This Was Patrξon's May Illustration ✨✨

official art from 墙头儿儿 for bookuu

“I am not trapped in the wrong body; I am trapped in a world that makes very little space for bodies like mine.”

-Ivan Coyote, Tomboy Survival Guide

An Yu Shan’s bookstore

"My Baby"

Silver & Lilia Animatic

Song: No More Birthday

queen of diamonds, upright + reversed 💎

I've redone this like eighty times, I have to just be done with it now and stop staring at all my mistakes oh no 🫠

The Avengers 2012 era was the best time ever in the fandom

Thor loves pop tarts, Clint lived in the vents, Bruce and Tony did science together, Steve was the mom friend of the team and did art in his free time, Natasha was cool aunt of the team, Loki was there too and a bunch of other characters like Peter, Sam, Bucky, Vision and Wanda all lived in the Avengers tower together

It was a much simpler time where everyone in the fandom was chill and having fun together

My Journey to Escape the War in Gaza

My name is Abdelmajed. I never imagined I’d be sharing my story like this, but life in Gaza has become unbearable. I am a survivor of the war here, and in the blink of an eye, everything I once knew—my home, my safety, my community—was ripped away from me.

The war has transformed Gaza into a graveyard of broken dreams. The buildings that once stood as symbols of life and resilience are now piles of rubble. Every corner is filled with the echoes of explosions. Every moment is shrouded in uncertainty. There is no security. There is no stability. There is no light at the end of the tunnel.

Basic needs have become luxuries. Food is scarce. Clean water is even scarcer. Hospitals are overwhelmed and under-resourced, and there is almost no medical care to be found. Every night, families go to bed hungry, praying they’ll wake up to see another day. The cost of basic necessities has skyrocketed, and it’s become a daily battle just to survive.

I’ve seen things I never thought possible—standing in long lines for a piece of bread, rationing every drop of water, and watching my people suffer in silence. I have lost everything—my home, my safety, my dignity.

Escape from Gaza is my only hope, but it’s almost impossible without financial help. The cost of evacuation is far beyond my means, and without support, I’m trapped in a warzone with no way out.

I’m reaching out to you now, in the hopes that someone, anyone, can help. I am not asking for luxury. I am asking for a chance—just a chance—to live. A chance to escape this never-ending cycle of fear, destruction, and loss. A chance to rebuild my life somewhere safe, where I can begin again, where I can find hope once more.

Chuffed

Help Abdelmajed Escape Gaza and Rebuild His Life

My name is Abdelmajed, and I am a survivor of the war in Gaza. Everything I once knew has been taken away—my home, my safety, and the people

Any amount you can give will help me get closer to safety. Even the smallest donation will make a difference—it could be the lifeline I need to survive. If you are unable to donate, please share my story. The more people who hear it, the better the chance that I can find the support I desperately need.

Your kindness and support mean the world to me. You’re not just helping me escape a war; you’re giving me a chance to live, to rebuild, to breathe again.

Thank you for listening. Thank you for caring.

Vetted by @gazavetters

Editing Your Novel Part 2: The Plot Pass

Okay, it's finally time to edit. You've got all your materials sorted, it's time to dive right in. You want to start with the big edits first, aka the plot pass.

Now listen. You're going to want to linger and fix those little bits of grammar or dialogue, and I know it's so hard not to, but letting yourself get off-track might mean wasting hours on a scene you realize later you have to delete. Fix a few spelling errors, leave a note, and stay plot-focused.

Making Sense (Of the Plot)

In the plot pass, you're asking yourself some basic questions:

Do events follow a clear order? - When you're getting everything down on the page for the first time, scenes might get jumbled up or events might not have clear causes. Maybe you have a car crashing into the cafe pages before, but in a writing haze, you wrote your main characters having a casual conversation moments later. If the bad guy beats your heroes to treasure, is it clear how they got there? (Not everyone can be Yzma.)

Do circumstances feel contrived? If there are any problems that can be solved by your characters sitting down and talking to each other, it may be better to lean into their motivation for not speaking to each other, rather than coming up with bad romcom scenarios. If the plot can be resolved by the mcguffin the grandma had the whole time, it might be better to make finding that mcguffin part of the plot instead.

It doesn't have to be perfect, and you don't have to reinvent the wheel. If someone gets bitten by a werewolf, it's perfectly fine to have them turn into one at the worst possible moment. When it comes to contrived, you're looking for problems that seem easy to solve and look for more interesting ways to complicate them.

Are your character motivations consistent to the characters throughout the story? - They can change throughout the story, but character motivations do need to be linked to the actions they take. An out-of-nowhere betrayal is way more satisfying if you lay the groundwork for it ahead of time.

Take a moment to list out the motivations of the characters in a scene you're not quite sure of can help you figure how to fix it. Having an outline helps with this a lot!

Are you following an "if... then" format? - My brain doesn't work like this when I'm writing, because as a writer you know how A got to Z, and it seems (in your head) obvious how it happened. This is where my scene card outline come in handy, because I can look at my overview of what should happen and why, and then compare it to what actually happens in the scene. I've discovered so many threads I forgot to connect that way, like why a character had a certain device (I forgot to have him pick it up two scenes earlier), or adding a few simmering dialogue bits that make the big fight pay off much better.

Can you fix the "Because the Plot Demands It" scenes? - Look, sometimes your character needs to be in that haunted house to see that damn ghost, but your character isn't the type to set foot in such a place. It's really easy, especially in the first draft, to contrive a way in there (she took a wrong turn on her way to grandma's!), but retooling these scenes to connect them to the characters motivations and needs is the way to go. The main character doesn't want to go into that obviously cursed place, but her best friend hasn't shown up for school in three days and now she's crying for help from the second floor window. Your character's strong desire to be there for her friend is a much better way to get her into that house.

This is not always easy - it took me six fricken drafts to realize a critical part of a character's motivation was because his father blamed him for his mother's death - but it is going to be worth putting in the work to hammer down.

Do you have a solid timeline? - This might not seem as important, but it's super easy to accidentally fit two weeks worth of activities in three days. Make sure you have that on reference, even if you don't mention it in the book. Also make sure to gauge your distances if your characters are on a trip, because if you do accidentally say it takes two hours to drive from Seattle to Spokane instead of five, someone will dive down your throat for it. Not me. Just someone.

Okay, maybe me. Slow down, you maniacs.

Next post we'll dive into the structure pass. See you then!