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"constantly changing and shifting architectural landscape" really is one of my favourite settings for a story because it encompasses two similar but distinct niches of existential horror

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I just heard my mom tell my brother, “when you die, you will go outside and garden until your father says you’re done” and it took me a second to realize that my brother was playing a videogame and this was not a theological discussion.

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if you give “stupid” characters rural/southern accents i don’t like you and if you give “smart” characters rural/southern accents but it’s a punchline i don’t like you even more

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you know what au concept i have flashed back to recently? the jimmy dating simulator hell au. which is to say: an au idea i had and i think posted about before where jimmy gets isekaied into being the protagonist of a dating simulator with all of his friends (that he flirts with/are commonly shipped with him) as the dating options and at FIRST when suddenly, all of his friends are OPENLY into him, it's great! he's preening under the attention, he's like "yes. haha. actually i AM great glad you finally noticed." and then bit by bit he's like. oh no. wait. what happened to my friends. and has an existential crisis about the world suddenly and horrendously revolving around him.

anyway i have been thinking about that again. i'm still not sure how i'd write it without either being A) too mean to the concept of dating games (which is to say, i don't really play them, and i worry i would come across as an outsider making fun of them because of that more than 'i love video game existential horror') or B) being too mean to the idea of like... fanon and shipping (two things i am Fine With, to be clear, i just love the idea of 'you are forced to meet a warped reflection of someone you love, and they have become warped around you'.) but it's also SUCH A GOOD PREMISE and if i can figure out how to make it work i'd love to. (or love to see someone else make it work if that happened.)

anyway all of this is to say: i know in the original post i joked about jimmy figuring it out because grian's too nice to him. but you know what, dating games absolutely have the tsundere one. i think it would be interesting if jimmy figured it out because scott was too nice to him. because like... in a lot of ways, THAT ONE would be the right kind of warped for jimmy to go. wait. this isn't someone fucking with me for the bit. .......why isn't this that.

all of this is ALSO to say: undecided on whether i like this premise as pretty fully horror (only jimmy knows something is wrong) or i choose someone who i think is like, wholly unattracted to jimmy even in fanon (and also honestly to make it work, basically wholly unconnected to him in the plot) to make stuck as the One Other Guy who knows something is wrong. if i had to do that i am thinking real hard and landing on. maybe cleo? that might just be me being a cleo guy but i think honestly cleo or like, ren might be the most effective ones for that slot.

all of this is ALSO ALSO to say: so like do we make this just a "jimmy has to live his life like this" horror or add the "time loop to get all the routes!" flavor of horror to it. so many options,

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I've been stuck on 10 pages for like a week!!

I have ~12~ pages now!!

I need to have ~40~ pages by tomorrow night!!

I might be ~fucked~

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Me, staring at the three pages I have written of my novel trying to make the brain make more of them: "I am a writer. I am a WRITER"

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“he would not fucking say that!” then put him in a situation that makes him say it, we wanna see him squirm

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Most tabletop RPGs don't bother to have a rule like "characters can't walk through walls." It is either implicit or prescribed through having a special ability that specifically allows one to do. Now, an RPG that specifically had a character option that stated "this character cannot walk through walls" would instantly reframe every other character in the game. If only a specific type of character has some limitation that we humans would assume to be self-explanatory, what the hell is the baseline in this game?

Games have implicit or explicit assumptions about their characters. In D&D it is assumed that characters can see, hear, speak, walk unassisted, and so on. These capabilities can be taken away but only through very specific rules interactions. A character's ability to see isn't marked until a player says that they would like to play a blind character.

I don't even know where I was going with this. This started out with me thinking about how funny it would be to make like a supplement for a game that features these really strange and specific abilities that suddenly change the assumptions of the game. Like, a supplement that has a creature with an ability like "Floorwalker: this creature can walk on floors." Because none of the other creatures in the game have that ability, it's now implicit that they can't walk on floors.

Anyway if anyone would like to help me salvage this post by saying something insightful go right ahead, I'm gonna go make some pasta.

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I want to write a book called “your character dies in the woods” that details all the pitfalls and dangers of being out on the road & in the wild for people without outdoors/wilderness experience bc I cannot keep reading narratives brush over life threatening conditions like nothing is happening.

I just read a book by one of my favorite authors whose plots are essentially airtight, but the MC was walking on a country road on a cold winter night and she was knocked down and fell into a drainage ditch covered in ice, broke through and got covered in icy mud and water.

Then she had a “miserable” 3 more miles to walk to the inn.

Babes she would not MAKE it to that inn.

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some people think writers are so eloquent and good with words, but the reality is that we can sit there with our fingers on the keyboard going, “what’s the word for non-sunlight lighting? Like, fake lighting?” and for ten minutes, all our brain will supply is “unofficial”, and we know that’s not the right word, but it’s the only word we can come up with…until finally it’s like our face got smashed into a brick wall and we remember the word we want is “artificial”.

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Pro-writing tip: if your story doesn't need a number, don't put a fucking number in it.

Nothing, I mean nothing, activates reader pedantry like a number.

I have seen it a thousand times in writing workshops. People just can't resist nitpicking a number. For example, "This scifi story takes place 200 years in the future and they have faster than light travel because it's plot convenient," will immediately drag every armchair scientist out of the woodwork to say why there's no way that technology would exist in only 200 years.

Dates, ages, math, spans of time, I don't know what it is but the second a specific number shows up, your reader is thinking, and they're thinking critically but it's about whether that information is correct. They are now doing the math and have gone off drawing conclusions and getting distracted from your story or worse, putting it down entirely because umm, that sword could not have existed in that Medieval year, or this character couldn't be this old because it means they were an infant when this other story event happened that they're supposed to know about, or these two events now overlap in the timeline, or... etc etc etc.

Unless you are 1000% certain that a specific number is adding to your narrative, and you know rock-solid, backwards and forwards that the information attached to that number is correct and consistent throughout the entire story, do yourself a favor, and don't bring that evil down upon your head.

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hey you're doing a great job, just remember: a semicolon can be used to combine two sentences where you might otherwise use a period; this allows you to create longer and longer run-on sentences

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if your personal least fave isn’t on here reblog and tell me what it is!! but also reblog anyways because it’s nice :]

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“If it’s about a dad dating other dads, how come some of them have kids???”