Silver-Smythe

We’re making some overdue improvements to the code that powers our login system. When we make these changes, all Archive users will be logged out of their accounts.

To avoid permanently losing access to your account, please make sure you know your password and/or can receive password reset emails by December 13.

We’ll do our best to help you regain access to your account whenever you contact us, but it’ll be a much easier process if it’s done while you’re still logged in. If you wait to get in touch with us later and can’t prove account ownership, we won’t be able to update your email and you might be logged out permanently.

Please take a moment to check your email account, and send a ticket as soon as you can if you need to have your email address manually updated. You can always reach Policy & Abuse here:

So, let me guess– you just started a new book, right? And you’re stumped. You have no idea how much an AK47 goes for nowadays. I get ya, cousin. Tough world we live in. A writer’s gotta know, but them NSA hounds are after ya 24/7. I know, cousin, I know. If there was only a way to find out all of this rather edgy information without getting yourself in trouble…

You’re in luck, cousin. I have just the thing for ya.

It’s called Havocscope. It’s got information and prices for all sorts of edgy information. Ever wondered how much cocaine costs by the gram, or how much a kidney sells for, or (worst of all) how much it costs to hire an assassin?

I got your back, cousin. Just head over to Havocscope.

((PS: In case you’re wondering, Havocscope is a database full of information regarding the criminal underworld. The information you will find there has been taken from newspapers and police reports. It’s perfectly legal, no need to worry about the NSA hounds, cousin ;p))

It’s October. It’s the perfect time to watch scary movies, catch up on you Stephen King reading, shake your head at that lame new Goosebumps movie that’s coming out whenever (seriously what are they thinking?), and try your hand at the horror genre.

As the scary story/movie season begins, I’d like to leave you with this guide.

The best horrors are psychological. At the time of my writing, I just finished watching The Awakening. I was impressed over all. I’d recommend it to a friend who was looking for something not so scary but maybe just haunting (no pun intended). It was more of a psychological thriller. If you’re like me, you’re a wimp but also very disappointed by the amount of awful horror movies that have come out this past decade (I’d like to put the blame on Paranormal Activity for starting the first-person jump scare craze). They’re bad for a simple reason: they’re shallow. To write a good horror story, you need to know what frightens humans. We’re all frightened by the unknown. There’s something in our brians that flips out when we’re met with something unfamiliar or something we can’t decipher quite right. Here is a beautiful Vsauce video that goes more into depth about what we find “creepy” and why. (Warning: There’s some unsettling images and video clips in this one). Possibly the greatest horror stories were in the T.V series The Twilight Zone. They were rarely terrifying in the sense that there was a ghost throwing glasses or a monster was hiding in a basement. They were scary because only one man saw the monster on the airplane’s wing, or the neighborhood couldn’t find out who the real monster was and were reduced to attacking one another. They were scary because they played with our minds. If only William Shatner could see the monster, what damage could it do without anyone else knowing? How oblivious was everyone else to the threat? If all the neighborhood was suspecting someone was a monster, then how could they prove innocence? In the big reveal (I won’t spoil the end), we know that the actual danger was 1) human nature and 2) another unstoppable force. They made the audience think after each episode ended. They were unsettling – the basis of all fear.

Don’t rely on stereotypes. Horror takes some thinking. You really need to understand what you’re writing. If you’re going off something you read in several other books or heard around several campfires or watched on several movie screens, you’re beating a dead horse. Sure, they may be scary, but why settle for something that is basically being half-assed by you? Let’s be honest, if you go off any stereotype for any genre, it’s going to be half-assed solely because you didn’t put original thought into it, and you don’t truly understand it.

AVOID THE TYPICAL WHITE MALE SURVIVOR CLICHE. It happens almost all the time. The women (or woman, as a lot of media typically will have only one female character) always die. The black guy always dies (again, only one if any at all). The white guy cries over the loss of his noble friends and/or love interest (’cause you know he’ll be kissing the female protagonist at some point) but gets to walk away.  This is similar to the point above. Just make your writing more diverse all around.

Not all great horror stories have monsters or ghosts or werewolves. Sometimes our own thoughts are the problem. Sometimes it’s our imagination that gets the best of us.

Don’t be afraid of keeping it common. Halloween was a great movie. What made it great was that it could have happened to anyone. It was an ordinary man in a ordinary mask targeting an ordinary teenager. There was nothing special about any of these characters. It was just something that happened and didn’t seem too foreign. At least with more traditional horror stories, we can tell ourselves at midnight, alone in our own beds, “Ghosts don’t exist.” 

It’s a very broad genre. Go for anything. Experiment with old folktales or mythology. Create your own monsters. Make your own Latin chants. Have fun with it and try to make someone afraid of the dark again. 

Well, my best advice to you as someone who also doesn’t have a penis, is to read books by people who do, ha ha. I’ve read a lot of books here and there where the authors describe the sensation of things like that and it is honestly the best place to find out because you’ll also come across so many different ways of describing which will build your understanding of how it might feel. And not necessarily from erotica - I just read The Girl With All The Gifts by M.R. Carey and here is a description from Kieran Gallagher’s perspective which might be the sort of thing you’re looking for:

‘He’s so scared, he’s worried that he might actually piss himself. He’s never understood before how being scared could make you do that; but now… he can feel his nuts tightening and his bladder loosening with every step he takes.’

And then in the first few pages of Lauren Beukes’ The Shining Girls, there is this:

He squeezes hard on the plastic pony in his pocket. The furious buzzing coming from underneath the cup is a vibration he can feel all the way down his vertebrae, tugging at his groin.

Those are two books I would recommend for you to read as a start; the latter, if I remember correctly, has more mentions of what being hard and stuff feels like because the guy in it is pretty twisted… Also note who the author is: don’t let your lack of experience put you off from learning and writing what you need to write anyways!

Read widely and in time you will come across the right kind of examples.

Generally though, you can sort of understand and imagine how certain situations might make someone with a penis feel, especially if it betrays them and their intentions, ha ha… I mean, I can imagine it is pretty embarrassing to get a boner whilst you’re engaging in a non-sexual activity. I have read a few accounts where the person has said they had no control over it and how mortified they were too, so that might kinda be a given?

If for whatever reason you don’t want to go through a bunch of books to find examples and you also can’t put yourself ‘in their shoes’ as it were to infer things, then the next best thing is Google. Please see my resources below for what I came up with if you can’t sully your history or whatever. Takin’ one for the team (ಥ‿ಥ)9

Otherwise, some of our penis-havers here on Tumblr might throw in a reply or reblog to give you their own personal account of what it’s like and what it does and how it feels when it does… the stuff that it does…

Not sure if this calls for a trigger warning but I feel I should mention to watch out for gendered language in the resources below, very much the assumption that only cis males have penises which no.

I find this kinda thing awkward too, hooooo boy, I’m a bit of a prude a no-sex kinda person ghhhhhhh I still hope I helped a little bit

Best of luck!

Resources

Reddit: Ask Men - What does it feel like to get an erection?

Girls Ask Guys: How does it feel to have a boner and come?

What does a boner feel like?

What’s the Deal with Boners?

Teen Guys and Questions About Erections

When and how often do guys get an erection?

How Many Boners Does A Guy Get In A Week?

I’ve noticed while reading that a lot of people, includingmyself, have difficulty writing realistic friendship in fiction. Here are somequick tips on how to make your fictional friendships more realistic. There will be a lot of Harry Potter references in this, so get ready.

1.       Shared History: Unless your characters just met, they have to have some kind of past with each other. Sketch out a history for them. Inside jokes don’t just come out of nowhere.

2.       Best Friends Are People Too: Sure, they’re not the main character, but never forget that best friends have personalities and flaws too. That’s what made Harry Potter so awesome. Harry’s friends, including Luna and Neville, had memorable personalities and character flaws. Your best friend characters may not have a major role in the novel, but you should at least figure out what makes them tick. Few things annoy me more than best friends who only exist to make the main character look more popular. (Hey there, Rebel Belle).

3.       Friends Have Other Lives: This kind of goes hand in hand with point #2. Friends have lives outside of your main character, don’t forget that. That’s kind of what I like about Cora Carmack (yes, I read everything) . Say what you want about her, but the secondary characters in some of her novels have lives outside of the protagonist.

4.       Yes, they have common interests but they are not the same person:  It’s true that friendships are often based on common interests. Harry and Ron both love Quidditch, have a certain disregard for the rules, despise Malfoy, and occasionally slack off in class. However, Ron has other interests outside of that. He loves Wizards Chess and teaches Harry to play with him even though Harry doesn’t appear to like it as much as Ron does.  And think about Hermione. She loves books and studying, and Ron and Harry don’t like that at all. So friends don’t have to have EVERYTHING in common.

5.       Sometimes there are rough patches: Good friendships have rough patches. Sometimes one character or person is annoyed by their friends for some reason or another. Sometimes all of our flaws get the best of us. This is something that you can make use of in your novel. Once again, look at how J.K. Rowling worked in rough patches with the trio.

6.       Sometimes friendships just don’t work out: Sadly, some friendships run their course. Snape and Lily Potter, anyone?

Brandon Chinn is the author of a sci-fi/fantasy series called The Kognition Cycle, and has self-published three books so far: First Fragment, Second Stage and Third Trial. He is currently working on the fourth and final book in the series, as well as many other pieces of writing. You can find his books on Amazon, and also find him on Goodreads. You can find out more about his books on his website, and also follow him on twitter!

One of the basics steps when writing a story is research. Looking for an specific topic is easy, but sometimes you forget that elements are connected and when you start writing about them you realise you have to make more research and have to stop writing just when your muse had shown up.

One of the easiest way to avoid missing something is triangulation, or as I like to call it, the subtle art of connecting dots. In simple words, triangulation is a systematic mechanism for research, is also useful when writing essays.

When we get asks like, I’m creating a new world, what should I keep in mind? How do I create a new culture? How can I make a new government system? What do I have to keep in mind when writing about guns? We are the ones making the connections for you, we cover the majority of things but since it’s not our story, the connection of ideas work differently. I’ll be using the questions above as examples.

Creating a New World

First stage Astronomy, Geography, Ecology.

Second stage Climate, Main location, Societies.

Third stage Seasons, Urbanization, Culture.

On the first stage you define if your world will have one, two or three suns, the same with moons, planets, things like that. Also you define the geography of the world, how many oceans, continents, mountains, islands, rivers, among others. For ecology, flora and fauna, where species live, how many will be and how they interact. Ecology includes humans.

On the second stage you set the climate for your world. How it will be affected if it has three suns and two moons. On the other hand, the geography will give you your main location, where will it be, how many rivers will it have, mountains, if it’s going to be on a island. In societies, you get to know where your characters are from, how many people lives within those societies. Leave culture for the next stage, here define demography.

On the tird stage work on the seasons, how they behave and how they affect your world. In urbanization set the buildings, parks, highways, transportation. Culture is more difficult to work, that’s why you’ll have to triangulate one more time.

Below you’ll find the following examples

Creating a Culture

Creating a New Government

Guns Research

Essays (example)