themardbard replied to your post “writing with a

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themardbard replied to your post “writing with a lil backlog”

Hey dude take your time if you need it! Don’t rush your storytelling for anyone else. Take as much time as you need, we’ll all still be here!

Oh, no, that wasn’t what I was complaining about at all– I’m doing this at the pace that suits me, which is, of course, as fast as possible for the writing, because I don’t really want to be doing anything else, but. No, I’m posting at a very deliberate pace, and actually doing it this way gives me a bit of freedom– I can say to myself, “I’m going away this weekend and won’t get anything written, why don’t I push this update back a tiny bit, and then the next one can be a bit later, and then I’ll have had time to finish the scene”. 

I was just complaining that the scene was taking a long time to grind itself out, as often happens when I want something specific to happen. Action sequences are hard because you have to kind of choreograph them, and the rough blocking that works effortlessly for a conversation can be really stressful for action because honestly– I saw a post about this a while ago, actually, and was like that is spot-on but didn’t reblog it I don’t think– the hardest thing about writing, the very hardest thing about writing, is the down-to-earth details of simple physical blocking. How do you get someone up and out the door, with breakfast, to the important meeting? How do you make sure the important things happen in the battle scene? You’ve got all this mundane physical-object shit to keep track of (did i say which hand her sword is in? how do you hold a sword really? how do i describe that so it sounds like i know what i’m talking about? how do I make sure the guy who she needs to see get killed is within eyeshot?) Because you’ve got to do all this mundane-detail-wrangling while also making sure your scene is conveying the larger arcs and themes you need it to– is she growing as a character from this? which direction? am I making the point that war is hell or that war is futile or that war is noble, or am I being as dispassionate as possible? which highlighted detail does that better? cut the others. 

It all gets easier with practice but it doesn’t necessarily get faster. 

And, for me, as an apparently undiagnosable sufferer of ADHD (i spent a good chunk of time trying to get medical help for this and got nowhere), I have to keep in mind the semi-functional formulae I’ve discovered for myself over the years, where I have to push against some resistance from my not-entirely-functional brain, but I also have to listen to it. I can’t trust it entirely, but most of the time its instincts are correct about something, and I have to figure out what. I’ve spent thirty years, on and off, trying to write to outlines, trying to teach myself to do what other people do, and that doesn’t work; I feel like in these last couple I’ve finally managed to discover how I most effectively can produce the long works of fiction that have been living in my heart this whole time, but it’s still not an exact science, and I don’t always know why. My brain doesn’t mean to fight me, and mostly it does what I want very, very well– but sometimes it sends me haring off down a 250,000-word path that it can’t come up with an ending to, and nobody likes that.

Anyway I started my first novel, very deliberately, in pencil on paper, at age 10, and I never finished that one but I have finished some since then. And I might finish this one. And that’d be great. Maybe I’m getting the hang of this.

deputychairman:this is how you know they really are friendspatroclusdefencesquad:geralt is having...

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deputychairman:

this is how you know they really are friends

patroclusdefencesquad:

geralt is having the time of his LIFE

in the second panel that is THE HAPPIEST we see Geralt in the ENTIRE series, he is DELIGHTED

Ancient Sea update

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As promised, I finally have Jaskier back in this story, failing to be a prima donna in the Advanced Bardic Performance Workshop Session, and workshopping the fragments of his new Tragic Ballad, which I had to actually write, which is just the worst. 

chapter 5, Session

But the bit I’m excerpting, at the risk of ruining the punchline, is the part where Geralt realizes that Yennefer and Jaskier are hanging out now, and this is where I’m enjoying the tight POV, because Geralt doesn’t know Triss well enough to understand precisely why she’s off-kilter in this conversation, but the reader knows what Yennefer has already told Triss all about, and which Triss of course cannot reveal any inkling of because that would go against the sorceress Bro Code. 

Geralt scratched uneasily at the back of his head under his hair, finding that he had a stray tiny braid woven into the length of his hair that Ciri had to have put there when he wasn’t paying attention. “They’re not… friends,” he said. “It’s hard for me not to see this as… slightly threatening.”

“Yennefer spoke of the bard as a friend,” Triss said, looking slightly, hm, wounded, offended maybe. Not good. “From what she said to me, they seemed quite close.”

“Hm,” Geralt said, feeling he was treading on shaky ground here. It wouldn’t do to offend a mage. Their loyalties tended to be, hm, strongly swayed by how much you annoyed them, he’d discovered. And there wasn’t much you could do, once one showed up, but go along with them and hope they lost interest before deciding to kill you. Which was precisely what he was hoping hadn’t happened to poor Jaskier.

“You don’t seem convinced,” Triss said. “What, you think Yennefer is sending you proof that she’s near this bard as a threat to you that she would somehow– what, hurt him?”

Geralt gritted his teeth, and said, “No,” but he could hear that it came out sounding false. If he was alienating Triss– it was painful to think of himself and Yennefer as being opposing sides of a conflict, but there was no question Triss would be on Yennefer’s side, and if Yennefer’s “side” became something that was in any way in opposition to Geralt, that would be a problem.

“You do,” Triss said. Oh, she was offended, or something– he couldn’t read her expression, but probably she was upset. Fuck. 

Well, nothing for it. “I care deeply for Yennefer but she is not careful with people,” Geralt said, “and I have been close friends with Jaskier for many years and know very well that he is not careful with himself. I don’t consider that an auspicious combination, is all, and given how they’ve interacted in the past, I don’t see it going well.”

“Hm,” Triss said, frowning, but she seemed less offended. She seemed to be fighting some inward battle, the contents of which he could barely guess at. “You’re… not wrong about Yennefer,” she conceded. “But the way she spoke of it, she was helping the bard record the events of the Battle of Sodden Field, not–” She hesitated. “Anything nefarious.” She cleared her throat, oddly.

“Mm,” Geralt said. 

ladycibia: dad wolf and his pack (thank you for all your sweet...

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ladycibia:

dad wolf and his pack

(thank you for all your sweet messages!! I hope you will like this as well ;v;)

snarklyboojum: anchorsoutatsea: This. Scene. Right.

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snarklyboojum:

anchorsoutatsea:

This. Scene. Right. Here.

This scene is so underrated.
We’ve just met Jaskier in this episode, but within minutes we find out that this bard is confident and well educated. As he and Geralt are trekking through the land looking for the Devil of Posada, we hear Jaskier say a line that’s seemingly unimportant, just more of his ramblings. He says “The elves called this Dol Blathanna before bequeathing it to the humans and retreating to their golden palaces in the mountains. There I go again, just…delivering exposition.” This is information that he prides himself in knowing, most likely taught to him during his time in Oxenfurt. He can even speak Elder, not a common trait for humans. Oxenfurt taught him their language, but the information they gave him is wrong. It’s the teaching of humans, not the truth. 
The scene above is the exact moment that Jaskier realizes everything he knew about the elves was wrong. Filavandrel tells Jaskier and Geralt that they were forced from their homes and starving, forced to ask a sylvan to steal for them for survival. Jaskier learns that it was humans that forced the elves into unlivable conditions. Everything was stolen from them, their land, their magic, their lives. 

And I think this was the exact moment that Jaskier chose to follow Geralt. Not because of the stories he would learn and could sing, not because Geralt was good for exposure and protection, but because Jaskier had just learned that elves, witchers, and creatures alike were never the real monsters. 

Humans were the real monsters all along. 

And if what humans said made people like Geralt a monster, he would rather choose to follow a monster Every. Single. Time. 

ALL OF THIS YES.  There’s a particular line in this scene that gets me - I think it might actually be the moment of this exact screencap, though I could be wrong.  “And now the humans proudly watch these very fields grow… our babies fertilizer for their grain.”  You can see this hitting Jaskier hard, especially after the propaganda and lies he never thought to question.

So let’s examine “Toss A Coin”.  The song is clearly Jaskier doing his own PR for Geralt, with the later verses easily adaptable to whatever particular monster a particular place is suffering from.  But the intro. The elves are barely mentioned, other to imply a hoard living high in the mountains at the edge of the world. The focus is on the “devil” not only because it’s more catchy and more stuff rhymes with “horn” but because it’s a distraction; it’s Jaskier’s way of saying the elves are here, and dangerous, but you don’t need to go looking for them.  Leave them alone. 

“Oh, valley of plenty.  Oh, valley of plenty.”  What if Jaskier thinks of those growing fields of grain every time he sings that song?  What if he looks around at the coins and smiles and food coming his way and wonders what bones are hiding underneath?