Oh My God...

I am constantly dragging my sister into long-ass phone calls and cornering her at family dinners.

She is the wall at which I throw things to see what sticks or, even better, what bounces back with improvements made

the most powerful writing tool is actually Brainstorming With The Girls

Just finished an entire chapter-by-chapter outline in one day, I need a shot and a burrito

I'm re-reading this story I wrote back in 2022 and... foone, do you think you get your "one phone call" even if you're in a medieval fantasyworld jail? because I don't think that's how it works

Here are some thoughts about dialogue tags while I have my editor hat on:

It's fine to use said as a dialogue tag. 'Said' works the way jeans do. Jeans are so ubiquitous that they function as a neutral colour in an outfit despite the fact that they are blue. Said is so ubiquitous in fiction that it functions as a neutral tag to indicate the speaker in much the same way

Using 'said' where necessary will stand out much less than elaborate attempts to avoid it

It is possible to reduce the use of said by reducing the number of dialogue tags overall.

Other dialogue tags are not neutral; you can use them to get various effects. One of these potential effects is '4th grade English class exercise'. Sometimes that's what you're going for and I would not dream of stopping you.

"You can use dialogue tags in the middle of speech," they say, "to affect the perception of the pacing."

"Or," they add, "to give an impression of delivery and tone without resorting to direct descriptions."

"You can even..." They pause to consider how to convey this, toying with their water bottle while they think. "Break dialogue up with actions instead of tags to avoid having blocks of dialogue in which everyone stands stock still and speaks in a monotone. This also contributes to conveying tone without describing it and can add to characterisation."

He's a big baby who needs constant snuggles

I think about this drawing every single time I'm doing something badly. Whatever I am doing, at least I'm not destroying things.

alright, I’m annoyed with the class that I’m taking. it’s about writing novels, and I thought it would have cool stuff about balancing your narrative and developing themes etc, but instead she spent the first class talking about how every book fits into the Hero’s Journey (the monomyth template). and I was somewhat of a contrarian, and said “can you give us examples of books that don’t fit into this template?” and she said “no. because all books fit.”

but I dunno man, I just finished reading this Korean book where the plot is just the character having a string of hookups and reflecting on them without changing in any way. I don’t know if it’s possible to contort that into the Hero’s Journey.

Me: *writes an amazing chapter*

Me: Ah yes. That is amazing. Can't wait to begin the next one. So many possibilities!

Me: *turns off my laptop and goes into a month-long depression*

“Pratchett went back to older throwaway jokes (like dwarves being apparently unisex) and used them as metaphors to discuss social change, racial assimilation, and other complex issues, while reexamining the species he’d thrown in at the margins of his world simply because they existed at the margins of every other fantasy universe. If goblins and orcs and trolls could think, then why were they always just there to be slaughtered by the heroes? And if the heroes slaughtered sentient beings en masse, how heroic exactly were they? It was a long overdue start on redressing issues long swept under the rug by a parade of Tolkien successors who never thought of anyone green and slimy as anything but a notch on the protagonist’s sword, and much of the urgency in Pratchett’s last few books seemed to be related to them. “There’s only one true evil in the world,” he said through his characters. “And that’s treating people like they were things.” And in the last of his “grown-up” Discworld books, that idea is shouted with the ferocity of those who have only a few words left and want to make them count. Goblins are people. Golems are people. Dwarves are people, and they do not become any less people because they decide to go by the gender they know themselves to be instead of the one society forces on them. Even trains might be people, and you’ll never know one way or the other unless you ask them, because treating someone like they’re a person and not a thing should be your default. And the only people who cling to tradition at the expense of real people are sad, angry dwellers in the darkness who don’t even understand how pathetic they are, clutching and grasping at the things they remember without ever understanding that the world was never that simple to begin with. The future is bright, it is shining, and it belongs to everyone.”

— John Seavey, The Evolution of the Disc (via pornosophical)