She Did It Again (and Again And Again And Again)

In light of tumblrs stupid new banned tags I will continue doing just whatever I want

tumblr users will see the word shrimp and black out and hit reblog without reading the rest of the post

🦐

gosh okay. i’m still having a pinch me moment over this. i’ve spent about a year and a half on tumblr and reaching 5000 is just… crazy to me. like, imagining that many people in a room is horrifying. i know it’s just a value at the end of the day, but in all honesty, i’m a little scared of the number. scared but so so grateful. i will never be anything but grateful for the attention and love this story has received. truly. 

i don’t know how to thank you all correctly, but in honour of the milestone, i will be hosting a small giveaway. as as last time, please make sure you’re following me and reblog this post if you want to enter. i’ll close the giveaway on the 25th of november and dm the winners on here, so make sure your messages are open as well.

prizes.

a 1000 word drabble with your hunter and an ro of your choice (platonic or romantic) or a fun drabble between two ros

a 500 word drabble (same rules as above)

early access to the next short story i’m writing for the midnight hours: shorts, which can be found on my itch.io page

good luck and thank you again!! i know i’ve said this a million times over but truly, i’ll say it a million more times. for a girl like me, this entire experience has been a fucking dream.

alien boy for today

Emily Henry / Henry H / Matty Healy / Taylor Swift / Madeline Miller

since y’all didn’t respond to my well thought out post. have some memes calling y’all out, as well as a link to my other well thought out and written post. i’m tired of seeing people complain about their dash being dead, when they only like shit. reblog or shut up - LINK

for reference -

genuinely from the bottom of my heart i wish every single one of you peace love joy and happiness for not only 2022 but for the rest of your lives.

You’re writing PTSD dreams wrong

But don’t worry, most writers are and I’m here to help because reading them is making me cRAzY.

I’m writing this because I’ve read three otherwise great romance novels back to back featuring characters dealing with PTSD (or PTSD symptoms) and each one of them made the same dream mistakes. I honestly can’t think of a fiction book I’ve read that didn’t make these mistakes, so I thought I’d compile a handy dandy list of mistakes and how to fix them. 

Lucky for you, I have PTSD and a ton of fellow veteran friends who deal with these symptoms. 

*This is based on my experience and things told to me by friends. This is not to say that the below doesn’t happen in real life, only that it’s not as common as you might think.

The issue with these dreams is twofold: on one side is the psychological accuracy of the dream and on the other side is how you’re using the dream within the narrative.

Oh an Black Sails spoilers-ish ahead. 

1) Stop writing the dream as a shot-by-shot accurate retelling of Traumatic Event.

Listen, not only do dreams seldom follow reality, but our own memories are tricky at best. I don’t remember getting beaten up because a) it was horrifying and we block stuff like that out and b) I was going in and out of consciousness. It would be pretty strange for me to dream something I don’t even fully remember. Our brains are simply not wired to do these vivid factually-accurate cinematic retellings.

My friend dreams things that did happen, but in his own words those dreams are always wrong in some noticeable or bizarre way. For instance, he’s getting chased through the streets of Iraq by a werewolf. 

2) Dreams are informed by reality, not direct reflections of it. 

It’s entirely likely my friend dreamt of a werewolf in Iraq because I got him binge watching Supernatural and the two ideas merged in his dreamstate. But see, that’s how dreams work. 

The trauma event exists as a constant in his subconscious, but he has all this other information right there in his conscious mind all day, every day. In dreams, there isn’t a clear delineation between that information.

My dreams are often dependent on whatever I’ve fallen asleep watching on television. The themes are consistent, but not the content.

In Black Sails, Captain Flint’s trauma dreams feature his dead partner and friend following him around his empty ship. You have an element of the trauma (the animated corpse of his friend) + his daily existence (his ship). The two things intersect to form these unsettling nightmares as expressions of his fears and grief. He never once relives the event itself in his dreams as shown on screen.

Speaking of…

3) Trauma dreams often revolve around feelings, not necessarily the events themselves.

The PTSD package generally includes heaps of shame, guilt, anger and fear. As someone who survived a beating when I should have had control of the situation, my dreams tend to revolve around fear that people will know I’m a fraud or being unable to act in a dangerous situation. 

Again, it’s entirely common for trauma victims to not remember large chunks (or the whole thing) of the trauma event. So why should their dreams be stunningly accurate? What we remember are feelings. Real strong feelings.

You cannot go wrong if you write your trauma dream around feelings, not a specific event.

4) If you present trauma dreams as expressions of themes, you can let go of the trauma dream as an exposition dump/way overused suspense trope.

You know you’ve read this: MC has dreams that are a shot-by-shot retelling of Traumatic Event that always cut off right before Traumatic Event, so that the Big Reveal must happen by a discovery later in the novel. 

If I were the MC in a book, the easy and common thing would be to use the “dream sequence” as an expository retelling of Traumatic Event as a way to give some backstory to why I might be surly, mistrustful, afraid to try something new, whatever, and to clumsily shoehorn in suspense where there doesn’t need to be.

The much more interesting thing might be if my dreams were inconsistent in content but consistent in theme. In one I’m on an alien planet (because I fell asleep watching the Science Channel again) and the ground opens up and I fall into a pit from which I can’t escape because I am helpless. In another a man is watching me while I sleep where I am again frozen and helpless. This would force the reader to think: what is the recurring issue in these dreams? Why is it important? What is this telling me about this character and what happened to her? 

It could be a personal preference, but I’d rather see the Traumatic Event either told in narrative flashbacks (not dreams) or verbally retold by the character in question. Let the dreams tell me something deeper about the character. It’s not that I was beat up, it’s that I feel like a failure because of it. One of these things is a shallow factual detail, the other tells you something about me as a person that I’m sharing with you, gentle reader, because talking about this stuff is healthy.

5) The Traumatic Event doesn’t have to be a big secret. 

In Black Sails, we know what happened to Captain Flint’s partner. It happened in real time in the show. That didn’t make his uber disturbing dreams less disturbing or mysterious. Fans still debate exactly what the symbolism was and what they were telling us about James Flint in those moments. We do know from the dreams that he was disturbed, obsessed, and also monumentally guilty and blaming himself for what happened. 

The mystery was perhaps more heightened by the fact that the dreams weren’t direct reflections of reality. We know who this person was, what she believed, and why she died. That Flint is imagining her screaming silently in his ear is horrifying and discordant with what we know to be factual. This adds emotional complexity to his character and the decisions he’s making while suffering these dreams. 

^^^this didn’t happen. It was a dream. A real unsettling dream.

Once you let go of the concept of the trauma dream as a literal retelling and exposition dump, you have the entire dreamscape to work in other narrative elements, like symbolism, metaphor, foreshadowing, etc. 

*1st gif source: @idontwikeit

no fuck you im not making a pillowfort. im not unlocking my twitter. until the literal day this site becomes a blank 404 error crater on the face of the internet i am here with my little pictures and indecipherable text posts from users just as unkillable as i