#nanowrimo is on the horizon which doesn't actually mean anything but | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

serenfire · 1 month

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Hey! I came here from glitched, and for whatever reason, tumblr absolutely refuses to let the devlog tag load for me, so my apologies if you've answered this before, but- how did you get the idea for glitched? Was it always going to be in this format of tumblr posts/ao3, or did that occur to you later?

Also, absolutely no pressure, but is the project still ongoing?

Hello! The tag redirects here, and I'll check my blog settings to see if there's a problem with it. It's the tag #glitched devlog, if the link doesn't work for you.

The project is in theory ongoing!, and in practice going very very slowly!! I had a bit of a crisis stemming from a med shortage at the beginning of the year, and all of Jan-Feb sucked expeditiously. It was just at the beginning of this month that I've been able to get back on my feet, but through the whole time I have been thinking about glitched every day! So it's going to happen. I believe in myself :)

(I guess it was good timing that the breakdown happened right before I made an official post outlining the plan to continue glitched, because that would have been blown out of the water. But, instead of hearing anything from me, I guess what happened was I released the demo as part of NaNoWriMo and then went completely radio silent! lol)

As for the inspiration behind glitched (I wrote a lot):

I've wanted to make an unfiction/ARG focused on tumblr blogs and ao3 accounts and fan culture at large since last summer. I was originally inspired by explaining SKAM to my youngest sibling, and when I elaborated on the joy of following different pieces of a story posted by different characters and watching their personal stories collide in ways that were representative of what it's like to exist in the world as a teenager, I was like: damn somebody's got to do the chronically online fan culture version of this.

As someone who grew up on the internet, I have sooo much to say on what social media as a person's only social outlet does to your perception of how communication works, what reading/writing fic for the express purpose of connecting with authors/fans (& using it solely as a means to an end instead of a joy in itself) does to your brain (like being an internet influencer, except in this very specific niche where it's only about attention and not money), devoting large swaths of your time to something that you consciously view as Not Very Important but all the Actually Important stuff you do in your life Sucks Balls and exploring that dichotomy of depression, etc etc.

I did a bit of research into unfiction and ARGs: looked at Mystic Messenger, Marble Hornets, Neurocracy, myhouse.wad, the SCP community, the Backrooms community. Lovingly thumbed through my favorite postmodern books: Pale Fire, House of Leaves, If On a Winter's Night a Traveler.

Toodled around thoughts of any possible plot that could justify making a tumblr- and ao3-focused story actually on the platforms themselves, but I couldn't figure out a compelling plot that justified actually making accounts and posting on them at specific times. I briefly had the idea to write a horror narrative from the perspective of someone writing a callout post on Google docs, which would be updated every day with the posts from each character involved. (I realized that it was going to have to go in the direction of Deep Shit In Real Life horror for the callout post angle to work, because my idea of making it an ambiguous supernatural horror did not mesh with why one makes a callout post.)

When my antidepressants kicked in, I kind of forgot all of this and got into cyberpunk lit instead. By the time NaNoWriMo was on the horizon, I had been combing through niche games on itch.io and had a wild idea to combine a story focused on tumblr & ao3 with my cyberpunk novel idea, and thus glitched was born.

Besides, it was so much easier to strangle css into twine and have control over it as an itch.io game instead of somehow keeping track of actual posts on actual websites posted at actual specific times (dear god, could you imagine the stress).

All that to say: thanks so much for asking!! I'm really glad you enjoyed reading glitched. I've really enjoyed what I've written so far!

If you'd want to be kept in the loop and perhaps beta read things when I sort myself out, please message me, that would be so awesome! (open offer btw. I love sharing my work with people <3)

(you don't even have to want to beta read it specifically you can just say hi, i'd love to pick your brain about what you think of the format of glitched as a whole)

#glitched: reborn #glitched #glitched devlog #ask #anonymous

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