




on this trans day of visibility, i was blessed with good lighting
Unfortunately I was unable to find larger sizes of these images.
Serendipity (names, places, mapbuilding, etc.)
Quick Story Idea
Full Story Idea
Writing Challenges
General Character
Quick Character
really just all of Seventh Sanctum
RPGesque generators
Writing Prompts
Inspiration Finder
Story Arc
Fantasy Story Situaton
Adventure
Chaotic Shiny is just really good in general
Random Plot
i want to experience girlhood in every dreamland. in new york gloom, smoke on the subway, water stains on the ceiling, bitten black nails and free upright pianos on the roof. big bright blue eyeshadow miami on the back of my boyfriend’s motorcycle. small town diner waitress with cherry stains on my apron and eyes for bigger skies. i want to live with a doeheart and steel skin. i want to be the princess and the peasant. reborn each time into another shade of girl.
Some advice for when you’re writing and find yourself stuck in the middle of a scene:
- kill someone
- ask this question: “What could go wrong?” and write exactly how it goes wrong
- switch the POV from your current character to another - a minor character, the antagonist, anyone
- stop writing whatever scene you’re struggling with and skip to the next one you want to write
- write the ending
- write a sex scene
- use a scene prompt
- use sentence starters
- read someone else’s writing
Never delete. Never read what you’ve already written. Pass Go, collect your $200, and keep going.
This is the literal best writing advice I have ever read. Period.
Special note: “Kill someone” means kill someone in the story. Please do not kill random real life passers by every time you hit a block. My lawyer says misunderstanding writing advice is not an acceptable defense. See you all in 25 to 50 years.
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.
Enjoy Halloween and nearly peeing yourselves.
- Accepting – too accepting; willing to excuse extreme behavior
- Adaptable – used to traveling from situation to situation; may not be able to fully adapt/live in a permanent situation
- Affable – accidentally befriends the wrong sort of people; pushes to befriend everyone
- Affectionate –inappropriate affection
- Alert – constantly on edge; paranoid
- Altruistic – self-destructive behavior for the sake of their Cause
- Apologetic – apologizes too much; is a doormat; guilt-ridden
- Aspiring – becomes very ambitious; ruthless in their attempts to reach goals
- Assertive – misunderstood as aggressive; actually aggressive; others react negatively when they take command all the time
- Athletic – joints weakened from exercise; performance-enhancing drug abuse; competitive
can u believe…tht there are people in this world….who think i am straight…