#ryeswritings

We punt or murder, why waste energy making him better when we already have A Better Purple Boi, who we wouldn't have write chapters of self-help which in the end changes his Character so vastly we may as well call him something different.

Yes! Jester in particular seemed kind of fine with what he was currently doing, because his goal was theirs - to end the war.

And you know, Essek himself also seemed more upset about lying to the Mighty Nein than committing treason. Because of the Mighty Nein (and probably also how he’s been treated by the Cerberus Assembly, there seems to be no love lost there) he’s definitely come to also regret the snowball effect his agreement with the Assembly had on the continental political stage. But his strongest points in that conversation were 1) the immense pain of realizing he’d betrayed people he cared about before he even knew them and 2) that he still doesn’t feel strong allegiance to the Dynasty, but rather to the Mighty Nein, because they’ve shown him far more kindness than his own home ever has.

No, Dog doesn’t bark.

It doesn’t make many noises in general. It is a pretty quiet cat, other than its purring upon being petted. Well, that doesn’t really sound like purring, but the timing is appropriate enough for its humans to assume that is what it is supposed to be.

There are a few occasions where it walks around the house and the floorboards creak a little too loudly. They creak more than they do for the humans in the house, even though Dog is a pretty light cat.

It happens mostly during the night.

Hizashi doesn’t hear it because he sleeps with his hearing aids off, but Shouta does.

On the first few occasions he had gotten up to make sure nobody had broken into the house, only to find Dog and the sound would immediately stop as the cat stopped and stared at him. As if politely expecting him to question its evening stroll.

Shouta is used to it by now. He doesn’t get up anymore to check, he knows it is just Dog patrolling.

Sometimes other than the creaking, there are other sounds that come from the living room during the night. Sometimes it is just scratching, nothing unusual. Sometimes it is the sound of something heavy being dragged across the apparent. More usually than not it is the radio, changing frequencies.

The one time Shouta bothered to investigate that, he found the radio already off. It made sense, because the source of the sound didn’t quite fit. He couldn’t pinpoint the direction of which the sound was coming from but it wasn’t the device Hizashi kept on the fridge to keep him company while he did housework. It wasn’t the one in his workroom either, or the TV or any other of their immediate accessible devices.

Shouta decided to not look further into it and went back to bed.

He isn’t sure where Dog was at that time. He didn’t encounter him anywhere on his trip from and back to the bedroom, although he could feel the eyes following him all the way.

They have four cats. It wasn’t that unreasonable of a feeling. Surely.

When Hitoshi moved in Shouta gifted him a pair of headphones for his podcasts and music, to help him through the night. Shouta has decided that Hitoshi either uses them consistently or is just used to weird sounds during the night.

Eri doesn’t mind the sounds. To her they mean that the house is being protected.

Shouta isn’t sure what brought her to this conclusion.

WE WERE NOT READY

WE WERE NOT READY FOR THAT SPEECH

FOR THAT KISS

When I was in college, one of my methods for writing papers was to only do enough research to be able to start my paper. 

I would do enough research to have a basic understanding of the subject, know what I’m arguing, know some broad topics for my outline that I’ll be addressing, and have a couple of supporting evidence for my argument. And then I would just start writing my paper at this point.

As I’m writing the paper, I’ll start noticing gaps in my research and knowledge. Like as I’m writing, I’ll realize that I need a certain statistic to strengthen my argument, or if I knew more about some subject I’ll be able to back up my argument more efficiently, or I need a citation to support my claim — one that I think is right, but need evidence for. That’s when I’ll do the research on that gap that I found so I can properly write my paper.

This worked for me because it helped me cut down on the amount of unnecessary research I would do — there are a lot of articles and studies out there, easily hundreds and thousands on the topic I was writing my paper on. It can be difficult sometimes to identify what will be useful and what won’t be. I could just keep researching, but where do I stop? At what point can I say I’m an expert? There really isn’t an endpoint for something like this

So, I chose to just start writing. And once I did, I could pinpoint exactly what information I needed to find, and it was a lot easier to find since I was looking for something specific, as opposed to broader research you do at the beginning, before you start writing the paper.

(This advice for writing papers is recommended for papers you write in class normally. For something like a senior thesis you’ll definitely want to do a lot more beginning research. Also this worked for me, as a former psych major. I can’t vouch how it’ll work for other majors.)

And I would give you the same advice. You’re never going to 100% know how to write high fantasy. It’s okay to not know how to do something, and chances are, even if you’ve written a lot of high fantasy recently, you’re still going to not know everything.

Trying to be an expert on writing high fantasy is a really lofty goal, and you’re probably going to overwhelm yourself before you even start. You might be caught up on what people say is right and wrong, you might be scared of not meeting certain expectations, or it might just be really intimidating. 

It’s okay to have forgotten something, and it’s okay to not know it before you start.

Writing advice is subjective at best, and I think you should just start writing. Start writing, and if you notice any gaps in your knowledge, or if you notice that you need a little help on a certain thing, look it up or ask for help then. It’s much easier and much more efficient to fill in the gaps as you find them, rather than try to learn everything at once.

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