Small Flaws To Give To Characters

Hozier perfoming in Austria

❝ Hozier at @lindosounds in Linz, Austria. 28.06.24 ❞

📸 shots.by.simone on Instagram

Hey guys - I did a poll a while back to see where people would be interested in reading this fic and most people said AO3 or Tumblr - so I’ve uploaded the first chapter to AO3 and here’s the link! please enjoy :) and feel free to message me with any questions

Summary: 

Daphne Langford loves a good story - why else would she choose to study English at the University of Oxford? However, the freedom of third year finally allows her to extend her degree to a form of art she’s been waiting to explore: music.

After a night out gone wrong, enter Andrew, a cynical but driven postgraduate student with a passion for politics, mythology and all of the juicy theoretical expertise she needs to bring her thesis to life. Thinking they’ll never meet again, fate just so happens to put Andrew right in Daphne’s path… as her thesis supervisor.

Between stealing glances at formal dinners and chance encounters in the city of gleaming spires, will the ‘whiskey-glass-half-empty’ singer and the driven optimist allow themselves to cross the boundary between musical allegories and reality, or are the smoke and mirrors offered by the whimsical city of gleaming spires too perfect of an illusion to hide behind?

After all he’s been through, she just might be “too sweet” for him…

(I hope this can be the dry humour, dark academia teacher/student dynamic fic of your dreams - pls enjoy reading as much as I enjoy writing it xox)

So I'm getting into prompt writing to practice and stretch my creative muscles in my down time. I thought, if any of it is any good that I might post it somewhere. It will mostly be short (ish) form original fiction on various genres, but I might do fanfic from time to time (esp Hozier, because I'm obsessed lol). Anyway here's a poll for where, if anywhere, I should post this stuff :P

PSA: Don't use Open Office

I keep seeing people recommending Open Office as an alternative to Word, and uh... look, it is, technically, an open source alternative to Word. And it can do a lot of what Word can, genuinely! But it is also an abandoned project that hasn't been updated in nine years, and there's an active fork of it which is still receiving updates, and that fork is called LibreOffice, and it's fantastic.

Seriously, if you think that your choices are either "grit your teeth and pay Microsoft for a subscription" or "support free software but have a kind of subpar office suite experience", I guarantee that it's because you're working with outdated information, or outdated software. Most people I know who have used the latest version of LibreOffice prefer it to Word. I even know a handful of people who prefer it to Scrivener.

Open Office was the original project, and so it has the most name recognition, and as far as I can tell, that's really the only reason people are still recommending it. It's kind of like if people were saying "hey, the iPhone 14 isn't your only smart phone option!" but then were only ever recommending the Samsung Galaxy S5 as an alternative. LibreOffice is literally a version of the same exact program as Open Office that's just newer and better – please don't get locked into using a worse tool just because the updated version of the program has a different name!

No I still haven't gotten over this

hozier in blue jeans save me... hozier in blue jeans. save me hozier in blue jeans!!!

📸: charles.reagan

A lot of fiction these days reads as if—as I saw Peter Raleigh put it the other day, and as I’ve discussed it before—the author is trying to describe a video playing in their mind. Often there is little or no interiority. Scenes play out in “real time” without summary. First-person POV stories describe things the character can’t see, but a distant camera could. There’s an overemphasis on characters’ outfits and facial expressions, including my personal pet peeve: the “reaction shot round-up” in which we get a description of every character’s reaction to something as if a camera was cutting between sitcom actors.

When I talk with other creative writing professors, we all seem to agree that interiority is disappearing. Even in first-person POV stories, younger writers often skip describing their character’s hopes, dreams, fears, thoughts, memories, or reactions. This trend is hardly limited to young writers though. I was speaking to an editor yesterday who agreed interiority has largely vanished from commercial fiction, and I think you increasingly notice its absence even in works shelved as “literary fiction.” When interiority does appear on the page, it is often brief and redundant with the dialogue and action. All of this is a great shame. Interiority is perhaps the prime example of an advantage prose as a medium holds over other artforms.

fascinated by this article, "Turning Off the TV in Your Mind," about the influences of visual narratives on writing prose narratives. i def notice the two things i excerpted above in fanfic, which i guess makes even more sense as most of the fic i read is for tv and film. i will also be thinking about its discussion of time in prose - i think that's something i often struggle with and i will try to be more conscious of the differences between screen and page next time i'm writing.

PRE-ORDER: Only available until June 30, 2024! Shipping from the United States and Europe to: US 🇺🇸, EU 🇪🇺, UK 🇬🇧, Canada 🇨🇦, Australia 🇦🇺, and New Zealand 🇳🇿 Thank you everyone for voting on the polls and helping shape these pride dragon pins together. It is been so much fun making these! You can get yours here:

prideknights.com⚔️🌈

Reblogging for the culture

why is andrew always in the dirt buddy it’s ok you can stand up

sometimes you need dialogue tags and don't want to use the same four