Kat likes unicorns

Descriptions can be tricky to get right. They shouldn’t be overdone, they also shouldn’t be absent, but how do you create a perfect description? Descriptions themselves have to do a lot with style. The style you’re writing in does influence the way your descriptions are built up and defines how descriptive the story is going to be on a whole. For me, I always try to use descriptions to create an atmosphere. I focus on what I want to make the reader feel and look at what I have to describe to achieve that feeling, thus creating an atmosphere. Atmosphere is what fuels your reader’s imagination. If the atmosphere is right, your reader will imagine many things you didn’t even describe. Let’s say we’re looking at an apartment. We could describe it as modern, open, with only a few flecks of colour in a rather black and white scenery. Or we could say that the kitchen and living room aren’t separated, that the furniture is mostly white while the flooring is made from dark wood, that t...

There are certain topics media doesn’t - and probably never will - address properly. Depression, anxiety, suicide. Mental illnesses in general are things nobody wants to see, even though they so clearly are among us. Society prefers to oversee things that couldn’t be unseen and continues to ignore issues that cost so much more than money. What we need are more people who openly discuss those topics, people who speak up against taboos. With Linkin Park’s Chester Bennington we had such a person. Someone who suffered, and someone who openly addressed what he was battling - in interviews, in songs. For many of us, Linkin Park was a part of our youth. We grew up with those songs that caught our interest, not only because of their melody, but also, perhaps mainly, due to their messages. Listen closely, and you’ll understand. With Chester Bennington, we didn’t only lose an incredibly talented musician and artist, but so much more. My condolences go out to his family and friends - may...

I don’t know any writer who hasn’t been in this situation at one point. You sit down, finally having some free time to write, and then - nothing. No matter how hard you try, you can’t even manage to write one word without being very unhappy with it. It’s like a massive blockade inside of your head, keeping you from creating sentences. This phenomenon is called writer’s block, and it happens to all of us at times. But how can we get rid of it? There’s two forms of writer’s block. With the first form, you can’t bring a sentence to paper despite having an idea, and with the second form, you can’t even figure out an idea. If there is an idea in your head but you just can’t figure out how to put it into words, go and plan out your story. Create a detailed scene plan, add ideas as you go along. Simply write down all of the ideas you have. Simply working around the ideas might help you get the words flowing again. If the problem is rather that you’re unhappy with every single phr...

If you’ve been reading fanfiction or prose online, you know that almost every author provides a little summary for their stories for you to read before you dive into the story. But what should that summary actually contain, and when can it be considered a good summary? The purpose of those summaries is obvious - they’re created to grab the reader’s attention and to make them click the story. They give an insight into what awaits the reader, what characters the story is focused on and whatever the author feels like telling the reader. It is there to generate clicks, basically. However, it should never be clickbait. If a reader is interested in a story and starts reading it, looking forward to reading something they’re really excited about, and then finds out that the story tells a completely different tale, you might just have lost a reader forever. As a rule of thumb, it’s always best to give an overview over the general idea you based the story on. Everything more than that...

It’s happened to all of us - we rush to school in the morning and notice we’ve forgotten something very important. Who’s there to save us? Our locker, filled with goodies we couldn’t survive without. Well, it might not be that critical, but a locker is something that does make your life at school a lot easier. It’s always there for you, and you can use it to store so much more than just your books and PE kit. Over the years I’ve accumulated a lot of stuff in my locker, and I noticed that, while I don’t need every single item I hoarded in there, some are definitely things I wish I had in there way earlier already. So here they are - my locker essentials! You might find yourself thinking that you personally don’t need them, but I got my good use out of all of them, and perhaps you’ll find one or another thing on that list you’d like to put in your very own locker - who knows? The bare minimals of a pencil case Nobody wants to buy an entire second pencil case, but I started hav...

If you’ve been on the internet for long enough, you might have stumbled across the term fanfiction multiple times already. But what exactly is a fanfiction? Fanfictions, as well as fanart, cosplay, fan films or fangames are commonly referred to as forms of fan labour. In general terms this means a fan of a fictional piece takes said fictional piece and creates something new out of it. In the case of fanfiction, this means someone is writing something that is associated to an already existing fictional piece such as a book, a TV show, a movie or a (video) game. Some fanfictions also take existing people such as celebrities and create something new out of their lives, but this form of fanfiction seems to be less popular. As fanfictions take characters and content from (mostly) professionally created content, copyright infringements might occur occasionally. Some creators do not want anyone to create fanfiction based on their original works, others don’t really mind and some do enc...

Listening to music while studying isn’t for everyone, and it definitely isn’t for me, however, I do listen to music while writing fiction. I feel like it does help getting into the mood your characters are in, thus helping you to describe their emotions in much more detail, but that’s just on a side note. Music can help us feel so many things. It can make us feel happy, sad, or just overly emotional. Music can add so much to our lives, and it can also help us focus. Even if it’s just to block out background noises - music does the job. It can make us feel more alert, or even more awake at times. But which music is ideal to help us focus? I created a playlist with my recommendations for you to check out. If you’d like to see it over on spotify and listen right away, click here . I’ll add to this over time, so make sure to check it out every now and then if you’re looking for more songs for your very own studying playlist. Music that I find helps me focusing usually only meets ...

Hello beautiful people of the internet, and hello July! June has been an incredibly busy month for me - I had my last final on the 28th, and I passed! Also, we had a giant heat wave going on, and that really isn't the best combination for a busy month, but we made it, and now we're finally onto the beautiful month of July! If you've seen the post about my songs of the month of June, the theme for July won't come as a surprise to you, but yes - it's penguins. I fell in love with the penguins back in 2005 when I saw the first Madagascar movie in the cinema, but I never really decided to be active in the fandom online, mostly due to my incredibly slow internet at the time. In 2011, I ran into Rica, who soon became one of my best friends and encouraged me to look into fanfiction and fanart. She was the biggest Fanguin I ever met - you should have seen her room. Everything was Madagascar, and she couldn't stop talking about it. We watched most of the TV show t...