Can You Imagine Floating Down The River And Seeing Something Like This? Majestic And Potentially Terrifying

The Jang and the Snowball Spectacle

Yo @godhatesverizon, I was your @pnatsecretsanta this year! You said you liked some good ol’ fashioned Jang and some snow, and who doesn’t love some seasonally appropriate shenanigans from the Mayview bullies? Apologies that this is so late, but I hope you enjoy the lunacy these goofballs get up to!

For all its quirks and oddities, one would expect the weather itself to be one of the last things to distinguish a town such as Mayview from its neighboring areas. This would, of course, be incorrect for freak hurricane-related reasons, but also for the small fact that in its geographical niche, the temperature can jump from pleasantly middling weather to negative five degrees in the span of half a night. So it was that when the people of Mayview awoke from their slumber that they were greeted with so much snow it buried their feet, when mere days before it was only cool enough to warrant a jacket.

The whoops and hollers of children and children-at-heart alike echoed in RJ’s ears as they set off for Johnny’s place, bundled in their warmest snowflake-patterned hoodie and steel blue gloves. The rest of their friends greeted them with a wave as they approached his house, and the group pulled into a huddle to discuss the day’s proceedings. “So what’s the plan for dealin’ with the mutant nerds today?” Stephen asked as the group turned their eyes to their crimson haired leader.

Johnny took a deep breath.

“Nothin’.” “WHAT?!” Ollie and Stephen cried in unison.

“We’ve been goin’ over this for too long and we’re clearly gettin’ a little burned out. I had ta force ya to sleep yesterday, Stephen, and the rest of us weren’t much better. So this is gonna be our day off. No thinkin’ about weirdo flyin’ people, or shootin’ lightning, or purple gunk. It’s just gonna be us an’ the snow. Tomorra’ we’ll look over everythin’ with fresh faces an’ we’ll get all the info we need outta the nerds. Today…” He threw his arms out, inviting the rest to take in the white wonderment surrounding them.

“Today we make the biggest ball of death this town has ever seen!” If the fire in the group’s eyes could leave their ocular prisons, there would be no snow left.

“YEAH!” Stephen whooped. “We setting it loose on Wicker Road again?” “Can we please not push the whole thing uphill like last year?” Ollie said through his smile, knowing his plea would be futile.

Purple gunk? came the message from RJ’s phone. Their leader’s eyes flicked to it for a second, before sliding to the side, as if unsure. Within an instant the phone was put away and the message forgotten, his wide grin returning and the flare in his eyes reigniting.

“Trust me, it’s gonna be the biggest and best ball we’ve done yet! NOW LET’S GET TO IT!” “YEAH!!” the others shouted, and the four took off to mold doom from the innocent fluff.

---

After ten minutes, the Jang regrouped to see the fruits of their labor and to pick a starting ball. Stephen’s ball, barely bigger than the palm of his hand, was the smallest of the lot. He attributed this to thinking he had found Mothman prints, but closer inspection had just revealed them to be raccoon tracks. Johnny tried to move his ball a little more and groaned when it fell apart in his hands. Ollie’s was bigger than the rest, but rebelled against its circular bretheren by taking the shape of a football. RJ’s ball was the roundest of the four, if a little on the smaller side. The group set RJ’s ball off to the side, and held somber eulogies for the other failed balls.

The subsequent pummeling back into the powder they were born from was markedly less somber.

The beginnings of the Deadly Doom Ball of Ultimate Destruction (named by Stephen) were humble, as the small orb graciously munched the snow laying neatly behind Johnny’s house. Its appetite grew with its size; by the time it devoured the last white flakes daring to exist in Johnny’s backyard, it reached RJ’s torso. The desecration of snow spread as the ball, now guided by two pairs of hands, absorbed the fallen flakes lying beside the sidewalk, making its way up the street.

“So,” Ollie said, turning to stare at Johnny, who was eyeing the path ahead for obstacles, “we taking it to the Usual Spot, or somewhere new?” “Can we not do the steepest hill again? That was so disappointing,” Stephen said, remembering how the previous year’s ball went only a few feet before cracking in half.

“Yeah, pushing that thing up there was a nightmare,” Ollie added, reminiscing on the four of them desperately digging into the snow with their backs to the ball, taking victory in inches.

“Nah, we’re gonna go partways up t’ the school and run it down the road!” Johnny cried out.

“Ngh..I really hope it doesn’t break this time,” Stephen huffed.

The four continued up the street, the ball greedily adding to its mass as they huffed and chatted about things such as potential fort designs and seeing how many snowballs they could throw into Jeff’s hair.

---

As the Corner Store came into view, a sniffle caught Johnny’s attention, and he turned to examine his pals. With his red nose and cheeks, Ollie looked like he had just walked out of a Christmas card, his face as puffy as his jacket. Stephen wasn’t much better, trying to hide his shuddering beneath his grape scarf and Jersey Devil jersey, and RJ kept rubbing their face with their sleeve. The small sneeze from RJ cinched it. “A’right, detour time. We get this ball to the store and then we get ourselves some goodies. Stephen, you still got that ten dollar bill in your pocket?” “Yep.” “Cool. You three go in and get yerselves some’n warm, an’ I’ll guard the ball.” The bully bunch made it to the edge of the store’s door in due time. Stephen, Ollie, and RJ dashed into the store, eager for something warm to slide down their gullets.

“Ho ho, little elves!” cried the wiry shopkeeper as he slid onto the countertop, decked in green and jingling bells. “What can I do you for, on your fine detour from Santa’s Shop?”

“Got anything warm?” Ollie asked as he tried and marginally succeeded at preventing Stephen from ransacking the isles.

The spark in the man’s eyes immediately threw this decision into question. As the green elf declared that he had just the thing and dashed up the stairs, the boy wondered what he just got them all into.

He barely had time to ponder calling for Johnny when the man returned, arms full of small packets, the lid of a small pan, and a coffee pot filled with piping hot...water? Before Ollie could say anything, the man had already ripped the small packets into pieces with his teeth, scattering the dust-colored powder into the pot. He then leapt onto the counter with a flourish, slammed the pan lid onto the pot with a clank!, and began to twirl. The pot quickly frothed with a chocolate swirl as he spun and spun, giggling manically all the while.

Ollie couldn’t figure out when the snowman-adored styrofoam cups had manifested onto the counter, or when exactly the other two had joined him, and at this point he was almost afraid to question it.

The three stared in a mix of bewilderment and awe as the shopkeeper slid backwards, filling each cup to the brim with small dips and pivots. He then threw himself backwards, his face underneath Ollie’s chin. “That’s three for five dollars, or four for seven,” he said without skipping a beat.

“Four, please,” Ollie said, at a loss for anything else to say.

Money changed hands, another batch was poured for Johnny, conversations about agents of Krampus were held, and the three turned to head out the door with the warmth in their gut once again matching the fire in their hearts. Their eyes caught glimpse of the new kid, his jaw set tight and his face as red as theirs were upon entering, although perhaps for different reasons.

Their gazes met. Seconds went by as the group and the nerd stared each other down, Max’s bewilderment fading back into his usual snarky look as he entertained their glares.

Wordlessly, the three turned and headed out the door, finding their fourth member with his back to them, staring at their not-so-little orb of doom.

“Yo bro, you’re not gonna believe what just happened in there!” Stephen called out to Johnny. The bully swirled around, and for a second the three glimpsed his mouth hanging askew, eyes wide with pinpoint pupils, face a touch paler than when they went in. Then his gaze darted from their faces to the cups in their hands, and he relaxed, his hand reaching for his share. With flailing arms and just a tad exaggeration, Stephen shared the details of the shopkeeper as the rest sipped their cocoa.

“And as we left, we fell upon the mutant new kid! I think that store guy did some kinda psychic damage to him ‘cuz he looked totally freaked out.” As if on cue, Max groan from inside the store fell upon their ears.

“We let him off though, ‘cuz of the pact.” “Mmm.” “Then he talked to Stephen for like ten minutes about Krampus and Santa’s secret ninja squad. Had to practically pry him out of the store,” Ollie added.

RJ pulled out their phone and showed them the image they got of the clerk, caught in a perfect backslide, the delicious liquid forever frozen halfway into its destination. The group oohed and aahed at their friend’s impeccable ability to take super clear shots with a little flip phone camera.

With a few more gulps of their cocoa and a desire to finish the rest on the way up, the bullies repositioned themselves and resumed their slow ascent to the top of the hill. RJ spared a glance at Johnny, who was staring daggers at the ball.

Johnny, in the meantime, put all of his focus on the conversations of his friends and on making sure the ball didn’t go off course.

He was not gonna mention the weird hissing that started when they got near that store.

He wasn’t gonna mention the purple thing that had taken an interest in the ball.

He wasn’t gonna think about how the purple thing had a human face and a child’s voice.

He definitely wasn’t gonna think about how all of that just disappeared right as the purple thing looked at him, as if it was never there, right in front of him.

He had made a pact with his buds and he was gonna keep it.

No weird mutant stuff today.

---

Pushing an ever-growing snowball up one of Mayview’s hills with only one hand quickly proved more difficult than expected. Ollie found it easier to lean into the mound with his shoulders providing leverage. RJ and Stephen followed suit, guzzling down the last of their now nearly lukewarm beverage and jamming the empty cups into their jacket pockets. Johnny, having chugged down his cocoa at the urging of his friends, merely rammed his entire frame into the ball. The slow rate of movement up the hill was matched by its growth, though by this point it had begun to dwarf its creators. By the time Johnny mentioned that he could see the school, it had overgrown Ollie by half a foot. Muscles strained and groans and grunts abounded as their fight against gravity reached its zenith. With one last shout from the children, the damned, doomed sphere nestled itself peacefully on the level footing of the school pavement.

The Jang locked eyes on each other, whooped, raised their fists triumphantly in the air, and promptly leaned on each other for support. As breath was sucked down their lungs and muscles left to rest for the first time in hours, the bullies gazed at their creation.

“She’s beautiful, guys.” Stephen said.

“She’s bigger than last years for sure,” Johnny beamed.

“...I don’t think what we just did is reasonably possible.” Ollie said, “and I don’t care.” “YEAH, physics is for WIMPS and NERDS and she doesn’t even have any lunch money!” “Physics is why pushing this thing back down is satisfying at all, Stephen.” “OI!” Johnny called out. “Getchur butts round Deathknell Mk. II! RJ wants a pic!” “Aww, that wasn’t what I called it earlier!” Stephen called out as he ran into position. So it was that a snapshot became immortalized (using Ollie’s phone, as it had a wider screen and a timer) of the four youths, burning cheeks accentuating beaming grins around their carefully cultivated sphere of chaos, Ollie’s one hand slung as high up on the ball as it could go. This was soon followed by pictures of each of them perched atop the ball mid-manic cackle, of Stephen splayed across the top frozen in triumphant shouting, of the group split into stacked pairs on both sides miming a struggle, and many more.

At last, after each photo was evaluated and deemed acceptable, the moment arrived. With more grunts and heaves, Deathknell Mk. II took position in the center of the road, adopting bits of gravel as it went.

“THREE!” came the cry as the ball inched forward.

“TWO!” came the shouts as the slope drew nearer.

“ONE!” came the call as the ball perched on the last few bits of level ground its front end had.

“GOOOOO!!!” With one last running shove and a cry, the obliteration orb teetered..

and tilted…

and slowly slid forward.

As momentum took hold, all caution was thrown to the wind as the deadly orb rocketed down the slope. Trees and buildings flew by as it claimed the hill as its own, tiny smushed white packets on the pavement the only sign it was there. The boys and RJ, with cold-kissed hands desperately clutching onto hoods and hats in the wake of the creation’s tailwind, could scarcely hope to keep up with its joyride as it spun down the hill with the pitter-patter of an army of spiders. It whizzed past the Corner Store in seconds, blew the soft covering of snow off the nearby oak and elm branches, turned slightly to the side as it neared the lower residential areas and chose what would be the bearer of its wrath.

A godawful scrunching brought the ball to a stop, and as the Jang neared it, their jaws fell open and their whoops died in their throat as they drank in the scene.

There at the curbside sat a jet-black SUV, toppled onto its side, buried on all fronts by piles of stone-colored, gravel-filled, leaf accented snow. Its side could hardly be called that now, crumpled and twisted into a metallic sinkhole and probably what Ms. Baxter would call “concave”; one would think an elephant had T-boned it. The lamppost behind it lurched forward with a broken spine, its light shining over the body in fits and spurts over the fresh body, as close to wincing as it could get. A wheel, badly misshapen and hissing something awful, fell into the mound with a plunk.

“I-is that…” Ollie started. “Principal Pleezdo’s car!” Stephen cried in shock, his mittens at the sides of his head.

The house beside them began to wail, a spine-tingling siren that wouldn’t be half-bad as an air raid warning.

“RUN!!!” Johnny screamed, and the bullies hurriedly scrambled as fast as their legs would carry them away from the crime scene, through slush and streets and powdered panic, eager to relive their revelry in the safety of Stephen’s living room.

Scabs in this update here to uplifit my spirits, water my crops, and ruin my years-old headcanons about how she might act. Dropkicking my soul into writing that story I’ve had for a while about her. Digging the color of her spectral energy, and I wonder about her backstory.

Right now she’s kinda giving off Kuzco energy (maybe start-to-mid-movie Kuczo?). We’ll see how this progresses.

i've been writing a book and the feedback i've gotten from family members is that i have been using a lot of description, that the plot is moving along pretty slowly, and "something" needs to happen. do you have any tips or advice on moving plots along quicker in order to keep the reader's attention? thanks so much!!

How to Move a Story Forward

When your character is just milling about in their world describing what they see, what they’re doing, and what’s happening to them, that’s not really a plot. It’s just a random string of events happening to your character, and typically it doesn’t make for very interesting reading. This kind of story moves slowly because nothing’s actually happening. Imagine following an average person through their average day versus following Katniss Everdeen through day three of The Hunger Games. It’s a big difference. And that’s not to say every plot has to be as exciting or dramatic as The Hunger Games, but there does need to be a conflict.

So, the first thing you have to do is sit down and figure out what your story is really about. What is going on in this person’s life that is worth writing about? Is there some sort of inner conflict they’re struggling with? Or is there an external conflict of some kind? Usually there are both with the focus being more on one than the other.

How stories begin…

Most stories start when a character’s life is still normal but just about to change. Katniss was getting ready to go hunting with Gale. Bella was settling in at her new high school after moving in with her dad, and Harry Potter was just living life as the boy in the cupboard.

What happens next…

And then something happens. This is called the “inciting incident” because it “incites” the conflict and brings on the important events of the story. Katniss volunteers as tribute when her sister is drafted into The Hunger Games. Bella meets Edward Cullen and an instant attraction develops between them. Harry Potter receives his letter to Hogwarts.

The character responds and forms a goal…

The character’s normal life has been turned upside down. Now what? For Katniss, the most important thing in the world to her was the safety and well being of her sister and mother, and since she is the one who keeps them safe and fed, her survival of The Hunger Games is vital. That’s her motivation, and her goal is to win the game. Bella becomes obsessed with learning more about Edward and who, or what, he is, and she falls for him and the magic his world brings into her otherwise boring life. Being part of that world is her motivation, staying alive in the process is her goal. Harry finally has a ticket out of his life of being abused and unloved, and he has a chance to connect with the legacy his parents left behind. Leaving his old life behind and embracing this new one is is motivation. Surviving his first year at Hogwarts is his goal.

But goals aren’t supposed to be easy to reach…

If the character can just sail smoothly right up to their goal, mission accomplished, that makes for a pretty boring story. You never hear people say, “WOW! THAT WAS AN INCREDIBLE GAME!” when the score was 20 to nothing. What makes the game exciting is when the teams are neck and neck, one getting ahead for a little while, then the other one being ahead for a little while. It’s the trying, and often failing, to get over obstacles that makes the conflict more interesting. In a lot of ways, that struggle actually is the conflict. What obstacles stand in the way of your character and their goal, and who (or what) put them there? For Katinss, the obstacles were the other tributes and all the frightening things added to the game by the gamemakers. For Bella, it was the nomad vampires who caused trouble at first for fun, and then later for revenge. The obstacles Harry faces are partly due to conflict with other students and teachers, and partly due to the first “shots fired” in what would become the overarching battle against Voldemort.

You win some, you lose some…

And it’s important that you show some wins along with the failures. Sometimes the character tries to overcome an obstacle, fails, tries again and succeeds. Sometimes they fail and have to come up with a work around. Either way, the fails add to the tension and drama while the wins add excitement and interest in what happens next.

The final showdown…

Eventually you get to the big showdown, aka “the climax.” This is when your character faces down the biggest challenge that stands in the way of reaching their goal. This could be an epic battle between your character and the villain. It could be the moment where your character realizes they’re in love with their best friend and they chase them to the airport to admit their undying love for them before they move away. Or it could be surviving one last night of a terrible storm before crawling out of hiding to assess the damage. Whatever it is, the culmination of that moment is achieving or failing to achieve their goal.

The dust settles…

Whatever crazy chain of events was set off by the inciting incident, they’ve come to an end now thanks to the actions of your protagonist and their friends. Or, if they haven’t come to an end, they’ve at least been waylaid for now, or things are at least moving in a better direction. Now your characters can clean up, rebuild, mend wounds, tie up loose threads, and get back to life as normal. Or, in the case of a series, they can re-group and figure out what happens next. And that’s the end.

… But some stories happen on the inside.

Some stories are more about people and their experiences than about any big crazy thing that happens to them. Stories like these are more emotional and are more about dealing with the inner conflict than an outer one. But even in stories like these, you’ll still have a similar structure to what I laid out above. It’s just a lot looser and tied up with an emotional journey rather than the physical one. Which isn’t to say they can’t have a parallel physical journey, but the important stuff is happening on the inside.

Whichever kind of story you’re writing, if you make sure you’re hitting the important points I’ve laid out above, whether they relate to an internal conflict, an external conflict, or a little of both, you can be sure you’re writing a story that is moving forward and will keep your audience engaged. Everything I’ve outlined above is the “something” that needs to happen to make your story interesting.

Good luck! :)

Do you have any advice for writing an intense, overwhelming chase scene?

So, this is a little unusual, in that it's something I haven't really thought a lot about.

For a real world situation, the process is to identify or create an opening, and escape. Usually this advice is more focused for situations for situations where someone's cornered you.

Also, the real world advice is to avoid a chase if at all possible. You don't want to get into a situation where you're directly testing your endurance against your enemy.

As for writing a chase scene. This is one of those times when you want to be efficient with your words, keep things as concise as possible. When you get more verbose it “slows down” the scene because it is literally slowing your reader's progress down.

Chases can be very logistically intensive for you, simply because you need a fairly coherent mental image of how the locations in your story fit together. Maps can be extremely helpful for this, whether you choose to share them or not.

I don't think I've talked about this on the blog, maps can be very helpful for getting a concrete image of how your world is put together, though, they can also, easily, start soaking up more time than the value they offer. That said, even pretty crude maps could be very useful in planning a chase scene. This is one of the times when your world needs to lock together into a unified space, instead of being able to move characters between loosely connected locations.

If you want the reader to have a detailed mental image for the locations, then you should probably have them in those spaces before the chase. Though, this is a situation where some, “stock locations,” could work for you. Liminal spaces can work pretty well for this, because most of your readers are going to have a preexisting basis for understanding what those areas look like. For example: even if their image of an airport causeway is different from yours, you'll both be close enough to the same space that you shouldn't run into many problems where you need to define the entire area.

It's also worth considering that as the chase progresses, it's possible to get gradually more verbose. As mentioned above, this will slow the reader, and as a result the scene, but it can convey the loss of inertia as your character tires or finds themselves having to slow down because they're now in unfamiliar (and possibly unsafe) territory, without being extremely direct about your character's exhaustion. This is an area that can benefit from some pretty careful word selection to hint at fatigue without outright stating it.

I do apologize that this is all pretty high level, concept advice, and a lot of this can be applied in other contexts. And, a lot of the above advice are things to keep in mind for all of your writing, but chases do stress these specific parts of your writing and world building.

Beyond that, it's the normal advice: Remember your world is a living place, so other people would be going about their daily lives while the chase rampages through. Remember persistence consequences, such as prior injuries, or injuries inflicted during the chase. Chases might lead into situations where other kinds of consequences might become unexpectedly relevant, such as your character being forced to run through the territory of a gang they angered earlier in the story. This is an opportunity to bring in unexpected consequences. Even if you don't stick to it, at least have an initial idea for what you want from the chase, then let the sequence play out as you go. (Cleaning this up is what rewrites are for, but it is important to let the chase flow, before you go back and worry about cleaning it up.)

Like I said at the beginning, this is something I don't generally think about, so it's been a bit before I could get back to this question, and I hope this helps.

-Starke

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Hello! This is my first time asking but I could I have some advice on how to write a story that starts in the climax of the plot already? The context is my MC woke up and they are not able to remember anything, but suddenly, he just woke up in the wards of his family (a very strong political figure in their world might I add) whom he told what his life was but the narratives they are telling does not match even in the slightest of the flashback that's plaguing him as the time stretches. And they were in the middle of the war, too. I'm having a hard time to achieve that mind-blowing... thrill I suppose? They also got a love interest that is unmistakably not the one his family claimed ‘their-spouse’ to be.

Starting with Inciting Incident

Remember: your story's climax is the moment your character faces off against the antagonist once and for all. While some stories do start at the climax, and then flashback to the beginning of the story to build back up to it, it doesn't mean you start at the climax and move forward from there.

I think there can be a lot of confusion with the concept of "In Media Res" which a lot of people confuse as meaning starting in the literal middle of the story, or at the inciting incident or climax. Instead, "in media res" simply means starting in the middle of the action. That action can be the inciting incident, the climax, or the literal middle, but again, it doesn't mean the story moves forward from there.

If you're starting your story at the point where your character wakes up without their memories, this isn't the climax but rather the inciting incident. This is the moment when their life and world are turned upside down. Starting at this moment in a story about memory loss is a great way to go, because your reader knows as little about the character and their world as the character does. It puts the reader in your character's shoes right from the start, and they'll be learning everything right alongside your character.

So, that's really the key is to make sure you're filling in the gaps left by not having an exposition. You'll need to make sure to fairly quickly illustrate this character's natural personality, the world they've woken up into, and what their life was apparently like before they lost their memories. If they're being lied to, you may want to build in some clues that hint at what their actual life was like--such as feeling a place is familiar to them even if they're told "no, you would never have been to such a place."

As far as creating that thrill in that opening moment, it's really going to come down to emotional and sensory description. In lieu of recognizing who they are, where they are, and what happened to them, they're going to focus on their immediate surroundings. What can they see, hear, smell, taste, feel? What does that sensory input tell them about who they are and where they are? How does that sensory input--and what they can learn from it--make them feel? What emotions are they feeling as they process this unfamiliar environment and realize they have no idea who they are, where they are, or what happened to them?

I hope that helps!

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I’ve been writing seriously for over 30 years and love to share what I’ve learned. Have a writing question? My inbox is always open!

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People talk a lot about how reading is necessary for writing, but when you really want to improve your writing, it’s important to go beyond just simple reading. Here are some things to do when reading:

Note how they begin and end the story. There are a ton of rather contradictory pieces of advice about starting stories, so see how they do it in the stories you enjoy. Don’t only look at the most popular stories, but look at your more obscure favorites.

See what strikes you. Is it fast or complicated scenes with a lot of emotions? Is it stark lines? Pithy dialogue? What do you remember the next day?

Pay attention to different styles. It’s not just whether they use past or present tense, first or third person. It’s whether the writing is more neutral or deeper inside character’s heads. Do they use italics? Parentheses? Other interesting stylistic choices? Take the ones you like and try them out in your own writing. See what works and what doesn’t.

Keep track of how they deal with other characters. Do we see a lot of secondary character each for very brief periods of time or are there a couple that show up a lot? How much information do we get about secondary characters? Do they have their own plots or do their plots revolve entirely around the main characters? 

Count how many plots there are. Is there just one main plot or are there multiple subplots? Are the storylines mostly plot-based or character-based?  

Pay attention to what you don’t like. If you don’t like what’s going on in a book or even just a scene, note what it is. Does the dialogue feel awkward? Are the characters inconsistent? Does the plot feel too convenient or cobbled together? Does the wording just feel off? See if you can spot those issues in your own writing, especially when reading a completed draft or beginning a later draft.

What are your favorite Crocodiles?

Oh that's an easy one!

African Dwarf Crocodiles (Osteolaemus tetraspis), family Crocodylidae, found in West-central Africa

This small crocodile species only grows to a length of up to 1.5 m (4.9 ft), on average.

photographs by San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance

#crocodiles #this is so cool #evolution #American Crocodile

Miocene Fossil from Africa Provides New Evidence for Origin of American Crocodiles

http://www.sci-news.com/paleontology/crocodylus-checchiai-origin-american-crocodiles-08679.html

Please reblog, this is so important.

Imagine skating around on a frozen lake and just coming across pairs of jaws, halfhazardly spread around the lake, jutting out of the ice. Would you touch them?

I have been using alligators as the base for dragons in a book I am writing. Please make me regret my decision and tell me some cursed facts about them!

contrary to popular belief, american alligators can survive the occasional deep freeze just fine!

they do so by entering a torpor state that’s basically a short-term hibernation, but first they make a big ol’ hole in the ice and stick their face out of it so they can breathe until the thaw comes.

depending on how long the freeze lasts, this may mean that the hole literally freezes shut around their faces, and abruptly the swamp by your house is now a skating rink with built-in pit trap hazards.

don’t worry about them though, they’re fine! as long as they have access to open air, they’ll wake up when the temperature rises again and go back to lurking around pretending to be logs, though they may bonk around disorientedly for a few days afterwards. 

“the shit was THAT about??? humans better stop fucking with the climate, I swear.”

overall, the alligators probably weathered the Great Blizzard of ‘21 better than the humans did.