WEBSITES FOR WRITERS {masterpost}

E.A. Deverell - FREE worksheets (characters, world building, narrator, etc.) and paid courses;

Hiveword - Helps to research any topic to write about (has other resources, too);

BetaBooks - Share your draft with your beta reader (can be more than one), and see where they stopped reading, their comments, etc.;

Charlotte Dillon - Research links;

Writing realistic injuries - The title is pretty self-explanatory: while writing about an injury, take a look at this useful website;

One Stop for Writers - You guys... this website has literally everything we need: a) Description thesaurus collection, b) Character builder, c) Story maps, d) Scene maps & timelines, e) World building surveys, f) Worksheets, f) Tutorials, and much more! Although it has a paid plan ($90/year | $50/6 months | $9/month), you can still get a 2-week FREE trial;

One Stop for Writers Roadmap - It has many tips for you, divided into three different topics: a) How to plan a story, b) How to write a story, c) How to revise a story. The best thing about this? It's FREE!

Story Structure Database - The Story Structure Database is an archive of books and movies, recording all their major plot points;

National Centre for Writing - FREE worksheets and writing courses. Has also paid courses;

Penguin Random House - Has some writing contests and great opportunities;

Crime Reads - Get inspired before writing a crime scene;

The Creative Academy for Writers - "Writers helping writers along every step of the path to publication." It's FREE and has ZOOM writing rooms;

Reedsy - "A trusted place to learn how to successfully publish your book" It has many tips, and tools (generators), contests, prompts lists, etc. FREE;

QueryTracker - Find agents for your books (personally, I've never used this before, but I thought I should feature it here);

Pacemaker - Track your goals (example: Write 50K words - then, everytime you write, you track the number of the words, and it will make a graphic for you with your progress). It's FREE but has a paid plan;

Save the Cat! - The blog of the most known storytelling method. You can find posts, sheets, a software (student discount - 70%), and other things;

I hope this is helpful for you!

(Also, check my blog if you want to!)

Black Holes: Seeing the Invisible!

Black holes are some of the most bizarre and fascinating objects in the cosmos. Astronomers want to study lots of them, but there’s one big problem – black holes are invisible! Since they don’t emit any light, it’s pretty tough to find them lurking in the inky void of space. Fortunately there are a few different ways we can “see” black holes indirectly by watching how they affect their surroundings.

Speedy stars

If you’ve spent some time stargazing, you know what a calm, peaceful place our universe can be. But did you know that a monster is hiding right in the heart of our Milky Way galaxy? Astronomers noticed stars zipping superfast around something we can’t see at the center of the galaxy, about 10 million miles per hour! The stars must be circling a supermassive black hole. No other object would have strong enough gravity to keep them from flying off into space.

Two astrophysicists won half of the Nobel Prize in Physics last year for revealing this dark secret. The black hole is truly monstrous, weighing about four million times as much as our Sun! And it seems our home galaxy is no exception – our Hubble Space Telescope has revealed that the hubs of most galaxies contain supermassive black holes.

Shadowy silhouettes

Technology has advanced enough that we’ve been able to spot one of these supermassive black holes in a nearby galaxy. In 2019, astronomers took the first-ever picture of a black hole in a galaxy called M87, which is about 55 million light-years away. They used an international network of radio telescopes called the Event Horizon Telescope.

In the image, we can see some light from hot gas surrounding a dark shape. While we still can’t see the black hole itself, we can see the “shadow” it casts on the bright backdrop.

Shattered stars

Black holes can come in a smaller variety, too. When a massive star runs out of the fuel it uses to shine, it collapses in on itself. These lightweight or “stellar-mass” black holes are only about 5-20 times as massive as the Sun. They’re scattered throughout the galaxy in the same places where we find stars, since that’s how they began their lives. Some of them started out with a companion star, and so far that’s been our best clue to find them.

Some black holes steal material from their companion star. As the material falls onto the black hole, it gets superhot and lights up in X-rays. The first confirmed black hole astronomers discovered, called Cygnus X-1, was found this way.

If a star comes too close to a supermassive black hole, the effect is even more dramatic! Instead of just siphoning material from the star like a smaller black hole would do, a supermassive black hole will completely tear the star apart into a stream of gas. This is called a tidal disruption event.

Making waves

But what if two companion stars both turn into black holes? They may eventually collide with each other to form a larger black hole, sending ripples through space-time – the fabric of the cosmos!

These ripples, called gravitational waves, travel across space at the speed of light. The waves that reach us are extremely weak because space-time is really stiff.

Three scientists received the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics for using LIGO to observe gravitational waves that were sent out from colliding stellar-mass black holes. Though gravitational waves are hard to detect, they offer a way to find black holes without having to see any light.

We’re teaming up with the European Space Agency for a mission called LISA, which stands for Laser Interferometer Space Antenna. When it launches in the 2030s, it will detect gravitational waves from merging supermassive black holes – a likely sign of colliding galaxies!

Rogue black holes

So we have a few ways to find black holes by seeing stuff that’s close to them. But astronomers think there could be 100 million black holes roaming the galaxy solo. Fortunately, our Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will provide a way to “see” these isolated black holes, too.

Roman will find solitary black holes when they pass in front of more distant stars from our vantage point. The black hole’s gravity will warp the starlight in ways that reveal its presence. In some cases we can figure out a black hole’s mass and distance this way, and even estimate how fast it’s moving through the galaxy.

For more about black holes, check out these Tumblr posts!

⚫ Gobble Up These Black (Hole) Friday Deals!

⚫ Hubble’s 5 Weirdest Black Hole Discoveries

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com.

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whats-in-a-username

3 years ago

SCRIBBLE AND SCRATCH

With a cup of tea, a pen, and my book

I sat to write at my favorite nook.

Head filled with voices trying to get out,

And a heart humming with tunes of doubt.

I scribble, and scratch then my words fade,

As I suppress the thoughts that make me afraid.

So I go back to the books that give me relief.

To find my answers within someone else's grief.

There are many problems within these books.

And in that world, solutions aren't mine to look

Within worn-out, annotated, and yellow pages,

I forget my fright as I did for ages.

Soon I'm drawn back to my nook

Holding on to empty pages of the notebook

I scribble, and scratch but the words don't fade

For I've let my thoughts out of its shade.

writing prompts! I’m sorry what romance is this edition

no, I didn’t write these. you don’t have to fear for my sanity.

waking up from a car crash with a different boyfriend than I remember

both me AND my crush got those daddy issues

my hot boss moved in with me…strictly for safety reasons!

blind date with a hot doctor got very weird, very fast

obnoxious guy next door is actually the art hoe of my dreams

my girlfriend who is young but old is an alien

she tries to turn me into a demon so we can be together FOREVER

wrist grabs, kissing and cross-dressing, oh my!

doctor wants to marry the dead girl on his gurney

bad-ass ice queen has a softer side…activated by a boy and cockroaches

flirty training techniques make him fear for his life

when your mom tries to get you laid and then tells your whole school about it

water nymph wants to seduce my cru- I mean the prince I have ZERO interest in

he wore a cardboard cutout with his crush’s face on it…that’s love

what to expect when you’re expecting a demon baby

got out of prison just in time to crash my bf’s wedding

proving that hoe-ing it up is beneficial to finding a relationship…w/SCIENCE

my crush has a secret future wife and she’s jelly

can’t stop flirting with the hottest ghost girls in school

pretend BF willing and able to catfish together but also why are we doing this?

she nearly drowned him, and now he’s in love with her

hospital roommate trying to cuddle in the middle of the night

I hired a hitman for myself, but his feelings were more romantic than murderous

he’s planning to kill her right after this date

she didn’t realize she’d been talking to her crush all along…in another man’s body

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whats-in-a-username

3 years ago

Nanowrimo starts tomorrow. I am not currently writing novels, but I do write poetry, and I think it would be nice to set myself a challenge and write consistently for a month. I love prompts, so I came up with some which are meant specifically for poetry, but can be used for prose too. Feel free to use them, if you want, and tag me if you do! (I will like and reblog from my main blog, @fragiledewdrop)

NANOWRIMO 2021 POETRY PROMPTS

1. A letter to the dead

2. Healing herbs

3. Heaven, if it exists

4. A silk glove on the ground

5. A solitary candle

6. A memory of light

7. The burden of immortality

8. White night

9. Staring contest with a statue

10. Black lace

11. Message in a bottle