No Book Left Behind

Have your car break down in strategic places.

Read obituaries to find eligible widowers.

Look in the census reports for places with the most single men.

Ask your friends' husbands who the eligible men are in their offices.

Be nice to everybody—they may have an eligible brother or son.

Volunteer for jury duty.

Be friendly to ugly men—handsome is as handsome does.

Get lost at football games.

Don't take a job in a company run largely by women.

Get a job demonstrating fishing tackle in a sporting goods store.

Go to all reunions of your high school or college class. There may be widowers there.

Don't be afraid to associate with more attractive girls; they may have some leftovers.

Go back to your home town for a visit—the wild kid next door may have become a very eligible bachelor while you were away.

Don't room with a girl who is a sad sack and let her pull you down to her level.

Stumble when you walk into a room that he's in.

Wear a Band-Aid. People always ask what happened.

Dropping the handkerchief still works.

Stand in a corner and cry softly. Chances are good that he'll come over to find out what's wrong.

Buy a convertible. Men like to ride in them.

Learn how to bake tasty apple pies. Bring one in to the office and let the eligible bachelors taste it.

"Acidentally" have your purse fly open, scattering its contents all over the street.

Practice your drinking with your women friends first.

Get a sunburn.

Don't tell him about your allergies.

Don't whine—girls who whine stay on the vine!

Show him you can have fun on a cheap date-but don't overdo it!

Double-date with a gay, happily married couple—let him see what it's like!

Talk to his father about business and agree that taxes are too high!

Never let him know he's the only one, even if you have to stay home one or two nights a week!

If he's rich, tell him you like his money—the honesty will intrigue him!

Clip and mail him a funny cartoon that means something to both of you.

Point out to him that the death rate of single men is twice that of married men.

Go to Yale.

If your mother is fat, tell him you take after your father. If he's fat too, tell him you're adopted!

Stow away on a battleship.

Rent a billboard and post your picture and telephone number on it.

Paint your name and number on roof and say, "Give me a buzz, pilots."

Sink at a fashionable beach at high noon!

Ride the airport bus back and forth from the airport.

Bribe ferris-wheel operator to get you stuck on the top of a Ferris wheel.

Stand on a busy street corner with a lasso.

Carry a camera and ask strange, handsome men if they would mind snapping your picture.

Make and sell toupees—bald men are easy catches!

Advertise for male co-owner of a boat.

Carry a tow chain in the trunk of your automobile.

Let it be known in your office that you have a button box and will sew on bachelors' loose buttons.

Don't marry him if he has too many loose buttons!

i'm sort of having a mild brain fog moment rn so i can't fully articulate what i'm on about, but i think a lot of able-bodied artists view things like canes and crutches as interchangeable. and they often don't know enough about the wide range of mobility aids to make an informed decision about what their character might actually use based on their disability

i also think that aids like walkers and rollators are sort of viewed as "cringe" on some level, and many people view them to be "just for old people," so many artists will opt for giving a character who has full-body pain and fatigue a cane (which, in many cases, can potentially WORSEN full-body pain) instead. and a lot of people don't realize that most wheelchair users are able to walk, so they don't consider it an option for characters with chronic pain

how do you distinguish grey from other colours beyond black and wite?

Distinguishing features of moral beige:

The protagonist is constantly agonising over Hard Choices; however, circumstances always conspire to prevent them from actually having to make those choices, so in practice they're just angsting over stuff they might have done.

The text exhibits a recurring pattern whereby the protagonist seems to to have made a Hard Choice, but new information is reliably revealed shortly thereafter which retroactively establishes that whatever they did was the morally upright course after all.

The protagonist's moral impulses are straightforwardly heroic, except in one specific context which lacks any clear real-world analogue; for example, being prejudiced against telepaths.

The protagonist's actions are consistently reasonable based on the information available to them – they're merely operating on bad information basically all the time due to a bizarre conspiracy and/or a series of increasingly implausible misunderstandings.

Why shouldn’t they be?

“Why does this character have to be a woman?”

Why shouldn’t she be?

“Why does this character have to be gay?”

Why shouldn’t they be?

“Why does this character have to be trans?”

Why shouldn’t they be?

“Why does this character have to be disabled?”

Why shouldn’t they be?

“Why does this character have to be fat?”

its fun

i can do literally whatever I want

cons of writing

shakespeare plays: Othello

no, royalties are not a significant source of income for most authors. if you wrote something like Project Hail Mary, then absolutely, the royalties would be substantial! but that's like winning the lottery. Ryan Gosling is not starring in the movie adaption of most books.

when you sell a book to a publisher, you get what's called 'an advance against royalties'. it's usually split into multiple parts, so you might get one third for the initial sale, one third for the final revised manuscript, and one third on the publishing date.

an advance against royalties is the publisher saying "we believe you will eventually make X amount in royalties, so here it is ahead of time." and then you don't actually see any money from royalties until the advance is paid off. most books do not make enough in royalties to pay off the advance (I have two children's books and one fiction book, and have yet to see royalties for any of them).

advances are still great, but you need to make them stretch! for instance, last year my net income was about 30k Canadian (21k USD), which is fantastic when you consider that I mostly made it through writing. but I'm definitely not a millionaire. I can live off my writing (not trying to undersell that!) but I'll probably remain in a low income bracket for the foreseeable future.

body language masterlist

a translator that doesn’t eat ass like google translate does

a reverse dictionary for when ur brain freezes

550 words to say instead of fuckin said

638 character traits for when ur brain freezes again