I’m told by numerous sources that one of the keys to writing well is simply to write badly until you have exhausted your ready supply of dogshit words.

I’ve also heard that about a lot of other things - coding, art, you do in fact get a lot better by simply doing it over and over and over and over again.

Anyways, that’s the reasoning behind the Pocket Fiction topic, where I draw a random tarot card and use it to compose a little bit of flash fiction in the rt0 universe.

Lately I’ve been taking a break from recreationally coding to try and do writing projects and god damn, it’s noticeably harder to write a lot of words when they’re intended to manipulate emotions rather than variables

Like, I think we all imagine ourselves imaginative and creative but then if you start actually exhaustively cataloguing your own ideas you quickly discover that most of them are not terribly original and there are a lot less of them than you’d thought there would be

i’ll have you know that when I chose “cube drone” as my alt, drones weren’t a thing (I’m old) and I absolutely did not expect that I’d have to compete for mind-share with actual cube-shaped drones

sorry, I just noticed something funny in the hugo awards this year

Minute five of your Dungeons and Dragons adventure:

the morning dew rolls down the heavy brick walls of this lushly appointed manor, bedecked in rich earth tones to indicate its allegiance with the Shah of Dust, the air rich with the aromas of spice and sweat

Minute one-hundred and eighty of your adventure:

this room has a chest in it

I would sometimes make fun of video games for just leaving expository diaries all over the place but now that I’ve been running a Dungeons and Dragons campaign of my own for a while my players are just ass-deep in found journals.

look, I’m not going to lie, I will fully admit that it is not in character for the Big Bad to just chronicle his evil plans in big bold letters in a little book that he keeps on his person and frequently misplaces but sometimes I’m just at a loss for how to continue

(you need to unambiguously point players to the next major location in the story)

uh,

uh

okay, so, uh… on the goblin chieftain’s dead body you find a tattered journal written in a childish hand

if y’all have great ways to deliver clear, diegetic exposition in the context of dungeons and also dragons, please

“as you stab the gelatinous cube a partially digested adventurer’s journal pops out”

i find that when trying to learn about a mental disorder out of curiosity, on top of reading the cold DSM literature on what that disorder is like,

an interesting thing do is to find people writing first-hand about it in their own subreddit or online community

lots of people diagnosing themselves with little evidence

but it’s nice to see these people representing themselves

and, for example, the lived experience of people with autism is very different from the way that media treats them

so it can be a good exercise

well, except for people with antisocial personality disorder, their communities tend to be pretty unfriendly

surely when I finish this new CMS i will start to become a productive writer/artist

just one more CMS bro

i promise, just one more CMS, that will fix everything

bro cmon just give me one more CMS bro i promise

i’ve always struggled with the problem of getting more dopamine from systems than content, which is the opposite of a lot of other creators’ problem

every year in november i observe “NaNoWriMo”, which stands for “National Not Writing Month”, and I spend the entire month not writing a Novel, as usual

I’m feeling a little sick so my bud is helping out

having a bengal is a fine way to experience being very gently eviscerated by your best friend

So, I caught a cold and instead of doing anything useful or productive I shotgunned 30 full hours of Steven Universe in an embarrassingly short timespan.

I barely feel any guilt about this: one of the luxuries about having a cold is that it’s one of the only times in my life I can ever just exist without stressing about my productivity, even more so than during a vacation. Even with the headache and the soreness sometimes I welcome these rare colds (not COVID though, that fucked me up).

Now I’m sad that it’s over. It hurts to extricate yourself from a deep dive like this when you’re really attached to a piece of media. It’s over, time to put it away for another couple of years.

I remember feeling exactly this same way when I was a tween at the end of my favourite books.

One of the reasons I’ve always wanted to write or draw fiction is this effect: I want to be able to induce this state in myself, create a wellspring that never runs dry.

… but it doesn’t work that way. It’s like tickling yourself, it just doesn’t work, and you spend so much longer with each moment that it completely wears out any emotion or humor.

okay, so, here’s my theory

that creative narrative project you’re working on? here’s the order you should write it in

first, low-stakes scene from the middle

then, outline

then, ending

then, beginning

then, high impact scenes

then, remainder of the middle

this is based on the assumption that your quality of work picks up as you gain consistency and experience with the characters and style you’re going for, then starts to drop off as you get exhausted

if you’re not excited to write a low-stakes scene from the middle of the story at the beginning of the project when your energy is at its highest, there is no WAY you’re going to be excited enough to write it weeks later when the whole project feels like a grind

This is probably some kind of dumb “times are changing” article, but it’s way more fun to imagine that it’s the instigating event to an exciting supernatural thriller.

so, a fantasy universe where if someone saves your life, you owe them a blood debt, but it’s commutative, transferable, and financialized, so if you save a life, that person now owes the debt, and people who save a lot of lives can bundle and sell their blood debts on the open market