what if we were sparring and your shirt was clinging to your body with sweat and your eyes were really intense and that got me distracted enough for you to pin me to the ground and sit on top of me? and maybe you were breathing all heavy and gave me a smug little smirk while saying “i win” and then i went “are you sure?” and grabbed you by the collar to pull you in for a kiss? and perhaps once we separated i said “because i think i’m the real winner here.” with our foreheads still pressed together? i think that’d be kinda cool idk!
AnonymousThis may sound like a dumb question but did Natasha cheat on the the Red Guardian or not? In one comic page she seemed to love him and even wanted to have children with him. However in other comic pages in were she is seen with Bucky during their soviet days. She dose not seem to care about the Red Guardian. So i'm a little confused here.
It’s not a dumb question because we’ve never been given an exact timeline of how this part of their lives played out. What we do know is that Natasha’s marriage to Alexi Shostakov (aka the Red Guardian) was an assignment given to her by the KGB. She knew it would be her upcoming mission when she was training with the Winter Soldier and it was something they both knew when they started their secret relationship.
Captain America #27
What’s important to understand about Natasha’s relationship with Alexei is that in the very beginning she did not love him and married him because that was the mission she was given. BUT – and this is a very important but – it’s also important to understand that she did eventually fall in love with him. The page you described was set in 1963, so six years after her marriage to Alexi (and six years since the Winter Soldier had been put back into stasis). By that time Natasha loved him very deeply, and to this day her relationship with him is still one of Natasha’s most important relationships.
Black Widow: The Coldest War
As for whether Natasha cheated on Alexi with the Winter Soldier, because we don’t have a definitive timeline there isn’t a definitive answer. It all depends on whether Natasha was introduced to Alexi during her training with the Winter Soldier or after they had been separated and Bucky put back into stasis.
Personally, I read it as the latter because it doesn’t make much sense to begin implanting Natasha’s cover story (that she was a 17-year-old ballerina instead of a 29-year-old KGB agent) into her brain when she was in the middle of her special ops training with the Winter Soldier. It makes more sense to me that Dept. X had always planned on brainwashing/implanting the cover story after she completed her training – so the discovery of their relationship would have just sped up what had already been preplanned. In that case, Natasha wouldn’t have actually been involved with him yet during her relationship with Bucky, but she did know that as a KGB agent she was going to have to eventually marry Alexi. I do know some people have read it the other way, that Dept. X began implanting her cover story while she was still training with the Winter Soldier, so yeah, in that case you could say she technically cheated on him with the Winter Soldier. Either way, we do know that the Winter Soldier was one of the truths her implanted cover story struggled to hide from Alexi during their first meeting.
Black Widow: Deadly Origin #2
Unfortunately I can’t give you a definite answer anon and it’s not something I expect the comic books to address any time soon. =/
"It’s not the length of a life that matters, just the depth of it. The chances we take. The paths we choose. How we go on after our hearts break. Hearts always break. And so we bend with our hearts. And we sway. But in the end… what matters is that we loved… and lived."
(based on things that yours truly notices as a freelance editor. This list is in no way complete, and will probably be added to as I continue to find repeated mistakes)
Dialogue
Use beats in your dialogue to break it up. Even “said” can make a very effective beat between lines.
(No beats: “It’s not lethal. Just highly dangerous with a good chance of being mutilated.” // Beats: “It’s not lethal,” he said. “Just highly dangerous with a good chance of being mutilated.”)
Note how the break allows a bit of a pause for ~dramatic effect
thinking of dialogue, use punctuation and distinct speech patterns! “Life, uh, finds a way.” is an iconic line anyway, but Jeff Goldblum’s signature verbal tic gives it character.
It’s okay if characters stutter. Don’t let the condemnation of stuttering characters as “cringey” in fanfic put you off. (and on that note,fuck cringe culture. Seriously. It saps all the fun out of creativity and fun is important.)
Use the landscape and settings around your character, and always, always remember a scene’s blocking. Where is everything in relation to your characters? Have you left someone holding a coffee cup for the last three scenes? Did you lose a character somewhere along the way?
using the contents of a scene is also great for fight sequences.
Similarly, large character casts are hard to keep track of so don’t be afraid to break them up. Sending someone off somewhere else can create some nifty little subplots.
Keep a personal note of how time passes. Trust me, it’s incredibly helpful to you as a writer and also for future readers.
Characters
Character growth does not have to be positive. Sometimes characters fail or suffer or get their motivations twisted up, and they finish the book as a villain rather than a hero.
All that matters is that a character changes throughout the plot in a way that readers can see; the sort of change they go through is entirely up to you.
scrap the idea that someone has to deserve a redemption arc. They probably don’t deserve it, which is the whole point. So don’t be afraid to make your villains seem completely irredeemable.
and you don’t need to redeem your antagonists in order to make them complex, sympathetic villains, anyway. Sometimes people get so stuck in their beliefs that they can’t see another way and it goes too far. Not everyone comes back from that.
Also, motivations and goals can absolutely change. That’s okay. You just need to have something that drives your character so that your readers are rooting for them.
Protagonists don’t need to be heroic. How you define the protagonists and antagonists in your story is based entirely on the morality in your story-world, NOT the moral ideas in the real world. What counts as a complex protagonist in a world torn apart by biological warfare will be very different than one living in our world.
Prose & Grammar
simple prose is just fine and you don’t need to fluff it up for pretty quotes.
Remember to vary your sentence structures and length. Start smaller and build it up, drawing your reader’s attention.
“And” and “But” are very valid sentence starters that are great for communicating the tone of internal narrative. You’re allowed to tweak grammar if that’s helpful for telling the story, it just needs to be accessible. Test out what you’ve written on other people.
