume that fanwork, you C H O S E  to do it. 

In my How to Edit a First Draft post, I mentioned something I call an edit notebook. Edit notebooks help you figure out what level of revisions your WIP requires, and exactly what is wrong with your manuscript. I use a 3-subject notebook per project, and a section per draft. An edit notebook is composed of a few parts:

1. Chapter-By-Chapter Notes

this is where you read through your manuscript and take notes on scenes

you usually want to note what happens in the chapter, how well it is written, and whether or not it is relevant to the plot

2. Overall Plot Notes

these also happen while you’re reading over your WIP

I usually made them in-between sections of chapters, but some I made while reading

these include things you’d like to add/change/remove from the plot

3. Analysis (Note: This is the most important part! The whole point of an edit notebook is to figure out how much editing you actually have to do. I sort these into different “levels.”)

Novel-Level: If all your notes say “delete scene,” “scrap,” “poorly written,” “unecessary” etc., then you’re probably looking at a full-on rewrite. Pull on your big-boy pants, grab a cup of coffee, and start re-plotting. 

Chapter-Level: If your notes are less about how bad the plot is and more about how bad the writing quality is, then your revisions should focus more on pacing, the order of your scenes, point of view, and rewriting/recrafting scenes to make them better. 

Line-Level: If the plot is flawless, there aren’t any plot holes or dull moments to be accounted for, just grammar/sentence structure problems, then this is when you print out your novel and go through it with a red pen. 

Of course, there are steps in-between, and sometimes you’ll spend several drafts in one level. But in general, this is what you should be looking for!

4. Redrafting (Especially important when making novel-level edits, which is probably what you’re dealing with when you have a first draft)

list possible scene ideas, brainstorm

try to write out your new plot, or at least the “tentpole” moments (the important events) 

from there, fill in what goes in-between the major events

remember, you can’t really know if it works or not until you actually write it!

5. Reoutlining

I like to make a summary sheet (below the cut), which ideally includes your major plot points, major flashbacks, subplots, symbols, conflicts, resolutions, and the story arc (as well as anything else you want to keep track of) 

plot out timelines/arcs for characters

basically do whatever you would normally do before you begin writing something new. Except, this isn’t new! You know what you’re doing and where you’re going this time. You got this.