reblog if you’re okay with people writing fanfics of your fanfics and/or fanfics inspired by your fanfics

For the last goddamn time...

"Kill your darlings" means "if something is holding you back, get rid of it, even if it sounds pretty."

That's it! That's all it means! It means if you're stuck and stalled out on your story and you could fix the whole block by removing something but you're avoiding removing that thing because it's good, you remove that thing. That's the darling.

It does NOT mean

The POINT is that you STOP FEELING GUILTY for throwing out good writing that isn't SERVING THE STORY.

The POINT is that you don't get so HUNG UP on the details that you lose sight of the BIG PICTURE.

Good grief....

Also, you don't have to like, delete it from existence. Keep a second document full of the Darlings. You never know when you'll need it later.

yes, your killed darlings are ripe for rebirth

“Kill your darlings” is a terrible phrase for this thing. It sounds like a weird Protestant work ethic thing.

It sounds like it means “Revising the bits you had fun writing so they’re more bland makes you sound Literary and Seeeerious, you know.”

“Don’t stay stuck” is right there, but somehow people went with “be brutal about what you’re proud of” instead and I Do Not Understand.

Kutter in Fahrt by Carl Emil Rudolf Ludwig Becker (German 1862--1926)

Spoke to a gen z person the other night and apparently the young folks don't know about the very legal sites from which you can access public domain media (including Dracula, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and other Victorian gothic horror stories)?

Like this young person didn't even know about goddamn Gutenberg which is a SHAME. I linked to it and they went "aw yiss time to do a theft" and I was like "I mean yo ho ho and all that, sure, but. you know gutenberg is entirely legal, right?"

Anyway I'm gonna put this in a few Choice Tags (sorry dracula fans I DID mention it though so it's fair game) and then put some Cool Links in a reblog so this post will still show UP in said tags lmao.

Spreading the news to my followers - if you weren’t aware of this before, here’s the link to Project Gutenberg - https://www.gutenberg.org/

Project Gutenberg is a gigantic collection of books that are in the public domain.  You can read the books through the site or you can download them in various formats so you can get the format you prefer for your eReader of choice.

It is free. 

It is legal.

I was reviewing the list of the top 100 books downloaded yesterday and I saw a fair few that I had to read for college classes - so if you’re a college student and your professor assigns you to read Plato or any number of older works, check here before you buy a copy.

I reread the Anne series several years back - they were free through this.  I need to reread Pride and Prejudice at least once a year, and my e-book version is from this.  Someone recommended Jekyll and Hyde to me a few weeks back and I got a free copy from this.  When I went to Haworth on my last holiday before the plague times, I brought books by the Bronte sisters with me to read or reread that I downloaded from here.  It’s a great resource.

Yes yes yes! I was honestly so flabbergasted that this young person hadn't heard of the gutenberg project! It's been around for AGES, maybe longer than the kindle has? And it's such a huge project and wonderful resource! It used to be a household name (or maybe that's just my family, thanks to my dad being a cheapskate nerd [affectionate]). I was so glad to be able to share this resource and others with them though, and I wanted to make sure no one else was missing out!

If you look at the first reblog from me I also recommended a few other resources, most of which were from www.archive.org, home of the Wayback Machine! They run openlibrary.org, where you can check out ebooks of some public domain titles! They even have the Bone series by Jeff Smith!

And archive.org itself has all kinds of public domain media including music and movies! For Dracula fans, here's a radio show adaptation of the book, starring Orson Welles! And here's a 1920 movie adaptation of "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," starring John Barrymore, the grandfather of Drew Barrymore!

I'm so excited to see people falling in love with classic media through Dracula Daily! Let's keep that fire blazing!

Also, if you can't handle reading things, check out libirvox.org! it's a free audio book project taking public domain works and people doing free audiobooks! there's a lot of great stuff on there, but it takes things in the public domain and makes audio books out of them!

it's a super nice project, and you can find some really nice readers there!

Also don't think a book is old because it's in the public domain

lots of writers and publishers are prepared to waive future profits for entirely petty reasons

because of this the entire works of Philip K Dick [petty writer who found himself with lots of hangers on during his life] and HP Lovecraft [his publisher - who was his wife and hated him] became public domain on their death

Sherlock Holmes entered public domain this year, it's always worth checking because you can save a fortune

and the more popular the classic - the more likely someone has uploaded it

Also don’t think a

book is old because it’s in

the public domain

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

Want audiobooks instead?

LibriVox has free public domain audiobooks.

Public domain works in the US are:

(Don't go looking for things in that third category unless you've studied a LOT about copyright law. Mostly that covers things like "weird little newsletters" and "self-published booklets" and sometimes fanzines. But most publications have a copyright notice in them.)

There's also some oddball exemptions here and there; copyright law is a tentacled mess. But those are the basic guidelines. (Except for audio. Audio has its own set of rules. It's weird.) (I mentioned tentacles, did I not? Double the amount of them you were thinking of.)

There are a lot of works from the 50s and early 60s that were not renewed, especially short stories published in magazines.

Project Gutenberg began in 1971; the first text was the US Declaration of Independence, shared through the university computer system. That was the start of "hey computers + public domain text = FREE BOOKS FOR EVERYONE."

Adding on that Project Gutenberg is not just Eng language texts either! I know specifically about the French texts because I did independent study French lit in high school and all my sources were Project Gutenberg acquired (Candide my beloathed) but there's many open source texts available in a number of languages.

browsing the top 100 books downloaded in the last 30 days can be really fun too, interesting to see how things change

https://www.gutenberg.org/browse/scores/top#books-last30

heads up that the libravox may have different narrators from chapter to chapter, since its all volunteer work. I read Phantom of the Opera that way and man it *really* fucked with me. Not a "dont use this service!" but rather a "be prepared for this potentially"

ghost stories are alarmingly easy to spread tbh

when I was like ten I was walking back from the chip shop near my gran's house with a neighbour and we took a short cut down an alley which was enclosed by garages except for one part which was wire fenced and led to the electricity shack

and while I was walking I chucked a chip over the fence. the girl walking with me, C, reasonably asks why I did that

"oh, don't you know?" I say, as if I'm not equally out of my own loop

she shakes her head. the enclosed alleyway has no streetlights. it's after dark. the shack is isolated in the distance.

"a little girl who lived up on the court climbed the fence once on a dare. she went up to the shack and touched it, but there was a wire sticking out, and when she touched it, she got electrocuted and died, right there. if you come back in the daylight, you can still see the black mark."

[editor's note: the court was the smaller road off the side of the crescent, which was the one C's family and my gran lived on. the houses there were slightly more expensive and newer, almost all occupied by wealthy commuters to the city, where most of the crescent houses were occupied by retirees and locals who worked on the trading estate. naturally, crescent kids hated the court. houses there got bricked about once a month.]

"no she didn't," C says

I made up this story for absolutely no reason and with no plan, but I'm not gonna back down now. "sure she did. and if you go past on your way back from the shops and you don't leave her an offering, she'll follow you home through the streetlights. one flickers behind you, then the next, then the next, until you get home. and then the lights start to flocked inside the house. even if you turn out all the electrics before bed, it'll be too late. she's inside. and you'll wake up on the night and see her, and she'll be so awful to see it'll stop your heart."

[editor's note: the streetlights always flickered. this was because our neighbour monkey george kept setting the junction boxes on fire]

"I never did before and she never followed me home!"

"do you come down the alley after dark? or do you take the main road with the streetlights?" I knew she didn't use the shortcut, because I'd been the one to talk her into it that night. she was three years younger than me and scared of the dark.

C claims not to believe me, but she throws a chip over the fence too, and walks the rest of the way looking over her shoulder. I get to pride myself for the night on being good at scary stories, and don't think much more about it.

fast forward six or seven years. I'm back in town. I'm on my way back from the chip shop, taking the same shortcut home. ahead of me on the road are a couple of kids I vaguely recognise as old playmates' younger siblings.

they stop, and I watch one fish out three sweeties from the pack they're sharing. they take one each and throw them over the fence. they carry on walking.

I realise that this is probably my fault, as are any resulting pest control issues around the old electricity shack.

when I get to the fence, I throw a chip over.

How Mexicans feel about duendes too.

True. Most Irish people, as Norwegians do with Trolls, will happily let the 'fairies' be a thing to make tours for tourists and idle threats to make children behave. Most Irish people will have a very normal and mature explanation of fairies as a common folk mythology that expresses some dimension of Irish culture but are not, obviously, to be taken literally.

And most Irish people, if you ask them to move a stone from a fairy circle will immoveably, flatly respond with 'absolutely fucking not'.

Construction projects have had to halt and be abandoned for it.

At work me and a couple coworkers (black, white, and mexican) had a fun discussion on whether there are more ghosts at a hospital or a cemetery.

everyone individually took a moment to specify that ghosts probably aren't REAL real. then weighed in on where and why.

for the record my position was that there's probably way more ghosts in hospitals because that's where people die horribly, but since you can only see ghosts in dark, solitary conditions, graveyards at night is where the majority of ghost sightings occur. hospitals are usually well lit and busy, so even if they're crammed with ghosts the living are too damn busy to see them. meanwhile if a cemetery has even one ghost that followed her corpse there from the hospital, she'll be spotted because that's where all the ghost hunters go to look.

this theory was received as extremely sensible, and a coworker drew the conclusion that that's why abandoned hospitals are even scarier than graveyards. once the place gets abandoned then you can tell how much ghosts got built up.

we all liked this explanation a lot and explained it to everyone else all night. and of course, none of us believe in ghosts.

Beliefs that are more interacted with than believed are so awesome sometimes.

Like this magical supernatural entity almost certainly doesn't actually exist, but that's no excuse to be impolite to them.

if it's good enough for you, then it deserves to be made. don't let anyone else decide if your story is worth it or not.

REBLOGING FOR THE PEOPLE IN THE BACK TO HEAR THAT, BE FUCKIN CRINGE TO DAMN STRESSFUL TO BE ANYTHING BUT YA SELF

Thank you! I need these pills

Talking with writers online

Their stories: Amazing grammar, soaring vocabulary, beautiful imagery and prose which flows like a river.

In chats: no capitalisation or punctuation, swears like a sailor, misspellings everywhere, acronyms and abbreviations every five words, idek

#listen #listen do u know how much braining it takes to make the words go? #it is a lot #it’s like wearing fancy clothes all day #and then when you’re at home and comfy #u just put on ur pj’s ( @feynites)

I have never related to a statement more than “do you know how much braining it takes to make words go?”

still amazed that like. 7 years later. this post is still going. it gets like 5-12 notes a day

it’s a heritage post, is what it is.

a writer's nightmare is having the vision for one specific scene for a fic and having to come up with The Rest

The absolute worst

All The Prompts List

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Searching best practices on JSTOR

Hi Tumblr researchers,

As promised, we're going to dive into some best practices for searching on JSTOR. This'll be a long one!

The first thing to note is that JSTOR is not Google, so searches should not be conducted in the same way.

More on that in this video:

Basic Search on JSTOR

Advanced Searching on JSTOR

Finding Content You Have Access To

To discover downloadable articles, chapters, and pamphlets for reading, you have the option to narrow down your search to accessible content. Simply navigate to the Advanced Search page and locate the "Select an access type" feature, which offers the following choices:

All Content will show you all of the relevant search results on JSTOR, regardless of whether or not you can access it.

Content I can access will show you content you can download or read online. This will include Early Journal Content and journals/books publishers have made freely available.

Once you've refined your search, simply select an option that aligns with your needs and discover the most relevant items. Additionally, you have the option to further narrow down your search results after conducting an initial search. Look for this option located below the "access type" checkbox, situated at the bottom left-hand side of the page.

Additional resources

For more search recommendations, feel free to explore this page on JSTOR searching. There, you will find information on truncation, wildcards, and proximity, using fields, and metadata hyperlinks.

if it's good enough for you, then it deserves to be made. don't let anyone else decide if your story is worth it or not.

REBLOGING FOR THE PEOPLE IN THE BACK TO HEAR THAT, BE FUCKIN CRINGE TO DAMN STRESSFUL TO BE ANYTHING BUT YA SELF

Thank you! I need these pills

Becoming a writer is great because now you have a hobby that haunts you whenever you don’t have time to do it

Becoming a writer is great because now you have a hobby that comes bundled with imposter syndrome

is that piece of media actually bad, or is it just not following the blueprint you projected onto it? is that work actually not good, or are you just demanding something from it that is absolutely antithetical to its themes, genre, tone, and narrative goal? is that story actually poorly written, or do you just dislike that it is not the specific things you wanted from it that it never set out to be, never was, and never is going to become? is it actually bad, or is it actually well-executed and you just dislike the story it chose to be because it isn't catering to your specific desires and expectations?

People keep misinterpreting this post, and I keep hiding their comments. This is not saying "there is no such thing as a bad piece of media". This is asking that you examine whether your opinion about the quality of the work is actually based on that work's merits and the goals it set out to achieve, not on the fact that it is not what you wanted to force it to be.

There are indeed poorly written and executed works! A great many of them! There is a lot of shit media out there! If you ask yourself these questions and still find that the answer remains "It is indeed a poorly done work on its own merits and fails to achieve what it wanted to do," then congratulations, you've done what I'm asking here.

I've seen a great many tightly written works panned as narratively disorganized because it doesn't focus on the side characters they want or explore an inconsequential implication. I've seen people dismiss a nuanced and deft thematic arc as incoherent because it did not say the same thing as people wanted the work to say. This post is a litany against a very common approach in fandom space that pans a work as poorly written and incoherent SIMPLY because it is not what they've projected onto it and does not do what they personally wanted.

Not everything you dislike is poorly done—just as how, conversely, not everything you like is a technical masterpiece. There are bad works! I am not saying that there is not. What I'm saying is that there is at least a small pattern I've observed in some corners that firmly acts like: "My personal taste is equivalent to whether a work is executed well, and if a work does not match my projected expectations or do exactly what I'm into, then it is objectively bad."

Sometimes, often, a piece of media really is shit for some reason or another. What I'm saying is that some of you on this website act like the overlap between "works that are badly done" and "stuff I personally dislike" is a perfect circle. It isn't. Sometimes, it's well done and just isn't for you, and that's fine.

person: so you’re writing a book?

me: yeah

person: what’s it about?

me: so it’s uh…like…it’s got…it really um…so what happens is…