#it is lost to the ether and no one shall ever perceive it again

[roast-ifs]

Sorry if this is a bit odd, but how do you find the inspo/time to sit down and write? I want to write "normally" and create stories of my own but I struggle doing it alone (I learned to write through roleplay, replies going back and forth and such) ;; your story and how you write is something I enjoy so much so hearing your input would be awesome :D thank you!

Not odd at all! I learned a lot through roleplaying too and even when I was a kid writing linearly I still shared it with friends. Building/entering a community of other authors or people wanting to read and support your work helps A LOT. Writing really doesn’t have to be as lonesome as classic authors/media/whatevs makes it out to be! In fact, it shouldn’t! You can’t create inside a vacuum-sealed bubble.

A lot of the time I use to write is also bc I’m lucky and can write during my job if it’s slow. I also only work part-time, and school takes up a lot of time, sure, but not a full 8hrs/day. It also helps that my workplace shut down from March to July and now we’re shutting down again until the end of the year lol so this has been a very very unique year in terms of free-time :’D

As for inspo--other people! Other IF games have been a huge inspiration, the original spark for snv happened years ago after listening to a Kaleo song and badly misunderstanding some red dead redemption online access thing (idek what it was bc my internet was so slow I couldn’t properly play it). Consuming media gives you ideas, art and writing and anything creative is always born of that which is around us and that which we consume--whether its art, tv shows, if games, etc. So if you’re running low on inspo, go through some other author’s WIPS, peruse unsplash/pinterest, read a book, etc. etc.

Another tip, especially when you’re starting out (at least it worked for me lol) I set a time limit on how long I would worldbuild and story build before writing anything. I’d built the plot and story and world in a few months and made a deadline to when I would start writing because, for me, I get sucked into the worldbuilding and would never write a thing.

A lot of my past projects failed because of that, because I spent so long working on fleshing out every piece of detail that eventually I just didn’t want to write it anymore.

Second tip, and again, only if it works for you, I set myself a low manageable daily word count goal. Setting yourself up with large daily goals is a very quick and easy way to get disheartened and frustrated. My goal every day is to write 500 words, because that was a manageable goal for me that wouldn’t overwhelm me. And, usually, when I start writing with that goal in mind, I wind up writing more bc the biggest block to writing is the whole ‘getting started’ bit.

I’m also treating snv like the first draft it is. I proof read a little as I’m writing but there are a ton of edits I want to make and scenes I want to polish, but doing so on top of that 500 word count goal would exhaust me so I don’t. At least not yet. I’ll probably set aside a week or something for just editing but otherwise, once a scene is written, I don’t sweat it (or try not to lol!! Unless it’s really broken then I’d work on it) bc I know a lot of other authors struggle with this too. They agonize over scenes until they’ve been written to death. If you’re re-reading a scene over and over again you’re not going to see how to make it better.

Leave it alone, let it ferment, and come back to it later (much later in my case). Imo the best proof reading is when I’ve forgotten what I’ve written XD

TL;DR Don’t write alone! Alone is no fun! And you won’t be able to suss out problems/bounce ideas on your own.

Make small manageable goals, try not to spend too long on the planning stage (in fact, plan while you’re writing if you like. I’ve only got most of chp. 3 outlined and I didn’t even outline chp. 1 and 2)

Treat your drafts just as they are--like drafts! They don’t (and shouldn’t!) be perfect! If you’re agonizing over a scene, let it go, let it sit, come back to it later.

Know (or learn!) your limits, be kind to yourself, and find people who will support you and help you with feedback, brainstorm, and constructive criticism. :)

#I am SO GLAD that the hundred or so pages of fanfic I shared with my friends never made it online though XDDD #it is lost to the ether and no one shall ever perceive it again #author asks #writing advice #and again!!! Find stuff that works for you!!

[joshua-caravaggio-blog]

Father Time's Daughter “The Journey”

A journey is space and time combined. They are the clearest representation of these two elements combined.

Space is easy for humans to perceive. It is constructed of obstacles. If there were no obstacles, no trees, no mountains, no buildings, if we existed on an infinite stretching flat plane, space would be difficult to understand.

Time however, is an element that exists more as an idea than anything. It could be argued that time is nothing more than a man-made construct. Let's for a moment, put that idea aside. Let's play pretend. Let us imagine a personification of time, like the mythology of old.

This personification we shall call Father Time. Even in his name we can see a narrative. He's not Dad Time, he's Father Time. Those combination of words create an image in our head. I do not know what it is that you see, but this is what I see, an elderly man. A long spiraling beard that seems impossibly long, as if he might step on it if he is not paying attention.

For that is a problem with someone who is beyond the measure of time. Your attention begins to wane when confronted with the mundane. Things like clothes (which he sometimes forgets to wear), and beards escape your attention when your span of consciousness if eternal.

I imagine Father Time being somewhat distracted. I would think that he can see the beginning of time as easily as he can see the end, and everything in between. He's not omniscient per say, that takes on some serious ramifications. God-like ramifications, and we don't want to put Father Time in the same arena as some of the heavier hitters.

I imagine Father Time was chosen...by someone, or something, to do this job. And to Father Time, this is a job. It is an obligation to him. An obligation he would gladly hand off to another if he did not have such good work ethic. You see, like time, Father Time is laborious. He seems to stretch on into infinity, and perhaps he does.

But even infinity, even laborious amounts of infinity reach a point, a breaking point if you will.

When you can look into all moments of time, but your only true interaction with all of those moments, is that you exist to make sure that those moments exist, you lose touch. And what happens when we lose touch? That very thing that we do not have, becomes more achingly apparent to us than anything else. We long to touch. We long to be held.

And even creatures that exist outside of space and time yearn.

And so it was with Father Time. Without ever having held another, he wanted that most of all.

I will not bother you with the details of Father Time's foray into the world of reality as we know it. I won't belabor you with an unlikely romance story of a mousy girl with curly brown hair and an entity of pure energy that until he decided it, did not even have a physical form.

No, that is a tale for another time. It is only after a severe reprimand from the powers that be, those untold and unknowing beings of pure thought that both exist and do not exist, that Father Time would return fully to his celestial abode, having left a sliver of himself to handle affairs in his absence.

But like all stories of forbidden love, a fruit was born from their unimaginable union. A daughter. Redhaired, large eyed and full of a curiosity that would kill a thousand cats.

This is after all, a story of Father Time's Daughter, more so than it is a story about Father Time. Her journey. Her trials and tribulations as the half-cosmic child of an ethereal quasi-deity.

And like many children of a split family, most of her struggle comes from the back-and-forth nature of living with your father on the weekends.

Of course for Father Time's Daughter, the struggle is much more arduous than a three hour ride with her Father and his new girlfriend. It's much more like Persephone's journey into the underworld. A journey into darkness and a resurrection that parallels Christ and Osiris.

Only when Persephone emerges does the mother Goddess Demeter allow vegetation to once again grow and in turn, allow the mortal race to continue.

Father Time's Daughter exists as both a mortal, and what we will call for simplicity's sake, a Celestial. This word means nothing, it is not an actual word that describes and infinite lived family composed of the personifications of ideas and concepts that we humans have attempted to understand for thousands of years. But it is a word, and words have power, and they create structure, which is what the mortal mind craves.

This half Celestial, half human must journey to her father, as surly as the night must follow the day. At first she will not know what this unearthly drive is. She will attribute it to any number of human afflictions, but it is a wanderlust born in the heart of a sun. It is a flame that has no way to be extinguished. It is a thought that will not go away, a feeling that will not relent until it has been addressed.

She will try all manner of things. All the things that humans try in order to see beyond this veil. And then she will try things that do not exist within perception of mortals. And it is within this these imperceptible moments, that she will learn of her lineage and her origin, and what she must do in order to begin her cosmic voyage to a place that does not exist to see a man that is not a man.

She will consult ancient texts that have not been held by human hands in untold millennia. She will perform rituals that will transcend the limits of her earthly understanding. She will look into a multitude of dimensions, searching for some entrance to her father's domain.

Her mind will split, and it will then shatter. She will become a thousand different people, and then each one of those thousand people will perform the exact same rituals and peer into the same dimensions and each in turn will split into a thousand and thousand more.

It will not be until the thousandth time that these same rituals and dimensional peerings have been undertaken, that she will be able to walk through the gateway into a void that exists nowhere but in all places at once. A pocket dimension created to interact with all other forms of reality and unreality.

She will become lost in the void. She will wander. She will encounter things that cannot be. She will encounter things that are not.

Eventually she will find her father's home. She will knock on his door and after a time, he will answer. He will immediately know her. He will not have known her before this. Unlike all of creation, Father Time was unable to see her. The one blind spot in eternity.

He says he would have visited if he had known. She is of course forgiving and of course composed of many personalities, whom almost all agree that he should be forgiven.

Meanwhile in our reality while she has been gone, as it was while Persephone was gone, humanity waits in a frozen wasteland to regain its sustenance. Our universe stopped. Time ceased to move. Father Time was so invested in his daughter's presence that he forgot everything else. Literally everything. All of existence (and some parts of non existence) began to feel the strain of time being stopped.

For your own limited perception of things, try to imagine the two disembodied hands twisting your body like a wet rag. All of what you are is being squeezed out of you, and not to mention the immense physical strain to your body as it twists with the same consistency as a terry cloth wash rag.

Well, that's what happened to reality. Eventually the powers that be came knocking at Father Time's door and gently reminded him that he had a job to do.

He and his daughter had one last embrace and then she went back the way she came, and eventually time began again.    

Every once in awhile, Father Time's Daughter recreates her journey, and all of reality is temporarily suspended, and bits of what it is, slowly gets squeezed out of it.

Most of the time we don't notice.