The Irish Twins Episode 7
A wise person once said… “No tears in the writer; no tears in the reader” -Robert Frost
To a degree, all writers understand this…do they implement it? Eh, not so much. But seriously, it is one of the most important elements to a story. And not just for tears. If you don’t laugh at your writing, your readers won’t laugh. If your mind doesn’t spin at some random plot twist that popped up, it's likely your readers minds won’t either. But how do you make sure that your writing doesn’t become bland and emotionless?
Well…thats a good question.
I have two answers.
First one is; well, heh, go take Mrs. Reid's writing class. She’s a miracle worker in that area, gracious, I had zero emotion, at least, emotion that wasn’t told, rather than shown, when I first started writing. After her class? Emotion is one of the biggest things people appreciate about my writing.
Second answer…is a little lengthy, first, your characters play a lot into it. If you don’t have a relatable character, or even just one that people can sympathize with…your mission is already failing. How do you make a sympathetic/relatable character? …that would take too long to answer right now, so we’ll just leave it at; you need a relatable character. Another element is writing quality, or “showing vs telling”. While telling isn’t bad and there are many situations where it's useful, it's a big barrier to writing emotion well. It dulls the impact of whatever you’re trying to present. When you show rather than tell, the readers and even you, the author, can feel the emotions woven through the story. In addition to those…two things? The believability of your story and what happens is something else that can ruin your writing. It doesn’t matter if you’re showing rather than telling, if you have the most relatable sympathetic character ever, you make something impossible happen that is pretty much effortless for the characters to do because of some sudden realization that the character has this special super power, it's gonna turn readers off immediately. You have to make things realistic. You have to be willing to actually put your characters through the fire and then pull them out, but realistically. Not me calling the kettle black…I’ve struggled with this a good bit, which is why I know it stalls the emotion, lol. While there are definitely more things that can affect the emotion in your story if I don’t move on this article is gonna get kinda long, so hopefully what I just said makes sense, XD,
Ok, moving on, who knows if any of y’all even care too much about this, but lets do a farm update because y’know, i do a lot on the farm so it's a big part of me and I love to talk about it.
First up… We’re getting…22? Yeah…i think its 22… don’t quote me on that, but anyways, we’re getting 22 new sheep, to add to our thirty-some that we have already. When we first started homesteading my dad had wanted to get a few sheep because he’d heard they were easy to take care of that depends on…alot and they didn’t eat near as much as cows, even though he wanted to do cows more than sheep. Well, us only having a small amount of land with hardly any grass, got one dairy cow before dad realized cows would not work…at least not at the stage of homesteading we were in and still somewhat are in, so, he started digging more into sheep and after a few months had fallen in love with the idea of getting them rather than cows. They are really hot on the market right now, specifically parasite free, grass fed sheep. One guy, who figured out how to get his sheep and cows that way, is literally selling them for 500$ a piece. Crazy, I know. Anyways we ended up deciding to invest in them and dad went and claimed ten I think it was, for when they were ready to be separated from the flock later in the year. Which was all fine and dandy…until we decided to move 😅And even that wasn’t terrible because the new place we bought had a lot more pasture with actual grass on it, so like, it was perfect. Yeah. Except for the fact that we had no well, so only a creek, no house, there were nine of us, not to mention we got the sheep right before flood season with not enough fencing and completely unprepared for having our entire fence wash out…so…yeah. The first two months were fine, we struggled a bit with moving the sheep around, figuring out how to rotationally graze them, and then we got hit with multiple floods, our fencing washed out, well, everything washed out pretty much, we had sheep dogs run away multiple times, oh gracious I could go on for a while with stories, lol, but we’ll just skip ahead like a year to the part where we got more sheep from someone after losing a few the winter before and since then have grown a lot in managing sheep. All that to say, we are now expanding our flock again, and this time, thankfully, much more prepared, but it’ll still be interesting cause we’ll have around 40-50 sheep to keep track of… Not to mention another set of dogs to add to our current seven. Yeah, we’ve got a lot of animals. Anyways, we’ll be picking these new sheep up on friday supposedly, so the day this article is coming out, so that’ll be fun!
Another slightly new animal is the calf, Brooklyn, who I put a picture of in a newsletter last month I believe, but she’s become quite the stubborn little heifer and oh my word she’s strong. It's like playing a game of tug-o-war except with like 200 pounds worth of weight on the other end, and she’s not even 100 pounds right now, she just pulls hard and likes to do her own thing. She’s adorable though. And she loves to play. It's hilarious watching her and her mom sometimes because Brooklyn is Princess’s first calf so she’s extra worried about her and tries to constantly keep her close by so when we let them out to pasture every day Princess goes around chasing Brooklyn who’s just happy to be free, trying to keep up with her. Anyways, I’ve been working with teaching Brooklyn how to be halter led lately and I suppose its going ok, she still needs some work but she’s doing better than when she first started lol. I’ve also been working with her mom a lot too, as I mentioned Brooklyn is her first calf which means Princess has never milked before so starting that out without dying has been fun, XD. She’s actually done really good, I trained Princess how to be halter led when she was a calf, as well as being ok with being rubbed all over and having her udder touched so she’s not flipped out much at all, which is really nice because that was the one thing I wasn’t looking forward to about Princess calving, lol.
Aside from that there’s not been a ton of stuff going on, it's gotten colder so we’ve had to start breaking ice in the water buckets and we had a dog get sick and had to take her to the vet and now we’re trying to help her get better, but yeah, that's about it. Everything else has been normal. 🙃
Ok, moving on again, I think this article's gotten pretty long so we’ll make this snappy, but BOOK UPDATE: I started rewriting book 1 in my series and I've gotten roughly 20k in and I'm loving what I have so far. I added a pov and i’m having a lot of fun with that, not to mention Jaxton is just a great person to write, *smirks* and torture and y’know, all that stuff. I got a couple quotes to dump on y’all, and then I made character boards for the first time so I’ll put those in tooooo!
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Everyone all of a sudden shut up, almost straining to hear what he’d say.
Great. It was always nice to watch someone else get into trouble, wasn’t it?
I intercepted before he could continue. “Sorry?” I said hesitantly.
Another long silence in which Ky stared blankly at me.
At last he moved to pinch his nose with his thumb and forefinger, groaning.
“What in tarnation were ye thinkin’ jumpin’ from the masts like thet?!”
It took me a minute to respond. I was kinda busy watching Veldor to get his reaction. I mean, Ky was terrifying when he was mad, but Veldor?
He would kill me.
Which was a lot more concerning.
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It was impossible.
He was joking, right?
My throat constricted.
He wasn’t joking.
His silence, the stark fear in his eyes.
I’d never hyperventilated before, or even seen someone hyperventilate, but in that moment, I think I was hyperventilating.
I couldn’t breathe.
I couldn’t see.
I could barely register anything.
It was coming back.
Everything.
My past.
It’d only been a ghost yesterday, a wisp of a memory that haunted my dreams.
Now?
It was a reality. It was no longer haunting me.
It was attacking me
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“You don’t have anything to say?” He asked after a few more minutes of complete silence.
Actually.
No.
I didn’t.
Not at all.
What was there to say?
He was here to kill me.
He might as well just get it over with. Life could move on easily enough without me.
It's not like I could stop whatever he was trying to accomplish in Astolia in this position anyways.
Kazamir regarded me with narrowed eyes, removing his rapier and slipping the edge under my chin, forcing my gaze back up.
I struggled to calm the wild pounding of my heart.
Hey, at least once I was dead I couldn’t be a curse anymore.
There was always a bright side to things.
Or at least…a gray side.
“Odd, last time we were together it seems you had plenty to say.” A smirk crept onto his face; one that would be unendingly satisfying to wipe off.
I shuddered instead, mind flicking back five years and coming to a screeching halt at the last time I saw Kazamir.
Kicking my fathers dead, murdered, body.
No.
The last time he saw me, I had had plenty to say.
The last time I saw him?
I blinked back tears, hoping that he couldn’t see them through the dark.
I still remained silent.
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Alright, there are a few quotes, here are the character boardsssss:
Alright, that's all I’ve got for now, besides a few memes, thanks for reading that rather long ramble see ya next time!
-Megan🖋️🎶💣😇
If you would like to get in touch with me, contact me at megankisslingwrites@gmail.com
