Like, The Most Compelling Ships For Me Always Stem Out Of One Thing: The Characters Have A Profound,

don’t let anyone tell you that it’s a bad thing to feel things deeply. a full heart is a strong heart and being soft doesn’t make you weak. being soft and loving makes you radiant. you deserve all of the love in the world and so many good things.

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: The Mallorca Files (TV 2019) Rating: General Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Miranda Blake/Max Winter Characters: Miranda Blake, Max Winter Additional Tags: Wintake, married Wintake, Established Relationship, Post-Season/Series 03, Not Canon Compliant, Pregnancy, Babyfic, Fluff, Domestic Fluff Summary:

After their honeymoon, Miranda surprises Max by buying them both breakfast.

Female Characters to Avoid in your Writing:  An Illustrated Guide.

1.  The Bella Swan (i.e. the blank sheet of paper)

Who she is:

In Twilight, Bella has absolutely no qualities that make her interesting as a character.  She’s shown to have very little personality, in the books or onscreen, and is only made “interesting” (a relative term here) via the inclusion of her sparkly, abusive boyfriend.  It feeds into the harmful mentality of adolescent girls that you need a significant other in order to find fulfillment, particularly if he’s significantly older and likes to watch you sleep.  Yikes.

Examples:

Bella is welcomed to school by a friendly, extroverted girl and given a place to sit amongst her and her friends.  Despite this girl’s kindness, Bella shrugs her off as a stereotypical shallow cheerleader, and spends her time staring wistfully at the guy across the cafeteria from them.  Once Edward becomes her official boyfriend, she immediately loses interest in her new friends as her life shifts its orbit to revolve completely around him. 

How to avoid her:

Female characters are allowed to have lives outside of their significant others.  They’re allowed to have friends, quirks, hobbies, and interests.  Give them some. 

The best fictional relationships are based off of characters who compliment each other, not one character who revolves around the other.  Make sure your female character’s life does not centralize around her significant other.

Strong female characters don’t look down on other girls, even if they are outgoing cheerleaders.  Being pasty and introverted doesn’t make you a better person, y’all – if it did, I’d be a decorated hero by now.

Give them aspirations besides getting an obsessive, much-older boyfriend.  In fact, don’t give them an obsessive, much-older boyfriend at all – if you do want them to have a significant other, give them one who cares about their interests and accepts that they have lives and goals outside of them.

2.  The Molly Hooper (i.e. the starry-eyed punching bag)

Who she is:

 Like most things about BBC’s Sherlock, Molly was an amazing concept that went progressively downhill.  I used to love her quiet tenacity and emotional intelligence, and was sure that with her strong basis as a character, she would overcome her infatuation with the titular Sherlock and find self-fulfillment.  Nope!

Examples: 

She remained stubbornly infatuated over the course of five years with an ambiguously gay man who, en large, treated her badly, leading to her public humiliation with zero pertinence to the plot or resolution.  Moreover, her infatuation with Sherlock quickly usurped almost all of her other characteristics, leading her to an increasingly immature characterization that was difficult to relate to.

How to avoid her:

By all means, please write female characters who are quiet, kind, and unassuming (a female character does not, contrary to popular belief, need to be rambunctious, callous, or violent to be “strong”) but remember than none of these traits need to make the character a pushover.  Let them stand their ground.

Similarly, attraction to men (or anyone, for that matter) does not invalidate a female character’s strength.  Just be sure she values herself more than their attention.

As I said earlier, don’t be afraid to make characters who are gentle and soft-spoken, but be wary of making them “childlike,” or giving them an infantile, emotionally characterization.

My best advice for writing gentle, soft-spoken, unassuming women would actually to look to male characters in the media fitting this description; since male characters are rarely infantilized as much as women are by popular media, you’ll get a much better idea of what a well-rounded character looks like. 

3.  The Irene Adler (i.e. the defanged badass)  

Who she is: 

Yup, another one of the BBC Sherlock women, among whom only Mrs. Hudson seemed to come through with her dignity and characterization intact.  In the books, Irene and Sherlock have absolutely zero romantic connotations, only bonded via Sherlock’s irritation and respect with her substantial intelligence.  In the show, it’s a different story entirely. 

Examples:  

Irene is a badass character who’s turned into a teary-eyed Damsel in Distress via her uncontrollable love for the show’s male lead.  It doesn’t help matters that she’s a self-proclaimed lesbian who falls in love with a man, which, unless you’re a woman who loves women yourself and writing about a character realizing she’s bi/pansexual, I would recommend against doing under any circumstances.  She ends up being defeated and subsequently rescued by Sherlock – a far cry from her defeat of him in the books. 

How to avoid her:

If you’re writing a badass female character, allow her to actually be badass, and allow her to actually show it throughout your work as opposed to just hearing other characters say it.  And one punch or kick isn’t enough, either:  I want to see this chick jump out of planes.

That said, “badass” does not equal emotionally callous.  It doesn’t bother me that Moffat showed Irene having feelings for someone else, what bothers me is how he went about it. 

When writing a character who’s shown to be attracted to more than one gender, just say she’s bisexual.  Pansexual.  Whatever, just don’t call her straight/gay depending on the situation she’s in.  Jesus.

4.  The Becky (i.e. the comedic rapist) 

Who she is: 

Most people who know me can vouch for my adoration of Supernatural, but it definitely has its problems:  it’s not as diverse as it could be, its treatment of women is subpar, and yes, there is some thinly veiled sexual violence:  all three of its leading characters have dealt with it at one point of another (Dean is routinely groped by female demons, a virginal Castiel was sexually taken advantage of by a disguised reaper, and the whole concept of sex under demonic possession is iffy to say the least.)  It’s rarely ever addressed afterwards, and is commonly used for comedic fodder.  Possibly the most quintessential example of this is Becky.

Examples: 

Becky abducts Sam, ties him to the bed, and kisses him against his will.  She then drugs him, albeit with a love potion, and is implied to have had sex with him under its influence. 

How to avoid her:

Male rape isn’t funny, y’all.  Media still takes rape against women a lot more seriously than rape against men, particularly female-on-male rape, and I can assure you its not.

Educate yourself on statistics for male sexual assault:  approximately thirty-eight percent of sexual violence survivors are male, for example, and approximately one in sixteen male college students has reported to have experienced sexual assault. 

Moreover, be aware that forty-six percent of all instances of male rape have a female perpetrator.

Read more here in this amazing article: http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2014/04/male_rape_in_america_a_new_study_reveals_that_men_are_sexually_assaulted.html

In other words, treat themes of sexual assault against men as seriously as you would treat themes of sexual assault against women.       

5.  The Movie Hermione (i.e. the flawless superhuman) 

Who she is: 

Okay, in and of herself, Movie Hermione is amazing:  she’s beautiful, intelligent, and heroic, as well as possibly the most useful character of the franchise.  She only bothers me in context of the fact that she takes away everything I loved most about Book Hermoine, and everything I loved about Book Ron, too.   

Examples: 

Book Hermione was beautiful, but not conventionally:  she had big, poofy curls, big teeth, and didn’t put a lot of effort into maintaining her appearance.  Movie Hermione looks effortlessly flawless, all the time.  Book Hermione was intelligent, but also loud, abrasive, and unintentionally annoying when talking about her interests (which meant a lot to me, because as a kid on the Asperger’s spectrum, I frequently was/am that way myself – it was nice to see a character struggling with the same traits).  She was also allowed to have flaws, such as struggling to keep up with academia, and being terrified of failure.  

Movie Hermione also took all of Ron’s redeeming qualities, and everything that made him compliment her as a couple:  his street smarts used to compliment her academic intelligence, for example, staying calm while she panicked in the Philosopher’s Stone when they were being overcome with vines.  He also stood up for her in the books against Snape, as opposed to the jerkish “he’s right, you know.”     

How to avoid her:

Allow your female characters to have flaws, as much so as any well-rounded male character.  Just be sure to counterbalance them with a suitable amount of redeeming qualities.  This will make your female character well-rounded, dynamic, and easy to get invested in.

There’s no reason for your female characters to always look perfect.  Sure, they can be stunningly gorgeous (particularly if their appearance is important to them), but it’s physical imperfections that make characters fun to imagine:  Harry’s scar and wild hair, for example.  Female characters are no different. 

If you’re writing a female character to have an eventual love interest, allow their personalities to compliment one another.  Allow the love interest to have qualities that the female character is lacking, so that they can compliment one another and have better chemistry. 

Basically, write your female characters as people. 

Check out my list of male characters to avoid here:   https://thecaffeinebookwarrior.tumblr.com/post/161184030785/male-protagonists-to-avoid-in-your-writing-an.

God willing, I will be publishing essays like this approximately every Friday, so be sure to follow my blog and stay tuned for future writing advice and observations!

Is micro fiction the same as one- shots?

It’s really just different story lengths.

Super Novel: 120,000+ words Novel: 80,00-120,000 words Young Adult Novel: 30,00-70,000 words Novella: 15,000-30,000 words Short Story: up to 15,000 words Flash Fiction: up to 1,000 words Micro Fiction: up to 300 words

And that’s just one list I found. There are several others with small variations, one change being they listed flash fiction as being up to 100 words but no more. There’s room to be flexible, and they’re really just guidelines. 

Great tips on things to think about when writing using multiple POVs

“Colonel Sheppard. I’m going to assume that you’re still at the midway station waiting for Doctor McKay to rewrite his macro. I understand what you’re doing, Colonel. Hell, I’ll even call it brave.”

how did you get into writing and getting published?

I’ve always loved writing.  I wrote poetry and stories all the time when I was a kid.  I have piles and piles of notebooks at my house full of decades’ worth of everything from fanfic smut (decades before I had the internet and knew that “fanfic smut” was a thing) to terrible poetry to novels in progress.  I didn’t know that being a writer was a real job people could have, I just liked to write and make up stories. 

I went to college to study theatre because I thought I wanted to be an actor (as it turns out, I VERY MUCH did not).  My school didn’t offer playwriting on the regular, but we had a visiting professor for a year who was a playwright and I took his class, and he was the first person who said to me, “You know, if you wanted to do this, this is something you could do.”  I wrote my first play for his class (reblogginhood was in it!) and kept writing after that. 

Then at some point in my twenties, I don’t really know why, I stopped writing.  I think I hit a point where I had kind of decided, “okay, this isn’t practical, this isn’t a real career, I need to figure out how the fuck I’m going to pay my electric bill, I need to give up this dream and go, like, be a regular human.”  So I did that for awhile.  I got into the world of arts management and worked for a bunch of different theatre companies doing marketing and fundraising and things like that.  And it was fine, I was good at it, I met a lot of people in the theatre world and all my friends were cool artists and it was great, but then it made me really sad because there was a part of me that felt like they were living this great exciting life I wasn’t living because I had stopped trying to even have that. 

Then a friend of mine asked me to help her write grants for this new project she was starting, which was a citywide new play festival that anyone could be in.  You didn’t have to be fancy or famous, you didn’t have to even be any good.  You just had to write a play, and show up.  So I signed up and I paid my fee and for seven years in a row, every year I wrote a new play for the festival.  I just kept writing and writing and writing and writing.  It was a huge amount of hard work.  I lost money on every show because I was paying actors out of my own pocket and printing playbills at Kinkos.  I borrowed coffee shops and warehouses from friends, anywhere I could perform for free.  I directed the shows myself if I couldn’t afford a director.  I ran sound off my iPod.  I tore my own tickets at the door.  I was working two jobs, around 60-hour weeks, and then writing until like 2 in the morning because that was the time that I had.  And then slowly, I got better.  My crappy amateur plays, where I was trying to copy the voices of other, better writers improved because I started to figure out what I really cared about and what I really wanted to say.  I applied for tons and tons and tons of awards and grants and fellowships and residencies.  I won a couple of them (maybe one out of every 50 things I applied for) and that helped get other people to take me seriously, but the most important thing was that I just kept writing and writing.  I had a new play in the festival every year, so slowly people started to know who I was and recognize my name.  Not zillions of people, but handfuls at a time.  The first show had like 30 people in the audience each night; I worked my way up to being able to fill a 200-seat venue.  Then I got asked to join a company of local playwrights who produce one show a year by one of their member writers; they had watched me busting my ass over the past seven or eight years and knew that I was a hard worker and had been watching my work get better and then finally one day they asked me to join and offered me a full production of one of my plays.  (That’s happening next month.) 

In between writing plays, I wanted to challenge myself, so I tried a few times to do National Novel Writing Month.  I never finished, but I had a few chapters of a time travel science fiction story about Watergate that I was noodling around with that I really liked, and from time to time I would pick it up and play with it some more in between theatre projects.  Then one day my brother, who is an L.A. film editor, called me to tell me that a company he worked with was branching out from film into publishing and was looking for science fiction novels.  I didn’t have a novel, I had like four chapters and some shrapnel, and was reluctant to show it to anyone, but my brother sent it off to his friend anyway, and they called me three days later to tell me they wanted to publish it and would pay me an advance to finish it.  (It’s coming out this summer.)

There are an infinite number of different directions a writing career can go, and no one writer’s path to success is necessarily replicable by any other writer.  I’m fully aware that my story of how I got a novel published is a weird one with a strange combination of luck and coincidence and circumstance and privilege and a million other forces I can’t control which resulted in my unfinished novel landing on the desk of someone looking for just such an unfinished novel.  But the important part is everything that happened before that, all the years of staying up until three in the morning or skipping happy hours with friends because I had to write, all the years of staged readings of mediocre plays where I was paying actors in pizza and hugs because I had no money, and even all the years of working demanding and tedious marketing and fundraising jobs for theatre companies, because that was how I became a writer.  There’s how to become a writer, and then there’s getting a book published.  Honestly I still cannot tell anyone how to get a book published.  “Have a brother who knows someone starting a publishing company” isn’t a career plan.  But I can tell you how to be a writer.  You just have to write. 

My heart is a huge library, and every book in it is about you.

Mansi (via fandammit)

Chapters: 2/? Fandom: The Mallorca Files (TV 2019) Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Miranda Blake/Max Winter Characters: Miranda Blake, Max Winter, Inés Villegas Additional Tags: Wintake, post-series 3, Canon Divergent, Feelings Realization, Series 3 Episode 4 "Water Water" Mention, Undercover as a Couple Summary:

It’s Valentine’s Day, and it’s the first one since Max broke up with Carmen six months ago. Miranda tries to cheer Max up. Also, they go undercover as a couple again.

Chapter 2 is now up!

Chapters: 3/? Fandom: Stargate Atlantis Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: John Sheppard/Elizabeth Weir Characters: John Sheppard, Elizabeth Weir Additional Tags: Fluff and Humor, Video & Computer Games, Dialogue Heavy Summary:

Dr. Elizabeth Weir is a secret gamer grrl, and Col. John Sheppard is surprised at her skills!