If your fic is 1000 words long, you can’t tag it slow burn. It’s not slow burn. That is a matchstick. And this is my personal bias here but if those motherfuckers you’re writing experience significant forward momentum in their relationship in under 5k words, then that is just a regular old burn. Slow burn should be borderline intolerable and a mistake to start reading at 2 in the morning.
If the fic doesn’t have multiple scenes where two people almost kiss but then don’t because of a contrived interruption that they are both grateful for and angry about, until the desperate reader is forced every other paragraph to mutter, “this is fucking ridiculous, this is bullshit, I’m so fucking mad, please update sooooooooooon,” then it isn’t a slow burn. It is a romance and that is a lovely thing but. Slow burns should feel like being set on fire unto your death but the tinder is people not kissing and the spark is people who don’t admit they love each other and the whole thing is. You know. Slow.
CORRECT
I once read a slow burn where the main pairing didn’t even speak to each other ontil 80k words in
This is the funniest fucking thing I’ve ever read and the only true slow burn fic
When my cousin Olivia was three, she started preschool and became best friends with a boy named Abraham. Most people called him Abe, even then, because Abraham is a mouthful for a three year old and, to most people, it’s the logical nickname.
Not, however, according to Olivia, who decided to nickname him Ham.
No one’s really sure whether she wasn’t totally listening when he was introduced and only caught the last part of his name, or if she decided Abe was too boring a nickname, or maybe she was just hungry, but the nickname has stuck for the last twenty years. Of course, Olivia was and still is the only person to use it.
When they were seven or eight, he decided to get back at her by calling her Olive. That nickname stuck, too, and they’ve been Olive and Ham since. But only to each other. They get highly offended if anyone else calls them that.
Last night was their seventh anniversary, and Abe proposed to Olivia, and she said yes. And how did she announce it on Facebook, you may ask?
People used to tell me “If you like ham so much, why don’t you just marry it?” So I am.
Shout out to Olive and Ham, who are still engaged and adorable and who are planning on getting married sometime next summer
I find it fascinating that people who choose not to have children are generally assumed to feel really strongly about not having children (or even to feel really strongly against children, anyone’s children, in general). I am probably not going to have children, not because I REALLY REALLY HATE the idea of having children, but because I don’t really really love it. Out of all the major decisions I will make in my life, this one is the only irreversible one. I can sell a house, quit a job, divorce a spouse, whatever. I cannot unhave a child. I cannot opt out of being a parent once I become a parent. I can’t even take a step back for the sake of self-care or whatever, or else my child will suffer.
So for me, having children is fuck yes or not at all. The default will be to remain childfree. Having children should be an opt-in decision, not an opt-out one. Until/unless I develop really strong feelings about wanting to have children, I won’t have them, even if that means I never end up having them at all.
yknow if romeo had just Cried on juliets corpse for a couple hours instead of drinking poison Right Then they would have been Fine
The moral of the story is: always take time to cry for a few hours before making important decisions.
So I’m more or less being facetious here, but this is actually a thing.
Hamlet is genre savvy. Hamlet knows how Tragedies work, and he’s not going to rush in and get stabby without making absolutely certain he’s got all the facts.
Except once he thinks he has all the facts – once he’s certain that it really is the ghost of his father and Claudius really did kill him, he rushes in and stabs the wrong guy, which starts a domino line of deaths and gets Laertes embroiled in his own revenge tragedy and ultimately results in the deaths of nearly every character other than Horatio.
That’s the irony and the tragedy of the story. Hamlet knows his tropes and actively tries to avoid them, and the tropes get him anyway. It’s inevitable, the tropes are hungry.
I want a sticker that says the tropes are hungry so I can put it on my laptop
i met a scholar once who said that tragedies aren’t about a silly “flaw” or anything, it’s about having a hero who’s just in the wrong goddamn story
if hamlet swapped places with othello he wouldn’t be duped by any of iago’s shit, he’d sit down & have a good think & actually examine the facts before taking action. meanwhile in denmark, othello would have killed claudius before act 2 could even start. but instead nope, they’re both in situations where their greatest strengths are totally useless and now we’ve got all these bodies to bury.
The tropes are hungry and the hero is in the wrong goddamn story.
Incidentally, if you are fishing any stream or river in the Mississippi river watershed and catch any fuckers that look like this;
DO NOT THROW THEM BACK FOR FUCK’S SAKE.
That’s an Asian Carp, and they ARE invasive. The Iowa DNR encourages people to catch, kill, and eat as many as possible.
They’re also tasty as hell, even though they’ve got lots of bones.
Also, yes, this fish has weird eyes that are set real low and look downwards.
It does not have two eyes on the same side; it just has a mark there that looks sorta like one.
Another pic;
They mostly eat plants, but sometimes will get snagged when line fishing. But, they also do THIS;
Midwesterners being who we are, we immediately knew what to do; BOWFISH THEM SHITS
And INVENT THE SPORT KNOWN AS ‘SCARPING’, which is just netting them out of the air/smacking them with baseball bats/spearing them with pitchforks/ect while waterskiing;
See…I’m good with a bow…but not that good. I AM however much better with a net and having the prey come to me.
…Does anyone want to take me to go Scarping?
You can also use a shotgun
The DNR actively encourages all inventive ways of killing them off that people can come up with. There’s no limit on them, so you can fill up the boat.
And they’re DANGED tasty. Nice mild firm white flesh.
Only in American might you go shooting fish off the back of a moving boat.
Hahahaha holy shit!!! I have never been more proud to be an American!! 😀
The Chaos Bitches 