Why Is This Me

That's a cute looking cat

in my jammies with mama

Intro to the 1989 reprint of The Color of Magic the first Discworld book by Terry Pratchett.

“At least ten.” Lmao

I want some nice cereal

During the most poor and homeless period of my life, I had a lot of people get angry with me because I spent $25 on Bath and Body Works candles during a sale. They couldn’t comprehend why the hell I would do that when I had been fighting for months to try and get us on our feet, afford food, and have an apartment to live in.

Those candles were placed beside wherever I slept that night. In the morning, I would move them and set them wherever I’d have to hang out. At one point I carried one around in my purse - one of those big honking 3-wick candles. I never lit them, but I’d open them and smell them a lot.

I credit that purchase with a lot of my drive that got me to where I am today. I had been working tirelessly, 15+ hour days with barely any reward, constantly on the phone or trying to deal with organizations and associations to “get help at”. It’d gone on for almost a year by the end of it, and I was so burnt out, to the point that I would shake 24/7. But I could get a bit of relief from my 3-wick “upper middle class lifestyle” candles. They represented my future goals, my home I wanted to decorate, and how I would one day not be in this mess anymore.

When we moved into the apartment, and our financial status improved, I burned those candles every single day. When they were empty, I cleaned them out, stuck labels on them, and they became the starting point of my really cute organization system I had ALWAYS planned to have.

So whenever I hear about someone very poor getting themselves a treat - maybe it’s Starbucks, maybe it’s a home deco item, maybe it’s a video game… I don’t judge them. I get it. I get that you can’t go without anything for that long without it making you go crazy. You need to pull some joy, inspiration, and motivation from somewhere.

Okay I need someone that's good with fountain pens, cars, motorcycles, cats, growing sunflowers (or plants in general), and maybe someone who's read a ton of books.

Gimme your knowledge and I'll figure out what to give in return.

there should be a hotline for me to call autistic people with specific hyperfixations every time i have a question

Neil Gaiman’s Advice to Aspiring Artists

What's the .

Damn, I'm old

1000 likes!

Gay

Types Of Writer’s Block (And How To Fix Them)

1. High inspiration, low motivation. You have so many ideas to write, but you just don’t have the motivation to actually get them down, and even if you can make yourself start writing it you’ll often find yourself getting distracted or disengaged in favour of imagining everything playing out

Try just bullet pointing the ideas you have instead of writing them properly, especially if you won’t remember it afterwards if you don’t. At least you’ll have the ideas ready to use when you have the motivation later on

2. Low inspiration, high motivation. You’re all prepared, you’re so pumped to write, you open your document aaaaand… three hours later, that cursor is still blinking at the top of a blank page

RIP pantsers but this is where plotting wins out; refer back to your plans and figure out where to go from here. You can also use your bullet points from the last point if this is applicable

3. No inspiration, no motivation. You don’t have any ideas, you don’t feel like writing, all in all everything is just sucky when you think about it

Make a deal with yourself; usually when I’m feeling this way I can tell myself “Okay, just write anyway for ten minutes and after that, if you really want to stop, you can stop” and then once my ten minutes is up I’ve often found my flow. Just remember that, if you still don’t want to keep writing after your ten minutes is up, don’t keep writing anyway and break your deal - it’ll be harder to make deals with yourself in future if your brain knows you don’t honour them

4. Can’t bridge the gap. When you’re stuck on this one sentence/paragraph that you just don’t know how to progress through. Until you figure it out, productivity has slowed to a halt

Mark it up, bullet point what you want to happen here, then move on. A lot of people don’t know how to keep writing after skipping a part because they don’t know exactly what happened to lead up to this moment - but you have a general idea just like you do for everything else you’re writing, and that’s enough. Just keep it generic and know you can go back to edit later, at the same time as when you’re filling in the blank. It’ll give editing you a clear purpose, if nothing else

5. Perfectionism and self-doubt. You don’t think your writing is perfect first time, so you struggle to accept that it’s anything better than a total failure. Whether or not you’re aware of the fact that this is an unrealistic standard makes no difference

Perfection is stagnant. If you write the perfect story, which would require you to turn a good story into something objective rather than subjective, then after that you’d never write again, because nothing will ever meet that standard again. That or you would only ever write the same kind of stories over and over, never growing or developing as a writer. If you’re looking back on your writing and saying “This is so bad, I hate it”, that’s generally a good thing; it means you’ve grown and improved. Maybe your current writing isn’t bad, if just matched your skill level at the time, and since then you’re able to maintain a higher standard since you’ve learned more about your craft as time went on