It Me.

This is so endearing that I'd write him some Scotty smut if he were still alive.

In case anyone wanted; James Doohan knew about all the Spirk porn, and in fact wanted a copy for himself. He also seemed rather bored by the fact he was only ever drawn with women. Someone draw him some Scotty yaoi asap!

Sometimes, you just have to sit down and make yourself write!

But not yet, though.

The problem with not having writer friends or friends who read books is that when I'm really excited, I have no one to share it with.

My BFF is an artist and they can show me drawings that they've been working on for days. I LOVE to see the sketches and evolution from the beginning to the finished product. We don't have the same visual process for writing. Instead, I end up holding my BFF hostage and sound like a nerdy loon while they desperately try to make sense of my rantings. I could work for an hour on a sentence and it looks about the same as when I started to an outsider! >.<

A list of things Steve Rogers would historically be unfamiliar with:

I fell down a rabbit hole of research about inventions circa the 40s and was surprised by a bunch of things that have been around way longer than I thought and some that are strangely reccent, and compiled them into a list. Aka, a resource for fic writers.

Bananas (or rather, the ones we have today. The ones he’d be accustomed to, the Gros Michel, a sweeter, creamier species, went extinct in the 50s and was replaced with the bland Cavendish banana.)

High-fives (the low-five was actually invented first, around WW2, and he may have been familiar with that)

Buffalo Wings (invented in the 60s)

CPR (not really used until the late 40s, not widely known until the 50s)

Tiramisu (invented in the 80s)

Big Macs & McNuggets (while McDonald’s was founded in 1940, the former wasn’t introduced until the 60s, and the latter, the 80s)

Seat belts (the first car to have one was in the late 40s, and only became mandatory to wear them in the 80s. holy shit.) 

Walmart (invented in 1962. Or really, the large-scale supermarkets as we know them today really)

Yellow tennis balls (prior to the 70s they were usually black or white)

Panadol (first sold in the US in the 50s)

The smiley face aka :) (popularised in the 60s)

Now alternatively, here’s a list of things Steve WOULD (or possibly would) be familiar with:

I’m not sure why some of these surprised me.

Modern Sunglasses (have been around a lot longer than I thought, and were mass produced in the 20s)

Nokia (was first founded in 1865. I’m not kidding. They began as a pulp mill and moved into making rubber respirators for military from the 30s onwards)

Nintendo (been around since 1889 as a toy company, during the 40s they made playing cards. Wouldn’t be implausible that he knew about Nintendo, perhaps from Morita)

Krispy Kreme (opened in 1937, didn’t spread widely until the 50s however)

Kool-Aid (introduced in the 30s)

Oreos (introduced in 1912)

Printed/graphic tees (didn’t become a trend until the 60s-70s, but they certainly existed in the 40s)

Hoodies (originated in the 30s, worn by workers in cold New York warehouses. Meaning, it’s entirely plausible Bucky could’ve been wearing hoodies in the 40s)

Malls (they weren’t called that back then, but they certainly had shopping centres or plazas since the 1800s)

Converse sneakers (invented in 1908 and have barely changed since!)

This sounds like a great twist on the genre!

Imagine how much scarier zombie movies would be if the zombies smiled when they saw you because they were excited to finally eat. Imagine walking into a building to go and find shelter, scavenge, whatever, and you shine your flashlight into a room only to find several zombies idling there. Your light catches their eyes and they turn to look at you, their expressions desolate and empty. However, the moment they spot you, their open mouths turn to wide uncontrollable smiles and their eyes disappear into slits. They almost look friendly. Maybe even some of them manage to laugh instead of groan. How would you feel after months and months of losing people you know to smiling hoards? How would you feel after every encounter with a joyful zombie leaves you shaken and tired and fearful? How would you feel after hearing the sounds of laughter mixed in with the sounds of screaming and flesh being torn? After everything, what would your brain's wiring process do to you when you see a friend smile? Would you hate smiling? Would you feel rage? Would your brain devolve back into a time where showing one's teeth always meant a threat? What would you do if the joy of the human race was now only kept by the dead

I have never liked the the skill versus luck debate, but it's acquired an intolerable dimension with the self-publishing groups I've joined.

The argument is deceptively simple, if you work hard, you should be successful. If you aren't, you aren't working hard enough. It doesn't take into account that luck has a part as well. A chance meeting with the company president may get me noticed. Or coffee spilled on my shirt means I miss that same meeting. Butterfly effect. Neither of those examples take into account how good I am at whatever I do; it's based things outside of my control. It gets more complex when you take into account economic background, education, race, gender, etc., but that's beside the point here.

This blindness gets worse when it comes to self-publishing because it involves two different skill sets: writing and marketing. I could be the best author out there, but if no one knows I exist, then I'm not selling anything. Likewise, I could be a marketing guru with a crappy book to sell and while I might do better initially, people will catch on and I'll not sell anything.

You can sharpen both skills, but only so far because luck is still a factor.

Perhaps I'm just frustrated by the lack of awareness that working hard doesn't always equal results.

I used to feel bad about writing paragraphs on completely different pages and trying to show where they are supposed to go, but I will never feel bad about the legibility of my drafts ever again!

you don't need to have cute handwriting girl, Dostoevsky's manuscript drafts looked like this

left- draft of Demons. right- draft of The Brothers Karamazov

I wish more people would critique books this way. I'm tired of blurbs being "a tour de force" and "next great American novel". I want to know if it's worth reading for *me*, not some vague audience. I'm glad authors can get praise like that and they deserve it (if it's real), but it tells me nothing as a potential reader.

I used to work for a trade book reviewer where I got paid to review people's books, and one of the rules of that review company is one that I think is just super useful to media analysis as a whole, and that is, we were told never to critique media for what it didn't do but only for what it did.

So, for instance, I couldn't say "this book didn't give its characters strong agency or goals". I instead had to say, "the characters in this book acted in ways that often felt misaligned with their characterization as if they were being pulled by the plot."

I think this is really important because a lot of "critiques" people give, if subverted to address what the book does instead of what it doesn't do, actually read pretty nonsensical. For instance, "none of the characters were unique" becomes "all of the characters read like other characters that exist in other media", which like... okay? That's not really a critique. It's just how fiction works. Or "none of the characters were likeable" becomes "all of the characters, at some point or another, did things that I found disagreeable or annoying" which is literally how every book works?

It also keeps you from holding a book to a standard it never sought to meet. "The world building in this book simply wasn't complex enough" becomes "The world building in this book was very simple", which, yes, good, that can actually be a good thing. Many books aspire to this. It's not actually a negative critique. Or "The stakes weren't very high and the climax didn't really offer any major plot twists or turns" becomes "The stakes were low and and the ending was quite predictable", which, if this is a cute romcom is exactly what I'm looking for.

Not to mention, I think this really helps to deconstruct a lot of the biases we carry into fiction. Characters not having strong agency isn't inherently bad. Characters who react to their surroundings can make a good story, so saying "the characters didn't have enough agency" is kind of weak, but when you flip it to say "the characters acted misaligned from their characterization" we can now see that the *real* problem here isn't that they lacked agency but that this lack of agency is inconsistent with the type of character that they are. a character this strong-willed *should* have more agency even if a weak-willed character might not.

So it's just a really simple way of framing the way I critique books that I think has really helped to show the difference between "this book is bad" and "this book didn't meet my personal preferences", but also, as someone talking about books, I think it helps give other people a clearer idea of what the book actually looks like so they can decide for themselves if it's worth their time.

Update: This is literally just a thought exercise to help you be more intentional with how you critique media. I'm not enforcing this as some divine rule that must be followed any time you have an opinion on fiction, and I'm definitely not saying that you have to structure every single sentence in a review to contain zero negative phrases. I'm just saying that I repurposed a rule we had at that specific reviewer to be a helpful tool to check myself when writing critiques now. If you don't want to use the tool, literally no one (especially not me) can or wants to force you to use it. As with all advice, it is a totally reasonable and normal thing to not have use for every piece of it that exists from random strangers on the internet. Use it to whatever extent it helps you or not at all.

more on writing muslim characters from a hijabi muslim girl

- hijabis get really excited over pretty scarves - they also like to collect pins and brooches - we get asked a lot of questions and it can be annoying or it can be amusing, just depends on our mood and personality and how the question is phrased - common questions include: - “not even water?” (referring to fasting) - hijabis hear a lot of “do you sleep in that?” (we don’t) and “where is your hair?” (in a bun or a braid, usually) - “is it mooze-slim or mozzlem?” (the answer is neither, it’s muslim, with a soft s and accent on the first syllable) - “ee-slam or iz-lamb?” (it’s iss-laam, accent on the first syllable) - “hee-job?” (heh-jahb, accent on the second syllable)

- “kor-an?” (no. quran. say it like koor-annn, accent on the second syllable) - people tend to mess up our names really badly and you just get a sigh and a resigned nod or an awkward smile, maybe a nickname instead - long hair is easy to hide, short hair is harder to wrap up - hijab isn’t just covering hair, it’s also showing as little skin as possible with the exception of face, hands, and feet, and not wearing tight/sheer clothing - that applies to men too, people just don’t like to mention it ( i wonder why) - henna/mehendi isn’t just for special occasions, you’ll see people wearing it for fun - henna/mehendi isn’t just for muslims, either, it’s not a religious thing - henna/mehendi is not just for women, men also wear it, especially on their weddings - there are big mehendi parties in the couple of nights before eid where people (usually just women and kids) gather and do each other’s mehendi, usually just hands and feet - five daily prayers - most muslim kids can stutter through a couple verses of quran in the original arabic text by the age of seven or eight, it does not matter where they live or where they’re from or what language they speak natively - muslim families tend to have multiple copies of the quran - there are no “versions” of the quran, there has only ever been one. all muslims follow the exact same book - muslims have no concept of taking God’s name in vain, we call on God at every little inconvenience - don’t use islamic phrases if you don’t know what they mean or how to use them. we use them often, inside and outside of religious settings. in islam, it is encouraged to mention God often and we say these things very casually, but we take them very seriously - Allahu Akbar means “God is Greatest” (often said when something shocks or surprises us, or if we’re scared or daunted, or when something amazing happens, whether it be good or bad; it’s like saying “oh my god”) - Subhan Allah means “Glory be to God” (i say subhan Allah at the sky, at babies, at trees, whatever strikes me as pleasant, especially if it’s in nature) - Bismillah means “in the name of God” and it’s just something you say before you start something like eating or doing your homework - In Shaa Allah means “if God wills” (example: you’ll be famous, in shaa Allah) (it’s a reminder that the future is in God’s hands, so be humble and be hopeful)

- Astaghfirullah means “i seek forgiveness from Allah” and it’s like “god forgive me” - Alhamdulillah means “all thanks and praise belong to God” and it’s just a little bit more serious than saying “thank god” (example: i passed my exams, alhamdulillah; i made it home okay, alhamdulillah) - when i say we use them casually, i really mean it - teacher forgot to assign homework? Alhamdulillah - our version of “amen” is “ameen” - muslims greet each other with “assalamu alaikum” which just means “peace be on you” and it’s like saying hi - the proper response is “walaikum assalam” which means “and on you be peace” and it’s like saying “you too”

Writing with Colors

A list of resources to help you describe different colors in your writing.

The Color Thesaurus A collection of infographics that show various shades of different colors, each shade/color labeled by name.

Color Reference Chart Another collection of infographics that show various shades of different colors, each shade/color labeled by name.

Hair Color Reference Chart A collection of infographics that show various shades of different hair colors, each shade/color labeled by name.

Eye Color Reference Chart A collection of infographics that show various shades of blue, brown, and green eye colors, each shade/color labeled by name.

Different Ways to Describe Hazel Eyes A list of ideas and suggestions for describing hazel eyes. Can be used as prompts or for brainstorming.

Different Ways to Describe Green Eyes A list of ideas and suggestions for describing green eyes. Can be used as prompts or for brainstorming.

Different Ways to Describe Blue Eyes A list of ideas and suggestions for describing blue eyes. Can be used as prompts or for brainstorming.

Different Ways to Describe Brown Eyes A list of ideas and suggestions for describing brown eyes. Can be used as prompts or for brainstorming.

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I’m a writer, poet, and editor. I share writing resources that I’ve collected over the years and found helpful for my own writing. If you like my blog, follow me for more resources! ♡