Shoujo Sparkles

The single best way to try and improve your own fic writing prose wise is to spend a significant period of time reading everything except fanfiction. A lot of fanfic is written, obviously, by people who read a lot of fic themselves. Nothing wrong with that in itself, but frankly, it leads to a kind of... self-cannibalizing prose style you can start to spot pretty quickly. I can read a fic sometimes and guess before I go to their profile what popular dudeslash fandoms they loved in 2015, you know? And because it's a style with very limited stylistic inputs, so to speak, over the years the selection of what I'd call 'AO3 house styles' (and there are several!) have gotten more and more calcified. If everything you read sounds like One Thing, your own writing will get locked into very narrow habits. They probably won't serve you well in the long run because of that narrowness.

We can argue about raising Bison for human consumption instead of cows on federal land all we want, but by all accounts we are missing like 25+ million bison because of their wholesale slaughter over the past few hundred years. They do serve an important ecological function.

So why berry producing bushes? Because we killed off bears.

Bears used to eat huge amounts of berries and fish, shit out the seeds, and spread berries around the US just like birds do. Except we killed like 99% of the bears, and we’re doing our best to exterminate the birds as well.

Who thinks of a bear as a creature that distributes seeds (and also technically fertilizer from eating hundreds of pounds of fish a year and then pooping farther inland).

Anyways here's my horny Astarion priest AU no i don't have religious trauma. but there is a fic attached if you wanna read it.

i brought in a bunch of my books from childhood, and we started having one-on-one reading lessons with the littles. then i went out and bought about fifty more books secondhand. first step was covering the pictures so the kids couldnt guess what the words said and had to actually TRY reading them first. second step was making a list of new words for each kid so we could learn about those words, what they meant, and if the kids were old enough, some of the etymology behind them (because if you can recognize latin root words, it's easier to make connections for pronunciation later on eg. unicorn -> universe).

the kids HATED this. reading was previously the easiest class and now it was really, really hard. but reading class had also previously been the most boring class; their books were ten pictures with a single sentence on the opposite page. we got through it by taking turns reading books the kids picked out from my collection- they would read one sentence or paragraph, then i would read the whole page complete with funny voices, then it would be their turn again, etc. it turns out that if kids are motivated to hear the rest of a good story or a lot of information about a topic they love, they're more willing to struggle.

the kids improved so rapidly that i honestly almost cried a few times from how proud i was. one little girl (kindergarten aged) went from being unable to sound out the whole alphabet to reading goodnight moon by herself in two months :'>

all this, though, was NOT my job. my job was to keep the kids on task during their online schooling and prevent them from killing each other or starving. i am not a teacher. the school system was failing these kids to the degree that outside individual reading lessons were necessary, and school systems across the US are still doing this!