i know this isn’t really original but im obsessed with how english words that refer to the bodily, the tangible, the elemental etc are so often of anglo-saxon/germanic origin e.g. (heart, blood, jaw, flesh) or observable phenomena, like adjectives describing light (glisten, gloaming, glitter, gleam, gloom, glow, dark, fire) or places (hearth, hall, hill), and the most stark, primal emotions or states (hate, love, life, lust, death) and of course fuck, shit, bitch, cunt etc– these often monosyllabic, consonant heavy words…and then you have the lilting, limpid romance/latinate, words like acquiesce and exacerbate and agrarian and pellucid and clemency and lucidity…and how maybe the secret of all great english language poetry is a textural balancing of the push-pull of the germanic and the romantic/latinate, a balancing of these two energies. like some of the most powerful moments in shakespeare are where the verbosity falls away and you have these plain utterances (“to be or not to be” or lear’s dying “look there look there”– all anglo saxon words) that are so powerful precisely because the language is so ornate elsewhere. i once came up with an elaborate wildly incoherent theory about this in the pub with some drunk american masters student who was dressed like harry styles
I cannot emphasize enough how much you need to read thoroughly through the terms of any publication before you send your writing to them. It is mandatory that you know and understand what rights you’re giving away when you’re trying to get published.
Just the other day I was emailed by a relatively new indie journal looking for writers. They made it very clear that they did not pay writers for their work, so I figured I’d probably be passing, but I took a look at their Copyright policy out of curiosity and it was a nightmare. They wanted “non-exclusive, irrevocable, royalty-free, perpetual, worldwide license and right to use, display, reproduce, distribute, and publish the Work on the internet and on or in any medium” (that’s copy and pasted btw) and that was the first of 10 sections on their Copyright agreement page. Yikes. That’s exactly the type of publishing nightmare you don’t want to be trapped in.
Most journals will ask for “First North American Rights” or a variation on “First Rights” which operate under the assumption that all right revert back to you and they only have the right to be the first publishers of the work. That is what you need to be looking for because you do want to retain all the rights to your work.
You want all rights to revert back to you upon publication in case you, say, want to publish it again in the future or use it for a bookmark or post it on your blog, or anything else you might want to do with the writing you worked hard on. Any time a publisher wants more than that, be very suspicious. Anyone who wants to own your work forever and be able to do whatever they want with it without your permission is not to be trusted. Anyone who wants all that and wants you to sign away your right to ever be paid for your work is running a scam.
Protect your writing. It’s not just your intellectual property, it’s also your baby. You worked hard on it. You need to do the extra research to protect yourself so that a scammer (or even a well meaning start up) doesn’t
steal you work right from under you nose and make money off of it.
Exclusive publishing rights have to have a set time frame! Do not agree to anything that doesn’t clearly state “up to five years from signature” or something like that.
What if the publisher goes defunct? What if they get bought by another publisher who doesn’t care to promote or publish your work? You still can’t to anything with it, you don’t own it anymore!
An old and homely grandmother accidentally summons a demon. She mistakes him for her gothic-phase teenage grandson and takes care of him. The demon decides to stay at his new home.
It isn’t uncommon for this particular demon to be summoned—from
exhausting Halloween party pranks in abandoned barns to more legitimate (more
exhausting) ceremonies in forests—but it has to admit, this is the first time
it’s been called forth from its realm into a claustrophobic living room bathed
in the dull orange-pink glow of old glass lamps and a multitude of wide-eyed,
creepy antique porcelain dolls that could give Chucky a run for his money with
all of their silent, seething stares combined. Accompanying those oddities are
tea cup and saucer sets on shelves atop frilly doilies crocheted with the
utmost care, and cross-stitched, colorful ‘Home Sweet Home’s hung across the wood-paneled
walls.
It’s a mistake—a wrong number, per se. No witch it’s ever
known has lived in such an, ah, dated,
home. Furthermore, no practitioner that ever summoned it has been absent, as if
they’d up and ding-dong ditched it. No, it didn’t work that way. Not at all.
Not if they want to survive the encounter.
It hears the clinking of movement in the room adjacent—the kitchen,
going by the pungent, bitter scent of cooled coffee and soggy, sweet sponge
cakes, but more jarring is the smell of blood. It moves—feels something slip
beneath its clawed foot as it does, and sees a crocheted blanket of whites and greys
and deep black yarn, wound intricately, perfectly, into a summoning circle. Its summoning circle. There is a small splash
of bright scarlet and sharp, jagged bits of a broken curio scattered on top,
as if someone had dropped it, attempted to pick it up the pieces and pricked their finger.
It would explain the blood. And it would explain the demon being brought into
this strange place.
As it connects these pieces in its mind, the inhabitant of
the house rounds the corner and exits the kitchen, holding a damp, white dish
towel close to her hand and fumbling with the beaded bifocals hanging from her
neck by a crocheted lanyard before stopping dead in her tracks.
Now, to be fair, the demon wouldn’t ordinarily second guess
being face-to-face with a hunchbacked crone with a beaked nose, beady eyes and
a peculiar lack of teeth, or a spidery shawl and ankle-length black dress, but
there is definitely something amiss here. Especially when the old biddy lets
her spectacles fall slack on her bosom and erupts into a wide, toothy (toothless)
grin, eyes squinting and crinkling from the sheer effort of it.
“Todd! Todd, dear, I didn’t know you were visiting this year!
You didn’t call, you didn’t write—but, oh, I’m so happy you’re here, dear!
Would it have been too much to ask you to ring the doorbell? I almost had a
heart attack. And don’t worry about the blood, here—I had an accident. My favorite
figure toppled off of the table and cleanup didn’t go as expected. But I seem
to recall you are quite into the bloodshed and ‘edgy’ stuff these days, so I
don’t suppose you mind.” She releases a hearty, kind laugh, but it isn’t
mocking, it’s sweet. Grandmotherly. The demon is by no means sentimental or
maudlin, but the kindness, the familiarity, the genuine fondness, does pull a
few dusty old nostalgic heartstrings. “Imagine if it leaves a scar! It’d be a
bit ‘badass,’ as you teenagers say, wouldn’t it?”
She is as blind as a bat without her glasses, it would appear,
because the demon is by no means a ‘Todd’ or a human at all, though humanoid, shrouded
in sleek, black skin and hard spikes and sharp claws. But the demon humors her, if only
because it had been caught off guard.
The old woman smiles still, before turning on her heel and
shuffling into the hallway with a stiff gait revealing a poor hip. “Be a dear
and make some more coffee, would you please? I’ll be back in a jiffy.”
Yes, this is most definitely a mistake. One for the record
books, for certain. For late-night trips to bars and conversations with colleagues,
while others discuss how many souls they’d swindled in exchange for peanuts, or
how many first-borns they’d been pledged for things idiot humans could have
gained without divine intervention. Ugh. Sometimes it all just became so pedantic
that little detours like this were a blessing—happy accidents, as the humans
would say.
That’s why the demon does as asked, and plods slowly into
the kitchen, careful to duck low and avoid the top of the doorframe. That’s why
it gingerly takes the small glass pot and empties it of old, stale coffee and carefully,
so carefully, takes a measuring scoop between its claws and fills the machine
with fresh grounds. It’s as the hot water is percolating that the old woman
returns, her index finger wrapped tight in a series of beige bandages.
“I’m surprised you’re so tall, Todd! I haven’t seen you
since you were at my hip! But your mother mails photos all the time—you do love
wearing all black, don’t you?” She takes a seat at the small round table in the
corner and taps the glass lid of the cake plate with quaking, unsteady, aged hands. “I was starting to think you’d never visit. Your father and I have
had our disagreements, but…I am glad you’re here, dear. Would you like some
cake?” Before the demon has a chance to decline, she lifts the lid and cuts a
generous slice from the near-complete circle that has scarcely been touched. It
smells of citrus and cream and is, as assumed earlier, soggy, oversaturated
with icing.
It was made for a special occasion, for guests, but it doesn’t
seem this old woman receives much company in this musty, stagnant house that
smells like an antique garage that hadn’t had its dust stirred in years.
Especially not from her absentee grandson, Todd.
The demon waits until the coffee pot is full, and takes two
small mugs from the counter, filling them until steam is frothing over the
rims. Then, and only then, does it accept the cake and sit, with some
difficulty, in a small chair at the small table. It warbles out a polite ‘thank
you,’ but it doesn’t suppose the woman understands. Manners are manners
regardless.
“Oh, dear, I can hardly understand. Your voice has gotten so
deep, just like your grandfather’s was. That, and I do recall you have an affinity
for that gravelly, screaming music. Did your voice get strained? It’s alright,
dear, I’ll do the talking. You just rest up. The coffee will help soothe.”
The demon merely nods—some communication can be understood
without fail—and drinks the coffee and eats the cake with a too-small fork. It’s
ordinary, mushy, but delicious because of the intent behind it and the love
that must have gone into its creation.
“I hope you enjoyed all of the presents I sent you. You
never write back—but I am aware most people use that fancy E-mail these days. I
just can’t wrap my head around it. I do wish your mom and dad would visit sometime.
I know of a wonderful little café down the street we can go to. I haven’t been; I wanted to visit it with Charles, before he…well.” She falls silent in her
rambling, staring into her coffee with a small, melancholy smile. “I can’t
believe it’s been ten years. You never had the chance to meet him. But never mind
that.” Suddenly, and with surprising speed that has the demon concerned for her well being, she moves to her feet, bracing her hands on the edge of the table. “I may as
well give you your birthday present, since you’re here. What timing! I only
finished it this morning. I’ll be right back.”
When she returns, the white, grey and black crocheted work with the summoning
circle is bundled in her arms.
“I found these designs in an occult book I borrowed from the
library. I thought you’d like them on a nice, warm blanket to fight off the
winter chill—I hope you do like it.” With gentle hands, she spreads the blanket
over the demon’s broad, spiky back like a shawl, smoothing it over craggy shoulders
and patting its arms affectionately. “Happy birthday, Todd, dear.”
Well, that settles it. Whoever, wherever, Todd is, he’s
clearly missing out. The demon will just have to be her grandson from now on.
this is so sweet. it made me want to hug someone.
i had to
I WOULD WATCH SIX SEASONS AND A MOVIE
Okay but she takes him to the little cafe and all of the people in her town are like “What is that thing, what the hell, Anette?” and she’s like “Don’t you remember my grandson Todd?” and the entire town just has to play along because no one will tell little old Nettie that her grandson is an actual demon because this is the happiest she’s been since her husband died.
Bonus: In season 4 she makes him run for mayor and he wins
I just want to watch ‘Todd’ help her with groceries, and help her with cooking, and help her clean up the dust around the house and air it out, and fill it with spring flowers because Anette mentioned she loved hyacinth and daffodils.
Over the seasons her eyesight worsens, so ‘Todd’ brings a hellhound into the house to act as her seeing eye dog, and people in town are kinda terrified of this massive black brute with fur that drips like thick oil, and a mouth that can open all the way back to its chest, but ‘Honey’ likes her hard candies, and doesn’t get oil on the carpet, and when ‘Todd’ has to go back to Hell for errands, Honey will snuggle up to Anette and rest his giant head on her lap, and whuff at her pockets for butterscotch.
Anette never gives ‘Todd’ her soul, but she gives him her heart
In season six, Anette gets sick. She spends most of the season bedridden and it becomes obvious by about midway through the season that she’s not going to make it to the end of the season. Todd spends the season travelling back and forth between the human realm and his home plane, trying hard to find something, anything that will help Anette get better, to prolong her life. He’s tried getting her to sell him her soul, but she’s just laughed, told him that he shouldn’t talk like that.
With only a few episodes left in the season Anette passes away, Todd is by her side. When the reaper comes for her Todd asks about the fate of her soul. In a dispassionate voice the reaper informs Todd that Anette spent the last few years of her life cavorting with creatures of darkness, that there can be only one fate for her. Todd refuses to accept this and he fights the reaper, eventually injuring the creature and driving it off. Knowing that Anette cannot stay in the Human Realm, and refusing to allow her spirit to be taken by another reaper, so he takes her soul in his arms. He’s done this before, when mortals have sold themselves to him. This time the soul cradled against his chest does not snuggle and fight. This time the soul held tight against him reaches out, pats him on the cheek tells him he was a good boy, and so handsome, just like his grandfather.
Todd takes Anette back to the demon realm, holding her tight against him as he travels across the bleak and forebidding landscape; such a sharp contrast to the rosy warmth of Anette’s home. Eventually, in a far corner of his home plane, Todd finds what he is looking for. It is a place where other demons do not tread; a large boulder cracked and broken, with a gap just barely large enough for Todd to fit through. This crack, of all things, gives him pause, but Anette’s soul makes a comment about needing to get home in time to feed Honey, and Todd forces himself to pass through it. He travels in darkness for a while, before he emerges into into a light so bright that it’s blinding. His eyes adjust slowly, and he finds himself face to face with two creatures, each of them at least twice his size one of them has six wings and the head of a lion, one of them is an amorphous creature within several rings. The lion-headed one snarls at Todd, and demands that he turn back, that he has no business here.
Todd looks down, holding Anette’s soul against his chest, he takes a deep breath, and speaks a single word, “Please.”
The two larger beings are taken aback by this. They are too used to Todd’s kind being belligerent, they consult with each other, they argue. The amorphous one seems to want to be lenient, the lion-headed one insists on being stricter. While they’re arguing Todd sneaks by them and runs as fast as he can, deeper into the brightly lit expanse. The path on which he travels begins to slope upwards, and eventually becomes a staircase. It becomes evident that each step further up the stair is more and more difficult for Todd, that it’s physically paining him to climb these stairs, but he keeps going.
They dedicate a full episode to this climb; interspersing the climb with scenes they weren’t able to show in previous seasons, Anette and Honey coming to visit Todd in the Mayor’s office, Anette and Todd playing bingo together for the first time, Anette and Todd watching their stories together in the mid afternoon, Anette falling asleep in her chair and Todd gently carrying her to bed. Anette making Todd lemonade in the summer while he’s up on the roof fixing that leak and cleaning out the rain gutters. Eventually Todd reaches the top, and all but collapses, he falls to a knee and for the first time his grip on Anette’s soul slips, and she falls away from him. Landing on the ground.
He reaches out for her, but someone gets there first. Another hand reaches out, and helps this elderly woman off the ground, helps her get to her feet. Anette gasps, it’s Charles. The pair of them throw their arms around each other. Anette tells Charles that she’s missed him so much, and she has so much to tell him. Charles nods. Todd watches a soft smile on his face. A delicate hand touches Todd’s shoulder, and pulls him easily to his feet. A figure; we never see exactly what it looks like, leans down, whispering in Todd’s ear that he’s done well, and that Anette will be well taken care of here. That she will spend an eternity with her loved ones. Todd looks back over to her, she’s surrounded by a sea of people. Todd nods, and smiles. The figure behind him tells him that while he has done good in bringing Anette here, this is not his place, and he must leave. Todd nods, he knew this would be the case.
Todd gets about six steps down the stairway before he is stopped by someone grabbing his shoulder again. He turns around, and Anette is standing behind him. She gives him a big hug and leads him back up the stairs, he should stay, she says. Get to know the family. Todd tries to tell her that he can’t stay, but she won’t hear it. She leads him up into the crowd of people and begins introducing him to long dead relatives of hers, all of whom give him skeptical looks when she introduces him as her grandson.
The mysterious figure appears next to Todd again and tells him once more he must leave, Todd opens his mouth to answer but Anette cuts him off. Nonsense, she tells the figure. IF she’s gonna stay here forever her grandson will be welcome to visit her. She and the figure stare at each other for a moment. The figure eventually sighs and looks away, the figure asks Todd if she’s always like this. Todd just shrugs and smiles, allowing Anette to lead him through a pair of pearly gates, she’s already talking about how much cake they’ll need to feed all of these relatives.
P.S. Honey is a Good Dog and gets to go, too.
the last lines of the show:
demon: you’re not blind here – but you’re not surprised. when…?
anette: oh, toddy, don’t be silly, my biological grandson’s not twelve feet tall and doesn’t scorch the furniture when he sneezes. i’ve known for ages.
demon: then why?
anette: you wouldn’t have stayed if you weren’t lonely too.
demon: you… you don’t have to keep calling me your grandson.
anette: nonsense! adopted children are just as real. now quit sniffling, you silly boy, and let’s go bake a cake. honey, heel!
honey: W̝̽̂̿͂͝Ọ̮̹̲̪̋ͦͅO̸̘͔̬͊F̜̫͙̟͕͖̙̋ͫ͌͗
that addition is a+ 🙂
THE ONLY ENDING I WILL EVER ACCEPT FOR THIS
Every time this post shows up on my dash, it gets better (and more heart wrenching. Y’all! Stop cutting the onions okay?!).
If ever don’t reblogging this, I’m either dead, dying, or buried under cat.
This is why I love Tumblr so much! Thank you all for collaborating on this prompt and turning it into something beautiful ❤
You are born with the ability to see whether people listen more often to the angel or the devil on their shoulder, based on the opacity of each- if they listen more to the angel, it’s more solid and the demon is more transparent, and vice versa. You recently met a guy online and you’re finally going to meet. You go in for a handshake and glance at his shoulders, but you can’t see the angel. Only a solid demon.
Run. That’s my first thought and it keeps playing in my head over and over again. Run!
“You OK?” asks the man before me.
I realize I’ve been standing frozen, probably looking spooked. “Yes,” I fake what I hope is a convincing smile. I look back at his right shoulder, there’s nothing there, then to his left shoulder where a solid colored devil rests.
As he turns to our table I glance over the restaurant to make sure my powers are still working. There’s a woman one table away with a transparent devil and a translucent angel, she listens to the angel more. The woman across from her has a devil that’s translucent, she listens to it a little more than she should.
I’ve had this power my whole life, to see which side one listens to, but never before have I seen a completely solid devil, never before have I seen the angel completely gone…
Run!
Turning back to him I seen he’s pulled my chair out for me, watching me expectantly.
I could run now but what if he follows? Maybe it’s best I don’t tip him off, assuming I haven’t already, and sneak out while he’s not looking.
“Thank you,” I sit down.
He sits across from me and looks down, pulling on his long sleeves. “Order whatever you want,” he mumbles, “don’t pay attention to the price.”
“Oh, OK thank you.” I can barely pay attention to the menu. I glance over the restaurant, planning an escape route from the restroom.
“It was at 5:50,” he says, picking right up from where our last conversation online left off.
“I watched that video a dozen times and couldn’t see it.”
As we talk he seems just like the shy sweet boy I met online but then I glance at the devil on his shoulder and remember to be scared.
I’m looking at his shoulder so often that he glances back to see what I’m looking at. Worried about it I glance down and gape; on his arm a cut peeks out from under his sleeve.
He sees me seeing it and panics, pulling his sleeves down.
My gaze falls to the table and we sit there in silence.
This whole time I’ve been avoiding the people with the more solid devils because they listen to them more, I never questioned what the devils were saying. His devil isn’t telling him to hurt me, it’s telling him to hurt himself, that he’s worthless and doesn’t deserve me; and me acting scared of him isn’t helping.
“Don’t listen,” slips out before I’ve finished getting my thoughts together. I take in a long breath and speak slowly. “Don’t listen to the voice that tells you you’re useless, that you’ll never make a difference… You’ve made a huge difference to me.”
I risk looking up and see him teary eyed. “Thank you,” he whispers, and beside his head a barely visible angel fades back into existence.
Thank you so much for doing this prompt @hannahcbrown!
To all the amigos out there, know that you are loved ❤️
like, okay. a lot of it has
to do with the way i write. i work best when i have a lot of room to work
with and to tell the story, which is why my chapters are really long and i write
in multiple povs. someone recently commented they were surprised they liked an invincible
summer because it’s rare for them to really get into a story that’s less than
ten chapters long, and i was like …. it’s almost a 140k words long. what are
you saying right now. because, in spite of it’s length, it only has 6 chapters.
and originally it only had 5, but then the last chapter was like 40k and that
seemed too ridiculous so i broke it up into two.
this is why never grow a
wishbone is just … so hard for me to write. i have a lot of plot stuff planned
out, but i’m really struggling with finding a way to get to it, because i
pretty much set myself up to fail for that fic. i wanted to try writing shorter
chapters, because i never had before, and it hadn’t occurred to me that HEY
MAYBE THERE WAS A REASON FOR THAT. but writing only 5k is very constraining to
me, and it means i end up focusing one chapter on one specific thing, rather
than bouncing around like i like too, and i end up writing myself into a
corner. this is made worse by the fact i did a single pov for this fic, in
spite of knowing full well how hard it is for me to tell a long story in a
single pov. when i start writing this fic again, i’m going to have to make the
chapters longer, maybe 6-8k, because otherwise i’ll go insane.
crust and sugar over is a
good balance for me for chapter length, because those chapters were 8-9k, and
that’s a really comfortable place for me if i’m not doing a super long fic.
with caso i struggled a lot with pacing, because i wanted this story to stay a
reasonable length, but the actual writing was pretty easy, i just struggled
with plotting the timeline of things.
an invincible summer was
actually very easy for me to write. my chapters were like … way too long, over
20k and i think two of them were over 30k. per chapter. what was i thinking.
but that had a lot of stuff going on, and outline wise, i literally did not
write a single thing down until after i published the third chapter, so over
60k into the story i was like hey … maybe an outline for the rest of it. before
that i just kept track of and planned everything in my head.
a terrifying clamour or
trumpets was very easy to write, in spite of being a single pov fic. but that
fic was very specific to my mood at the time. i’d had the idea of ed dying of
trisha’s illness since i was like … 14. but it wasn’t until i was stuck at
minimum wage job that i hated with my bright and shiny college degree and a bit
of situational depression that i was like OKAY now i am ready. and i wrote most of it all at once without an
outline.
know the difference, by
comparison, was very hard for me to write with the single pov. also a lot of it
was i was talking about a lot of big concepts with that fic, and it was an
angel/wing fic, and i was worried people would read it for pretty boys with
wings and then be like ??? what’s all this religious body horror and
pretentious bullshit??
survival is a talent is
pretty easy for me to write. there are scenes that i struggle with sometimes,
usually because i’m trying not to mess up my timeline, but for the most part
siat comes out easy. 15k is a good chapter length for me for long fic, although
sometimes it runs a little over because i don’t want to cut it off in the
middle of something Dramatic happening. i know i take a while to update, and i’d
hate to leave you guys on too big a cliffhanger.
build you wings on the way
down is like … the messiest fic i’ve written to date. originally, bywotwd and
son of the desert were one fic. but then i realized a lot of themes and story
stuff would work SO MUCH BETTER in sotd, so i incorporated them into that fic.
but then that meant my original plan for bywotwd was pretty much shafted. and
it took me a really long time to come up with a continuation that wasn’t a rip
off of sotd, and instead was interesting and different in it’s own right. it
ended up being a MUCH bigger story than i was planning on telling, as tends to
happen to me, but i really didn’t want to spend 100k on it, which is why plot
in bywotwd happens at 100mph. bywotwd is like if you were making a puzzle, and
halfway through someone stole all your pieces for a different puzzle. but hey!
they give you two boxes of puzzle pieces, mess them together, and tell you good
luck. so now you have to complete the puzzle using these pieces, but you can’t
alter the half a puzzle you already made, and the whole thing still has to make
sense and show an actual picture. that’s why writing bywotwd is so hard for me.
anyway. that was a super long
answer to your question. i hope it was interesting for some of you??
if you find bones in the forest, sit a bit and listen. they are old and have some good stories to tell. maybe they’ll teach you a spell or two, or explain where the water on our planet came from.
if you find bones by the ocean, run. don’t look back. run, faster, faster. the sea may love you but there are nights where she knows neither mercy nor science, and the bones warn you only once.
Before I get going, I’m 75% deaf, as some of you know, semi-reliant on hearing aids and lip reading. My first languages were Makaton sign and then BSL. I now use spoken English.
There are a lot of issues I find with how deaf people are represented in books, when represented at all. I would love to see more deaf and hard of hearing characters in the books I read- without having to read books specifically about deaf/HoH people- but when I find them, they’re grossly undercharacterized or stereotyped. Authors write them in a way that sets signing language characters apart from speaking characters as if they are inferior, and this makes my blood boil.
Some technicalties
I’ll keep this brief.
You may have heard that “deaf” is a slur and you should use “hearing impaired”. Don’t. I’ve never met a deaf or hard of hearing person who believed that. Use deaf for people who are deaf, and Hard of Hearing (HoH) for people who lack hearing. These can be interchangeable depending on the person. This is why sensitivity readers are a useful part of the beta process.
Sign language is incredibly varied. It developes in the same way as spoken language. Fun fact: in BSL there are at least half a dozen ways to say bullshit, my favourite of which is laying your arms across one another with one hand making a bull’s head sign and the other hand going flat, like a cowpat. It’s beautifully crude, and the face makes the exclamation mark. Wonderful.
There are different sign languages. Knowing more than one would make a character multi or bi-lingual, even if they are non-speaking.
Makaton is basic sign language used by children, and it mirrors the very simple language used by toddlers.
Yes, we swear and talk shit about people around us in sign language sometimes, and no, it isn’t disrespectful to have signing characters do this. Just remember that we also say nice things, and random things, and talk about fandoms and TV shows and what we’re having for dinner, too.
Each signed language is different from another. ASL and BSL? Nothing alike. Just google the two different signs for horse.
Remember that sign language is a language, equal to the spoken word
Therefore, treat it as such. Use quotation speech marks and dialogue
tags. You only need to explicitly state that this character uses signed language once, and then let your modifiers and description do the rest.
It isn’t a form of “sub-speech" or “making hand actions”- sign language is a language all on its own: it has its own grammar rules, syntactical structures, punctuation, patterns, idioms and colloquialisms. For example, “what is your name?” becomes “Your name what?” with the facial expression forming punctuation in the same way that spoken English uses alterations of prosodic tone (inflections). There is even pidgin sign; a language phenomenon usually associated with spoken language.
In the same way that you would describe a spoken-English character’s tone of voice, you would describe a signed-English speaker’s facial expressions and the way that they sign- keeping in mind that these things are our language’s equivalent of verbal inflection.
So please, none of that use of “special speech marks” or italicised
speech for sign. If your viewpoint character doesn’t understand signed
speech, then you take the same approach that would be used for any other
language they don’t understand, like French or Thai. E.g “He said something
in rapid sign language, face wrinkling in obvious disgust.” is a good
way of conveying this. The proof that you’ve done this well is in whether or not you can switch “sign language” for French or something else, and it would read the same.
Don’t be afraid to describe how things are said, either.
Sign language is such a beautiful and expressive way of talking, and to
see a writer do it justice would be truly fabulous. Putting this into practise:
“Oh, I love maths!” She said, fingers sharp and wide with sarcasm. She raised her eyebrows.
“I’m sorry.” He replied and made his face small, but could not keep the grin forming. She was starting to laugh, too.
This is part one of two, for the sake of readability and keeping the information simple as I can. Part two- writing the deaf characters themselves- is coming up over the weekend. See you then and best luck with your writing until that point 😀
This is part of my weekly advice theme. Each week I look at what you’ve asked me to help with, and write a post or series of posts for it. Next week: settings and character development (including heroes, anti-heroes, villains, and every other kind of character).
Thank you, this is wonderful and helpful.
Some great thoughts on writing deaf characters talking!
So, I had a very long talk with my Deaf sensitivity reader (who was paid for his work) about this.
His preference is to see signed speech punctuated (quotes, commas, periods, etc) AND ITALICIZED. He wants an immediate visual distinction between spoken-only and signed-only/signed-and-spoken speech, especially because in some cases a character can be signing one thing and saying another.
Disabled communities are not monoliths. What one person prefers, another person abhors, and a third person could give a damn one way or the other.
Make a Vampire character who’s lived through several waves of the common language’s development and can’t let go if certain gramatical habbits from different time eras.
So like, thou ist a horrid creature, an absolute cur, but go off i guess
… can i use that phrase irl?
Absolutely you can and I encourage more uses of similar phrases that just completely fuck up the chronology of the english langauge. I wanna hear 15th century english mixed with surfer speak mixed with current age internet lingo like all the time.
Like this? Well my dude, seems like a weasel hath not such a deal of splean as you’re toss’d with. Chill already, you’re not valid.
You are an unrighteous, bastardly gullion. Heaven truly
knows that thou art false as hell. When you die, I will face God and walk
backwards into hell just so that I can beat your ass in the afterlife too.
wupacing 