inscrutablemachine

[inscrutablemachine]

hi!! i’ve loved your books since i was in elementary school and my most recent reread coincided with me getting into watercolor! here is an (unfortunately rotated) painting i made of vera from specifically PDTMP i blew up the moon! love your work sm, inscrutable machine and otherwise

D'AW. I'm so flattered! Spontaneous fan art makes any creator glow with joy. For everyone, here, I flipped it right side up. My little Vera the fake Conquerer Orb.

[inscrutablemachine]

Dunno how active you are here atm but does the inscrutable machine (the actual machine) have any visual references? People seem to forget it in fanart and none of the book covers have it pictured, so creating a cosplay prop is proving to be a tad difficult..

Well, I assume the answer is way, way too late, but...

No.

However, this thing (apparently made by someone named Willa Yang) is pretty close. Penny things of it as a centipede, but I see it as more pillbug-y.

[inscrutablemachine]

Any tips for writing novels?

Also,, How do you get out of writers block?

Okay, first, I never ignore messages. What I do, constantly, is get busy and emotionally distracted, and put off answering a little longer, and a little longer, and a little longer, until it becomes months or years or forever.

Second, I have one major piece of advice. Outline. Prep your story. Actually write it down, in a file or on paper. The beginning point. The ending point. Work out all the steps you need to get from one to the other. Then write down all the cool things you think of that you want in the book, and find a place to add them where they make sense. Look at what you have, figure out what the story needs, and adjust it.

Now you know what you're going to be writing, can't get lost, and can focus your motivation to actually sit down and write it. Plus, you can still add stuff as you go along, and even figure out where you can go back and add details to what you've already written.

[inscrutablemachine]

“Yip.”

“Blaart.”

“Yip yap yap yip yap.”

“Blaaaaart.”

*protracted pause*

*frenzied kissing noises*

*frenzied gagging and spitting noises*

“BLAART.”

“Yip YAP.”

The kobolds and goblins decide to get along

[inscrutablemachine]

Do You Want To Read A Snowman I Mean Sample?

So I got this sudden crazy surge of inspiration and in like four days I plotted out and wrote an 18,000 word sample for what might be my next book.

I call it Some Enchanted Starship: A Space Soap Opera With Magic. It's YA! Ridiculously tangled relationships! Lust, love, and friendship! Repairing sensor arrays! Things going horribly, horribly wrong! And a squirrel with the appropriate job title 'Gremlin'!

All this you can read for the price of telling me if you like it and think I should continue the book.

If you tell me you don't like it, I will cry, but I should probably know.

Some Enchanted Starship in PDF format

Some Enchanted Starship in EPUB format

Some Enchanted Starship in MOBI format

I haven't included any kobolds yet. I'll try to figure out how to add one later in the book. My readers expect things from me.

[inscrutablemachine]

There is a reason I write books about early teen girls kicking ass and making things explode. I know my audience, and I know their soul. They want to rampage. They want to monologue. They want to be feared for their battle skills. Some of them want to do these things while wearing a frilly dress, but there's a lot of variety on that point.

if you dont have me on facebook you are probably not missing out on any posts but the comment section is important too lmao

[inscrutablemachine]

Tinkaton is my favorite. Short girl with big pigtails and a giant hammer? That’s my aesthetic right there.

Kirlia was my favorite until Tinkaton was added. Third place is Umbreon.

if you don’t know what pokemon are considered popular, or if you don’t know if your favorite is popular, then uhhh. well. use your best judgement

id add an “idk” answer but im worried it would sweep and im genuinely curious about this so

[inscrutablemachine]

Having written a novel to celebrate a friend's transition, can confirm.

Also this is an excuse to show off a commission I bought of two characters from that book, and I will never pass up that chance.

everything is a transgender allegory except being transgender which is about being alive

[inscrutablemachine]

Possible Ad Blurb?

So here is my first draft of the ad blurb for Amazon and the back cover of Skip School, Make Dragons. Sound good?

Artifact Forge doesn't make monsters. She's a bioengineer. She creates exotic magical livestock, upgrades cats into witches' familiars, and can turn you into a goblin if you accept the risks.

She's also thirteen, and has arrived in Goblita to learn her uncle is dead, she's inherited his business, and has a demonic cousin her age. Don't worry, Artifact can handle it. She's a prodigy! Give her a bioengineering challenge and she'll make you something better than you wanted.

Which is the problem when her messenger dragon turns into a ravening chimera, her new cousin gets her involved in a burglary, and the kids at school drag her into their dungeon crawling hobby.

With all that plus running a business and household like an adult, will Artifact have time to actually attend classes? Ask her again after she saves the city from the disasters she caused.

[inscrutablemachine]

Wrench, from A Spaceship Repair Girl Supposedly Named Rachel.

(Fan art by https://www.tumblr.com/nycteris)

hi hello show me your gobs / kobolds / lil creatures

[inscrutablemachine]

The original fascinates me because it is SO different from the Disney version and anything people think they know about the story. Also it's SO WEIRD. In Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid:

The moral is 'Love is great, but have you tried having an immortal soul so you can go to heaven?'

The Prince doesn't marry her. He marries a nun who is also a princess and who happens to look exactly like the mermaid.

He's not European, because Andersen thought Orientalism was hot. Orientalism also gave him the 1800s trope of...

The Little Mermaid spends her entire time on land as the Prince's concubine slave girl.

There's this messed up conversation where she's sitting on his lap and they're making out and he says he thinks of her as a child also he wants to marry her, but it's only because she looks like the nun he's in love with so he'll hold out for the real thing.

Most importantly, the nameless Sea Witch is even more awesome. She doesn't trick the mermaid into anything. The witch lays out all the horrible negatives of the spell, at every stage asking the mermaid if she's sure she wants to go through with this. Last she (correctly) warns the mermaid that after all that it still won't work and she won't get the prince, does she still want to take this deal??? And the mermaid does so okay, spell cast.

Did I mention that the mermaid's reward at the end of the story is a chance to do enough good deeds to get an immortal soul? Andersen was hyper religious and the moral of most of his stories was 'life sucks, the only happiness is in heaven'.

The discussion around Ariel TheLittleMermaid baffles me bc if my dad literally destroyed a bunch of stuff I collected in front of me in a terrifyingly violent display of anger and I had a witch offer me an out if I could score the boy I thought was hot, my name would be on that dotted line before you can say "poor unfortunate soul". What do you mean she's stupid, her dad ravaged her Special Interest Cave like a toddler throwing a temper tantrum, I would also run the fuck away

[inscrutablemachine]

Oi oi! I don't use this account TOO much, but IT'S BOOK RELEASE DAY WOO! I wrote a book about a high school girl with necromancy powers in a world that already has a lot of super heroes and supervillains! Actually, this is the sequel to that book, but it's awesome and a girl trying to use black magic for good finds out that using any kind of power for good gets morally complicated fast.

For fans of the series, Tonika the super-brainy cyborg is back! Dr. Biotic, mutagen-addicted mad scientist, has more than a one sentence role! Avery's relationship with Sue gets even more complicated, but not about Chris, they're both happy to be dating him. We meet the final member of the Black Magic Kids Club, and most importantly, many secrets are uncovered by Ghost Cat Solvin' Mysteries.

Go buy it, because I badly translated into Latin the magic spell "Yea though I walk through the valley of death, I will fear no evil, for I am the meanest bitch in the valley."

[inscrutablemachine]

The idea was that you had an RTS where each of the three factions plays so differently that it's like a different games. Candy's gimmick was where the other two factions are top-down RTS style, building bases and controlling multiple units, Candy is an FPS fighting those bases and units.

What do you think about the "teddy bears and machine guns" game from the "please don't tell my parent's" series?

I honestly like the idea of it as a game, and it's too bad that it was really only important in the 1st book.

Honestly, I mostly don't have a lot of thoughts about it. It sounds like a kind of game (or maybe three kinds of game mashed together?) that I suspect I wouldn't enjoy much, but Penny et al seem to enjoy it.

I do wish we'd gotten a better idea of what's involved, though. Toybox seems to be an RTS, Candy is some kind of solo adventure with base-building elements, and Junkyard is... Spore-esque, maybe?

Out of curiosity, why do you ask, beyond that I'm familiar with PTDMP?

[inscrutablemachine]

I am utterly boggled and flattered that anyone is making these, and that country Avery, that's pretty good.

She, uh... has a new book being released in... uh, Tuesday, actually.

It has Ghost Cat Solvin' Mysteries in it. I don't know why I think Ghost Cat Solvin' Mysteries is the greatest thing. Maybe he just is.

I would be more loquacious, but I just did a tumblr search for Please Don't Tell My Parents I'm A Supervillain and I'm still reeling from finding stuff.

please don’t tell my parents im queen of the dead!

Avery Special from ‘please don’t tell my parents im queen of the dead’ by richard roberts - necromancer goals <3

and Sue! a shadow queen

(picrew used can be found here)

Some more country avery! (picrew)

[inscrutablemachine]

AW. I enjoy placing characters all over the gender and species spectrum. Relevant to this post, I am proud of Fidget in You Can Be A Cyborg When You're Older, a human character who I carefully never referred to with any pronouns or any gendered details in description.

Man, that book has so many robots.

In my upcoming Please Don't Tell My Parents I Saved The World Again I have a trans girl ghost obsessed with possessing beautiful, feminine robots! Not that the main character knows about the trans part, because I mean, it's not her business.

In the WIP I'm pausing mid-chapter to answer this notification, the main character's super power turns her into fear eating monsters. First stage, cute/sexy monster girls. Then they get more and more creepypasta horrible...

Thank you so much for the mention. I feel loved. Better, I feel that my books are loved.

being nonbinary and a fan of non-human creatures isn’t easy. like i’m constantly struggling with the fact that i’m both like “i wish there was more enby representation in humans” and “i’m the same gender as mewtwo and that fucking rips”

[inscrutablemachine]

Warning, this is just slightly sad.

In my adolescence, I worked in a zoo. I worked in the building that held the raptor sector, and my sector held a couple of spillovers. Relevant, we had a blind owl. Detached retinas.

Sad? Yeah, sort of. It was also the most content animal I have ever encountered. It made capybaras look fidgety. It sat there all day with its head tilting slowly up and then snapping back, looking at floaters. It didn't need a cage. It never tried to fly. Put food right in front of its face and it would eat.

An owl's brain exists to process its vision, and that's it. Remove its vision and nothing is going on in there. At all. I've watched that truth in action.

I went to the local aviary today and they had some really mean things to say about owls.

[inscrutablemachine]

I wrote the first person PoV story of one of my favorite characters dying. That was an experience, oof. The story means a lot to me.

Also I have characters who died and stayed dead, characters who were already dead but are operating as a ghost, characters who think they died but maybe have false memories, and characters who died in-story but came back as something else.

Also body thefts and possessions. Somebody complained once that all my books have possessions.

Are any of your characters dead?