Via @swatercolor [insta]

It’s uncanny how similar Trump is acting like Hitler. People are now doing the Nazi salute. They’re drawing the symbol. The KKK was seen in Kentucky asking people to join them. ICE has been ripping families apart. Companies have pulled back Diversity Initiatives. We’re no longer part of WHO and there won’t be any communication from the CDC at least until February 1st. We’re being censored and the news can’t be trusted. Thousands of Americans didn’t know there were protests against Trump yesterday outside the U.S. Quotes from The Handmaid’s Tale and Anne Frank have been compared to what’s going on right now.

According to The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Studies and Prevention the U.S. has officially been given a red flag alert for Genocide.

I’m exhausted but I will never stop being angry.

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."

seeing a cover i drew at the library is so wild lmao

WAIT 3 PEOPLE IN LINE??? Feeling a lot of pressure ;0_0 sorry to the people in the queue behind me. im reading so slowly rn

i know i've said this before but i'm going to say it again because the more i work with geriatric women the stronger i feel about the fact that the only anti-aging that women in their 20s/30s should be obsessed with is building strong bones and muscle mass. that's like the most important thing you can you can do right now to lay a good foundation for healthy aging. you can botox the shit out of your face but that's not going to do anything to save you from dying prematurely from a fatal hip fracture that you can't bounce back from because you didn't do anything to prevent yourself from becoming frail and breakable. like i know that sounds harsh but that is reality for a lot of older women and i don't want that to be you.

Make the first move. Pronounce your OWN name wrong. Assert your dominance. You Have The Power Now

Anyway if you see this you have to reblog and tag with a delight from ur day -- even the littlest thing counts

Sometimes you need to outline a whole ass fantasy novel in a single day instead of dealing with your feelings

J. R. R. Tolkien: no, my books aren't about the war I experienced. It's just a story

J. R. R. Tolkien's works: you cannot go home, war ends entire bloodlines, you are mourning the death of your brother alone, you dug into the earth and permanently scored the land, you cannot explain what you have been through, you cannot go home, "that wound will never fully heal. He will carry it the rest of his life", leaving the women behind does not save them, the young die first, you cannot go home, the parent will bury their child, you have lost the wives and you will never connect with them again, "how shall any tower withstand such numbers and such reckless hate?", you are not the same, you cannot go home, you can never go home, your father will only side with those he sees as worthy bloodlines and you cannot change his mind, it is more meaningful Not to kill, sometimes your sacrifice accomplishes nothing, you cannot go home

I can’t find a good app to make a private world building wiki. All of them are either specifically tailored to roleplaying games to an annoying degree or force you to make your wiki public or put all the decent features behind a paywall or something. I’m broke and just want the ability to write little articles for myself with links so I can remember what I was doing.

Mattresses, unbeknownst to many, are a lot like cars. Every year new ones roll out, they’re always tweaking and innovating and you’ll never find the same one you loved decades ago when buying a new one.

Where I sold mattresses had a three month return or exchange program for this reason. New beds take a while to break in, and they’re a big expense. Your body is used to the old one. So we made sure people were loving it. If a bed got returned we’d take it back, sanitize and clean it, then sell it again on clearance.

To sell these we always had to disclose what clearance meant to customers, and they had to sign that they knew what they were getting. (FYI, not every company is as… forthright about the used bed situation)

In clearance we had beds that were floor models, we had returns, and more rarely we had old models whose line had been discontinued. These clearance beds were always final sale, so a bed could only be sold twice.

Now, the manager at the store I was working at had realized a vital fact. Clearance beds in the warehouse didn’t sell, especially old models that salespeople weren’t familiar with. And even more especially in odd sizes, like twin extra longs. So he set up a split king on the showroom floor to exhibit clearance beds, pulling all those forgotten twin extra longs out onto the showroom.

Almost all of these were brand new discontinued models. Beds I’d never learned in training were exhumed to be displayed. The manufacturers had moved on to new lines and they’d been left behind. Why would he take such in interest in selling old stock, you might wonder? Because we made double commission on the sales margin of clearance beds, and if we’d had a bed long enough they dropped the cost in the system so it was a fucking cash cow to sell these. Even with huge discounts the commissions were wonderful so it was a win win.

When I got started I was jazzed about this program, I was so on board to sell weird old brand new beds and make a ton of money. I had a wonderful older couple come in, looking for a split king adjustable set. This was a white whale sale.

The current clearance models on the floor were a latex mattress that was brand new despite being of an age to start first grade, and a tempurpedic floor model. The couple laid down and it was like magic. They each loved the bed they’d laid down on. They wanted to buy the whole shebang.

I. Was. Thrilled. I told them about the clearance program and what that meant, and they weren’t bothered in the least. I wrote up the sale then dashed into the back, fizzing with excitement to tell my manager what I’d done.

“You sold the death bed?!” He asked in delight.

I pulled up short, my smile freezing in place. “What…?”

“Didn’t you check the notes?”

I hesitated for a long beat then slowly shook my head. You see, dear reader, all beds had a personal history. Every clearance bed had logs written up by the person who took the return, as well as warehouse crew after sanitizing. It helped us know what to expect when selling them. “Wasn’t it just a floor model? You said it was a floor model…”

He slowly shook his head. I checked the notes.

It turned out, it had been sold as a floor model. The first time. But the company had made an exception and taken it back as a return two months later. Why? Because it’s owner had passed away.

I stared at the computer in horror and my manager shrugged. “They signed the clearance form. Technically it was a floor model.”

“We know for a fact that a man died in that bed!”

“What they don’t know can’t haunt them,” he said philosophically.

The man came back a week later for more sheets, utterly delighted to tell me how well they were sleeping. I clamped my teeth down around the secret of the deathbed, choosing to let them love their new bed without the stigma. Only one person would be haunted by that deathbed, and it was me.