To A Lady And A Knight, By @ladyliliana. I Hope This Does Ula And Lorne Justice. I Believe It’s Going

You know what? Maybe the iceberg on top is how much words there are on the paper. But you wrote that entire chunk of rock. Because a word is not just a word. With every sentence you weave, you are conveying a multitude of meanings, you are juggling different characters with different agenda’s, you have pages of background info rolling around in your head.  After writing, the iceberg may just be two characters having dinner together and talking about their spaghetti for a full paragraph. Yet beneath the surface you have written two characters carefully scanning each other’s reactions for any sign their dinner-date is in love, too.  The iceberg might be a stiffening of character A’s stance, a look, the balling of fists. But you know the trauma that happened when A was sixteen and you have been digging and groping for the most subtle and yet most right way to convey that.  For every action you write, you have written thoughts, discussions, motivations in your head. For every scenery you have plannend a country. Even if you only write a hundred words per hour, you are writing half a life. And your readers might not see the entirety of your work. But as they admire the iceberg, part of their awe will come from sensing something vast and enourmous underneath the water.  

working on my Sheith fantasy au and it’s… going. slowly

More taggames! I was tagged by the lovely @andtheotherwriter to share the first three lines of my WIP, while the wonderful @merigreenleaf tagged me to the share the last line (at least, the last I’ve written so far). This is for Elementary: He had been repeating the name in his mind for weeks. Tungsten. He muttered it when he was standing behind the counter of his father's shop, wrote it in inkt on his lower arm, whispered it into Miltons ears. Slowly, the sound had wrapped itself around him, comfortable like an old jacket.   

And the last one: Tungsten sat down and cried. He's going to be okay, I promise! I’m not tagging anyone because this has been going around for a while now and I’m not sure who’s already done it, but if you haven’t, feel free to take this note as a tag!

But this is a paradox, is it not? Because what is braver than admitting you are not brave? If you can’t face the truth in the mirror, at least you can face the truth right here, in this piece of text. You have shown us. You have told us writers -  scared, trembling, bold writers - that you are afraid to speak out. And in doing so, you have confronted us and yourself with such a vulnerable, honest thing. 

Maybe you cannot stand up to anyone (yet). Maybe you cannot raise your voice (yet). Maybe you cannot confront (yet). But you can write about it. You are doing it right now. You are giving us the murky depth of your heart and you are defying the norm by admitting your doubts.

Why do I write? Why do so many writers write? Because we see the things that are wrong - with the world, with ourselves. And we cannot speak about them. So we put them on paper. Instead of yelling, arguing, confronting, we create a story, a poem.

They say the pen in mightier than the sword. You just told us that you are not a fighting, sword-wielding knight. But you have used your pen, and you are most certainly a writer.

I am not bold

There are a lot of things a lot of people say about how to be a writer. Write every day, get published, get readers to love you, win awards and whatever. But for me there is one thing that all writers, actually all creative people, seem to have in common.

They are bold.

They defy the norm, they defy the conventions, they defy the universe itself.

Writers write from the murky awful depths of their hearts. This goes for all writers not just some genres. There is unique courage in writing a story that tears your own self apart. But they do it anyway and then they stitch themselves back together by writing more! 

Here’s my problem. I am not bold.

I am a coward. I would be the first to say that. I hate confrontation. I don’t ever point out anything wrong. I cannot stand up to anyone without having a complete panic attack. I cannot even stand in front of a mirror and face the truth of myself without my knees shaking. I stay quiet when people around me raise their voices. I stay quiet when saying something would mean something. I stay quiet even if my heart is breaking, especially when my heart is breaking.

I don’t confront. I don’t question. I don’t refuse.

This might be conditioning from my upbringing. This might be the weight of expectations thrown on me. Or this might just be who I am.

At the end of the day, all this means is that I pull back when I should write honestly. I step aside when I should forge on. I delete the words that must have stayed.

At the end of the day, I am not bold enough to be a writer. And I probably never will be.

Please do tag me! It’s the one way I don’t feel annoying for talking about my work.

tag me!

hey, if you see this:

could you please reblog this if you’re okay with being tagged in tag games? 

Ruth Madievsky, All-Night Pharmacy // Suzanne Scanlon, Promising Young Women // Robin Roe, A List of Cages // Hayao Miyazaki, Kiki's Delivery Service // Susan Sontag, As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980 // D. H. Lawrence, The Plumbed Serpent // Jennifer S. Cheng, "So We Must Meet Apart" // Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart // Alice Oseman, Radio Silence // Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice

theindianexpress / pascalchampion / hozier, ‘to noise making’ / titanic (1997) dir. james cameron / my chemical romance, ‘sing’ / abc news / dead poets society (1989) dir. peter weir / bertolt brecht

I’m only following 67 blogs, I definitely need more blogs to follow

Reblog this post if you post any of the following and I’ll check you out!

mythology (all types; if we’re talking specifics though, I’m mostly interested in greek/roman, celtic and japanese myths and legends)

aesthetic (preferably soft or pale aesthetic, any aes will do though!)

literature

writing

original content creators (meaning if you create your own moodboards/edits/graphics etc.)

I would love it if my mutuals could possibly reblog this to help me out?

Princesses and feminists, these are for Cassandra and Helen by @futureauthor-mabye. I hope you like them! Requests for OC aesthetics are open.

Thanks for the invitation to ramble! Come drop by on my blog/in my inbox anytime, I’d love to hear about your projects. I’m writing a historical fantasy, set in England around 1800. It’s about a band of traveling artists/magicians, each of them having left their homes and joined the group for their own reasons. I follow a couple of them throughout the story as they slowely split up because 1) Tin, a girl with a gun named Charley and the temper of a wargod, gets someone in prison per accident and goes on to attemp jailbreak 2) Silver, a lad pretending to be arrogant, leaves after a extensive misunderstanding and is taken in by a guy he is totally not falling in love with (spoiler: romance is the least of his problems) 3) Copper (sort of an asshole, but Silvers best friend) and Phosphore (she’s a godess, I don’t even know) go to find Silver but find quite something else and 4) Tungsten, the newest member of the group, tries really hard to understand himself, the world, and just to not fuck this up (spoiler: someone else fuck it up for him) I use this story to work with very different and diverse characters and I get to do a lot of historical research, so I really feel like I’m out playing and exploring!

Tell me what you’re working on!

I’m realizing as I see other writeblrs talk about their characters that I really don’t know what most of you are writing. (Or I did at one point and it’s hard to keep straight.) I’d love to become more familiar with your projects! I’m unfortunately an anxious introvert who’s too afraid to initiate conversations and I’m pretty sure the times I’m on Tumblr aren’t when anyone else is so I miss a lot of posts.

So I’m wondering if I could get all you writers to reblog this post and ramble about your characters? Or link me to a bio page for them if you have one? Or a page about your stories in general if you have that? If you want to, of course!

Please help out a curious person who stinks at talking to people. Even if we haven’t talked, I would love to hear your ramblings! 💚

I’ve been away for a little (long) while, but here’s a moodboard for heavy weight lifter Ginger, by @brownchickendog. I hope this was worth the wait!