Scribbled Fiction

As you may or may not know, I have a YouTube channel in addition to this blog and my various social media, and being a part of the YouTube community has made me inspired to make way more videos than I originally did. I do find that the videos don't hit it off as well here on my blog as I would like, but I enjoy making them, which is part of what held me back from uploading(along with a general sense of laziness and lack of inspiration), but lately, I've been more drawn into the YouTube writer community and gotten to know some of the people there. There are some very lovely people I've met (if you're reading this, what's up, my peeps!), and seeing their content and interacting with them makes me want to upload more. So, without further ado, thank you, writers of YouTube, and this one's for you. Types of Character Creators Among Writers Video should be here, but if it doesn't show up here's the link:  https://www.youtube.com/watc...

I'll be the first to admit that I'm a little nervous to post this list. I've posted things about mental health and depression in the past, but I've never talked about it with this level of transparency. And it scares me. I guess a part of me maybe doesn't want to admit weakness like this, but without understanding your own weakness, you can't really get stronger. So we're going to do this. Hurting yourself (losing sleep, undergoing physical strain just because you want to feel something, self-harm) ... it's not worth it. Paint over those wrists instead. Bake something. Create rather than destroy. Having a horrible episode an hour after you were laughing and having a good time does not invalidate the fun you had earlier. Tears after a smile does not mean the smile wasn't real. You aren't faking it. If you feel like this, it's real, and you need to treat it as such. Your struggling is going to be more than one person's, and...

All right, we've done the main character and the antagonist , but what about secondary characters? It's time to outline our SCs to keep our other characters company. But first, who are our secondary characters? Secondary characters are: Best friends Other friends Family members Fellow questers Sidekicks Love interests(But only if the romance is more of a subplot than part of the main story. If the story is based around the romance, I would treat their character outline more like a main character) Other important characters that aren't the main character or the antagonist So how do we outline a secondary character? Again, we start with the basic questions: Name Age Appearance All these are mandatory knowledge. I like to know what their favorite color is too, just for fun. I feel like that's important. At this point, the About section could be helpful, but if you want a simpler format(since after all, these are SCs and not...

So, here we have another short story. I was planning to write the one for this month from scratch, but there are two reasons I ended up not doing that: 1) ultimately I was having trouble coming up with a new story right now 2) It was just valentine's day, and this story was a little valentine's-y, as you probably guessed from the title ;) Before we start the story, a little context: Archer's family situation is. . . complicated. (stuff that will be explained in the sequel to Robbing Centaurs and Other Bad Ideas ) His relationship with his brother is the worst of all his problems. His brother has been a bane of mine in writing, trying to figure out why he is the way that he is and why he does what he does. The worst part is his name. The working name when I was originally drafting the story was Omen, just something I put in there on the fly knowing I would change it, now his name is Alder, which I'm questioning because it might get confused with Archer's n...

I was having difficulty coming up with a post topic for today, but fortunately I remembered that I had drafted part of this post months ago and then never come back to it. Procrastination, to the rescue! Subplot and mini plot details that I always love  The neighbor that has a background character arc. The thing where there's a conversation going on in the foreground and something funny going on in the background. The dog that keeps leaving and coming back. The character that's always baking- especially when it means they're in a specific mood. When a lot of time passes. So many stories happen in a few week's timeframe, but I like when we're just told that a whole year passed or something and then the narrative continues. Re-occurring jokes. When the character who has been in the dark about some huge secret figures it out for themselves. When the character who has been in the dark about some huge secret thinks they've figured it out but they...

All right, it's time for another session of character outlining. This time around, it's the villain! What's your villain like? You don't know! So that's what we're here to work out. If you haven't already read part 1 of this series, Outlining Characters 101: How I Outline Characters (A Simple But Effective Format), click here to read it before you continue. Ultimately, writing villains is the same as writing any other character. After all, they're people too, with allergies and preferences and blood types. But to outline a villain, there are a few key things to include that you wouldn't include in most other character outlines. So let's begin! Villain questionnaires start the same as any other: Name Age Appearance Likes Dislikes And it's here that the outline starts to change. The questions above are the basics, stuff that I would consider necessary knowledge for almost any character.  So at this point one will probably...

So, as you may or may not know from reading my January Wrapup just a few days ago, last month I participated in a writing contest called The Writer Games! I'd never done a contest before, and I was almost too chicken to do it, but it was hosted by my dear Julia from LitAflame , so how bad could it be? I signed up thinking that once I saw how the first round would go, I would figure out whether I wanted to keep going or not. Like I said, I was super chicken. *laughs nervously* But it was awesome! Round one involved a whopping 80 people and involved writing a 6-word writing prompt that you would use in your own story should you reach the finals. I didn't include the prompt in the PDF that's coming up soon because... well, it's only six words. Giving it its own page seemed a little much for half a sentence. So I'll include it here: I slayed the stars for you. And I made it into the next round!! One of only 30 to do so!! I gotta say, I wasn't really ex...

So, another month has come and gone. It felt like both a long month and then a short month, but I feel like I was productive and had a good time, so I guess we can rank this as a win! And did you notice? I finally designed divider graphics for the wrapups! I keep meaning to, but every month I'm too lazy to work on them. This time around I decided, no, I was going to take the extra time and work on those dividers if it was the death of me! So yeah. That will be all. Time for the wrapup! Writing for me has been a lot more productive now that I've switched editing projects. I think I still might want to go back to Jack, Thief's Son sometime in the future, but that time is not now. It needs more time to stew in my mind. But in other news, Robbing Centaurs and Other Bad Ideas  is coming along nicely. I've looked closely and decided what things I need to edit before I can hand it off to beta readers. Most of the work will be in adding to the word count ...