Virga, the phenomenon of rain not reaching the ground. Virga is produced when rain is falling from the base of the cloud but evaporates in dry air before reaching the ground surface.
sorry for romanticizing the mundane but the fact that laughter is infectious is so incredible to me. like yeah it's just a reaction to stimuli but the way it feels to hear someone laugh and feel yourself compelled to share that joy is really something. and it's so simple and requires no skill but it's so special and important to me.
guys it turns out if you wanna have fun and be a fun and interesting person you like have to fill your day with fun things and not just rotting in your room …… need a moment to process
And is this train due in 0 minutes in the station with us right now?
x
going on the internet to stare at things. going to a antique mall to stare at things. going to the aquarium to stare at things. going to an art gallery to stare at things. picking up a book to stare at things. going to the cinema to stare at things. &other such cases
(As requested by both an anon and @my-words-are-light)
One of the hardest parts of writing speculative fiction is presenting readers with a world that’s interesting and different from our own in a way that’s both immersive and understandable at the same time.
Thankfully, there are a few techniques that can help you present worldbuilding information to your readers in a natural way, as well as many tricks to tweaking the presentation until it’s just right.
1. The ignorant character.
By introducing a character who doesn’t know about the aspects of the world building you’re trying to convey, you can let the ignorant character voice the questions the reader naturally wants to ask. Traditionally, this is seen when the protagonist or (another character) is brought into a new world, society, organization. In cases where that’s the natural outcome of the plot, and the character has a purpose in the story outside of simply asking questions, it can be pulled off just fine. But there’s another aspect to this which writers don’t often consider:
Every character is your ignorant character.
In a realistic world, no person knows everything. Someone will be behind on the news. Someone won’t know all the facts. Many, many someones won’t have studied a common part of their society simply because they aren’t large part of that fraction or don’t have the time for it.
Instead of inserting an ignorant character and creating a stiff and annoying piece of expository dialogue, find the character already existing in the story who doesn’t know about the thing being learned.
2. Conflicting opinions.
A fantastic way to convey detailed world building concepts is to have characters with conflicting viewpoints discuss or argue about them. Unless you’re working with a brainwashed society, every character should hold their own set of religious, political, and social beliefs.
Examples of this kind of dialogue:
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“They asked me to tell you what it was like to be twenty and pregnant in 1950 and when you tell your boyfriend you’re pregnant, he tells you about a friend of his in the army whose girl told him she was pregnant, so he got all his buddies to come and say, “We all fucked her, so who knows who the father is?” And he laughs at the good joke…. What was it like, if you were planning to go to graduate school and get a degree and earn a living so you could support yourself and do the work you loved—what it was like to be a senior at Radcliffe and pregnant and if you bore this child, this child which the law demanded you bear and would then call “unlawful,” “illegitimate,” this child whose father denied it … What was it like? […] It’s like this: if I had dropped out of college, thrown away my education, depended on my parents … if I had done all that, which is what the anti-abortion people want me to have done, I would have borne a child for them, … the authorities, the theorists, the fundamentalists; I would have born a child for them, their child. But I would not have born my own first child, or second child, or third child. My children. The life of that fetus would have prevented, would have aborted, three other fetuses … the three wanted children, the three I had with my husband—whom, if I had not aborted the unwanted one, I would never have met … I would have been an “unwed mother” of a three-year-old in California, without work, with half an education, living off her parents…. But it is the children I have to come back to, my children Elisabeth, Caroline, Theodore, my joy, my pride, my loves. If I had not broken the law and aborted that life nobody wanted, they would have been aborted by a cruel, bigoted, and senseless law. They would never have been born. This thought I cannot bear. What was it like, in the Dark Ages when abortion was a crime, for the girl whose dad couldn’t borrow cash, as my dad could? What was it like for the girl who couldn’t even tell her dad, because he would go crazy with shame and rage? Who couldn’t tell her mother? Who had to go alone to that filthy room and put herself body and soul into the hands of a professional criminal? – because that is what every doctor who did an abortion was, whether he was an extortionist or an idealist. You know what it was like for her. You know and I know; that is why we are here. We are not going back to the Dark Ages. We are not going to let anybody in this country have that kind of power over any girl or woman. There are great powers, outside the government and in it, trying to legislate the return of darkness. We are not great powers. But we are the light. Nobody can put us out. May all of you shine very bright and steady, today and always.”
— Ursula K. Le Guin (via nightkitchentarot)
“Love is so embarrassing. I bled in your bed. I’m sorry. I have built you a shore with all my best words & still, the waves.”
— Claire Schwartz, from Bound