#pitchposts

[what-do-1000-swords-look-like]

Finally finished all ten episodes of Pitch. Started watching the show for Kylie, stayed for the cast and the incredible story. I cannot believe Fox cancelled that show and left so many things unresolved. It should be a rule somewhere that when a show gets cancelled, a finale episode must be shot or in the can that resolves anything left open and unresolved for all of the characters.

It is an absolute crime that we didn't get to see more of this:

or this

or this

or this

And Blip and Evelyn and Oscar and Al and Livan and even Charlie. The whole cast was phenomenal and the story was richly layered. A true ensemble and a treasure trove of impeccable characters. (and compared to Big Sky, Kylie's current show, the showrunner/writing team here knew how to handle episodic arcs in combination with an overhead arc and balancing all of the characters' stories while not diminishing the main protagonist's presence/story line) This should have made the cut, hands down.

[alexanderwales]

Pitchposting: Generation Ship

(Pitchposting is a way of giving away ideas that threaten to grow in my mind until they become draft documents. They are free to a good home, though there's no guarantee that I won't try to write them at some point.)

Alright, hear me out: it's a generation ship, one expected to reach its destination with an entirely new generation of people who never knew the homeland, except instead of being a scifi concept, we're doing it as mundane as possible.

I think this is one of those ideas that only appeals to me because I immediately start thinking about the logistics of it all, and there's something in the mundane, gritty realism that really appeals to me. Mostly I'm worldbuilding and problem solving, trying to get at what it would actually be like for people to have been at sea their entire lives, to have a ship that either needs to endure the waves or be rebuilt as it goes.

I was going to say that this needs to be fantasy, but I guess technically it can be an Alderson Disk or something. An Alderson Disk has a habitable circumference of approximately a billion kilometers, a sailing ship can go maybe eighty miles a day, that's a ballpark of 12.5 million days to circumnavigate the disk, which is 34,000 years. That's a hell of a lot of generations, twice as long as we've had agriculture. (But you could also just have it be a fantasy world that's larger than our own, with a generation ship that was only trying to flee to greener pastures that are a hundred years away.)

The purest version of this story is a world that's just water, to match the void of space. The ship sails, repairs are made from flotsam and jetsam and driftwood from unspecified places, rainwater is caught and put into barrels, pitch is used for patching, fish and kelp are hauled up from the ocean, birds are captured from the sky, and the ship must necessarily endure storms and swells.

I've always felt there was something compelling about constrained living situations, places where everyone knows everyone and you have to make it work because there's absolutely no way out — where you're on a knife's edge because there's only so much preparation you can do. A generation ship needs to think about absolutely all of its needs and how it will deal with the deterioration of all things over time, along with problems that might only crop up once every hundred years, or problems that won't become apparent until long after the ship has left the dock.

Let's say you have a sailing ship the size of one of the largest sailing vessels of the 19th century, a thousand people all told. The families are carefully braided to prevent accidental incest, everyone has their position in life, every master has at least one apprentice but probably more so gout or cancer don't eliminate the last person who knew how to make more pitch.

This is clearly an Idea story, one that starts with a ridiculous premise and then explores it, but one of my favorite things about idea stories is finding the characters and the conflicts within them. For a generation ship, the biggest, most obvious conflict is the conflict between generations: the old people who once knew dry land, the middle generation who will likely die before the destination is reached, and the children who will be the beneficiaries of all this travel.

We have a woman who was born to the sea, who loves the sea, who loves the travel and takes great joy in knowing that she's probably not going to see the end of it until she's ancient. We have the grizzled sailor who's nearly risen to the rank of captain and sees the whole mission as utter foolishness. A boy of thirteen who is obsessed with writing stories about the land they've set off toward and keeps his telescope on the horizon, hoping that the predictions were off, that they're somehow two decades early. A girl of sixteen who doesn't feel suited to the marriage that's planned for her, who is secretly in love with her best friend. A scientist who has been quietly advancing the state of knowledge with every new fish brought up from the deeps.

And then there's the plot, which there are so, so many options for. I would start the novel with simple sailing, a few chapters of the daily routine, the personalities, their petty fights with each other, and the stress of being in the middle of unfathomably deep waters whose depths are only glimpsed when the nets bring up something new. Then ... an island, another ship, sea creatures that have a glimmer of intelligence, a storm that makes the ship limp, spoilage that threatens starvation unless drastic action is taken, a political squabble that might bring all the plans crashing down.

Maybe it's a book about being trapped by the past, or about hanging on by what feels like a delicate thread, or about how systems are fragile and careful thinking and brave leadership are the only things that will get us through.

Mostly I think I want to be a geek about a ship that needs to survive in the ocean for a hundred years, and I do not have the time to write this novel, not when there are so many other novels to write.

[thewadapan]

Pitchposting: STREAMERS

Sometimes at work, I want to reach out over the counter with both hands, grab my customer by the head, and scream at them, have you ever worked a job like this in your life?

Pitch #1: Disclosure Agreements

A "streamer" is someone who broadcasts their stream of consciousness online. Riders can join or leave at any time, and experience all of the streamer's qualia, including some awareness of the streamer's thoughts and relevant memories alongside the raw sensory experience. The connection is one-way.

There's probably a stream for basically anything: adrenaline junkies skydiving or racing fast cars, artists struggling through the process of ideation in realtime, influencers eating experimental meals in foreign cafés, obviously a lot of people having a lot of sex, zookeepers, fighters, clubbers, stoners, and also one astronaut.

Casey finds streamers who are working shitty, minimum-wage jobs, and experiences their shifts with them.

It's mostly boring. It's very human. Maybe she's not the only one—there could be an entire subculture of workplace voyeurism. It can't yet be mainstream for people to be streaming their jobs, otherwise the public awareness that it's widespread would affect people's behaviour—y'know, the observer effect—so maybe it's underground. Maybe it's positive, and they're watching out of camaraderie, or maybe it's negative, and they're all just waiting for the bad day with the blow-up argument. If the workers get caught streaming, they'll be fired, so there's a strict culture of kayfabe in the riders: don't interact with the streamer, don't post their personal details anywhere. But then, what counts as a personal detail? People are breaking these rules all the time. People keep getting caught. The streams go dark. But there's always more: the world has an infinite supply of cashiers and call centre operators who just want to be seen, to be seen as a person, by anyone. Casey takes it all pretty seriously, which from a certain perspective makes her a fanatic: but her own emotions are naturally muted, repressed, given over to the people she inhabits. I think you can't help getting the sense that Casey is waiting for something, perhaps without even consciously knowing it.

One day, she's in a stream all by herself—maybe it's a night shift, maybe the job is uniquely boring or unpleasant, maybe the guy himself is offputting in just the right way that, most of the time, there's literally nobody else who wants to live in his head. And then something terrible happens. It'd probably have to be something like, he kills someone, or commits a terrible moral wrong by more subtle means (say, deliberately sabotaging a batch at his factory in a way that's likely to cause deaths), and appears to get away with it. Or maybe it's the other way around: something singularly horrible happens to him, and Casey is the only other person in the world who knows what he's experienced. Casey becomes obsessed with him, and travels to his place of work to expose him or meet him. I'm not exactly sure what the ending of this one would be like. For me, the moment this entire thing builds towards is one of rejection: Casey finally sees this guy from the outside, and he is disgusted by her and what she's done. What she envisions as a moment of catharsis or empathy turns in an instant into total alienation.

In text, this story could use a parallel-columns gimmick: the prosaic experience of the streamer on the left, and Casey's running commentary on the right. As a comic, you'd overlay Casey's thoughts as narration, while the artwork shows the streamer. I think it would be fun to do a really cold open, where it's not clear what the relationship is between these parallel narrative threads, or even that they're literally different people!

In television or movie, you could instead employ first-person POV camerawork, and/or split-screen effects. A more conventional approach might be to film Casey physically inhabiting the same scene as the streamer, jarringly substituting them from shot to shot. Casey's performance would never quite matching the emotional tone of the scene: maybe she laughs while the streamer is upset, or literally keeps making little asides at the camera.

(This story obviously wouldn't work as a video game, because the lack of agency Casey experiences—locked in, a spectator—is antithetical to the immersion and choice offered by games.)

Pitch #2: Exposure Therapy

A "streamer" is someone who relives the memory of another person, experiencing their stream of consciousness. The technology was originally intended for healthcare: memory transplants can be used for therapy, to allow patients to experience their fears in a perfectly controlled environment, or maybe even as a new form of anaesthetic; memories are a strictly controlled substance, like hard prescription drugs.

However, there's also a black market for memories: a marketplace of ideas, if you like. Suddenly, experience itself is being commodified; if you go through something terrible, that sucks for you, but hey, maybe someone will pay out the ass for you to show them that memory!

You can remember shaking the hand of a dead celebrity. You can remember going to that concert which sold out before you could get tickets. You can remember playing that concert. You can remember shooting up a school. You can remember being attacked by a bear. You can't remember what it feels like to die, but you can remember what it feels like to almost die.

And again, you can remember having all kinds of sex—but of course, this new kind of porn is harder to produce, because now all those pesky thoughts are an inextricable part of it. There's cyclical escalation where people are trying to feel better about the sex they're having, to produce more sublime smut, but the more self-conscious they're being about it, the worse it is. (I'm assuming people have thoughts like this while making regular real-world porn; the difference here, to me, is that the audience is experiencing those same thought processes, which then becomes part of it. The basic Streamers concept naturally lends itself to stories entirely about sex, via themes of intimacy and exhibitionism, so I'm trying to take these pitches in less-obvious directions.)

A lot of people think the whole thing is sick and tasteless. There's maybe a cohort of people who believe that running these memories constitutes creating—and then killing—a clone of the person who originally experienced them; they're framed as fringe conspiracy theorists, but there's a tiny chance they're right.

Trent is an ex-veteran who has killed a man in cold blood, legally. He is disabled and struggling to pay his healthcare bills. He feels used and abandoned by the government. When he discovers that there are sickos online who will pay very well for memories of murder, he makes the choice to share this memory, despite feeling like he's only further exploiting the man whose life he took. However, when the memory goes very public, his actions come under new scrutiny from the general public, and it threatens the entire legitimacy of his country's military and government. (For a version of this story without the military, Trent is a thief who "accidentally" killed a man during a home invasion that went awry.)

I do kind of think it'd be better to have the protagonist of this one be purely a victim, rather than a morally-complicated victim of the military-industrial complex. The thing is, the exact trauma they've suffered massively informs the character of the story. In Trent's case, his PTSD is externalised as it becomes reality for countless strangers around the world, and his sin is reified by the media.

For me, what I find compelling about this pitch in abstract is that it's a heightening of the economic pressures that face many writers of "real" literature: readers want real experiences, which means people writing about their real traumas, which can be a way of experiencing that same trauma over and over.

Pitch #3: Composure Breakers

Kyle is a "streamer"—that is, someone who streams an experience from one person to another. He breaks into someone's home, knocks them out, and forces them to inhabit the mind of someone undergoing trauma. (Perhaps it would be better for it to be a computer virus, or a letter bomb, or a magic power, or something similarly impersonal and hands-off.) Obviously this is illegal.

It's very ideologically motivated vigilantism: Kyle believes that if only he can show a bad person what it's like to live in their victim's shoes, they will change their ways. To start with, he's been using memories donated to him consensually: "this customer is rude to me and my colleagues every single day. I want you to make her see what she looks like from the outside". Or, "that public figure is a turbo racist. I want you to show him this time I was beaten within an inch of my life for the colour of my skin". Or, "that politician keeps lobbying for hostile architecture. I want you to make him experience a single night from when I was sleeping rough". Car crashes, redundancy, cyberbullying, poisonings, gender dysphoria, theft, workplace accidents, domestic abuse, chronic illness, sexual harassment: Kyle takes them all and uses them to make people beg for forgiveness, and as his ambitions grow, he turns his attentions to bigger targets. (If he's a hacker type, maybe it's a different kind of escalation—he uses a virus on the entire userbase of an incel forum.) The results aren't always perfect, but he believes he's overall doing good.

Eventually, though, he gets a violent memory of dubious provenance, and an opportunity to use it on a very powerful person. Maybe he's purposefully sought it out on the dark web, where people are selling bad memories for stupid money. Maybe a mysterious benefactor has passed the memory on to him. It's obvious that the victim shared this memory with someone they trusted, only to be betrayed, either for money or out of misguided concern. Kyle knows it's wrong to use it, but he's convinced this memory would let him make someone change the world.

I guess it's a little unclear to me exactly how the victim finds out their trauma has been used in this way. Maybe the public figure immediately makes a very public disclosure, with lots of specific details that the victim is aghast to recognise? To Kyle, they say: how dare you make them a victim, how dare you make them anything like me. The inherent contradiction of Kyle's ideology is laid bare: he wants to reduce suffering in the world, but the only way he can think to do this is by duplicating suffering.

I think this one would live-or-die on the quality and specificity of the experiences seen towards the beginning. If I was writing it, I'd want to make sure to consult with people who've experienced similar things to whatever I chose to depict. But the idea of that leaves me uneasy, because in a way, that transmutation of other people's trauma feels like exactly the same thing I'd be criticising Kyle of doing.

The only way I could see myself writing it would be if Kyle doesn't experience any of the memories himself, and neither does the reader: instead, we see these conversations before and after, and the mundane reality of him breaking into people's homes. But then, if the audience isn't actually experiencing those memories, that feels like it instantly makes this pitch a worse version of this premise than the previous two.

Still, in terms of the moral complexity, this is the one that grabs me the most. The themes of appropriation and justice have plenty of depth to explore, and I connect more with Kyle than with the other protagonists. I feel like we've all talked to someone who just does not understand how another person or group is suffering, and thought to ourselves, I wish I could put you through it.

Influences

If you haven't read any of my previous pitchposting articles on my website, here's the rub: I have no intention of writing this story. Sometimes I get an idea in my head, and it's an interesting thought exercise for me, but it doesn't compel me enough to go through the entire process of working out specific beats. This is how all my stories start life, as a very abstract outline full of the impressions of scenes: "a joke goes here" rather than the joke itself.

Although I've presented them in a certain order to create a logical progression, Pitch #3 was what first popped into my head, with the other two being variations on the theme. I was inspired by the very recent furor over Seven Shoulders, a newly-announced book by some guy called Sam Forster who disguised himself by doing blackface to prove that racism still exists in America. To see someone trying to vicariously experience other people's misery to prove a point, while violating generally those same people's basic wishes, filled me with secondhand embarrassment; this informed Kyle's character.

If you're compelled by these pitches, here's a list of pre-existing stories I consciously drew inspiration from:

I recently finished watching the hit show Severance, in which a work/life balance is forcibly implemented by partitioning the mind; one version of yourself knows only work, and the other knows the rest of life. While Severance is a dreadful mystery-box show that I'm convinced will never be able to deliver on an ending, its core conceit is great and it has some amazing character work. Themes of memory and exploitation have been on my mind!

"It's Not the End of the World" by @alexanderwales is an unfinished series of vignettes about a superhero with voyeuristic powers, set in the world of Ward by Wildbow. I always felt like it was a shame Wales never finished this one, because I loved it.

"Lena" is a short story by qntm about digital copies of the human mind, which are exploited years into the future. It slaps!

Much of the hedonism of Pitch #1 is, weirdly enough, inspired by a film I never finished watching: Like Me by Robert Mockler, about a girl who livestreams a bunch of fucked up shit. I genuinely just didn't have the stomach for it, but I also felt like it was fundamentally misanthropic in a way which I flatly disagreed with. Don't recommend it!

Obviously this whole thing is very Black Mirror, with particular inspiration drawn from "The Entire History of You" with its recorded memories, "White Christmas" with its vicarious livestreaming, and Pitch #2's main theme draws inspiration from the ending to "Fifteen Million Merits".

Without spoiling too much, the ending of Puella Magi Madoka Magica reveals that, in our final, darkest moments, we are not alone: a higher power is there to experience our suffering with us, take it on as their own. This is probably how Casey views herself in Pitch #1.

The movie Inception is about people trying to sneak an idea into the mind of an influential individual. I picture Kyle's means of implanting memories as being similar to the apparatus depicted in that film.

I probably also drew inspiration from the memory orbs in Fallout: Equestria, an edgy doorstopper My Little Pony fanfiction which I read as a teen and which basically forms the entire basis for my work. One character in that story develops a compulsion to watch a particularly memory orb over and over, as a coping mechanism.

What would your take on these stories look like? Are there any experiences you could be moved to share with other people? How do you think these stories end?

Anyway I promise I'm working on actual writing, I'm just very bad at it!

[alternia-for-real-justice]

St.o.p being pitch .o.n main y.o.u tw.o.. ~♣️

-Marisi/Mod Marsti of @beforus-for-real-justice

Midtuna do you s33 this shit? Chat wants us to stop pitchposting on main. Anyway com3 h3r3 you n3v3r l3t m3 bit3 yo> lik3 how yo> promis3d m3 yo>d l3t m3.

[bugpoasting]

question....beloved bugmoots......i do fear in order to keep the flame stoked re: Thoughts i need to start pitchposting/hornyposting on here. however the format here is Not as condusive for such discussions (i would like a modicum of privacy/i dont like tumblr's reblog/reply system) so: what do you guys think is the best course of action

[monstroso]

we're on season 7 now, four episodes to go. and here is a list, in no particular order, of my favorite moments while watching Mad Men. spoilers ig?

when i observed that Sally asking Glen "Where are you?" on the phone is not her actually asking where she is. She's too young to know what you talk about on the phone, but it's something her mother always says, so it must be How You Talk On The Phone.

knowing how stories (and in particular side characters I tend to like) work I told DJ, "I'm not attached to Duck, he's the kind of character the writers will have either blow his brains out or get auto-erotic asphyxiated" and DJ flatly replying, "No, that's someone else." and then getting to that point in the story and going, "Man! I was really rooting for auto-erotic asphyxiation" while giggling the entire time.

DJ: Is this not AUTO-erotic asphyxiation? me: only if he's hard in the car.

Don's, "I didn't know I was going to get interrogated by the telephone operator from Hooterville!" and me going, "I understand that now!" excitedly, because I had just watched the Petticoat Junction portion of the Beverly Hillbillies video (RIP).

DJ and I (nearly) always going, "Oh *wow*" at exactly the same time when a remarkable outfit or set design piece appears on screen. It's getting spooky at this point.

Asking DJ to gif this:

and getting it!

Hearing about what it was like when the show was airing and speculating about what it would be like if Mad Men had caught on here on tumblr. I really think we should pitchpost guys, it would be hilarious.

[kinghorrorboros-fr]

My girl Pitch with her goggles on! She usually pulls them on whenever goes underground or.... "underground" (buildings) and her flaming eyes just make her into walking headlights.

[deep-hearts-core]

that scene in pitch perfect where benji is singing along to the party outside doing magic tricks sadly in bed - ok this description sounds ridiculous but please roll with it - fucking BREAKS me every time man. especially when i watched this in middle school/high school. it’s just so relatable and as much of a caricature as he’s supposed to be i hope i’m not wrong in assuming that a lot of us really Felt That more than we Felt anything else when watching. 

[amy1heartbeat]

Advanced Linkbuilding: How to Find the Absolute Best Publishers and Writers to Pitch

Advanced Linkbuilding: How to Find the Absolute Best Publishers and Writers to Pitch

Posted by KristinTynski

In my last post, I explained how using network visualization tools can help you massively improve your content marketing PR/Outreach strategy —understanding which news outlets have the largest syndication networks empowers your outreach team to prioritize high-syndication publications over lower syndication publications. The result? The content you are pitching enjoys significantly more widespread link pickups.

Today, I’m going to take you a little deeper — we'll be looking at a few techniques for forming an even better understanding of the publisher syndication networks in your particular niche. I've broken this technique into two parts:

Technique One — Leveraging Buzzsumo influencer data and twitter scraping to find the most influential journalists writing about any topic

Technique Two — Leveraging the Gdelt Dataset to reveal deep story syndication networks between publishers using in-context links.

Why do this at all?

If you are interested in generating high-value links at scale, these techniques provide an undeniable competitive advantage — they help you to deeply understand how writers and news publications connect and syndicate to each other.

In our opinion at Fractl, data-driven content stories that have strong news hooks, finding writers and publications who would find the content compelling, and pitching them effectively is the single highest ROI SEO activity possible. Done correctly, it is entirely possible to generate dozens, sometimes even hundreds or thousands, of high-authority links with one or a handful of content campaigns.

Let's dive in.

Using Buzzsumo to understand journalist influencer networks on any topic

First, you want to figure out who your topc influencers are your a topic. A very handy feature of Buzzsumo is its “influencers” tool. You can locate it on the influences tab, then follow these steps:

Select only “Journalists.” This will limit the result to only the Twitter accounts of those known to be reporters and journalists of major publications. Bloggers and lower authority publishers will be excluded.

Search using a topical keyword. If it is straightforward, one or two searches should be fine. If it is more complex, create a few related queries, and collate the twitter accounts that appear in all of them. Alternatively, use the Boolean "and/or" in your search to narrow your result. It is critical to be sure your search results are returning journalists that as closely match your target criteria as possible.

Ideally, you want at least 100 results. More is generally better, so long as you are sure the results represent your target criteria well.

Once you are happy with your search result, click export to grab a CSV.

The next step is to grab all of the people each of these known journalist influencers follows — the goal is to understand which of these 100 or so influencers impacts the other 100 the most. Additionally, we want to find people outside of this group that many of these 100 follow in common.

To do so, we leveraged Twint, a handy Twitter scraper available on Github to pull all of the people each of these journalist influencers follow. Using our scraped data, we built an edge list, which allowed us to visualize the result in  Gephi.

Here is an interactive version for you to explore, and here is a screenshot of what it looks like:

This graph shows us which nodes (influencers) have the most In-Degree links. In other words: it tells us who, of our media influencers, is most followed. 

These are the top 10 nodes:

@maiasz

Radley Balko (@radleybalko) Opinion journalist, Washington Post

@johannhari101

@davidkroll

@narcomania

@milbank

@samquinones7

@felicejfreyer

@jeannewhalen

@ericbolling 

Who is the most influential?

Using the “Betweenness Centrality” score given by Gephi, we get a rough understanding of which nodes (influencers) in the network act as hubs of information transfer. Those with the highest "Betweenness Centrality" can be thought of as the “connectors” of the network. These are the top 10 influencers:

Maia Szalavitz (@maiasz) Neuroscience Journalist, VICE and TIME

Radley Balko (@radleybalko) Opinion journalist, Washington Post

Johann Hari (@johannhari101) New York Times best-selling author

David Kroll (@davidkroll) Freelance healthcare writer, Forbes Heath

Max Daly (@Narcomania) Global Drugs Editor, VICE

Dana Milbank (@milbank)Columnist, Washington Post

Sam Quinones (@samquinones7), Author

Felice Freyer (@felicejfreyer), Boston Globe Reporter, Mental health and Addiction

Jeanne Whalen (@jeannewhalen) Business Reporter, Washington Post

Eric Bolling (@ericbolling) New York Times best-selling author

@maiasz, @davidkroll, and @johannhari101 are standouts. There's considerable overlap between the winners in "In-Degree" and "Betweenness Centrality" but they are still quite different. 

What else can we learn?

The middle of the visualization holds many of the largest sized nodes. The nodes in this view are sized by "In-Degree." The large, centrally located nodes are disproportionately followed by other members of the graph and enjoy popularity across the board (from many of the other influential nodes). These are journalists commonly followed by everyone else. Sifting through these centrally located nodes will surface many journalists who behave as influencers of the group initially pulled from BuzzSumo.

So, if you had a campaign about a niche topic, you could consider pitching to an influencer surfaced from this data —according to our the visualization, an article shared in their network would have the most reach and potential ROI

Using Gdelt to find the most influential websites on a topic with in-context link analysis

The first example was a great way to find the best journalists in a niche to pitch to, but top journalists are often the most pitched to overall. Often times, it can be easier to get a pickup from less known writers at major publications. For this reason, understanding which major publishers are most influential, and enjoy the widest syndication on a specific theme, topic, or beat, can be majorly helpful. By using Gdelt’s massive and fully comprehensive database of digital news stories, along with Google BigQuery and Gephi, it is possible to dig even deeper to yield important strategic information that will help you prioritize your content pitching.

We pulled all of the articles in Gdelt’s database that are known to be about a specific theme within a given timeframe. In this case (as with the previous example) we looked at "behaviour health." For each article we found in Gdelt’s database that matches our criteria, we also grabbed links found only within the context of the article.

Here is how it is done:

Connect to Gdelt on Google BigQuery — you can find a tutorial here.

Pull data from Gdelt. You can use this command: SELECT DocumentIdentifier,V2Themes,Extras,SourceCommonName,DATE FROM [gdelt-bq:gdeltv2.gkg] where (V2Themes like '%Your Theme%').

Select any theme you find, here — just replace the part between the percentages.

To extract the links found in each article and build an edge file. This can be done with a relatively simple python script to pull out all of the <PAGE_LINKS> from the results of the query, clean the links to only show their root domain (not the full URL) and put them into an edge file format.

Note: The edge file is made up of Source-->Target pairs. The Source is the article and the Target are the links found within the article. The edge list will look like this:

Article 1, First link found in the article.

Article 1, Second link found in the article.

Article 2, First link found in the article.

Article 2, Second link found in the article.

Article 2, Third link found in the article.

From here, the edge file can be used to build a network visualization where the nodes publishers and the edges between them represent the in-context links found from our Gdelt data pull around whatever topic we desired.

This final visualization is a network representation of the publishers who have written stories about addiction, and where those stories link to.

What can we learn from this graph?

This tells us which nodes (Publisher websites) have the most In-Degree links. In other words: who is the most linked. We can see that the most linked-to for this topic are:

tmz.com

people.com

cdc.gov

cnn.com

go.com

nih.gov

ap.org

latimes.com

jamanetwork.com

nytimes.com

Which publisher is most influential? 

Using the "Betweenness Centrality" score given by Gephi, we get a rough understanding of which nodes (publishers) in the network act as hubs of information transfer. The nodes with the highest "Betweenness Centrality" can be thought of as the "connectors" of the network. Getting pickups from these high-betweenness centrality nodes gives a much greater likelihood of syndication for that specific topic/theme. 

Dailymail.co.uk

Nytimes.com

People.com

CNN.com

Latimes.com

washingtonpost.com

usatoday.com

cvslocal.com

huffingtonpost.com

sfgate.com

What else can we learn?

Similar to the first example, the higher the betweenness centrality numbers, number of In-degree links, and the more centrally located in the graph, the more “important” that node can generally be said to be. Using this as a guide, the most important pitching targets can be easily identified. 

Understanding some of the edge clusters gives additional insights into other potential opportunities. Including a few clusters specific to different regional or state local news, and a few foreign language publication clusters.

Wrapping up

I’ve outlined two different techniques we use at Fractl to understand the influence networks around specific topical areas, both in terms of publications and the writers at those publications. The visualization techniques described are not obvious guides, but instead, are tools for combing through large amounts of data and finding hidden information. Use these techniques to unearth new opportunities and prioritize as you get ready to find the best places to pitch the content you’ve worked so hard to create.

Do you have any similar ideas or tactics to ensure you're pitching the best writers and publishers with your content? Comment below!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

KristinTynski

[alexanderwales]

Pitchposting: a wayward mother's litrpg

[cw: child abandonment, bad mothers]

I came up with this idea while trying to describe a non-standard litrpg that wouldn't sell, and it gripped me enough that I've been thinking about it. Now's the time to set that idea free.

Our protagonist is a woman in her thirties or maybe forties. She's divorced with two children, but she left the children with their father. She's got all kinds of issues, and felt trapped in the marriage and her life, and overwhelmed by taking care of the kids what felt like day in and day out. I don't think the age of her children really matters that much, but they need to be old enough to play videogames.

She gets isekaied into the world of a videogame that her children most loved, the one that they had been talking to her about for years, the source of their obsession. She gets a videogame interface.

Let's start with what I find compelling about the premise: the litRPG isekai stuff is being used to examine a relationship between a mother and her child(ren). We can have some power fantasy, as a treat, but mostly we have this very firm and unique lens through which to look at the world, and we have things that we surely must want to confront, revelations about motherhood and about this specific character, whoever she ends up being. In theory, the thing we're moving toward is a synthesis where we have excised the tension.

So, some questions that pop out to me:

How many children does this woman have? I don't know that it matters all that much, but where you have multiple characters who fulfil the same role, it's almost always better to condense them down. The flip side to this is there's maybe less to explore, and I think there's a different tenor to a single child and what we must assume is true of the character.

Does it have to be a woman? Is there not as much meat on the bone if it's a father who left his children? I think that this could also work, certainly, the reason it was initially a mother instead of a father was that I was trying to pick a protagonist that would lose as much RoyalRoad audience as quickly as possible while still being technically in the litRPG genre. (There are obviously different stereotypes about men and women. I kind of think the central idea of "your mom gets isekaied into that game you were obsessed with and she never really understood" probably hits right for more people, but I don't know.)

What kind of game? Alright, yeah, fair. The main point of the idea is that it's a game the mother is only passingly familiar with. Maybe she went so far as to throw a themed birthday party at one point, but she does not understand it, and maybe over the course of the story, gradually comes to understand (though really, understanding her child(ren) through the game is the main point). I'm thinking some kind of JRPG. Definitely better if it's a game with a story.

Should this game be real? Another interesting question! If the game is a real game, say FF7, then we can assume that the reader knows things, and there can be dramatic irony. If we invent a game, then we have a lot more control over what the game is, and can stay in the mother character's head better as we're in mutual ignorance.

Okay, I think those are all the most salient questions, time to stop workshopping this. I have more ideas than I have time to write novels. Thanks @thewadapan for the idea of pitchposting.

[alexanderwales]

Pitchposting: Bad Detectives

content warning: bdsm, sexual violence, suicide, murder, police

Pitchposting is when you write about a thing that you're not going to write to exorcise the demons.

I was a big fan of the Hannibal TV show, partly because it was a bit silly. I'm worried that the thing I'm going to describe here will feel like a riff on that, but hopefully it's just an influence. The actual core of the idea came while watching Presumed Innocent.

The book follows two detectives who hunt serial killers. I'm not sure I care all that much about actual serial killers or the actual people who hunt them, though I have read a few nonfiction books from former FBI people, mostly to make sure I understand the perspective of government employees and how their process of self-mythologizing goes (for a different book). This book takes place in one of those worlds where there are a ton of serial killers, they're clever and artistic and tortured, and they're caught by looking at their signatures and through careful psychoanalysis rather than security cameras, fingerprints, and other features of the national security panopticon.

Our male lead is scruffy and tightly clenched. He's a loner. He doesn't talk much, but when he does, it's insightful and poignant. He's weird, but not in a way that maps well to any actual diagnosis. He's extremely good at getting inside the head of serial killers, understanding their patterns, knowing the things that will give them away, how they'll inevitably slip up or be caught. To the extent we get his inner thoughts, he is absolutely fucked in the head: the only reason you wouldn't call him a serial killer is that he's never actually killed anyone, and the only reason he hasn't done it is because it's wrong. He instead satisfies his urges through his job with the FBI, which allows him access to tons and tons of photographs and the chance to visit crime scenes, to talk to serial killers, to confront his darkness over and over, flirting with it. Maybe there's actually some question whether he has killed someone, and in what circumstances, if he's an Ethical Serial Killer of some kind. You can smell the frustrated impulses on him.

Our female lead is carefully put together and very cold. She's a loner. She doesn't talk much, but when she does, she's sad and distant. She's weird in a way that doesn't map to any diagnosis. She's fastidious. She has eight of the exact same suit and three pairs of the same shoes. She's extremely good at getting in the heads of serial killers, which again, is the main way that serial killers are caught in this world rather than, I don't know, loads of interviews, tip lines, etc. She is absolutely fucked in the head: she's drawn to killers like a moth to flame. She is, essentially, prey incarnate, a lamb who would willingly lie down to be brutalized by the lion. The only reason she hasn't been killed is that she has a sense of self-preservation and thinks that killing and hurting people is wrong. She satisfies her urges through her work, which gets her access to serial killers, lets her interview them, lets her see the crime scenes and imagine herself in them, etc.

I think for the purposes of pitchposting, we could stop there. Obviously we have two completely insane people in a very high-stress high-stakes job who happen to match each other in a way that no human ever actually does. They have these private inner lives that they cannot, under any circumstances, share with other people, but the central tension is that if they did share with each other, they would find that they're a perfect fit.

The scene that's been kicking around in my head is the two of them trying to recreate a crime scene together, with her in the role of victim and him in the role of perpetrator. They're in their work clothes, conservatively dressed, both playing the part of professional, and each actually thinking while they're playing it cool "wow, this is so hot, god I wish this were real".

It's basically this, as a fucked up psycosexual erotic thriller/romance:

I think as far as this core relationship goes, it's pretty solid. Both have a dark secret, their dark secrets complement each other, there's plenty of reason for both of them to misunderstand the other (because both would naturally assume that the other is repulsed rather than attracted).

But at the end of the line, I'm not sure what an ending would look like for the two of them. He's not just a sadist, he has a hunger for murder, and his whole character orientation has been around trying to satisfy those urges in other ways that don't quite work. And she's not just a masochist, she has erotic suicidality, which I might have just coined (but probably did not). The ending that their internal drives are pointing at is with him as a killer and her dead. That would be a very daring ending, and I'm not sure what it would mean ... but I also don't know what ending would work better, or even what the themes of this book would be, other than just "look at these two freaks". (And of course the audience for the book is people who see themselves in one or the other of these two freaks. I'm using "freaks" affectionately here.)

The main problem is that this is all sort of gross. Hannibal steered away from sexual violence, one major notable exception aside, vaguely implying it sometimes but often using murder as a stand-in for sex. I thought the show worked best when it was the most divorced from reality, when it was being serious about its camp. The serial murders are works of art, things of beauty, dark and horrible but also aesthetic and neatly planned.

Maybe you can do that here. Maybe serial killers in this world have absolutely no interest in sexual violence of any kind. Maybe our protagonists are vaguely sexless themselves, and when they're acting out murders together the sex stuff exists only in the mind of the reader. And then when they do have sex, if they do, then that's a stand-in for murder. This is less gross than, e.g. having sexually violent crimes that sexually excite our protagonist, at least in my opinion, maybe because that would be less divorced from reality.

A woman with an interest in getting raped is ... I mean, there are real women like that out there, ones who have that fantasy and ones who actually would want to make that fantasy a reality in some way. But a woman who thinks it's hot to be ritually stabbed fifty-two times in the stomach is less real, and her dark desire is more clearly a stand-in for other dark desires, whatever repressed urge our audience feels, or sees in others, or how we understand ourselves and our thoughts. Easier to do the mapping when it's clear that we're not mapping to anything substantially real. (Knowing humans, I am sure that there probably is someone out there with vivid fantasies about basically anything, but if I wrote the story it would be with "this is not literally about dismemberment, decapitation, vivisection, bondage, stabbing, etc." in mind.)

I think having the serial killers be over the top also helps to take you out some of what tends to be a icky about true crime. It becomes clear that this is a fantasy, that it's exploring something in our brains, rather than doing the typical procedural thing of "ripped from the headlines". These would be killers with their own weird fucked up demons they let free, artists, rather than the serial killers we get in the real world, who are mostly impulse idiots. I think it's easy to not be exploitative if you're completely divorcing yourself from reality.

I think I'm the wrong person to write this, which makes it perfect for a pitchpost. I enjoyed Hannibal, but it seems like an exhausting thing to write, and trying to strike the right balance for both main characters seems tough and like an ongoing battle I'd be fighting with every word. There'd be a risk of teetering over into grimderp shock value at every turn.

I'm trying, right now, to think about a way to have that same dynamic I like without it being some sex-murder thing, and I'm coming up blank. Two people who are serious professionals with a dark secret whose careers are ostensibly about stopping that thing ... you know, maybe just set the story in a repressive society where the things they think are horrible and would offend the other are things we maybe find a little boring or everyday, though this loses you the aspect of "our desires would literally destroy us". So I don't think it would be quite the same, but I'd be more likely to write it, rather than wallowing in the sexy murdersphere.

[alexanderwales]

Pitchposting: Turn-Based Lovers

Time to set another idea free.

The title is taken from an article I read somewhere, and it fired up something in me, namely that I don't think I've ever seen "turn-based" be used in a piece of fiction, aside from maybe Erfworld.

The specific scene I had in my head is that there are two people waiting in line at the market to buy apples, standing on adjoining tiles, and due to some of the metaphysics of the world, this particular turn is taking a very long time. They get to talking, because there's fuck all to do — they've used their movement for the turn and anyway are waiting for the merchant to come back — and maybe they irritate each other a little, with some prickliness of the sort that's common in romances. He mistakes her for a washerwoman because she's not in her scholar's robes, she makes some remark about the brutish military not realizing that he's a naval officer.

After the long pause while something complicated was happening somewhere else in the world, they go their separate ways, but perhaps the sourness of their initial meeting feels like a loose thread that needs to be resolved. They had exchanged names and professions, enough to track each other down with a letter, if maybe not in person.

One apologetic letter that's maybe a bit too long gets a response that's also a bit too long, and perhaps personally revealing in a way that it wasn't meant to be.

They get to talking. Most of the book is done through letters, which is another way in which they're "turn-based". He's at sea, and there's a loneliness that comes with that. Eventually it's revealed that she's not the first he exchanged letters with, and that the other woman had fallen in love with someone else while he was away, the letters not enough for her.

Maybe I just want to write an epistolary novel and the turn-based thing does not figure into it at all, which would make this a Bad pitchpost.

Right now I'm thinking that the grand finale would be a big declaration of love where one of the two holds up the turn order of the entire world in order to profess all the ways they are meant for each other, which ties into their initial meeting at a marketplace. I don't know for certain that this is worth all the setup though.

(There are tons of interesting things that you can do in a work of prose fiction where everything is turn-based though. Imagine a battle sequence where your best friend has been mortally wounded and you're helpless to do anything about it because your healing magic takes three turns, so you're just watching him die? Or imagine a horror scene where you have done all the math and understand that it's helpless for four full turns before the monster kills you? Maybe we can have our scientist/alchemist running tons of experiments that take a great many turns to complete, which maps to waiting for the soldier/sailor's ship to return or whatever.)

[alexanderwales]

Pitchposting: The Reused Maiden

(Pitchposting is a way to write up an idea that won't get the honor of becoming a story. Free to a good home.)

Like a lot of good ideas, this one was based on me misreading something. The actual thing was rescued maiden, but my brain doesn't read so well without context, so I read reused maiden, and it fired up some neurons.

Our protagonist is a fifth daughter, in a time when that means she would be a burden on her family. In other times, on other worlds, she might be sent off to become a nun or work as a governess in a socially ambiguous position, or maybe even be sent to an asylum if she was "difficult". In this world, there's always some demand for maidens, even if they're a low birth. When a dragon spews fire above a village in his third flyby that month, the village elders take stock of who might be able to allay the dragon's desire for "unspoilt" flesh.

Everyone agrees that it's best that a maiden goes willingly. There are always stories about what happens when a maiden gets taken by a dragon, and before a sacrifice, those stories become unaccountably upbeat. They pretend that no one really knows what a dragon does with a maiden, that perhaps it's not horrible, and sometimes, yes, the maidens do go to their fate willingly.

Our protagonist goes kicking, screaming, and biting. She vows revenge on her father, her mother, her sisters, and everyone in the village. She says, in a rage, that she will kill the fucking dragon herself if she has to. She has no means to get free of her chains, let alone to kill a dragon, but her anger is hot enough to sustain her even as the night grows cold. She howls as though trying to awaken something inside of her.

She doesn't end up saving herself. A knight in shining armor comes and slays the dragon in glorious battle, which our protagonist only learns about later. The knight is not even aware of her existence, only of the tradition, and anyway is mostly after the hoard.

When the death of the dragon is reported and confirmed, some very sheepish village elders come to where our protagonist is still chained to a rock. It would be possible, perhaps, for everyone to forget this whole awful thing had ever happened, but the protagonist's threats are echoing in everyone's ears, and her horrible howling could be heard through the night. There is some question about how much she meant it when she said that she would "fucking kill you bastards with my bare hands if I ever get free".

After some discussion, it is decided that the protagonist can have no place within the village, if only for the safety of the townsfolk. But there are other villages, and while there's no question about releasing her, those other villages have their own problems: sometimes dragons, sometimes spirits, sometimes ancient curses. Our protagonist has been spared a messy death at the talons of a dragon, but now she's in the position of being a commodity.

She's first sold to an intermediary, a mercenary group or a passing wizard or someone else that gets her onto the next place. If you wanted to write this story, here is where you could pivot into being a different sort of thing: maybe her captor only meant to free her, and this is the start of a romance, because every romance loves an inauspicious and problematic start. But if I were writing this story, she would be treated as the commodity that she is, only well enough that she can be sold as good stock to the next party.

And there would be a next party, someone who wants a sacrificial maiden for a different purpose: appeasing a volcano or calling on the power of the ancestors or something like that.

And again, fate conspires for the sacrifice to not go through, and our protagonist is shuttled off to another place where she's to be put to death for some reason or another.

Astute readers will have noticed that our protagonist has a distinct lack of agency here, and is essentially being manhandled from place to place. This is the wonderful thing about pitchposting: I'm not actually writing this story, so don't have to actually solve these problems. I think it's fine for a story to be about a character with no agency, who is constantly struggling and fighting and trying every trick and still winds up at the mercy of a knight in shining armor coming to rescue her for unrelated reasons. Maybe that says something, or maybe stories don't have to say something.

(And maybe she gets saved by the same knight in shining armor, who has been crossing paths with her while entirely ignorant that it's simply been the same maiden across different kingdoms and continents. This is one of those little nuggets that I think is almost worth writing a full book for, a scene where it's revealed that they have, impossibly, been entwined with each other this entire time. A mistreated, reused maiden and a knight so shiningly pure that he's been the lone driving force behind putting down thirteen different evils as he came across them? I think there's something there.)

But there's a different version where perhaps the maiden gets out of the jams on her own, using only her wits. Maybe she meets with the dragon and dupes him into going to the trap the knight in shining armor has set for him. Maybe she gets offered as a cultic sacrifice to a demon, but she'd dragged a toe across their waxen sigils and ruined the summoning to her benefit. She uses her wits, and her bag of tricks, and a few things she picks up along the way. The reused maiden, scraping by every time, narrowly dodging death but always with death on the horizon like an arctic sunset.

I guess my version of this story is about the rage, but it doesn't have to be that. Maybe it can be about sadder things, like being sad about the uses that a society has deemed you fit for, or the inhumanity of humans, or something like that. I don't know how many times you can reuse the same maiden for this story before it gets to be boring or unbelievable or you've just mined out the available space. My guess would be that five is stretching it, so long as they're varied enough, and one of them looks like one of those suspicious happily-ever-afters that seems to be coming two-thirds of the way through a book.

But as an ending, I like the idea that the maiden eventually gets thrust at the feet of an old crone, bound and gagged, but with blood around her mouth where she bit one of the guards (and she has, after all this time, become very good at biting guards). The witch waits until the guards have retreated, then cuts our protagonist free of her bindings, and our wily spitfire of a protagonist probably does attack immediately after that. But once the hostilities are over, the witch asks for the maiden's stories, how many times she escaped death and at whose hands, and they drink tea as they talk.

I mean, obviously the witch was once a maiden too, and she had her own trials and tribulations before making a successful transition to old crone. Maybe we reveal that the witch has been a guiding hand this whole time, except that seems needlessly cruel (but perhaps this works as just one more injustice inflicted on the maiden, another battle to fight). I tend to think endings are important and need to be considered, but they're also very hard. Maybe we can have some cosmic reveal about why this world seems to have endless uses for maidens, but that leans just a little too meta for my current tastes.

Look, I'm not going to write this story, even if this was a longer post than pitchposting is supposed to be. There's a lot to be said about the role of the virgin sacrifice, and there's a lot that's been said, with much of it clumsy. There are needles that I would be worried about threading, particularly with regards to sex and sexual violence, implied or otherwise. The obvious thing to do, if you're a virgin about to be sacrificed for the third time, is to just lose your virginity, which ... certainly is a plot beat, I guess. I'm not sure I'd want to go there, or how I would go there. It's hard not to think of the whole thing as social commentary, which makes it hard not to write it like that.

But I think it would be better being its own thing. I guess if you disagree, you could just write it some other way.

[alexanderwales]

Pitchposting: Zero-Shot Fighting

I was going to open this by saying that Bourne Identity is an underrated movie, but then I went to check the box office receipts and apparently I wildly underestimated both the financial success and cultural impact of that movie. I guess that's why they made so many sequels.

Anyway, the best part of the movie for my tastes was Bourne getting in a fight and realizing that he's actually really good at fighting. He gets into a scuffle and has this moment of going from 'oh god, don't hit me' to 'oh, actually, I'm a badass'.

(In AI contexts, "zero-shot" is when an AI is challenged with a problem which did not occur within the training data. I think it's a super useful concept handle to apply to all kinds of human things, equivalent to "first try" or "sight read" but more broad.)

This whole idea is basically that, stretched out as far as I think it can possibly go.

The most natural fit is some kind of shonen thing where our hero enters every battle not really knowing what his abilities are even going to be. In every battle, he's discovering his power as he goes along, and needs to figure it out fast so he doesn't get crushed by his opponent. Maybe he's not starting at exactly square one every fight, since maybe there's scaling involved.

We have a protagonist who shows up to a gun fight not knowing what weapon he's going to be wielding.

I think writing this would present a few challenges. First, you would want to make sure that all the powers are interesting and evolve over the course of a fight. Second, you would want to make sure that the matches are interesting, because the whole thing hinges on author fiat a lot more than usual, and giving your protagonist magnet powers against a metal manipulator would make people cry bullshit. Third, my guess is that there's a limit to how often you can do this until it gets boring, and my authorial instincts say that it's four times.

So once you've had your four (or whatever) fights where your protagonist is using a random power, it's probably good to pick a new trick up. Zero-shot fighting is still the default, but maybe he can hang on to some vestige of powers from old fights, or can guide the power selection, or can otherwise exercise some agency and control.

[kinghorrorboros-fr]

It's not a good idea to get the attention of walking headlights when you've got a splitting headache....

An impulse doodle featuring @ophionyx 's Relic and my Pitch!

[kinghorrorboros-fr]

I should be posting more often.

Anyway, meet Pitch, my new disgustingly greasy favorite from my gaggle of lizards. She's missing pants because having to collect 165 longneck scraps instead of like 60 for the bundle is a great fucking idea

Petroleum is her shtick and make sure she doesn't set the world on fire just because she spat oil all over it.