“As I Grow Older, I Pay Less Attention To What Men Say. I Just Watch What They Do.”

Velimir Khlebnikov, from Collected Works, Vol.III: Selected Poems, (tr. by Paul Schmidt)

Hhhhhh. That feeling when you know you're still improving and haven't gotten fully skilled yet but the only way for you to improve is to keep making the Bad Stuff first before being able to make the Good Stuff.

When A Character Is facing a difficult decision they…

weigh the pros and cons repeatedly.

ask for advice from friends or mentors.

feel anxious and restless.

struggle to sleep, thinking about the decision.

go back and forth between options.

fear making the wrong choice.

imagine possible outcomes and consequences.

feel pressure from external expectations.

seek out as much information as possible.

procrastinate on making the final decision.

experience self-doubt and second-guessing.

wish for a clear sign or answer.

You are still in my notifs

Good.

I wouldn't wanna be anywhere else.

“how did you get into writing” girl nobody gets into writing. writing shows up one day at your door and gets into you

Writing advice that changed my sentence

When I was a young writer, I was told that I often started my sentences with "there is/there was/there are." I was told to eliminate those as much as possible.

I couldn't believe how often I used them. My first novel was completely littered with them.

I learned to diversify and grow my use of verbs. Instead of the state-of-being verbs, like "is" which isn't very descriptive at all, I started using stronger verbs.

Instead of writing "There were a bunch of trees on the hill" I wrote "A cluster of trees towered over the hill."

"Towered" is a much stronger verb than "Is"

Use the state-of-being words, but if you can, try replacing them with more active verbs. You might be surprised how much your writing improves.

Saw a post about the reading order of a beloved author and how their early books are a bit rocky and mediocre. Imagine if we created a writing environment that believed in and supported people, so that they could start with a slightly dumb story, and be given the connection/resources/validation/support to grow over the course of a lifetime. They wouldn’t have to hit the ground running with a splendidly workshopped series, an mfa, and an audience of TikTok followers who have promised to buy it, so that all a gatekeeper needs to do is collect the money. They could just be a chicken shed cleaner, or a mediocre small-town journalist writing one column a week (which is a job that people used to have and support an entire family - imagine writing 500 words a week and having that be your whole day job lmao) with a bad book, and forty years later they’d be a Great.

I’d like to live in a world with more Greats. There are a lot of chicken shed cleaners who are Greats and we’ll never know them.

I do not want it to be like “back in the old days” where it was only men (with housekeeper wives) writing mediocre books. I want secure material circumstances for people, and I want time for them to do something that may never “pay off.”

Richard Jackson, from "After All This"

I love when people get delightedly flustered by compliments. It activates some kind of insane prey drive in me. Today at lunch we had this cute trans server in a well-coordinated outfit and she got so bashful when I complimented it that I immediately became a dachshund of light flirtation and could not physically stop myself from laying it on outrageously thick just to see her begin to lose her composure and turn entirely pink.