Person A: "You're going to have to get back up eventually."

Person B: "Can't I just rot here?"

Person A: "And let them win?"

Person B: "It's a loss I'm willing to accept."

Person A: "No it's not."

Person B: "...No. It's not."

writing tip #4035:

step 1: write it

step 2: edit it

step 3: read it

step 4: spend fifty-two hours trying to work out what's wrong with the opening of that one chapter

step 5: oh god oh fuck if i change that then i'll have to change all of the fucki

step 6: go back to step 1

me as a writer

my favourite thing is characters who just met the person theyre literally going to be wildly in love with for the rest of their lives and theyre like “:/ they’re not all that” this is so embarrassing for u

Mr. Fitzwilliam "She is tolerable, I suppose; but not handsome enough to tempt me," Darcy

Most infuriating part of writing is having an idea and thinking oh, this is gonna be so good and wanting to IMMEDIATELY share the vision with other people because it's gonna be good but then you start writing it down and - it is gonna be good. Except. It is also gonna take so, so, so long to finish. And in the meantime. You are the only one with The Vision. Alone. Losing your mind. 😭

You get a call from an old friend who you haven't heard from in a while. She's been ducking your calls for weeks and now she needs a huge favor. She wants you to help her drive cross country. What's going on with her and do you help or not? Write the dialogue.

Writing is wild. One day you’re unstoppable and the next day you’re staring at your keyboard like it personally betrayed you.

No googling, curious about something

Things are going well

Spoiler

Okay normally I'm on the side of "words mean whatever we need them to mean".

but guys, I don’t like the suggestion that it’s what is happening here. Being unfamiliar with the term, and guessing its meaning based on vibes, doesn’t mean you have equal authority on whether it’s “correct” with the community who actively use this word in a technical sense.

please do consider that if you haven't been exposed to the word in the context it's used in, "both are correct" and "you can interpret it differently" and “there is no right or wrong answer” and “it feels like it SHOULD be X” cannot be a fully realised take. Sure, linguistics recognises there are rules in which meaning changes - but “laypeople being unfamiliar with the word, and liking vibes better” isn’t one of them.

You can do that with most words, especially slang, and shape them to the needs of the majority, but this isn't like... a fanfiction word, invented for fanfic and, like, solely used for injured hockey players where it doesn’t matter if the injured limb swaps sides 4 times in a sex scene and phases through a stomach. It is, in its context, a bit more load-bearing (ha) than that.

It's fine to be unfamiliar with the context, and it's fine for words to change, but do just take a quick second to hear it in a native sentence!

One of the most common ways of using this word is to assess four-legged animals. "Favouring" is a specific grouping of behaviour - a hesitancy in gait, stiffness, reluctance to put weight on a limb. It’s often inconsistent, as the animal tries to compensate or conceal the pain. It may not be a full limp or obvious lameness, since prey animals especially will actively try to conceal this; favouring is a subtle reluctance, and a useful word for a very specific recognisable behaviour that the animal is usually trying to lie about. (That’s probably why it’s used in romance fiction, as it’s an interestingly romantic and stoic way to react to pain, and doesn’t mean the limb is inconveniently disabled. A fictional character favouring a wounded leg can wince attractively when it’s jostled, but it doesn’t matter too much if the author forgets and has them run to the door suddenly - “favouring” isn’t incompatible with “running” in horses either.)

The sentence “Favouring the off hind” is equestrian jargon: it means “pain behaviour on the back right leg.” It does not mean “opposite-pain in the not-on deer” and is not confusing in its professional register.

If you've only vaguely heard of "myeloma", and most people in a poll are guessing it's a skin cancer, that doesn't mean that myeloma and melanoma can now readily collapse into the same word - they're under active use in their native contexts, where the people frequently using them do need to communicate the difference between skin and blood cancer.

A poll of laypeople misunderstanding “myeloma,” or non-horse-people misunderstanding “favouring,” isn’t quite enough to indicate a full semantic shift and change of meaning of the term. The community that uses the term “favouring” in the context of “limb injury” - vets, farriers, farmers, commentators, equestrians - knows what it means and uses it consistently in the same way. They’re not confused. because to them, it isn’t a vibesy, sex-scene-hand waving word. It’s a cluster of pain signals.

If you aren’t familiar with that usage, then that’s really more about your own lack of familiarity. Not all interpretations DO carry equal authority, especially when one is just confusion/unfamiliarity. You just haven’t met it before, and that’s fine.

Tl;dr: I’m all for words changing meanings, but we shouldn’t be too quick to declare that when it’s based entirely on unfamiliarity and vibes-based readings.

i love when ppl ask writers questions about their ocs and they're like "uhh i think so?" as if they didn't invent them. like they're just mild acquaintances we have

Person A: "I don't think we're good for each other."

Person B: "Yeah? Funny, 'cause I'm as good as you're ever going to get."

Person A: "That's not true."

Person B: "You haven't dealt with yourself before. Trust me, barely anyone would want to."

[X] <- psst click this

writing tip #4034:

write one word. write one goddamn word on that page. i beg of you. just one word. please

The Witch-Hag of Sorrelwood: 200k excerpt!

So... I had planned to do a 175k post but then I blinked, and we were at 200k haha. Surprise! To anyone going "200k?! You started in April!" trust me, I'm just as shocked as you are! I have never written this much this fast for a single project, like, ever. Ayla and Behir just have the SauceTM I guess! (and the pressure of maintaining a writing streak, courtesy of last year's fantastic writing tracker that @concerningwolves so generously put into the world, of which we have this one for 2026 up for grabs. You're welcome.)

Anyway here's a fun bit from a ways into our adventure in celebration of this landmark! Oopsies, what's that? Is someone feeling...feelings?? 🫣✨

(Full 800 word [200k special aayy!!] excerpt under the cut! Prev excerpt [here]!)

~~~~~~~~~~

“I see. You’re being ridiculous to try to get a rise out of me,” I answered through my teeth.

She sneered back, eyes glinting. “Who, me?”

The twitch had returned, it seemed, right in the corner of my eye. “If a snake bites you, I’m letting it have you.”

The witch laughed and stooped, teasingly waving another crayfish. “Ah, not to worry, hero. The largest viper has nothing to fear from the others,” she said with a wink.

Reading weird poetry and short stories and unapologetically strange novels really does teach you that a lot of stuff people teach you about writing is just not true. Almost anything someone tells you must happen when you’re writing has an exception and writing advice has trends and fads just like anything else.

I was struggling to find where I fit as a writer until I found writers like Daniel Olivias who wrote short stories in ways I’d never seen before. I owe a lot of my current inspiration in my writing to Latin American magical realism writers. Finding magical realism and surrealism really opened doors in my brain that had been shut before.

You can get weird with it. You can get weird in content, weird in form, weird in structure. You don’t need a plot. You can tell a story backwards, you can just sit in an idea, you can explain, overexplain, skip explanation, get political, start ideas, end ideas. No ifs ands or buts you can just throw traditional story structure out the window.

I know what kind of writer I am now. A weird one. You don’t have to be held to standards of predictability, genre fiction, markets, tropes. You can just do whatever. Truly. Honestly. Completely. For ten words or a hundred thousand.

the narrative: *starts the third act by repeating a scene from the first act but now it has a totally different context*

me: ohoHOhohoHOHOhoHO

the hard part about writing is literally writing a banger sentence n then having to be like. do NOT share it. dont share it. dont share it. just wait. its not as good outside of context. just WAAAAAIT. when its like. if i dont get attention right this second im gonna stop writing forever my hands will turn to stone & my brain will fall outta my ears n go rolling around on the floor & down the apartment stairs & out into the cool night air never to be seen again