cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/14812704

a short story / black comedy i wrote about gaming addiction and the value of digital treasures

if you read it, let me know what you think.

(written with over 70 footnotes that add context and flavor to the '90s-00s setting. some of the footnotes are paragraphs long. the footnotes are not necessary to understand the story as they function more as a way to break the third person perspective to provide context & personal stories around the various 90s-2000s things that pop up throughout the story. NOTE: if you read on the site, you can click a footnote number, then click the arrow after the actual footnote to take you back. you can also skip the footnotes entirely if breaking up the text takes you out of the story too much.)

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/17551809

I made some prototype rules for this game, and the community I made for it is linked. Basically you have an "Editor" (Game Master/Dungeon Master) who guides the writers (players/characters) through creating a world and their characters, then regularly adds a chapter prompt that they have to write a chapter for their character for. It's not a long time commitment, I was thinking to playtest a story for maybe every other day or every two days for the shortest story structure (5 chapters). It's all designed to take place in one forum post, with top-level comments for OOC, world building, character creation, and the chapters. Also, if this does just turn into a freeform r/writewithme clone, my feelings won't be hurt; it will be cool to have helped create a community no matter what it looks like in the end.

i run a gaming blog that is more like a creative writing blog. i just published this essay. the essay's main theme is nostalgia and living-in-the-past told through personal stories.

if you read it, let me know what you think. thanks.

Do you struggle to write every day? Come join an accountability team and compete for the prize of most consistent writers!

Here's how it works:

1️⃣ Reply to this message seeking an accountability partner, or reply to another user's request. Each team must consist of exactly two members.

2️⃣ This coming week, keep track of the number of days you have spent at least fifteen minutes working on your book, blog, or other writing project. The number of successful days is your score.

3️⃣ Add your score together with your partner's. The maximum number of points a team can earn is 14.

4️⃣ Next week on Sunday, a new announcement will be posted. One member of your team must reply with the team's score. Be honest. If you lie, your pants will spontaneously burst into flames.

5️⃣ The team with the highest score will be declared the winner! In the event of a tie, the winning team will be chosen randomly. Remember, the goal is not to write a million words. Rather, the goal is consistency—writing

I hope this is allowed here, if not, feel free to remove my post, mods

My name is Richard Silva, I'm a young Brazilian writer(17) who just published their first book. Since I was a kid I wrote things, but for the first time, I made something I am going to share with the world. Currently, I'm finishing Brazilian integral high school, which in other words, wastes 9 hours of my day with mostly nothing. It's very stressful, and leaves me with not much appropriate time for actually writing quality content, so you might imagine how many reviews this book had to get before I felt like I was satisfied.

I would like to encourage you to read my book, and share your thoughts on it, of course, it's me first one, so constructive criticism is very welcomed. My desire is to be able to make a living out of my art, and when reading this book, you are helping me make this dream possible :)

And please, if you did enjoy it(even if it's a little bit), leave me a review on google play saying how much you

National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) kicks off today!

I've got a couple hundred words in, mostly just hoping to write a bit every day. Anyone else participating? What are your goals?

Protip: If you're on Mastodon, you can follow a hashtag just like you can an account, and the #nanowrimo tag is pretty active today. :-)

I love writing. I love telling stories and putting all the fantasies and day dreams in my head down on paper. I write mostly for myself, though I share some with people and love it when they comment on it.

As much as I love it, I don't do it enough. I get pulled by my vices (video games and anime mostly) and spent way more time on that than anything else. Even when I pull myself away from them, I still have school and work that takes my productivity away, and by the end of it, even if I feel like writing, I don't.

I'd love to get back into it, especially going through my old stories and editing them to be better. It's hard. I want to improve, but often I don't know how. I want to keep doing it and write more, but I don't want to stop enjoying it. I've got so much I need to do, so much else I want to do, and even when I have the time I keep getting distracted.

Sorry for the long post, just wanted to vent.

This post might sound like an advertisement (which it partly is, of course, you don't try to get published if you don't want people to read your stuff) but I want to use this post to encourage other new writers.

It took a long time to find a home for this story and I thought about giving up on it when rejections started piling up in my inbox. I'm sure there are others who feel the same from time to time, but please continue to submit.

For those interested, here is the story: https://stateofmatter.in/fiction/milk/

Just a wannabe writer here. I've only ever strung a few paragraphs together, maybe an essay's worth occasionally. I used to work on blog posts in Evernote and I still use it for capturing stray thoughts. I use it as a place for ideas and that's exactly what happens. I never develop the idea, I just write down another one. Years ago I used Word, but thought maybe now there are apps better suited to the writing process. What do others use for an application/ platform?

"What’s your process like?"

Me:

So everyone's different, and I am autistic. I have an extensive memory for details, quick and sometimes instinctive understanding of many fiction principles, and a lot of visual thinking. (I have my shortcomings too, especially over-thinking and over-explaining instead of showing.) But I think at least some of what I do can work for you.

1. Discipline is better than motivation. Motivation ends, discipline stays. Eventually, hopefully like me, you'll get to a point where you feel wrong if you didn't write every day (or 5 days a week in my case). This hugely helps keep you motivated
2. I am a one-trick pony with it; but I always started with a theme, a feeling, something important I want to share and say. For me it was a terrible childhood, my desire for healing and family, my idealism towards wanting a greater world, and how we all need to become better and happier people to achieve it. I wanted to capture that idea and feeling since I was lik

So my novel takes place in an afterlife and focuses on one major character, as they try to heal from childhood trauma, learn helpful mental health tools, and newly take in this beautiful universe.

The other major characters are also developing ethically and emotionally, and we need to see inside their minds and watch them learn.

Meanwhile the past was literally a different life, and there's not a lot of past talked about in the narration— more thought about or talked about by the characters.

So with that, I've decided that the best way to write my novel is first-person present tense with the main character; and then with the occasional times where I need to focus on other characters when the main isn't around, third-person present tense.

This is not a common choice, but I think it is the best choice for my particular novel. I think it's the best choice for my novel's sense of immediacy, for getting inside characters' heads, and for experiencing many new things from the main charact

So I'm on v2 of my novel. I could call it "second draft", but it's more of the second semi-prose outline. I have a fight scene in Chapter 13.

The fight scene involves an inexperienced demigod villain, an inexperienced demigod hero, the hero's kung fu master mom who is not a demigod, and their support android. It's all at the mom's house in front of the ocean. The demigods have flight, telekinesis, increased strength, and semi-invulnerability when they maintain their personal body forcefields.

Either way, here's a few things I learned while writing this fight scene, off the top of my head:

1. Fight scenes really aren't natural to me. I always wanted to write this science fantasy action piece, and I'm learning that I'm much better at philosophy, and at painting a picture of wonder, than I am at action. I already instinctively understood how to pace a fight scene quickly with terse sentences and good flow, and to not focus on choreography. But planning out the actions is still tough.

I guess the way that my brain works is that I try to plan out the best ideas, the best scenes, the best actions first. I focus on what excites me and what will function the best. This uses a lot of brain power, and I can only do it for a bit before I get exhausted and end that day's writing.

After that when I edit, all I have to do is cut and rearrange things, make the dialogue better, stuff like that. (I'm not doing the full prose yet.) At times where I will have to punch up or completely rewrite scenes, that will be tough again.

. . .

I'm writing my first novel, and it's a blockbuster of a literary mental health work set in a space-age afterlife universe. I have full faith in it, but I'm always learning during the process. I pantsed for part of my first draft/pre-draft, but man does pantsing give me bad results. Now I just semi-prose outline the full novel, until the whole story works.

So among the other things I've discovered about writing and about my own processes, my philosop

Made by me.

I was inspired by S. Horwitz who transcribed Rowling's post of her outline of OoP and posted about it on his site/blog. And I quite liked this Grid.

He calls it an 'Expanded Series Grid', and was seemingly upset when Rowling described her chapter action sumaries on the grid as 'plot'. He calls them 'series' which is not something I'm familiar with, but his advice seems pretty good so I'll take his word for it.

I started by using MS Word, to open a document, go to layout and set margins to narrow. And orientation to landscape.

edit: I forgot to put in instructions for Libre Writer: for Writer, go to Format> Page Style> Page, and click landscape and halve the margins.

I took the image and ran it through an online service (extractimage) to get a usable table. It was mostly correct, so I copied the result and pasted it in.

The result is pretty good method of compiling factional subplots

I want to share an experience I had the other day that fundamentally changed the way I think about my writing and the way I process feedback.

One night before I went to bed, I had a spark of inspiration, a new idea that would finally give me a satisfying way to tackle a project that had been bouncing around in my head for a long time.

I'm a fan of constructed languages-- stuff like Klingon from Star Trek and the Elvish languages from Tolkien. One language in particular I thought would be a wonderful experience to let people learn together as a group, if only there was a way to make it enjoyable for people who weren't particularly interested in linguistics. So, for several months, the idea stuck with me, never feeling complete. Then, that night, I realized an RPG might be the perfect medium to deliver the experience of learning a fictional language in a fun, engaging way.

So, the next day I had a lot of creative energy, and I sta

Before summer holidays i decided to try to start writing a book, or at least, a long and engaging story. I wrote some months ago a short fanfic and the few people that read it like it very much.

However, writing something original sure is much harder. I was about to start writing before noticing i would need some world building beforehand. I started brainstorming what fantasy races, cultures, etc... i want. I took some notes in Obsidian of how i want the world & characters to be: Their flaws, their strengths.... Writing fanfic is much easier in my opinion, you have already all the fleshed out characters and detailed world.

Anyway, i didn't write a single line of the actual story and feel like i am wasting time planning everything about the world. It can be frustrating.

Did you guys get stuck world building too? What approach do you have with it?

You don't start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it's good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it. That's why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistence.

-- Octavia E. Butler