Courtesy of @marvelousbooks

Valen went most of his life illiterate due to spending a great deal of his formative years as a street urchin and a soldier in the Blood Wars. He knew how his name is spelled and what it looks like written, largely out of necessity, but little else until he settled in with the rebel drow of Lith My’athar.

 jadelyn: knightless: saathi1013: ...

Imagonna need to pop in the Stargate: SG1 discs now, be back in a year.

If the final product won’t be in chronological order either, you can focus on the linear nature of the narrative itself. You’ll be slowly revealing plot points and emotional connections and backstory as you go, so while the events might be transpiring out of order, the story is still going from beginning to middle to end. Does that make sense?

What I mean is, take the focus off of the events and actions of the story and put the focus on the character development beats, the reveals that lead up to the climax, the themes that you’re developing as you go. Those still need to have a logical progression, after all, and they can be tied into the chronology of the story in whatever order you write those events. 

Fandom - Black Jewels fusion: with Dragon Age (if you know it, pick a lead; if not let me know and I’ll give you something else!)

Hello friend! Let’s see, let’s see. ‘What is Marvelous missing with respect to their writing?’ (My deck does better with a direct question, so I hope this one works for you.) She decided to offer up the Five of Cups. Which is, um, well. It’s a sad one. It’s focus is regrets, grief, defeat, and releasing something important. Like all of the ‘lose a thing, feel sad’ emotions, that’s the five. The image is of an individual standing on a beach with a fishbowl, other, empty fishbowls at their feet and a bunch of sprites trying to comfort them. There are also imaginary fishes and bowls full of tears and teeming depths full of a prospective audience. This one ranged a teeny bit abstract, but I’m going to keep a bit more concrete.

What you might be missing w/r/t your writing? Well, this card *in particular* has a vibe of lingering in sorrow, of keeping from moving forward or accepting pleasure or comfort. Not all five of cups’ have this vibe, but Shadow spit this one out for a reason. Because of that, I’m seeing two different avenues off of this one, so hopefully one or the other helps in some manner. :)

The first considers your writing. *steeples fingers* For that I must ask: have you considered angst? Silliness aside, and more specifically to this card, how is your emotion in your work faring, especially where you’re stuck? Because of the lingering aspects of this card for me, it suggests to me that smoothing your way in your actual writing might be a matter of considering both emotional repercussions and emotional continuity of whatever plot bits might be happening. Alternatively, are you lingering in some sort of emotional or plot soup that’s just not working? You might consider backing up and letting go/trading off bits of plot (dump the fishbowl o_o release your imaginary fish) to keep the emotional trajectory from bogging down into places you don’t want to take your story.

The second considers you as a writer. Did you level up as a writer recently? There’s a certain amount of loss involved in increasing in skill. You lose a measure of confidence, lose some of the rhythm and cadence you wrote with before you jumped in skill, and lose some of your ability incorporate elements uninterrogated. When the complexity of your writing compounds upon itself and you suddenly just...see more shit and have to deal with more shit, there’s a moment of lingering at your new skill level while you just fucking despair for a bit. All that hard work, and for what? Is your writing going to not match up to your vision forever (even as people are encouraging you and reminding you that you’re awesome). Rage and despair as much as you want, if this is the case, but let the sprites pat you on the head and trade you glowy rocks eventually. Don’t hang out too long at your levelling-up skill level, you have a whole ‘nother level to conquer.

It makes me happy that A) You donated expecting them to go the book sale, and B) the library decided to add to the collection instead. That's win/win right there.