(via alwayszebras-deactivated2017121)

(via alwayszebras-deactivated2017121)

deejayshorty:

thewritingcafe:

BASICS:

Genres:

• Alternate World: A setting that is not our world, but may be similar. This includes “portal fantasies” in which characters find an alternative world through their own. An example would be The Chronicles of Narnia.
• Arabian: Fantasy that is based on the Middle East and North Africa.
• Arthurian: Set in Camelot and deals with Arthurian mythology and legends.
• Bangsian: Set in the afterlife or deals heavily with the afterlife. It most often deals with famous and historical people as characters. An example could be The Lovely Bones.
• Celtic: Fantasy that is based on the Celtic people, most often the Irish.
• Christian: This genre has Christian themes and elements.
• Classical: Based on Roman and Greek myths.
• Contemporary: This genre takes place in modern society in which paranormal and magical creatures live among us. An example would be the Harry Potter series.
• Dark: This genre combines fantasy and horror elements. The tone or feel of dark fantasy is often gloomy, bleak, and gothic.
• Epic: This genre is long and, as the name says, epic. Epic is similar to high fantasy, but has more importance, meaning, or depth. Epic fantasy is most often in a medieval setting.
• Gaslamp: Also known as gaslight, this genre has a Victorian or Edwardian setting.
• Gunpowder: Gunpowder crosses epic or high fantasy with “rifles and railroads”, but the technology remains realistic unlike the similar genre of steampunk.
• Heroic: Centers on one or more heroes who start out as humble, unlikely heroes thrown into a plot that challenges them.
• High: This is considered the “classic” fantasy genre. High fantasy contains the general fantasy elements and is set in a fictional world.
• Historical: The setting in this genre is any time period within our world that has fantasy elements added.
• Medieval: Set between ancient times and the industrial era. Often set in Europe and involves knights. (medieval references)
• Mythic: Fantasy involving or based on myths, folklore, and fairy tales.
• Portal: Involves a portal, doorway, or other entryway that leads the protagonist from the “normal world” to the “magical world”.
• Quest: As the name suggests, the protagonist in this genre sets out on a quest. The protagonist most frequently searches for an object of importance and returns home with it.
• Sword and Sorcery: Pseudomedieval settings in which the characters use swords and engage in action-packed plots. Magic is also an element, as is romance.
• Urban: Has a modern or urban setting in which magic and paranormal creatures exist, often in secret.
• Wuxia: A genre in which the protagonist learns a martial art and follows a code. This genre is popular in Chinese speaking areas.

Word Counts:

Word counts for fantasy are longer than other genres because of the need for world building. Even in fantasy that takes place in our world, there is a need for the introduction of the fantasy aspect.

Word counts for established authors with a fan base can run higher because publishers are willing to take a higher chance on those authors. First-time authors (who have little to no fan base) will most likely not publish a longer book through traditional publishing. Established authors may also have better luck with publishing a novel far shorter than that genre’s expected or desired word count, though first-time authors may achieve this as well.

A general rule of thumb for first-time authors is to stay under 100k and probably under 110k for fantasy.

Other exceptions to word count guidelines would be for short fiction (novellas, novelettes, short stories, etc.) and that one great author who shows up every few years with a perfect 200k manuscript.

But why are there word count guidelines? For young readers, it’s pretty obvious why books should be shorter. For other age groups, it comes down to the editor’s preference, shelf space in book stores, and the cost of publishing a book. The bigger the book, the more expensive it is to publish.

• General Fantasy: 75k - 110k
• Epic Fantasy: 90k - 120k
• Contemporary Fantasy: 90k - 120k
• Urban Fantasy: 80k - 100k
• Middle Grade: 45k - 70k
• YA: 75k - 120k (depending on sub-genre)
• Adult: 80k - 120k (depending on sub-genre)

WORLD BUILDING:

A pseudo-European medieval setting is fine, but it’s overdone. And it’s always full of white men and white women in disguise as white men because around 85% (ignore my guess/exaggeration, I only put it there for emphasis) of fantasy writers seem to have trouble letting go of patriarchal societies. 

Guys. It’s fantasy. You can do whatever you want. You can write a fantasy that takes place in a jungle. Or in a desert. Or in a prairie. The people can be extremely diverse in one region and less diverse in another. The cultures should differ. Different voices should be heard. Queer people exist. People of color exist. Not everyone has two arms or two legs or the ability to hear.

As for the fantasy elements, you also make up the rules. Don’t go searching around about how a certain magic spell is done, just make it up. Magic can be whatever color you want. It can be no color at all. You can use as much or as little magic as you want.

Keep track of what you put into your world and stick to the rules. There should be limits, laws, cultures, climates, disputes, and everything else that exists in our world. However, you don’t have to go over every subject when writing your story.

World Building:

• Fantasy World Building Questionnaire
• Magical World Builder’s Guide
• Creating Fantasy and Science Fiction Worlds
• Creating Religions
• Quick and Dirty World Building
• World Building Links
• Fantasy World Building Questions
• The Seed of Government (2)
• Guide to Science Fiction and Fantasy
• Fantasy Worlds and Race
• Water Geography
• Alternate Medieval Fantasy Story
• Writing Magic
• Types of Magic
• When Magic Goes Wrong
• Magic-Like Psychic Abilities
• Science and Magic
• Creative Uses of Magic
• Thoughts on Creating Magic Systems
• Defining the Sources, Effects, and Costs of Magic
• World Building Basics
• Mythology Master Post
• Fantasy Religions
• Setting the Fantastic in the Everyday World
• Making Histories
• Matching Your Money to Your World
• Building a Better Beast
• A Man in Beast’s Clothing
• Creating and Using Fictional Languages
• Creating a Language
• Creating Fictional Holidays
• Creating Holidays
• Weather and World Building 101
• Describing Fantastic Creatures
• Medieval Technology
• Music For Your Fantasy World
• A heterogeneous World
• Articles on World Building

Cliches:

• Grand List of Fantasy Cliches (most of this can be debated)
• Fantasy Cliches Discussion
• Ten Fantasy Cliches That Should Be Put to Rest
• Seven Fantasy Cliches That Need to Disappear
• Avoiding Fantasy Cliches 101
• Avoiding Fantasy Cliches
• Fantasy Cliches
• Fantasy Cliche Meter: The Bad Guys
• Fantasy Novelist’s Exam
• Mary Sue Race Test

Note: Species (like elves and dwarves) are not cliches. The way they are executed are cliches.

CHARACTERS

Read More

(via alwayszebras-deactivated2017121)

alwayszebras:

So I’m finally happy enough with this cover to post it publicly. This is a fan cover (I suppose that’s a thing now) for The Foxhole Court. 

I thought about making an actual emblem for PSU (which is a made up university based on Clemson) but though the university is the primary setting, it was the Foxes who drive the story, hence the fox paws. If this cover was real, I imagine it to be primarily matte with the letters in gloss. 

In a kind of related note I really love making covers, there’s something soothing about photoshopping (except for parts where it’s boring). It’s a shame I have no artistic abilities/sensibilities. :/ Because sometimes I can’t ever find the perfect picture or art and I hate making do with what’s out there. I also need to improve my photoshopping skillz. Anyone know some good tutes?

eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

Look at the shiny thing she made me <3333333333

(via alwayszebras-deactivated2017121)

jojothedickcopter:

As I sashay through the valley of the shadow of death 

My soul for these shoes

(via madamsabotage)

akanamay:

 

missturdle:

On the importance of Magical Girl Heroines & Weaponized Femininity: 

Let me start by saying that officially speaking, Sailor Moon is older than I am. I started watching while living in Singapore while I was four, so I definitely came in around the end of Sailor Moon R and watched Sailor Moon S despite the fact that it was played in Japanese with Chinese subtitles. When I moved back to the States, Sailor Moon started being released and aired in sub and dub form and being young and happy to actually hear a language I understood with a show I already liked, I watched the dubs. They’re not the shining star of any animated dub, but I went back several times as I got older, and rewatched the series, in dubs, in subs, all 200 episodes. I changed my self-identified scout, I understood what got cut out of the show, what was censored, I went back and relived my crush on Tuxedo Mask again…and again. In terms of “formative  media” Sailor Moon is probably near the top of the list. I still have the sticker book I had when I was 5/6 that has a page dedicated to these magical girls, and they’ve been with me a lot longer than almost anything else, including Harry Potter, Avatar: the Last Airbender, and most other narratives, superhero, fantasy, or otherwise. 

When I got the chance last year, I showed one of my girl cousins (who was twelve) the first episode of Sailor Moon. She came back to me about a week or so later and was maybe thirty episodes into the series, bursting with excitement over everything and every one. 

I stopped to think about how much that meant to me. Then I thought a little harder. One of my best friends gave me an opportunity to cosplay as Sailor Scouts, and I leapt at the chance. I accidentally stumbled across the newer series Puella Magi Madoka Magica, and marathoned all twelve episodes. Then I made my best friend watch it.

Why does Mahou Shoujo stick with us? The show I loved when I was six is something I love when I’m twenty, and something my cousin who is a tween also loves. For that matter, Puella Magi is, essentially, an update of the classic Magical Girl story, with some genre subversions thrown in. What makes magical girls so important?

It clicked, today, and I think I’m stating the obvious here, when I say I didn’t get a whole hell of a lot of Female Coming of Age narratives in school, in the media, or otherwise. The word bildungsroman is practically synonymous with “story about a young boy who grows up”. It’s not that I can’t relate to those narratives - I can - it’s just that they’re not about me. 

The Magical Girl genre is essentially a genre which explores the female Heroine’s arc, the female coming of age story, and the womanhood narrative with varying degrees of success or failure — but it gets explored. I’d be hard pressed to name a whole lot of series that allow women to play every single archetypal role in the heroic book the way say, Sailor Moon does. Because Usagi Tsukino is a regular girl who is sort of clumsy and a bit of a bad student, but kind and loving and sweet. She is the “regular young girl” who begins a journey into becoming a powerful woman. She might initially play at being the virginal Princess type, but let’s face it — her future child drops out of the sky, and there’s never any sort of real play at insinuating she’s a bad person because she grows up. Usagi is a Warrior, a Queen, a Mother, a Lover, a Friend, a Sister - the Heroine of the story. She saves her own boyfriend/consort’s ass regularly from the bad guys. Essentially, she’s the hero, and the story is about her. 

It’s more complex than that, of course. Her weapons are pink and shiny and come in the form of compacts and wands with heart and moon shapes. She wears a sailor fuku, she’s got long flowing hair, she’s feminine, beautiful, and when she doesn’t trip first, she’s going to kick your ass in the name of the moon (and love and justice). Being a girl is her weapon. Being feminine and a woman is her weapon. Some of the other Scouts have other presentations of themselves and their genders, but that’s just it - womanhood and girlhood, and gender, and sexuality, and so on — has a spectrum. It’s all there. 

Now look at Puella Magi. At only twelve episodes it packs a hard punch, and it’s so easy to claim that Kyubey represents the devil, with a contract waiting to be made to essentially use your soul to fight witches. This claim that the narrative is Faustian isn’t wholly wrong, but I’d argue it’s not all there is either. 

Kyubey isn’t the devil. Kyubey is the society we live in, which takes up and preys on young girls at vulnerable times in their lives, and asks them to be perfect. Society asks girls to fight against evil, the icky, awful, and impure, and it keeps asking until we say yes. Yes to being beautiful, and perfect, and good, and pure, and sweet, yes to being a nice young lady, yes to fighting everything that is bad and evil and dangerous - to fighting the things that threaten us and our friends. 

Except there’s a catch. We’re fighting ourselves. What they don’t tell you, society, or Kyubey in this metaphor, is that there is no way to prevent yourself from becoming what you started out fighting. You lose, in this scenario, every time. At some point, a young, “emotionally volatile” girl grows up and becomes a woman. One day, you hit puberty, or maybe you haven’t yet, and someone leers at you, or looks at you wrong, or calls after you and you are suddenly made aware of the fact that being a woman is dangerous. Growing up means something incredibly different for girls than it does boys. 

And this is something Kyubey himself says, and the implications of it are astounding. Girls become women. Magical girls become witches. There’s no stopping it, the process happens whether you want it to or not. You grow up, sure, but there’s a reason for it. Sayaka Miki fights relentlessly against the evils she sees in the world, but she becomes obsessed with her imperfections and failures, she berates herself for falling short of her own standards, and for standards thrust upon her, and she literally can not win. The standards are always changing, they can’t be met, they’re meant to keep you fighting, but only in a certain way, only the way society wants you to. Sayaka loses her cool, she overhears some men say awful, horribly misogynistic and sexist things about their ‘girlfriends’ on a train, and she loses it. Sayaka reacts to the endless stream of hatred and misogyny set up in a patriarchal society that has been asking her to fight against women who failed to met society’s expectations and while we don’t see the results of her losing her cool on the train directly, we can all imagine that she could have beaten these men up, or she could have killed them. In the end, the result doesn’t matter. The losing her temper does.

You become a witch or a bitch the day you fight back. And even if you don’t fight back, you’re going to become a witch or a bitch eventually. That’s the unfortunate truth of growing up female — sooner or later, society will betray you. And while you might not become Walpurgisnacht, it can be as simple as a hiss in your ear, or a seething message in your inbox. You’re an emotionally out of control girl, you’re evil, you’re bad, you’re a slut, a whore, or a bitch, or hysterical, or over reacting. You become a woman in a society that hates women. And if and when you react, you get tossed straight into the bin of evil terrible things. 

Puella Magi is a story about young teenager girls who, while exploring who they are as people, their sexualities, their lives, their desires, hopes, wants, wishes, and dreams — find out that society is going to see them as shitty monstrous plagues upon the world sooner or later. And you can try to stop it, or take it back, or hold out hope, or you can lose your unholy shit and hit back. You can say the idea of witches is complete and utter bullshit, and women and girls don’t deserve that fate. You can fight against it, you can be Madoka Kaname, or Usagi Tsukino and you can fight against people who prey on other girls and women for having anything special or bright about them and try to make it something terrible or wrong. 

Magical Girl stories are stories about growing up and becoming a woman, and protecting other women, saving other women, following desires and dreams and wishes and then kicking the bad guys in the face with your high heeled boots. The weapon is womanhood and girlhood and your sexuality because that’s the weapon society gave you and told you you were going to hurt yourself with it. Except the thing is, you don’t have to hurt yourself. You can protect yourself, and your friends, and your ideas, and feelings, and some days, yes, you fall down on your knees and sob messily because you can’t defeat every bad guy on your own, or ever, or alone - but goddamnit you have the ability to take power in your agency and who you are. Society doesn’t OFTEN tell girls that. We don’t often get the message that who we are is okay, acceptable, powerful, or amazing, much less that it’s also okay if we don’t succeed every single time. We know the fight is a part of our lives, but survival is the minimum. Getting stories about winning beyond that is amazing. 

This is why I cringe when people complain loudly that there aren’t “Magical Boy” series for them to watch. To start with, there are already several series that involve young boys transforming with magical powers and skirts/wands/sparkles/etc. There’s also an abundance of already available fantasy male heroes who start off on Hero’s journeys that describe the process of growing up and becoming a “man” in society. Magical Girls are a genre that rely on a female narrative, on becoming a woman, on relative experiences of love and sex and dreams and wishes that are influenced by the treatment of women in society. That doesn’t mean men can enjoy these stories, or relate to them, or that people who don’t fall in the binary gender spectrum can’t relate to them (on the contrary, there’s a lot of reliability in not “fitting” gender roles or expectations in the series I’ve just mentioned), it just means that this genre is built on something very specific to a narrative that is not male dominated, that isn’t a male narrative. There’s, uh, a reason why Mamoru Chiba is the major male love interest, and why PMMM features one male love interest who ends up with someone else. The ability to find WOC and QWOC in Magical girl series is also a big part of the genre, and pushes the majority of the focus on female pleasure rather than the dudes. Yes, the Male Gaze exists in much of the genre, but… Tuxedo Mask is also clearly a young girl’s dream man. So is Sailor Uranus. The crushes and loves are often more fluid than they would be elsewhere, and equally important, they’re not in the perspective of Prize/Not prize and give an active role to the women in the relationships.

Magical Girls are important to real girls because they tell us stories about ourselves and our powers, and we need them, because girls need to see themselves as heroes and saviors too.

(via scribblesloth-deactivated201609)

(via sorion)

sorion:

monsters-inked:

THESE ARE SO COOL! LOOK AT DRACO ASDFGHKJJL’AS

credit to pink-martini

I wasn’t going to reblog this… and then I saw that they added Draco.

(via sorion)

i-do-augustus-i-do:

paigeallenyummm:

ambers-heard:

“this leaves men confused and unable to pigeonhole you. What they are forced to do instead is… take you seriously.”

Reblog every time

What is this from?

(via sorion)