Latest Posts by every-soul-a-battlefield - Page 2

That gap I-

Write your own name?

Fuck you here's a red squiggle

.

please feel too much bean

Uh

🇨🇦😲

ur first and last recent emojis are ur gender now. mine is 🅱👨‍❤‍💋‍👨

Great Vowlue™️

i have a debilitating fear of owls can you tell me something about them that will make me less afraid?

categorically speaking, most of an owl is just... fluff!

no seriously, here's a barn owl, feathers on:

and here's a barn owl, feathers off:

(no worries guys, it's a model)

it's not even chicken-sized! most of it is just legs.

and this is true of most owls, which is why they're so dang light!

😑

Not all construction work is equally enjoyable. For example, enlarging a drilled hole is boring, but fastening pieces of metal together is riveting.

evil rush bomb sawyer

evil beach boys wouldn’t it be knife

When people get pregnant, they will give up smoking, give up alcohol, give up coffee and soda, give up fondue and raw cheese, give up cold cuts and sushi, all because they have heard somewhere, from someone, that these things can be bad for the baby. They don’t know the research, haven’t looked at the studies, can’t talk about sample sizes and control groups. But their dedication to their future child’s safety is so strong, their caution is so overpowering, that they give up these things just in case. 

So it baffles me when those same people will insist on spanking their kids. 

Even when they are shown the research.

 Regardless of what the experts in the field say. 

No matter who says it. 

Or how it is said. 

People are so invested in this ability to hit their kids without judgement or consequence, that it absolutely confounds me. 

‘hell’ and ‘fuck’ combining into the much less substantial ‘heck’ is literally exactly the same energy as sodium and chloride combing to make table salt

#LateStageCapitalism

Who could've ever seen it coming 🤷‍♂️

I live in a forest

Fuck

If there are trees you aren’t alone

Andy Stark

Now that the movie theater in my hometown is closing forever, I can finally tell you all about the absolutely batshit job I had my freshman year of college. 

I am 19 years old and apply to work at the local movie theater, which is owned/founded by a wannabe business tycoon baby boomer who was like a cross between Donald Trump, Danny DeVito, and Jay Gastby (the Gatsby parallel will make sense in a minute, I promise. But it’s very important to me that you know that this man looked like a Danny DeVito clone with Trump’s toupee.) 

They are paying me minimum wage, which back then was about $6.50 an hour, to sweep popcorn off of the carpet with a tiny broom and occasionally hand out mints at the door at the end of movies. Our uniforms were unisex and consisted of a dark green tuxedo jacket and shirt with black bow-ties. There was also a stupid little hat but nobody actually wore them. This isn’t very important, except the uniform actually went with the interior ~design~ of the theater, which I think was supposed to look “fancy” but actually looked like the person who designs Cheesecake Factories dropped acid and got set loose in a Home Depot with an unlimited budget and no directions. 

I do my job, sweeping popcorn off of the rugs, wandering the hallways, and occasionally handing out mints. We get free popcorn on break (with no butter) which at 19 I thought was the most amazing thing I ever experienced. Because I was poor, my diet probably consisted of about 80% movie theater popcorn by volume. We could also stand in the back of the theater and watch like 5 minutes of a movie if there was no popcorn left to sweep up with our little brooms. 

For some reason Donald DeVito-Gatsby took a liking to me. Not in a creepy way–he just thought I was the shit for some reason. He called me “Tammy” once, which is not even close to my real name–doesn’t even have any of the actual letters of my name in it, which I think he eventually figured out was wrong, but still didn’t care enough to find out my actual name, so he just started calling me “sport” every time he saw me (which was almost daily). 

He’d saunter up on his tiny legs while I was sweeping popcorn and say something like, “Doing great today, sport! Keep it up!” and clap me on my little epaulet-clad shoulder and leave. I could never figure out why I appeared to be his favorite popcorn-sweeper. It was baffling. 

I have no idea what he actually did to run the theater except wander the halls, occasionally yell at the managers for letting the concession stand use too much butter, and talk about how much his tailored suits cost. Probably nothing.

He would also occasionally hire dance troops to perform Vegas-style routines at the front of the theater before big premiers. This was 1) very weird, and 2) somehow perfectly in-character with everything about this man’s personality and aesthetic. 

He once had his high school reunion there, and made a mixtape of songs from the 1960s to play on a loop during the big event. They were all terrible songs, and the CD just played on a loop for years and years and years afterward because he liked it and no one could be bothered to turn it off, I guess. I think it was probably still playing on loop when the theater shut down. It is because of this that I now have a classically-trained rage response to the song “Aquarius” by the 5th Dimension. 

Anyway, sometime while I was working there, he decided that what the theater really needed to keep up with the times was to knock out the end of one of the hallways and build an enormous IMAX theater with like 500 seats and it’s own dedicated concession stand that served more expensive food. We didn’t have anything like that in our town, so it was kind of a big deal. 

The wall gets knocked out, and the concrete gets poured, and there is a crew working to put in all of the wiring needed for the giant speakers, etc. Donald DeVito-Gatsby is very distressed about this because he was super racist and literally scared of Mexicans, who made up most of the construction crew on-site.

Donald DeVito-Gatsby decides that I am the perfect person to “keep an eye on them” and “make sure they’re not planning anything” because somehow he thinks I speak Spanish. I do not speak Spanish. I attempted to correct him. He doesn’t believe me. 

So he sets me up in the unfinished theater with my own little pink hardhat, and now my job is to sit there on an unattached memory foam IMAX seat all day and “watch them”. For what? I don’t know. I don’t think he knew, either. 

The helmet is pink because, I don’t know, maybe he thought a girl would be offended by a normal hardhat? I’m not sure. Anyway, the best part of this was that he got some shiny stickers and put “IN CHARGE” on the hardhat when he sent me off into the construction zone. I was not, in fact, in charge of anything. I don’t know why he did this.

The foreman spoke English, but most of his crew didn’t, and we eventually figured out that Mr. DeVito-Gatsby had probably heard me speak Sicilian on the phone with my family and thought it was Spanish, but I still understood almost none of what was being said between the crew at the site. Over the course of about three months we developed this kind of pidgin language when he wasn’t there to translate. After figuring out that I had nothing to eat but popcorn during my shift, one of the guys started bringing me lunch, which was probably the nicest thing anyone had ever done for me at 19.

I have no idea what Mr. DeVito-Gatsby thought these guys were going to do. He made some noise about how they were probably going to “steal something”, which would have been impossible because most of the audio equipment weighed hundreds of pounds. It apparently never occurred to him that the person most likely to steal anything would probably be the person who made the least money–which was me, making $6.50 an hour. 

I didn’t actually steal anything, though. Occasionally I’d make off with an extra cup of popcorn on my break, and one time one of the concessions people felt bad for us and brought us the hotdogs they were going to throw out. Mr. DeVito-Gatsby yelled at them for it.

I literally did nothing for months. I just…sat there and took naps and played Pokemon on my Gameboy. There was literally no point in me being there at all, and I was probably in the way sometimes, but I was being paid $6.50 an hour with the owner’s approval to sit there and literally do nothing at all because he was racist. 

Eventually, DeVito-Gatsby started adding stickers to my hardhat for some reason. He didn’t tell me why–I would just show up and there’d be more stickers. I would later find out that apparently he went into the equipment room and would just add a sticker whenever he felt I had done an “especially good job”, and I have no idea what that even means considering I was doing literally nothing. One day I came in and he had added “SPORT!!!” to the font in sharpie, so now my hardhat said “SPORT!!! IN CHARGE” with a bunch of random stickers. I was not, in fact, in charge of anything at all, and I don’t know what the exclamation points were for.

Months went by and the IMAX was basically finished, but neither Donald DeVito-Gatsby nor any of the managers ever showed up to reassign me, and I wasn’t going to ask about it because I Really Liked this gig where I was basically being paid to sit there and sleep and play video games all day. 

One morning, I came in and the crew was finally packed up and gone, the theater was finished, and I had…nothing to do. At all. It was just… empty. When I went to find a manager to ask if I needed to go do something else, he waved me off and told me that my job was now to “babysit” the IMAX theater until they started selling tickets for the first show. Owner’s orders. OK, I said, and went to sit in the now finished IMAX theater by myself.

This went on for several weeks before my desire to see other humans finally outweighed my desire to be paid to do nothing. I asked again to be reassigned again, but nope, that was my job now. When the theater wasn’t going to be showing movies, my job was going to be to just…sit in the theater. For no reason, and just…I don’t know, stare at the blank screen. 

I hung up my pink hardhat, put away my little green tuxedo jacket and went home, and never went back. No one ever called me about missing a shift. I’m not sure anyone even noticed I had left. 

Writing Advice Masterlist

CRAFT

How to write subtext

When to use summary and when to use scene

What is purple prose vs descriptive style

What to consider when writing for teens and children

The different types of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd person

When to show and when to tell

Showing vs. Telling in plot, character, setting, dialogue, etc. 

What is good telling?

Psychic distance (what it is + comparing 3rd omniscient, 3rd limited, and 1st person)

How to write strong dialogue

How to avoid melodrama

How to create powerful similes and metaphors

How to lengthen or shorten a novel

How to use 2nd person

YA vs NA vs Adult

Transitioning a book from being YA to being adult

The push and pull of hope and despair

How to introduce a flashback

Is it okay to use a POV shift for one scene?

Writing conflict and antagonist forces in a contemporary work/a piece with no villain

Describing setting in a way that’s in character

Using Symbolism

How to describe music

How to write a sex scene

Writing sexual or romantic tension/attraction

How to write a kiss scene

Writing romantic or sexual attraction (when you’re aromantic/asexual)

How to be subtle with theme

How to plan a story’s conflict

How to write a 1st person witness narrator

Where to add a character description

First sentences

Avoiding repetitive sentence structure

How to write a death scene

How to write body language

Using specificity to come up with original ideas

How to cut -ing verbs

Past vs present tense

What can be ambiguous and what needs to be explained? + Magical realism vs fantasy

Describing something abstract/intangible

Creating tension

How to improve your description (writing exercise) 

Using collective (aka: “we”) POV

Experimenting with form

Creating causal relationship between scenes in a non-linear plot

PLOT, STRUCTURE, AND CONCEPT

What is structure?

How to know if a plot is satisfying

How to develop plot material

How to develop a novel idea from nothing

How to write the beginning of a novel

How to write a story that is mostly internal

Finding the balance between plot driven and character driven

Common pitfalls of a meet cute

Plotting a contemporary novel

Plotting the 2nd half of a novel

Plot beats in the 2nd half of a novel

Pacing tips

How to develop a specific idea

Working with subplots

More on subplots

How to keep your plot moving forward

Writing backstory

How does structure work in literary fiction?

Writing plotless or slice-of-life fiction

CHARACTER

How does a character arc work?

Character development questions + exercises

How to use MBTI as a character development tool

How to find a character’s unique diction and vocabulary

How to write a problematic/morally grey/morally bankrupt character + with recommended readings

Is it okay to write a problematic main character? Where is the line?

Writing an anti-hero

Balancing out an unlikeable character

Writing a romance with a mentally ill character without romanticizing their mental illness

More thoughts on respectfully writing mental illness

How to do research to write a character with mental illness

What do I do if I feel like I write the same character over and over?

How to add character depth

As a male writer, can I write 1st person from a woman’s perspective?

Should a book have a comic relief character?

How to write a character mistake

Character motives

How to write more complex character psychology

How to develop side characters

How to write an active character

How to manage a book with a very large cast

Writing an unreliable narrator

Writing LGBTQIAP+ characters

On writing diversity

On respectfully writing queer characters 

Is it okay to write outside your lane?

Writing asexual characters

Writing friendships

Writing a healthy romantic relationship

Why I will always writing about ‘problematic’ characters 

Integrating character descriptions

Tips for character motivation/yearning

Writing character body language

WRITING PRACTICE AND PROCESS

How to get back into writing after a long break

How to deal with criticism

The pressure to create in the writing community

Advice for teen and new writers

How to work on multiple projects at once

Dealing with rejection

What to do if you’re on deadline and don’t have an idea or finished draft

How to revamp and old idea to fit your current writing style

Realizing you won’t have time to write all your ideas, and what to do

What to do if you don’t have a plot

Dealing wth jealousy as a writer

Dealing with Creative Slumps and Low Motivation

Dealing with low-confidence and doubting your abilities

PLATFORM & PUBLISHING

Starting a platform

More on starting a platform

Why I chose to traditionally publish

Pros and cons of different social media platforms for writers

Resources for finding literary magazines to submit to

Starting an author tube channel

SHORT STORIES

How to write a short story collection

Is the concept right for a novel or short story? + How to write a character arc in a short story

Should a short story be structured using novel structures like 15 beat?

How much planning do I do for a short story?

How to outline a short story

More on outlining a short story

How to title a short story

My short story writing process + how to get started with short stories + how to edit a short story + short story tips

More tips on how to write a short story

Writing the ending (aka moment of character reflection, or moment of ‘lift’) of a short story

More on writing the end of a short story

OTHER STUFF

How to get started with screenwriting

How to format a screenplay

Best pieces of writing advice I’ve ever gotten

My top 10 writing tips

Should you change your work for judgemental family members?

How to share your work with your family if you write about dark or mature content

How to slay an English exam composition

What is literary fiction?

Can a fantasy novel also be literary fiction?

How to lead a writing workshop

How to read more

Advice for creative writing majors (in Canada and elsewhere)

A list of useful essays on craft

if you’ve never been to the united states i hope this helps you understand how absolutely fucking brainwashed the majority of this country is

i can’t believe people expect me to do anything in my life except reading books, listening to music and crying at every little inconvenience

Remember if you’re out at a store and someone says “This is a robbery” you can say “no it’s not” and then the robber will leave because theyre a robber and this is no longer a robbery .

Cats and train miniature

It actually works

It works so well

spotify premium amazon prime netflix discord nitro hbo max disney plus youtube premium tumblr plus i hope you die premium i hope we all die plus

Holy shit

Also this totally should have been in the soundtrack for The Fault In Our Stars

What happens once you kill yourself? Because I'm ready to go.

You wanna know what happens once you kill yourself? Your mother comes home from work and finds her baby dead and she screams and runs over to you and tries to get you to wake up but you won’t and she keeps screaming and shaking you and her tears are dripping onto your face and your dad hears all the screaming and runs into the room and he can’t even speak because the child that he loved and the child that he watched grow up is gone forever and finally your little sister runs into the room to see what all the fuss is about and she sees you dead. The person she looked up to and loved. The person she bragged about to  her friends, the person she wanted to be just like when she grew up, the person that made her feel safe. But she’s never really going to get to grow up and smile and laugh and love because she’ll always be consumed with this feeling of missing you. And now there’s something missing from your family and they can barely look at each other anymore because everything reminds them of you but you’re gone and hurts more than anything. and you think that your mom never cared because she was always busy and yelling at you to finish your homework and clean your room and forgot to say I love you sometimes but really, she loved you more than anything and she doesn’t leave the house anymore, she can’t even get out of bed and she’s getting thinner and thinner because it’s too hard to eat. Your father had to quit his job and he doesn’t sleep anymore, every time he closes his eyes he sees his baby dead, and the image never goes away no matter how much alcohol he drinks. And at school your best friend sees that your seat is empty and she gets this sick feeling in her stomach and that’s when she hears the announcement. You killed yourself. And suddenly she’s screaming and crying in the middle of class and no one even bothers comforting because they’re all  busy sitting there staring at your empty seat with tears dripping down their cheeks and all she wants is for you to hug her and tell her it’s gonna be okay like you always did, but this time, you’re not there to do it, everything is dark now that you’re gone and her grades are slipping, she barely goes to school anymore and she ended up in hospital after taking too many pills because she wanted to see you again. the girls who used to make fun of the way you dressed feel their throats get tight, they don’t talk to each other anymore, they don’t talk to anyone, they’re all in therapy trying so hard not to blame themselves but nothing works. and your teacher who always gave you a hard time stares blankly at the wall, she quits her job a few days later. And then your boyfriend hears the news and he can’t breathe, he still calls you a lot just to hear your voice and he talks to you on facebook but you never message him back, he can’t fall in love again because every girl he meets reminds him of you, he’s never going to get over you, he loved you and he cries himself to sleep every night, hating himself and slicing his skin because he couldn’t save you and he’s never going to hold you in his arms or hear you laugh again. Now everyone who knew you, whether they were a big part of your life or someone you passed in the hallway a few times a week, they carry this aching feeling around inside them because you’re gone, and they miss you, and they don’t know why you left but it must’ve been their fault and they should’ve stopped you and they should’ve told you they loved you more and that feeling is never going to go away. And so you killed yourself

but you killed everyone else around you too. 

You may be surprised to hear that I too have my tongue wrapped internally around my skull

No I’m not human I’m a god damned hummingbird

hey bunjy, would you happen to have any cursed (or blessed) facts about hummingbirds? saw one in my garden yesterday and they've been on my mind

contrary to popular belief, hummingbirds can open their beak all the way just like other birds can!

it's...

hm.

I don't wike it :(

I would like to reiterate on the fact that Mark Zuckerberg is in fact a robot

What's the robot up to this time

Mail Online

Mark Zuckerberg wakeboards holding American flag in cringeworthy clip

Mark Zuckerberg posted a cringeworthy clip to his Instagram account on July 4 in which he rides above the water on an electronic surfboard w