Sometimes The Person In The Mirror Seems So… Strange

One of the stranger things about training brand new nurses is explaining how to min max small talk. It feels very weird to coach people on how to chat.

the entire time i am having right now

Is this a problem?

Master Prompt List

Romantic Prompts

Romance Story Starters

Romantic Questions Prompts

Romance Prompt Lists (Masterpost)

Bad romances/unrequited/break-up Masterpost

Flirting + Teasing Masterpost

Two smart and also stupid people in love

Romance Dialogue - Bubbly + Reserved

Push and pull romantic prompts

Jealousy Prompts

Things said during sex Prompts

Awkward Post-Sex Dialogue

One-Liners Dialogue - Romantic, Smutty + Physical

Love Language - Showing, not telling love

Love Language - Showing you care

Romance Dialogue Prompts – Uncomfortable with affection

Grumpy Affectionate Dialogue

Grumpy + Sunshine Dialogue

Inexperienced with romance Prompts

Love Confessions (Masterpost)

Lovers being caught Prompts

OTP Christmas Prompts

OTP with Children Prompts

Meet Cutes

Meet Uglies

Milestones in a relationship

Moving in together

Introducing partner(s) to family

Meeting the family Prompts

Anniversary Dinner Prompts

Proposal Prompts

Elopement Prompts

Wedding Dialogue

Honeymoon

Physical Reactions

Seeking out physical affection

Romantic, non-sexual intimacy prompts

Date Prompts Masterpost

Forbidden Romance

Love-hate relationship

Reluctant allies to friends to lovers dynamic

Lovers to enemies

Reasons for lovers turning to enemies

Exes to lovers (1 + 2)

Getting back together Prompts

Flirty friends to lovers Prompts

Friends with benefits to lovers Prompts

Enemies to friends with benefits Prompts

Enemies to friends Prompts

Neighbors to Lovers Dialogue Prompts

Best friends to lovers Prompts

Childhood friends to lovers Prompts

Childhood friends to enemies to lovers prompts

Matchmaking Prompts

Accidental Marriage Prompts

Ways a wedding could go wrong

Fake Dating Masterpost

OT3 Masterpost

Love Triangle Ideas

Second chance trope

OTP Prompt Challenge

Relationship Changes

Bed Sharing Scenarios

Kisses Masterpost (Prompts, First Kiss, Accidental Kiss, …)

Enemies to Lovers Masterpost

Ship Dynamics

Fluffy Prompts

One Hundred Compliments

Giving the reader butterflies with your characters

Making your characters blush

Domestic fluff prompts

Soft Domestic Stuff

Pregnancy Prompts

Sleepy Starters

Fluff Prompts

Fluffy Dialogue Prompts (x)

Fluffy Sentence Starters

Cute Interactions

Hand-holding

Touching

Hugs

Super soft intimacy

Casual Affections

Affections without touching

Touches Ask Games

Things to do at a carnival

Cooking/Baking Dialogue Prompts

Quiet movie night Prompts

Having fun in the rain

Height Difference Prompts

Hurt/Comfort Prompts

Hurt/Comfort Masterpost

Injury Dialogue Prompts

Sickness Dialogue Prompts

Angsty Prompts

Angsty Prompts

Angsty Dialogue Masterpost

Leaving Dialogue Prompts

Reunion Dialogue Reactions

Unwilling goodbye + love confession prompts

Trying to make them stay Dialogue Prompts

Sacrificing Dialogue

Amnesia Prompts

Amnesia Dialogue

Bad Luck Prompts

Lover being hurt Prompts

Drama Starting Points

Conflicts for Couples 1 + 2

Betrayal Dialogue Prompts

Hiding from horror dialogue

Finding out the truth dialogue

“I’m sorry…” Apology Starters

Saying I’m sorry…

Apologizing for emotional neglect

Keeping loved ones apart

Family Prompts

Family Prompts Masterpost

Friends Prompts

Friends Prompt Challenge

Platonic activities for friends

Online Friends Prompts

Group of Friends AU Prompts

Opening Sentences (Friend group in NYC)

Road Trip Ideas

Party Games Prompts

Drunk Friendgroup

Amusement Park Activities

Surprise party gone wrong

Settings for conversations

Having fun in the rain

Bar Conversation Starters

Girls’ night out ideas

Outside of school activities

Walking to school prompts

Rekindling Friendship Dialogue

AU Prompts

AU ideas

Royalty AU Masterpost

Victorian AU Prompts

Historic Prompts - 1800s Ball Prompts

Parallel Universe Romance Prompts (x)

Roommates AU Masterpost

Boarding School Prompts

Sport Romance Prompts

College AU Masterpost

Teacher x Teacher Prompts

Hogwarts Prompts

Workplace AU Masterpost

Neighbor AUs (1 + 2 + 3)

Fan x Celebrity Prompts

Road to fame ideas

Gossip Girl/Rich AUs

Dancer Prompts

Coffee Shop AU Masterpost

Bookstore AUs

Flower Shop AUs

Bodyguard AUs

Bodyguard Dialogue Prompts

Firefighter/Police AUs

Lawyer AUs

Patient and Doctor Prompts

Groundhog Day Prompts

Pirate Prompts

Spy Prompts

Soulmates AU Masterpost

Lifeguard AUs

Band AU Prompts

Rockstar AUs

Eurovision Prompts

Supernatural/Mystery/Thriller/Crime Prompts

Ghosts Masterpost

Mermaid Prompts

Guardian Angel Prompts

Summoning a God Prompts

Life & Death Prompts

Showing aliens the human world

Murder Mystery/Thriller Masterpost

Survival Game Prompts

Partners in Crime – Meeting again

Assassins Banter Dialogue

Assassin x Target Prompts

Heist Prompts

Hero x Villain Masterpost

Falling for the kidnapper prompts

Causes for the apocalypse

Post-apocalyptic romance prompts

Fantasy/Sci-Fi Masterpost (Werewolves, Vampires, Time Travel, etc.)

Holiday/Seasonal Prompts

Monthly Prompt Lists

Spooktober/Halloween Prompts

Christmas Prompts Compilation

24 Days of Gift-Giving - Advent Calendar

Fluffy winter holiday prompts

New Year’s Eve Prompts

New Year’s Dialogue Prompts

Valentine’s Day Prompts

Spring Vibes

Summer Vibes

Fall Vibes

Fall AUs

Winter Vibes

Birthday AUs

Birthday Prompts

Ranked Prompt Lists

Ranked Lists (Top 20 Lists, Best Prompts/Posts of the Year)

Various Prompt Lists

Contemporary/Realistic Prompts (1 + 2)

Sarcastic Dialogue Prompts

Ways to die at home

Random Questions Prompts

Favourite Tropes

Animal Prompts

Dialogue Responses

5 + 1 Fic Prompts

‘Write about’ Prompts

‘Imagine your OTP’ Prompts

Drabble Prompts Masterlist

All The Fic Titles

All The Prompts List

List of Names

Writing Games

Ask Games

Daily Writing Challenge

30 Days Writing Challenge

AU & Trope Combos

One Word Prompt Lists

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Anne Sexton, from a letter featured in Anne Sexton; A Self-Portrait In Letters

Talking with writers online

Their stories: Amazing grammar, soaring vocabulary, beautiful imagery and prose which flows like a river.

In chats: no capitalisation or punctuation, swears like a sailor, misspellings everywhere, acronyms and abbreviations every five words, idek

The words they're afraid of.

(Read on our blog.)

The recently appointed Department of Defense head Pete Hegseth (formerly Fox News pundit, perpetually soused creepy uncle, and current group chat leaker of classified intel) banned images of the Enola Gay from the Pentagon’s website for the offense of “DEI” language. In keeping with the far right’s stated war on anything vaguely resembling diversity, equity and inclusion, even historical photos are up for cancellation. When a literal weapon of mass destruction is censored for being a bit fruity under the Trump administration’s war against inconvenient truths, what exactly is left untouched?

This is clown show stuff, but the stakes are far from funny. While some might be hesitant to compare the current administration to the very worst history has to offer, we can at least all agree that they are dyed-in-the-wool grammar Nazis. Policing language has been the objective of the MAGA culture war long before Project 2025’s debut—the wave of book bans orchestrated by astroturf movements like Moms for Liberty, and Florida’s 2022 Don’t Say Gay bill have already had a profound effect in the arena of free speech and freedom of expression (despite the far right’s long tradition of doublespeak performative free-speech martyrdom to the contrary). Don’t Say Gay ostensibly targeted K-3 education, but LGBT+ content at all levels of education (and beyond) was either quietly censored or entirely preempted in practice. The results were not just a war on so-called ideology, or words alone—but on reality and essential freedoms.

Now, words as innocuous and important as racism, climate change, hate speech, prejudice, mental health, and inequality are targeted as subversive. Entire concepts are being vanished from government institutions, scrubbed not only from descriptions but from metadata, search indexes, and archival frameworks.

If you don’t name a thing, does it exist?

These words are as numerous as they are generic: women, race, Black, immigrants, multicultural, gender, injustice. But what is painfully unserious is also particularly dangerous in its real-world consequences. The process of controlling words is a well-worn authoritarian tendency. Fifty-two universities are now under investigation as part of the President's effort to curb “woke” research and thought crimes. Institutions are being coerced to comply with a nebulous set of ideological demands, or face budgetary annihilation. That means cutting funding for entire departments, slashing financial aid, defunding scientific grants, and pressuring faculty to self-censor.

The possibilities for censorship extend far and wide—interfering, by extension, in everything from reproductive healthcare programs, to libraries and museums. The Trump administration’s proposed budget slashing all federal funding for libraries, including the Institute of Museum and Library Services, will effectively gut an infrastructure that supports over 100,000 libraries and museums across the country—community centers, educational lifelines, internet access points, and archives of marginalized histories (starting with the Smithsonian Institution).

When you erase access, you erase participation. And when you erase participation, you erase people, and the means by which future generations might even learn they existed. A culture that cannot remember is a culture that cannot resist.

The erasure is, yet again, unsurprisingly targeted at minorities and LGBT+ people. The National Parks Service quietly revised the Stonewall Monument’s website to remove references to transgender people—a fundamental part of the original protests. Not an oversight, not a mistake, but a deliberate excision—one point in a wider plan of erasure depicted in stark detail in Project 2025, a blueprint to dismantle civil rights, defund LGBT+-related healthcare, and rewrite history from the ground up.

Dehumanization by deletion—welcome to the reactionary resurgence of doubleplusungood governance. In Trumpland, words are weapons—but not in the way they intend. Their fear of language betrays its power; that’s why they’re trying so hard to police it.

Words hurt them.

Hurt them back.

- the Ellipsus Team

Go write!

Bad news, y'all

You really gotta write the damn book to become a published author

a notice to writers of multi-chapter fics with long breaks between updates:

Sometimes, when I see an update, I don't remember what happened before. I then take the opportunity to re-read the fic in its entirety, starting from the beginning, which is honestly a real treat. I get to re-experience the fic and pick up on foreshadowing I never noticed before. And then it feels like the new chapter lasts even longer because it takes me so long to get to it.

Honestly, I love it.

So that's just one more reason to never feel about about taking a long time to update.

Talking with writers online

Their stories: Amazing grammar, soaring vocabulary, beautiful imagery and prose which flows like a river.

In chats: no capitalisation or punctuation, swears like a sailor, misspellings everywhere, acronyms and abbreviations every five words, idek