R.M.Shah

Put a fun fact about you, and tag moots!

I play the Trumpet and Piano, but no one ever believes me when I say I can play 😭.

I have two little white spots in the middle of my front teeth that the dentists have no clue what they are because they’ve migrated to the bottom of my teeth and they say they shouldn’t have moved lol

I can play the piano & my teeth are a bit stained yellow from sucking on vitamins heheh

Let's see...

Should we go depressing or fun..?

BOTH.

I've had three surgeries in the past three years (for a stupid stomach problem)

I've been in 18 musicals! Technically speaking I've been in 24 stage shows (musicals/plays specifically)!

I've ALSO had three surgeries, but not in the past three years (i had one a full month and a bit ago)

I play trombone and the ocarina

I'm a competitive cheerleader of nearly 14 years now i think

and uh. I learned how to read in english through playing pokemon black :3

I can play flute and have been doing competitive swim for over 10 years

I can speed draw decent art in 1-2 minutes.

I have over 2,300 hours on The Binding of Isaac

And i've never had my first kiss.

uhh let’s see

i’m a missionary’s kid, and i’ve been to 4 different countries, and about 128 hotels.

i have also never been kissed

I had five wisdom teeth rather than 4

I was in a commercial when I was 12 or 13

I have in fact been kissed and I have mixed feelings about it because it was kind of gross but also weirdly exhilarating

I own like 60+ pairs of socks

My joints are intensely crackly for some reason and I can’t move at all without something popping or clicking

I’ve met Jason Mraz

I can do a really good impression of Stitch from Lilo and Stitch and Theodore from Alvin and the Chipmunks

I used to eat grass, paper, and crayons as a small child

uuuuhhhhh in the past ten years I have been bit in the face by a dog, hit by the sparks of a giant smoke bomb (my own dumbass’s fault), fell off my bike and ran my face into a rock, and ran into a folded up picnic table and gave myself a concussion and a nice scar by my hairline. Most of these happened within 2-5 years of each other lmao

I've been sober for over 2 years now (2 years 1 month and 10 days :D)

@cantpickafandomtbh @wyvernofstories @generally-genderfluid @arsonist-pixie @sixofcrowsispeak @zarinahook @oooooooohhh-somerseeeet @stag-stag-stag @rose-the-nerd + open tags

and uhhhh

I once accidentally dated a guy for two years when I was like 11 because I didn't know how to turn him down

Fun fact... I acted as an accomplice to my aunt when she stole 3 rolls of toilet paper from Buckingham palace

I have deep-seated and arbitrary hatred for things sometimes. Here's a non-exhaustive list :

Buses, Inspector Gaget, saying "Hello", Velvet, Sauerkraut (visually), and Star Wars

These might be autism. These might be arbitrary. We'll never know.

I've had 12 surgeries on my toes in the span of a year and for a while thought I'd have to walk with a cane? Idk wheres not a ton of interesting stuff about me

Ive sang in front of over 3 thousand people 4 times (in secondary school, the primary and secondary schools nearby were also all invited to the shows, was genuinely terrifying)

I’ve never been kissed (except I kinda have? Me and my childhood friends were obsessed with kissing eachother but I don’t count kisses from friends as actual kisses, also was kissed a few times by a boy that had forced me to date him- also do not count that)

I’ve got something wrong with my stomach, have done for ten years now, no doctor has managed to figure out what’s wrong but they all agree that it’s not just anxiety so that’s something I guess?

I don’t really talk to anyone on here so I’m just gonna tag people I’ve messaged with on here before 😂

I've a scar from when I was young and fell on a glass mug. Six stitches I think and no hair grows there. It's by my eyebrow.

20 Tips for Writing a Character With Mental Health Issues or a Disability

I have previously written a thorough guide on how to write and research mental illnesses but if you want a quicker dos-and-don'ts list here you go:

1. Research the Illness Thoroughly: Not a five-minute skim. Actual research, symptoms, variation, how it's diagnosed, how it's treated, what myths surround it. When I had to write PTSD for a character I made a whole google docs on: the illness itself, the illness in regards to my character’s situation, the symptoms/side effects my character would likely have, ways to incorporate them in my writing, etc.

2. Talk to People Who Actually Have It: If you don't know anyone in real life, spaces like Reddit and Quora can be genuinely useful. Nothing replaces hearing it directly from someone living with the illness.

3. Find Media Praised for Depicting It Accurately: Don’t just look for movies/shows with characters who have that mental illness, specifically research media praised for their accurate depiction of it. It's usually more instructive than any single article on the condition itself.

4. Find Media Criticized for Depicting It Inaccurately, and Figure Out Why: This is just as valuable as the praised examples. Knowing exactly what to avoid, and why it landed wrong, saves you from repeating the same mistake.

5. Remember No Two People Experience It Identically: Research gives you the general shape, but your character still needs their own specific relationship with their condition.

6. Don't Make the Condition Their Entire Personality: They still need hobbies, opinions, a sense of humor, flaws unrelated to the condition entirely. A diagnosis isn't a whole character.

7. Show It in Small, Unglamorous Moments Too: Not just the dramatic crisis scenes like panic attacks or hallucinations. The mundane, everyday impact is often more honest and more overlooked in fiction. 

8. Avoid the "Cured by Love" Narrative: Unless you're specifically critiquing that trope, a romantic partner isn't a treatment plan. This one shows up constantly and it's worth actively avoiding.

9. Give Them Agency Over Their Own Condition: They shouldn't exist purely as a burden on other characters or a lesson for someone else's growth. Let them make their own decisions about their own life. Also, if this is someone who’s lived with the condition their entire life, avoid using the typical ‘they don’t know what to do when symptoms kick in and a side character has to help’ scene. 

10. Research Realistic Coping Mechanisms or Treatment: Not just the symptoms. How someone actually manages day to day medication, therapy, routines, matters just as much as how the condition presents.

11. Be Careful Using the Condition as Shorthand for "Dangerous": Unless you're deliberately examining that stigma, this is one of the more damaging tropes in fiction and it's worth actively working against. This also applies for portraying a character as “damaged” or “unstable” solely because they have a mental illness.

12. Give Them Flaws That Have Nothing to Do With the Condition: A character can be stubborn, petty, or messy in ways completely unrelated to their diagnosis. That separation matters.

13. Consider How It Intersects With the Rest of Their Identity: Culture, family, access to healthcare, and financial situation all change how a condition is experienced and treated.

14. Read Own-Voices Essays and Memoirs, Not Just Clinical Descriptions: Clinical sources tell you the facts. Personal accounts tell you what it actually feels like to live inside them.

15. Avoid Writing It as a Checklist of Symptoms: Show it through behavior, internal narration, and small decisions instead of naming every symptom like a diagnostic manual.

16. Be Mindful of Language: Terms people use to describe themselves and outdated or clinical terms aren't always the same thing. Follow the community's own language where you can.

17. Think About Their Support System: Do they have one? How do they feel about needing help, and how do they navigate asking for it, or refusing to?

18. Don't Rush an Unrealistic "Fix" by the End: Some conditions aren't cured, they're managed. A tidy resolution can undercut everything honest you built earlier in the story.

19. Get a Sensitivity Reader Before Publishing, If You Can: Someone who actually lives with the condition will catch things research alone won't.

20. Write for the People Who Actually Live It First: Not for how "relatable" or "palatable" it feels to readers who don't share the experience. Accuracy matters more than universal comfort.

21. Don’t Make Their Story Revolve Around The Mental Illness: Please remember that there are millions of people around the globe with thousands of different mental illnesses who live with those illnesses day in and day out. It doesn’t define them, it doesn’t become their entire life, and it shouldn’t be the main aspect of your character’s storyline. 

This isn't a list you follow rigidly, it's a starting point for actually caring enough to get it right. Happy writing! :)

Looking For More Writing Tips And Tricks?

Check out the rest of Quillology with Haya; a blog dedicated to writing and publishing tips for authors!

One of my favorite things about books is seeing how every writer has their own unique voice. No two stories are ever the same, and that's what makes reading so much fun.

At some point you stop editing because it's done... or because you've read it so many times you can't tell anymore.

Your first draft isn't supposed to be perfect.

It's supposed to exist.

Every published book started as a messy draft that needed fresh eyes, honest feedback, and a lot of revision.

Keep writing. Your story deserves the chance to be finished.

This is really exciting, linguistically speaking.

Because it’s not true that Tumblr never uses punctuation. But it is true that lack of punctuation has become, itself, a form of punctuation. On Tumblr the lack of punctuation in multisentence-long posts creates the function of rhetorical speech, or speech that is not intended to have an answer, usually in the form of a question. Consider the following two potential posts. Each individual line should be taken as a post:

ugh is there any particular reason people at work have to take these massive handfuls of sauce packets they know they’re not going to use like god put that back we have to pay for that stuff

Ugh. Is there any particular reason people at work have to take these massive handfuls of sauce packets they know they’re not going to use? Like god, put that back. We have to pay for that stuff.

In your head, those two potential posts sound totally different. In the first one I’m ranting about work, and this requires no answer. The second may actually engage you to give an answer about hoarding sauce packets. And if you answer the first post, you will likely do so in the same style. 

Here’s what makes this exciting: the English language has no actual punctuation for rhetorical speech–that is, there are no special marks that specifically indicate “this speech is in the abstract, and requires no answer.” Not only that, it never has. The first written record of English (actually proto-English, predating even Old English) dates to the 400s CE, so we’re talking about 1600 years of having absolutely no marker whatsoever for rhetorical speech.

A group of teens and young adults on a blogging website literally reshaped a deficit a millennium and a half old in our language to fit their language needs. More! This group has agreed on a more or less universal standard for these new rules, which fits the definition of “language.” Which is to say Tumblr English is its own actual, real, separate dialect of the English language, and because it is spoken by people worldwide who have introduced concepts from their own languages into it, it may qualify as a written form of pidgin. 

The tags are absolutely a factor. You want someone to take a breath in the middle of a sentence, you start a new tag. You want to have, as seen here, this removable piece between commas (does it have a name?) - you have 5 tags in this sentence alone. And sometimes you just

pause in the middle of a sentence…

and let your voice

language is this constantly evolving thing tbh, it doesn’t remain the same unless it’s dead and the people who used it gone so seeing the evolution of the language used on tumblr is literally so fucking amazing i want to cry with joy at it

because we also add in words from other languages, or make entirely new words up as additional terms to denote something (see ‘tol’ and ‘smol’ in relation to ‘tall’ and ‘small’) and this is constant. we are doing this daily without any sort of breathing space because there’s millions of us on this hellsite and we are constantly talking and so the language changes day-by-day until we have general, universal rules for what to do in a post, what to add in our tags, how to add it, why we add it, what we mean by it

we’ve created a language in the same way our ancestors all did: by building on the ones that came before and changing them to suit our needs and our system

and that’s fucking awesome okay

What?

What.

Now take this logic and apply it to things like ADHD, autism, clinical depression, and other less visible/divergent disabilities. You cannot think your way out of feeling.