My parents are funeral directors

ratpaca:

I pretty much grew up in a funeral home and I have so many stories. 

Here are a few of them:

One time we had hired a new funeral director, and we ran out of holy water so he ran up to my dad so panicked and asked how we could order some  before the funeral that afternoon. My dad told him to “Boil the hell out of it”. We thought he would laugh but he spent the next hour boiling water on the stove.

One time my dad was driving the hearse to a funeral and the council hadn’t dug the plot, like they full on forgot to dig a hole for a funeral. He rang up my mum crying because it was so stressful and mum honestly though him shouting “I lost the plot” was a joke.

My brother and I use to play hide and seek at a graveyard and we almost fell in open plots a few time. We would steal peoples flowers until mum told us the importance of flowers. After that I would pick flowers from the bushes and give them to every grave without them because I felt so bad for them.

When we would go driving we would always keep an eye out for parks with roses so we could come back later and “borrow” the rose petals so we didn’t have to pay for them.

Mum has heard “you raise me up” and “Amazing grace” so many times shes told us if we play them at her funeral she will straight up haunt us.

Discussions about what we wanted at our funerals have been a normal part of our lives since we were tiny. Every year each one of us would give mum and dad a detailed description of our funeral, kind of like a morbid letter to Santa.

 So many people died from car accidents and mum and dad discussed funerals all the time I became so phobic of driving I would have a panic attack when ever I got in the front seat. 

When I was about 10 I would steal all the fake crosses for coffins and give them to people at school.

When I was 14 I really wanted to be a mortician so mum said I was allowed to come in and help prep a body for a funeral. I went in all gloved up and pulled back the sheet on the body and it was the ACTUAL mortician and he sat up and screamed at me. I died a little inside that day.

In the back room there was a fridge for the workers and it mostly had coke but once it had a can of beer and I sculled it before I knew what it was….I was 11.

Once my brothers and I hid in the coffin display room to scare my parents but they knew about it and shut the lids. Assholes.

When I was 13 i was obsessed with phantom of the opera so I would play music on the organ in the viewing room in the dark, thought I was so edgy.

We have one of the only horse drawn hearses in the country so we were asked to bring it down for a historical reenactment in the oldest cemetery in the town. I got to wizz around an old cemetery on a horse drawn hearse with a top hat on. I made so many goths jealous. Was a good day.

I am so terrified of the idea of ghosts (I don’t believe in them) even though I grew up at a funeral home. 

Once this person who thought ghosts were real asked my parents if they had had ghostly experiences and they laughed in her face. She was so offended that people who had spent most of there life around dead people didn’t have any proof ghosts were real. 

Does anyone else think about the accidental historical impact the gAang made in atla?

ahjareyn:

Cuz I do.

I mean, come on. The pentapox? How do you think that will go down in the Avatar-verse’s history books? A freak plague that went extinct as soon as it arose or the greatest escape story ever?

The new legend of the Moon Spirit? How long do you think it took to spread the word about Yue becoming the Moon Spirit? Do you think Sokka’s in that story? A Southern Water Tribe boy being the one to give her the courage to make her own choice?

The (in)accuracy of the Ember Island Player’s version of events? Would the illicit love affair between Fire Lord Zuko and Katara of the Southern Water tribe be considered absolute fact three hundred years down the line? Would historians question the lineage of Aang’s children?

A certain school within the Fire Nation that traditionally holds dances in a cave once a year. It’s considered a secret rite of passage and no one is quite sure why they do it, it’s just something they’ve been doing for so long.

These guys lived and actually shaped the history of their world in a HUGE way. And I can’t help but think of that a lot. Especially all the minor things…

summerlightning:

temporarytitletumbls:

sarahtaylorgibson:

audacityinblack:

sarahtaylorgibson:

Writing a novel when you imagine all you stories in film format is hard because there’s really no written equivalent of “lens flare” or “slow motion montage backed by Gregorian choir”

You can get the same effect of a lens flare with close-detail descriptions, combined with breaks to new paragraphs.

Your slow-motion montage backed by a Gregorian choir can be done with a few technques that all involve repetition.

First is epizeuxis, the repeating of a word for emphasis.

Example:

Falling. Falling. Falling. There was nothing to keep Marie from plunging into the rolling river below. She could only hope for a miracle now, that she would come out alive somehow despite a twenty-foot drop into five-foot-deep water.

Then there’s anaphora, where you write a number of phrases with the same words at the beginning.

There were still mages out there living in terror of shining steel armor emblazoned with the Sword of Mercy.

There were still mages out there being forced by desperation into the clutches of demons.

There were mages out there being threatened with Tranquility as
punishment for their disobedience, and the threats were being made good
upon.

Mages who had attempted to flee, but knew nothing of the outside
world and were forced to return to their prison out of need for
sustenance and shelter.

Mages who only desired to find the families they were torn from.

Mages who only wanted to see the sun.

This kind of repetition effectively slows the pace of your writing and puts the focus on that small scene. That’s where you get your slow pan. The same repetition also has a subtle musicality to it depending on the words you use. That’s where you get the same vibe as you might get from a Gregorian choir.

Damn I made relatable reblog- bait post and writer Tumblr went hard with it. This is legitimately very good advice. 

Good shit. Makes me think of @summerlightning‘s writing.

What a nice thing to say, dear heart!  Thank you so much!