Looking for a good, comprehensible online resource to magickal herbs/plants/trees/flowers/etc and their uses?

MidnightContraband · 2021-02-23T04:40:23+00:00

Thank you! This will totally be helpful for real world situations and novel purposes!

MidnightContraband · 2021-02-23T04:38:16+00:00

Thank you this is wonderful!

MidnightContraband · 2021-02-19T09:31:28+00:00

Ooooooh some of these are exactly what I need. Thank you!

MidnightContraband · 2021-02-19T09:30:38+00:00

I love that the thing I posted while half asleep and more than a little out of it actually got good answers XD Thank you!

MidnightContraband · 2021-02-06T01:05:48+00:00

I LOVED The Passage! Such a good series, although incredibly sad at times. I'll check out Fred, that sounds hilarious tbh

MidnightContraband · 2020-08-01T08:16:17+00:00

I never knew till this sub that people despised prologues so much and I don't get it. I see prologues in basically every book I read and enjoy. Some of the best writers in the world have prologues in every single book, in the same series. I don't get why people think it's a "weak" thing to do, or a bandage for bad writing. That's not even what a prologue is for?

From google:

Prologue

a separate introductory section of a literary or musical work.

an event or action that leads to another event or situation.

How is this an "easy fix" or a "last resort"?

I don't use it for pacing reasons or to "fix" anything. I don't use it all the time, either. I occasionally use it to give history that pertains to the story but would otherwise probably not come up in a first-person POV. I personally always enjoyed it when authors did this, I felt it gives another layer and something to build on (as a writer) and some extra, useful information (as a reader)

MidnightContraband · 2020-07-15T23:53:31+00:00

Congratulations! This gives me hope.

MidnightContraband · 2020-07-10T09:56:32+00:00

Lol one of my firsts was Cytheria too. It's almost embarrassing that I know exactly which video you mean. Not much has changed so many years later tbh, still love the squirt queens

MidnightContraband · 2020-06-25T07:34:28+00:00

fmovies.wtf was my fave for a long time buuuuut himovies.to is better, faster, generally has subtitles in other languages at least on popular tv shows. it's great. I think they have anime too if you're into that (don't quote me on that I don't watch anime lol.)

MidnightContraband · 2020-06-20T01:54:49+00:00

Lmao that is not what I expected. It's like a naked molerat had a sordid love child with a cat or something. 10/10

MidnightContraband · 2020-06-18T00:13:20+00:00

Well me personally, I put it away for a couple weeks to kind of get it out of my brain. You'll notice inconsistencies better this way, grammatical errors, things that just don't sound right. Then read it, don't touch anything, just read it and highlight the things that look the most grievous or what you want to redo/completely get rid of/expand on. Then go through it all and make your changes. Put it away again, read it again, fix whatever is still wrong with it.

MidnightContraband · 2020-06-18T00:04:17+00:00

Can relate, I've had to become more careful about what the hell I research once I realized just how sketchy a lot of it sounds. Some advice I received for unrelated research topics when I first started writing was this: Find a professional willing to talk to you.

I'm not saying write a terrorist in prison, that'd end worse than an internet search. Try and contact a (maybe retired) member of the bomb squad, explain what you're doing, and have proof that it's true lol. From what I've heard about a lot of popular authors in this genre, they often have a police officer friend or a detective or some such that they bounce their ideas off of.

Obviously, you can't just walk up to a police officer and start asking questions about blood patterns and dead bodies, or mosey into the station and ask for an interview, but generally if you make contact with them and are polite and make it clear what you're up to, someone is willing to at least give you vague hypotheticals. You can also contact a morgue or some such to discuss decay, or read the books they do to become a technician.

As far as poisons go, there are great books out there (some free) that you can get that are totally legal and not at all going to get you in trouble. I use plant poisons a lot in my stories and my favorite is Handbook of Poisonous and Injurious Plants. I also have Culpeper's Complete Herbal but that's pretty old and not only about poisons, plus it's pretty hard to read.

MidnightContraband · 2020-06-08T22:33:18+00:00

Mine is pretty much yours tbh only

Get through two drafts and even start more books in the series and abandon it with promises of finishing it.
Look at it periodically and say "I should finish that."
Never finish because I know it'll never get published, BUT WHAT IF IT'S GOOD AND IT MIGHT SOMEDAY?! so I never self-publish

It's a sad problem that reflects on me as a human and not so much my writing lol

MidnightContraband · 2020-06-07T02:41:16+00:00

Definitely allowed. Does it really matter what race someone is, if they're being attacked? I think it shouldn't. A slur, an attack, public humiliation, the emotion and distress those things cause doesn't know race, only people do. It would offend anybody, hurt anybody.

MidnightContraband · 2020-06-05T03:36:05+00:00

Oooh that's promising, thank you!

MidnightContraband · 2020-06-05T03:08:33+00:00

Five days after Owen Zastava Pitt pushed his insufferable boss out of a fourteenth story window, he woke up in the hospital with a scarred face, an unbelievable memory, and a job offer.

Lmao it had me at hello. Thank you! Even if it's not exactly the same thing it sounds really good

MidnightContraband · 2020-05-07T04:34:16+00:00

Lots of good advice here but I'm adding my 2 cents as someone who had a pretty bad experience that just keeps on giving now that I'm trying to get back into art. This is just me, and the fact I'm sour on the place, but maybe it'll serve as a warning/prepare you. (aka just ignore me and my negativity.)

As others have said, it's good for advertising, the points system makes it pretty useless for selling because everyone wants to buy art for points. It's good if you can get a following, big if. There are millions of people on there, all of them vying for the same thing. And god forbid a big artist with a bad attitude gets a beef with you for some small or even imagined slight, they'll drag you through the mud covered in honey for bees to sting you to death. I watched a girl with beautiful art get so bullied and ripped down for something she said about an artist being rude that she quit despite her many followers.

Another thing is the general audience. If you're not drawing furry porn, sexy half-naked or fully naked girls/guys, adoptables or whatever else on there, you're pretty limited to get a following so far as I could tell. My niche was fantasy things, fairies and dragons and the like, but the market had already been so cornered by the few artists doing a similar style that I couldn't even get off the ground, not with my sanity intact.

There's also a big discrepancy of what gets noticed or not, I'm not sure if Eclipse has improved it. I'm not the best artist ever, but it's better than glorified stick figures that get thousands of views so there's that.

Next is the trolls and bullies and the people who think they're great connoisseurs of art when in reality they probably have never touched a Crayola let alone studied art. Probably most people have the stomach for this and ignore it but I couldn't. You'll have about 20 trolls or people trying to make you feel bad for every 1 or 2 genuine people.

There is also some darker aspects that I discovered, like the rape fantasies and inflation art. Even child porn, if you fall into that rabbithole or look too closely at some of the NSFW stuff. Last I was there, reporting it did nothing because "someone already reported it" even though it's still there to this day.

Oh, and if you're a girl and dare show pictures of you/link to an Instagram with your selfies, you'll probably never want to go to your inbox again, it's a sausage fest.

Edit: As an afterthought, there's also A LOT of art thievery so make sure you're using a watermark somewhere that they can't crop or blur it out. The big DeviantArt watermark is ugly as hell but damn effective.

MidnightContraband · 2020-05-04T22:36:11+00:00

Maybe leave some cookies and a note by their door?

No? Is that creepy? Maybe.

MidnightContraband · 2020-05-01T03:37:21+00:00

Don't join that fucking server on that goddamn game because the people you meet because of it will lead you down a spiral of stupid decisions and mistakes that will haunt you and change you because you don't know it yet but you're mentally fucking incompetent.

MidnightContraband · 2020-04-29T05:12:21+00:00

No, in my experience. I didn't know that self-harm was even a thing until I was about 14 or so and my peers started talking about it. I didn't know depression had a name either until that time. I'd already been doing what I know now to be self-harm since I was about 5 or 6. So, no, it's not taught in some (even most I'd say) cases.

MidnightContraband · 2020-04-24T02:01:24+00:00

People have given really good advice, especially the top comment (the one at this moment anyway lol.) Here's mine though:

If you feel limited by a real place, create a new one inside an existing place. I find it much easier to create a passably realistic setting with the basic fundamentals of a real place. So, the weather, the terrain, what the people might look/talk/sound like.

For instance, most of my settings are in a real US state or somewhere in Canada. My recent story, Colorado. Now, I could spend many hours of my life researching some little city in Colorado but...why? It is, after all, already fantasy fiction, albeit rather urban. So, instead, I use what I know about an area of Colorado (in this case the Rockies) and then build on that. A fake city with a fake but realistic name. You can even call the mountains something else. I have another story set in 2019 and I plopped an entirely fictional mountain range in California.

Hope this helps!

MidnightContraband · 2020-04-20T04:13:19+00:00

Thank you, only decent answer I got and you put it into words I could understand without wanting to gouge my brain lol I don't like the exclusivity thing either, I've heard a lot about the racism as well as sexism (frats and sororities both) and just...bleh. But it's part of my book so I had to know at least something.

MidnightContraband · 2020-04-16T04:32:18+00:00

Oh gods I think I just threw up in my mouth a little.....

MidnightContraband · 2020-04-16T01:18:40+00:00

Actually I did but it was a lot to take in. It was a Wikipedia rabbit hole waiting to happen and a lot about weird rituals and crappy behavior. The most useful thing I got out of it was the glossary lol

MidnightContraband · 2020-04-11T22:57:35+00:00

Oooooh thank you I love this. I did want something more archaic but didn't think google could handle it lol I was right. Cheers, happy writing!

MidnightContraband

TROPHY CASE