This Is So True, It's Only A Matter Of Perspective.

Can’t figure out why this scene still isn’t working?

You’ve written and rewritten the same scene five times and convinced yourself to move on to fix it later but it’s still there, still broken, and you can’t put a finger on what the problem is.

You’re in the wrong POV (if applicable)

Your narrator isn’t the best choice here, maybe they’re overshadowing a more important character or their commentary on what’s happening isn’t compelling enough by nature of their relationship with the story.

Your refuse to kill your darlings

You’ve worked so damn hard trying to fit a square peg of this really cool idea in isolation into the round hole that your narrative became. No matter how hard you shove or how many angles you try, it’s not going to work. Delete it, or move it.

This scene occurs at the wrong time

Maybe it’s a revelation that hits too early or too late, either in the physical timeline or within a character’s arc. Maybe it messes up the pacing, leaving characters either rushing or waiting around for the next scene to hit because the placement of your story beats has left clumps and gaps of action.

This scene throws somebody OOC

It might be a darling that needs sacrifice. Maybe it’s the wrong character to have that monologue or to say that cool quip you thought of, or they’re weirdly passionate about a thing that shouldn’t matter to them/nonplussed about something that should be very important to them. It’s something X would never do but you wrote anyway for the sake of the plot.

—

Or some combination of these. My deleted scenes for ENNS’s sequel is officially longer than the existing manuscript purely due to trial and error with my plot.

I just realized that I have a couple (2) of these books. They're amazing!

xkcd fans are the only fandom I've had direct experience with where people do the stereotypical nerdy fan thing of referring to installments of the thing they like by their release order numbers instead of their titles

Happy Birthday Mr. Spock😭💖💚🖖

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine "Past Tense, Pt. 1"

Skip Google for Research

As Google has worked to overtake the internet, its search algorithm has not just gotten worse.  It has been designed to prioritize advertisers and popular pages often times excluding pages and content that better matches your search terms 

As a writer in need of information for my stories, I find this unacceptable.  As a proponent of availability of information so the populace can actually educate itself, it is unforgivable.

Below is a concise list of useful research sites compiled by Edward Clark over on Facebook. I was familiar with some, but not all of these.

⁂

Google is so powerful that it “hides” other search systems from us. We just don’t know the existence of most of them. Meanwhile, there are still a huge number of excellent searchers in the world who specialize in books, science, other smart information. Keep a list of sites you never heard of.

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

www.pdfdrive.com is the largest website for free download of books in PDF format. Claiming over 225 million names.

www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free

New KnitHacker Community!

I received a notice last night that a KnitHacker community has been approved on Tumblr, 500 spots only. What should we do with it?

Link to preview here.

Leave a comment below if you'd like an invite!

Commissions are open starting at $20 for a fully-colored full body character!

For examples of my art, check my portfolio, or simply scroll through my blog!

The only valid thief is a magpie.