Your Fantasy Book Title

Your Fantasy Book Title

I decided to be silly and make one of these.

Eye Color

Brown: A Court of Blue: A Throne of Green: A Tale of Gray: A Storm of Hazel: A Song of Other: A Kingdom of 

Zodiac

Aries: Flame and Taurus: Stone and Gemini: Passion and Cancer: Moons and Leo: Kings and Virgo: Queens and Libra: Justice and Scorpio: Poison and Sagittarius: Arrows and Capricorn: Ice and Aquarius: Stars and Pisces: Dreams and 

Favorite Color (of these options)

Black: Moonlight Purple: Royalty Blue: Sorrow Green: Thieves Yellow: Treachery Orange: Dragons Red: War White: Daylight 

baby dragons that sleep in your fireplace and roll about in the soot and the ash trying to get comfortable on burning logs, screeching loudly whenever people walk by or when more logs need to be added to its roost and not stopping until content again

baby dragons with wings that are disproportionate to their bodies until older but nonetheless stubbornly trying to pick themselves up off the ground by running and aggressively flapping and managing to only get a few feet off the ground for a few seconds before crash landing

baby dragons that haven’t been exposed to priceless things such as gems and gold pieces and instead infatuate themselves with other unusual shiny things — like silverware, brass clocks, instruments, and pots and pans

baby dragons who get cold in the winter and crawl up into their caretaker’s clothing (almost always while said clothing is being worn) and curl up as tight as possible and begin to make sounds similar to content purring as they sleep

“You Blew Me Away” sculpture by Penny Hardy

So, anyway, I say as though we are mid-conversation, and you're not just being invited into this conversation mid-thought. One of my editors phoned me today to check in with a file I'd sent over. (<3)

The conversation can be surmised as, "This feels like something you would write, but it's juuuust off enough I'm phoning to make sure this is an intentional stylistic choice you have made. Also, are you concussed/have you been taken over by the Borg because ummm."

They explained that certain sentences were very fractured and abrupt, which is not my style at all, and I was like, huh, weird... And then we went through some examples, and you know that meme going around, the "he would not fucking say that" meme?

Yeah. That's what I experienced except with myself because I would not fucking say that. Why would I break up a sentence like that? Why would I make them so short? It reads like bullet points. Wtf.

Anyway. Turns out Grammarly and Pro-Writing-Aid were having an AI war in my manuscript files, and the "suggestions" are no longer just suggestions because the AI was ignoring my "decline" every time it made a silly suggestion. (This may have been a conflict between the different software. I don't know.)

It is, to put it bluntly, a total butchery of my style and writing voice. My editor is doing surgery, removing all the unnecessary full stops and stitching my sentences back together to give them back their flow. Meanwhile, I'm over here feeling like Don Corleone, gesturing at my manuscript like:

ID: a gif of Don Corleone from the Godfather emoting despair as he says, "Look how they massacred my boy."

Fearing that it wasn't just this one manuscript, I've spent the whole night going through everything I've worked on recently, and yep. Yeeeep. Any file where I've not had the editing software turned off is a shit show. It's fine; it's all salvageable if annoying to deal with. But the reason I come to you now, on the day of my daughter's wedding, is to share this absolute gem of a fuck up with you all.

This is a sentence from a Batman fic I've been tinkering with to keep the brain weasels happy. This is what it is supposed to read as:

"It was quite the feat, considering Gotham was mostly made up of smog and tear gas."

This is what the AI changed it to:

"It was quite the feat. Considering Gotham was mostly made up. Of tear gas. And Smaug."

Absolute non-sensical sentence structure aside, SMAUG. FUCKING SMAUG. What was the AI doing? Apart from trying to write a Batman x Hobbit crossover??? Is this what happens when you force Grammarly to ignore the words "Batman Muppet threesome?"

Did I make it sentient??? Is it finally rebelling? Was Brucie Wayne being Miss Piggy and Kermit's side piece too much???? What have I wrought?

Anyway. Double-check your work. The grammar software is getting sillier every day.

i love pitting classically trained magic users against self-taught magic users in sci-fi/fantasy but it shouldn’t be snobbish disdain for them it should be terror

Finding Some Fucking Motivation

And if you already found it - here’s what to fucking do with it!

If you’re a writer then you’ll know that motivation is a fickle motherfucking beast that will immediately abandon you if you even fucking think about taking it for granted. 

With that in mind here are some great fucking ways to boost the fuck out of your motivation!

Make a kick-ass playlist; gather the shit out of the music that makes your heart pound and slam it into a fucking playlist and hammer that shit until you finish your draft.

Do some fucking exercise; right, arseholes. Get out there, in that world, and sweat your buns off and you’ll find that endorphins get off THEIR arses and do something useful and you suddenly want to do more shit.

Do a shitty (writing) exercise; find a prompt you like and run with it to the fucking end. Either it’ll be shite or you’ll love it. Either way you wrote something and that’s a fucking win!

Take a fucking break; you deserve it, bitch! Rest makes us productive, don’t let the capitalist bullshit mentality of work till you die grind you down. 

Find your fucking passion; if you don’t love your fucking story anymore, have a goddamn word with yourself and find out why. Life’s too fucking short to write shit you hate!

And check out this updated fucking resource list, just in case it help;

IDEAS AND FUCKING PLANNING

102 ways to get a fucking idea

A fucking years worth of prompts, LITERALLY

Developing Your Fucking Idea

WRITING STYLE AND CONTENT

Writing In First Fucking Person

Fucking Unreliable Narrators Are The Shit

Writing good fucking sex

Sexy doesn’t always mean actual fucking 

MISC

An extra nine fucking ways to motivate yourself

Learning to love your fucking craft

Fucking finish your first draft

More Fucking Resources

BOOKS THAT CAN FUCKING HELP YOU

Small fucking disclaimer; if you click these links I might get a little fucking commission because I’m an amazon affiliate;

The Elements Of Style (Did Someone Say Seminal Fucking Text?)

Zen In The Art Of Writing (Because Ray Fucking Bradbury)

On Writing: A Memoir Of The Craft (Listen To Stephen Fucking King Children.

The Five Day Novel (Get Fucking In There, Amigos)