weaselandfriends - Tumblr blog

weaselandfriends · 2 months

Text

Detailed insight into the planning behind a serial work. Some of the revelations here about what was planned and what came about off the cuff totally surprised me. (It probably gives good insight into the kind of writer I am that if I encountered the 4 year versus 8 year inconsistency my route would have been to forget it happened)

Here are some fun / amusing / potentially-interesting facts about the process of writing and plotting Almost Nowhere, if anyone's curious.

Major spoilers for the whole of Almost Nowhere under the cut.

(There's really no way to spoiler-censor this material without rendering it incomprehensible. If you haven't read the book, do that first before reading this post.)

(1)

A large fraction of the book's eventual plot emerged from my attempts to patch a single, in-some-sense trivial continuity error I made while writing the very first chapter.

The Mooncrash section of that chapter ends with this sentence (emphasis added):

All parties were used to stillness, now, for the Mooncrash was nearly four years old.

And a few paragraphs later, in the opening of the Academy section, we get this (emphasis added again):

For (as everyone knows) the Shroud is upon us and while it tolerates the Academy — as it presently is, as it has been for the last eight years, a chrysalis, preparing itself step by minuscule step [...]

So: The Mooncrash is 4 years old. The Academy crash is at least 8 years old, and indeed older.

Yet the Mooncrash is also as old as the crash system itself! It was made by humans, during the period between the discovery of the anomalings and the mass-crashing of the human race. (This is only shown in the second chapter, but I had it in mind before then.)

How long has the human race been crashed, then? At most 4 years, and at least 8 years? How could that possibly be?

It would have been easy enough to just edit the chapter, but that's not how I do things. Restrictions, famously, breed creativity. I enjoy attempting to solve puzzles I have inadvertently created for myself, and many of my best ideas have been produced through this process.

It would also have been simple and easy to merely say: "OK, I guess time elapses at different subjective rates, in different crashes."

Amusingly, I ended up doing that anyway! But for some reason, this avenue didn't occur to me at first. By the time I started asking myself whether to include this kind of effect, I already had a different solution in mind.

I spent a lot of time beating my head against the figurative wall, trying to resolve the 4-vs-8-year issue. The early parts of my AN notes are full of this stuff.

----

At some early point, I came up with the idea that the anomalings/shades would deal with troublesome crashes by "rebasing" them, rewriting their histories.

I didn't intend, initially, for this idea to take over the plot as much as it eventually did. It was just a fun idea that underscored the huge power differential between the anomalings and their captives, and felt in line with the Cartesian/Wachowskian themes of transcending a "fake"/illusory world, radically doubting one's own perceptions and memories, etc.

But, having stipulated that "rebases" were a thing, I hit upon the idea that they could be used to modify the total quantity of past (subjective) time inside a crash -- turning 8 years into 4, or vice versa, or whatever.

So, I could fix the problem by stipulating that one -- or both -- of the problematic crashes had already been rebased, in this way.

But why? And by whom?

----

Now, at this early stage, I also had the idea in mind that the character "Anne" would eventually escape from her crash, and that she would have a hand in various major events in the story -- including some events that had already occurred, relative to the "present" of the textual PoV.

But I didn't know, yet, what these interventions actually were.

(I put "Anne" in quotes, here, because in the very early stages I casually assumed that only the PoV Anne introduced in Chapter 1 would be a major character, and that her sisters were merely background material for her personal narrative, like the tower itself. Of course, in the process of thinking through the details of things, I realized that this assumption was needless and indeed counterproductive.)

As often happens when I'm plotting a story, I found that two unknowns slotted neatly into one another, each one providing a potential solution to the problem posed by the other.

We need something for "Anne" to do in the past. Something consequential, something that shows off her newfound agency -- but also something that obscures her role from view. Ideally, something kind of weird, esoteric, "advanced"; something that feels buried inside the deep, dark center of the backstory, which the reader will only "excavate" at the end of a long, strange journey.

And we need someone to rebase the Mooncrash.

That answers the "who?" question. But again -- why?

Well, it was already in the plan that Azad would join forces with Michael, when Michael went in search of his lost Anne. That Anne would meet Azad, as a result, and that it would be Azad who persuades her to return to Michael's crash.

I didn't, at the time, have much else planned for the Anne-Azad connection.

As originally conceived, the "Azad convinces Anne to return" scene was about Azad's uncertain loyalties, and about Anne's lack of exposure to other human beings (and to the power of words, as deployed by human beings with access to real human culture). That is, it merely served specific, separate purposes in the sub-stories of these two characters. There was no intent to set up, or develop, a thread connecting these sub-stories, making Azad a major character in Anne's arc and vice versa.

But that seems like kind of a shame, doesn't it? Why go to the trouble of preparing these characters, and bringing them into contact, if I didn't have anything for them to do together?

Anne and Azad.

We need someone to rebase the Mooncrash.

We need Anne to learn about real human culture, somehow, before she leaves. I knew that, already, though I didn't have a mechanism in mind.

(I also knew, by this point, that causing Azad's appointment as translator was another one of "Anne's" consequential moves. I had conceived of this, at first, as a relatively impersonal act, done only for its historical significance. Indeed, that would have been enough -- but the more the merrier, theme/motivation-wise.)

Problems paired up, interlocked, and became each others' solutions.

(1b)

As is obvious from the above, I didn't have the scenario planned out in very much detail when I wrote the first chapter.

At the time, the story had been gestating in my head for a while, but only as a bunch of vague inklings and intentions.

The proximate cause of writing-the-first-chapter was a sudden and unexpected burst of inspiration. I was riding the bus to a social event, and suddenly my mind was awash with crisp, never-before-glimpsed details about Anne and her tower, the Mooncrash, the Academy, Cordelia's blue dress -- all the stuff of Chapter 1. It felt like a crucial message was being beamed into my brain, VALIS-style, from the Muse / Higher Power.

I had an urge to bail on the social event, turn around, ride back home, and start writing immediately -- what if the magic went away, as suddenly as it had arrived? I resisted that urge and made a perfunctory appearance at the event, but then went back home and wrote as much as I could before falling asleep.

So, when I was writing that chapter, stuff like "four years" and "eight years" wasn't based on any single coherent picture, just vibes and vague inklings.

(I think 4 years probably sounded like the right amount of time for G&A to have been in the Mooncrash, character-wise. Meanwhile, Hector's ascension from the Academy had to be long enough ago that there would be no direct overlap between Hector and any of the current students. The "Bad Old Days" had to feel like something you'd only hear about in rumors, or from authority figures who probably weren't telling the full story.)

(2)

Like TNC before it, Almost Nowhere was originally conceived as relatively simple and straightforward story, only to become something much weirder and more complicated as I fleshed out the details.

As I said above, I only had a very vague "plan" at the outset of the writing process. But I kinda knew where I was going with it, in very broad strokes.

The original arc, insofar as it existed at all, was something like:

The bilateral / anomaling tension is introduced.

The bilateral PoV characters come to an understanding of their situation.

Many of the bilateral PoV characters join up with Hector Stein, who is already trying to defeat the anomalings and free humanity from the crashes.

Azad temporarily sides with the anomalings, and Anne temporarily returns to her captive state. But both them "come around" eventually.

Anne eventually triumphs over Michael, delivers a dramatic monologue castigating him for imprisoning her (etc.), and mounts a successful escape.

Shortly after Anne's escape, some (TBD!) resolution to the main conflict is achieved. Whatever it is, it is proposed/spearheaded by the bilateral faction (and specifically Anne herself), and it somehow exemplifies "the bilateral way of thinking/being."

The humbled anomalings conclude that "the bilateral way of thinking/being" has its advantages, both practically and morally.

So the story, as originally conceived, was much more straightforwardly about the "good" PoV humans fighting back against aliens.

It unabashedly took the bilateral side in the conflict, and it ended with a "beauty of our weapons" sort of moment in which the bilaterals are both victorious and righteous, and in which these two kinds of success are closely linked and almost merged.

I have to imagine that, even in counterfactual worlds where some things went differently, I never would have stuck to this version of the story all the way through.

Because, one way or the other, I would have eventually realized that.. like... this version of the story kind of sucks, right?

I mean, why go to the trouble of introducing these aliens, and trying to make them interesting, only to say "nah, actually these guys were just wrong, it's us and our existing 'ordinary' pre-conceptions that are right, and that's what the story was about all along"?

It would have been "inventing a guy to be mad at," as the saying goes.

Not a great foundation for a story. And the least interesting possible direction to go in, given this kind of setup.

It also presents a seemingly unresolvable tension, for the writer, about how to portray the distinctively "bilateral" nature of the bilateral side in the conflict.

If "bilateral" is as broad a category as the anomalings say it is -- if you and I and all of us, whatever other qualities we possess, participate equally in this sin -- then it's hard to strike a note of emotional triumph around the quality of "bilaterality" that doesn't feel wrong, vacuous, or bloodlessly abstract.

"Woo, yeah, humans are great!" I mean, are they? All of them? You don't get to say "well, only the good ones," here, or "in their ideals if not always their acts," or anything like that. Everyone is included in the relevant category, except for the guys-who-aren't that were invented for this specific story.

It's difficult to make this land properly, in the same way it would be difficult to write a story that inspires "carbon-based life pride" or "having-DNA pride" or the like in its reader.

So this version of the story was dead on arrival. And indeed, by the time I was thinking through the stuff chronicled in (1) above, this version of the story felt like a provisional placeholder, at best, in my mind.

Nonetheless, there are various echoes of it in the story I eventually landed on.

For example, in the original version of "Anne's" escape -- conceived in a much more straightforwardly positive way -- I had Anne reading "real" books in secret, drawing moral strength from them, and then including a bunch of literary quotes in her big dramatic monologue to Michael. (I took inspiration, here, from John the Savage reading Shakespeare in Brave New World.)

And I had the idea that "Anne," being an autodidact, would read omnivorously without making culture-bound distinctions familiar to you and me; that her selection of quotes, in the monologue, would put low culture alongside high culture, infamous books alongside famous ones, etc.; and as a particular case, that it'd be fun if -- before going on to quote Shakespeare and co. -- she began the whole thing by quoting Ayn Rand.

And that one idea stuck, even if the rest of it didn't.

(Or, consider how the idea of "a powerful move in the conflict that exemplifies the bilateral way of thinking/being" actually crops up multiple times in the finished story, right up to its last scenes. One can see traces of it in the "trick" that obsesses Michael, in the use of autobiographical writing to build up nostalgium, and in Annabel's improved crash design.)

(3)

I came up with the Mirzakhani Mechanism relatively late, in between writing Chapter 13 and writing Chapters 14-15 (in which the MM is introduced).

The MM was a product of looking back at the sci-fi elements that already existed in the story, like crashes and rebases, and trying to invent some single underlying explanation that covered all of them in a relatively parsimonious way.

This basically "worked," I think -- it certainly worked better than I had been expecting, after playing the dangerous game of "write a bunch of weird stuff and hope you'll be able to explain it all later." (I remember talking to one reader who was shocked that I hadn't had the MM in mind from the very beginning, which was flattering.)

It also had unintended consequences that kinda took over the story, but largely in a good way.

Earlier, I had planned to have the post-rebase crash timelines "screened off" from the outside world somehow, so that rebasing a crash wouldn't mess up the timeline of the outside world. But, once I'd fixed the idea that "rebasing is an MM event" in place, I realized that this wasn't consistent with the way MM events were meant to work. Instead, the exposition in Ch. 15 directly implies the stuff about rebases that Grant realizes much later in Ch. 41.

Once I'd noticed this, it was obvious that it was extremely important, and I re-incorporated it into the broader plot.

On a related note, I eventually decided that the account of the anomalings "going backward in time to our era" in Ch. 15 didn't really make sense. This meant I needed a different, more viable way anomalings and bilaterals to exist at the same point in time.

This line of thought, along with several others (like "what happened to all the nonhuman organisms?" and "which parts of the MM multiverse are real?"), eventually led me to invent Everywhere-Heaven and the beasts.

That happened right at the start of 2022, between Chapters 21 and 22.

It quickly became clear that the E-H/beasts stuff could be put to a lot of valuable use in story's third act, which was largely a worrying blank space in my head (even at this point!). From thereon out, I worked on fleshing out the third act behind the scenes while writing the second.

Not coincidentally, Chapter 22 contains a ton of E-H-related foreshadowing, and also some hints that human scientists (like Aidan in Ch. 15) had never fully understood the anomalings.

The use of Maryam Mirzakhani, a real (and recently deceased) mathematician, was a weird choice and arguably one in poor taste. All I can really say in defense of it is that it came to me suddenly, and had a number of properties that fit the vibe of the part of the story in which it appeared, and I have a policy of "going with my gut" when it suggests such things to me.

I felt similarly about this choice and another thing introduced in Ch. 15, the nuclear attack intended to kill scientists. Both of these things underscored the fact that the story took place in an alternate reality. And both felt sort of "edgy," "too dark," "too close to the real world" compared to the tone of the story so far. But I wanted to take the story to new places in the coming acts -- "darker," "more real" places -- and something felt right about introducing these elements at this exact point, as signposts providing an indication of where things were headed.

(4)

The phrase "NOWHERE TO HIDE" was originally "NO MERCY," in my notes.

And the abbreviation "NM" for "NO MERCY" was used throughout my notes for Nowhere-To-Hide related stuff, e.g. "NM Annes."

This wasn't the product of much thought, just the first thing that came to mind that had roughly the correct vibe. I almost immediately concluded that I'd have to replace "NO MERCY" with something else in the work itself, since it would seem like an Undertale reference that I didn't intend to make.

"Moon" was originally just a placeholder name -- a shorthand for "the 'NM Anne' who rebased the Mooncrash." But I liked the idea of actually using it, once it had occurred to me.

The corresponding placeholder name for A11 was "Ling," as in "linguist" (but also an actual name).

(5)

I went through 3 different outlines of the third act.

Really, there was a first outline, which was really bad, and then there were two slightly-different versions of a very different outline that mostly corresponds to the finished draft.

The first, bad outline was amusingly titled "notes-satisfying-ending.txt", because I explicitly used this post about "satisfying endings" as a guideline while writing it.

(To be clear, I don't think the linked post was to blame for the badness of that first outline. I didn't ultimately find the post very helpful as writing advice, but the "satisfying ending" outline wasn't even a "satisfying ending" in the post's own terms, and was also bad in unrelated ways.)

I don't want to go into much detail about the bad outline. It was really bad, and also really different from what eventually occurred. It's honestly a pretty embarrassing document.

A lot of the key ideas were there (E-H, etc.), and the very end of the story was roughly the same. But it had a ton of needless flaws that I later corrected. Various existing character arcs and motivations were dropped and never picked up, or suddenly diverted in some new and unfruitful direction; way too much time was spent on getting characters and objects from point A to point B, or otherwise sort of rambling about in a way that didn't matter in the end; it included a lot of whimsical "fun ideas" that weren't necessary and would have added clutter to an already very full canvas; etc.

I never got to the point of building a chapter-by-chapter version of this outline, but I'm sure it would have much longer than the existing third act, also.

The existing third act is pretty long, but it was actually the result of an aggressive pruning and tightening process.

If the "satisfying-ending" outline had a single greatest flaw, it was terrible pacing. Lots of slack, lots of empty space, and when big things did happen, they came out of nowhere, not really prompted by what came immediately before them.

The next draft of the ending resulted from taking the raw materials of "satisfying-ending," purging all the dross, re-thinking all the obviously flawed stuff, and then trying to rearrange the pieces in front of me in a way that was maximally "tight" and interconnected, with questions and tensions introduced and then resolved in a rapid-fire manner, and without any major thread "sitting around in the background" long enough to feel stale, or get forgotten.

That outline was in a file called "notes-good-end.txt."

Much later, I tightened up the plan even further, merging some things that were originally in separate chapters. This was in a file called "notes-true-end.txt", and -- true to its name -- was the version reflected in the book itself.

So there was "satisfying-ending," which sucked; "good-end," which was good; and "true-end," which was slightly better.

(I realize the multiplicity of the ending, and the account of deliberate "tightening" etc., is in apparent tension with my recent account of working by direct inspiration.

There are a few things I can say about this tension.

For one, it really is true that the third act of AN was more deliberately reasoned-out, and less directly-inspired, than some of the earlier stuff. This is kind of inevitable: you don't get to do anything after an ending, that's what an ending is, and so you have to deliberately try to make the final act of a story fully work as a thing unto itself, rather than writing checks in the hope of cashing them at some later point.

And separately, I do think the final version of the ending feels "more real," "more true to the work" than the satisfying-ending draft.

I think I was aware, even while composing "satisfying-ending," that it felt off and wrong in some ways. But it was only after going through the exercise of creating a complete ending -- some sort of complete ending -- that I was able to look back and say "OK, this fits, but this doesn't fit," and distill something that actually felt right.)

#writing #nostalgebraist #almost nowhere

59 notes · View notes

weaselandfriends · 2 months

Text

I have my own theory on the muse-and-transmitter process described here. In short, I think it is because the writer is not practiced in technical craftsmanship that they have this feeling of divine inspiration. It's because they themselves do not understand on a rote, technical level the mechanical processes guiding their actions that they ascribe it to an outside muse or divine force of inspiration.

The relationship between "technical craft" and "art" varies from medium to medium, and I think prose fiction is where technical craft is at its least visible or innately knowable. The primary skill necessary for prose fiction is being literate, which is a skill most people in modern times develop at an extremely young age, before they are fully cognizant of themselves and their position in the world. Poetry, film, painting all require technical skills that are usually learned at an older age, and so the people who learn those skills are much more aware of those skills as "skills."

(Even in those fields, instinct remains a driving force. I simply think it's more apparent in prose fiction.)

An essay I adore, Get a Real Degree by Elif Batuman, tears down the idea of writer's workshops. It has this to say on the notion of "craft" in writing:

Shame also explains the fetish of ‘craft’: an ostensibly legitimising technique, designed to recast writing as a workmanlike, perhaps even working-class skill, as opposed to something every no-good dilettante already knows how to do.

Craft as a concept is innately tied to something that can be studied and practiced. It's somewhat at odds with prose fiction conceptually, which came long after poetry, popularized in the 1700 and 1800s, when the shift from feudalism to mercantilism and capitalism led to an explosion of the until-then minuscule middle class. Prose appealed to people educated enough to read but not so specifically educated to, say, understand iambic pentameter. It was specifically a craft-less mode of writing, which broadened its appeal. (Think about Shakespeare, himself a crowd pleaser, who is certain to have in every play a comic relief Fool who spouts bawdy puns in plain-spoken prose to contrast the blank verse soliloquys of Hamlet and King Lear.) It's no coincidence that the first true literary movement to emerge out of prose fiction in the Western world was realism, which depicted tableau-like cross-sections of society from the wealthiest elites to the most impoverished beggars. By freeing literary art from "craft," all strata of population found it accessible, both to create and consume.

Nowadays, as literature has ceded most of its ground in the cultural lexicon to the even more accessibly consumed (if not accessibly created) film, and the publishing industry is focused more and more on a narrowing target audience of upper middle-class elites, there has become a need for "craft" to become an integral part of prose fiction. Batuman's quote suggests this is due to upper-class shame; but at the same time, "craft" is a way to exclude those who don't have the disposable income to attend writer's workshops.

The notion of the Muse itself came from a time before literary craft was understood on a technical level. The ancient Greeks would need to wait until Aristotle, 700ish years after their society's foundation, for the first real work of literary criticism that sought to understand how and why literature works in an academic way. The European Renaissance writers would call upon the Muse in imitation of the Greco-Roman works they adored, but were themselves highly educated elites with a 99.99th percentile comprehension of metrical form and rhetoric.

All this is to say, many modern prose authors, lacking a specific education in creative writing, cannot put academic words to their own talent and return this vision of the Muse. I would contend it is not divine inspiration but instinct that drives them. They have read and seen quality fiction, fiction they admire, and imitate it unconsciously, in a synthesized mass with all the other works they admire, and the output is something that confounds them because the process occurred unconsciously over the course of their lives, rather than beaten into their brains via school. The outcome is that the curtains may be blue, and the author may have simply thought the curtains should be blue, but that does not mean there was no reason why the curtains were blue, regardless of what the author consciously understood or intended.

the light, and the glass

So there's this particular quality I have, as a fiction writer, and I have very little sense of how common or rare it is.

The quality is closely related to that famous Michaelangelo quip, about his sculptures being "already complete within the marble block":

The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work. It is already there, I just have to chisel away the superfluous material.

This is how I feel, too, about my works of fiction. They feel like "real things" that "already exist," in some important sense, before I write them down -- or, indeed, before I even fully know what they contain.

So, for instance, if I haven't yet thought of an ending for a story I'm playing with in my mind, I nonetheless have a vivid sense that this particular story has an ending, and that this ending already is whatever it happens to be. It's only that I haven't managed to "see" it yet.

To clarify the point, consider the contrast between this thing, and two relatively familiar ways of thinking about how fiction gets made:

Conscious, goal-directed craft/artifice. Intending to write a Satisfying Plot in which each character has an Arc, the Story Beats follow logically from one another and are arranged with what is called Good Pacing, the proverbial Cat is Saved, etc., and "solving for" these desiderata in a conscious manner. Or, intending to create something much more outré and unsettling than all that -- but having some specific set of (outre, unsettling) intentions in mind, at the outset, and concocting/arranging the elements of your work in a conscious way guided by these intentions.

Free-wheeling, self-expressive "creativity." Just do whatever, man! Follow your bliss. The canvas is blank and anything is possible. Whatever you feel like putting into that empty space, go ahead and put it there. (The key thing being that, after "putting something there," you'll look and recognize something with origins in you, and your own whims and feelings at a particular moment.)

For me, though, the process of writing, and even of "ideating" (plotting, etc.), feels like a kind of transcription or channeling, as opposed to either of the above.

When I say "channeling," here, I don't mean that I have some actual, mystical belief in a supernatural object revealing itself through me. Not in the woo-woo sense anyway; whatever is really going on here, I am sure it "merely" involves the mechanics of the human mind, as implemented in the physical human mind and body.

But I do mean that it feels a lot like that. Like the story -- and not just the story part of the stories, but the whole thing, the "art object" -- has some real prior existence outside of me, first.

Like I am merely doing my best to "get it right," to be a perfect transmitter for the radio signal. To "do justice" to the "real thing," in the secondary act of writing words onto a page.

To be a courier who transports a valuable object from some originary otherworld into a place which happens to be called "existence" -- and to ensure, as much as possible, that it suffers no disfiguring scrapes during the journey.

----

I should say, though, that there's a lot of the "#1" above in my process too, the conscious-artifice thing.

Except... when I do that kind of thing, the intentions all come from the "real object," and my goal is to fill in whatever I can't see of that object so that everything I can see is preserved.

So: I will come to know, surely and indefeasibly, that the story must have some particular feature. (An event, a little moment, a character feeling a certain way at a certain time, even a specific turn of phrase.) Better to say: I know the story does have this feature. I see it in the marble.

But I can't see everything that's there, already, in the marble. And sometimes these glimpses-from-the-beyond are strange, inconvenient, difficult to "fit" into the current story (or perhaps into any story) in a natural-seeming manner.

And that's my task, when I'm doing the conscious-artifice thing: to take this collection of axiomatically-present glimpses, and build a structure around them into which they can "fit," naturally and even logically, just as if they were ordinary story-building-blocks like their neighbors, being placed here and there for ordinary story-reasons.

----

This has various implications. For one, it determines which kinds of writerly anxieties I suffer from, and which types leave me alone.

Like, I have virtually no self-doubt about my "ideas." About the overall, large-scale goodness-or-badness of the thing I'm creating. At least, not when considered "in principle," in an idealized sense that abstracts away from my actual capabilities as a guy who puts words on pages.

"Was this story, as a whole, a good idea?" is a question I find difficult to ask myself. Even when applied to smaller units, like specific plot points, this kind of question simply goes nowhere when I attempt to think about it. Insofar as my mind can cough up any answer, that answer looks like:

Yes

(after a moment, with mounting bewilderment) Yes, obviously -- how strange even to ask!

(after another moment, and as an afterthought) ...but if it weren't any good, is that really my business? It's not like I came up with it. I was asked to keep it safe and bring it into reality, and I take that duty seriously, but once it has reached its destination I wipe my hands of the matter. Don't shoot the messenger!

It's not, just, that I feel like the "real thing" "already exists." I also feel, always, that the real thing is... really good.

I deeply, thoroughly trust the Muse / Higher Power responsible for originally "making" this stuff. (To speak in relatively woo-woo terms, for ease and clarity.)

The Muse / Higher Power is a seriously skilled artist, much more so than little-old-me; if She makes any errors at all, they are not really mistakes, but "are volitional and are the portals of discovery."

And what's more, there is a sacred, unearthly gleam to the artifacts She makes, perhaps having something to do with that Fairyland, that place-other-than-"existence," in which they are originally made.

It feels like an honor to be designated as a courier for these enchanted things. Perhaps not a deserved honor -- on which more below -- but it's never the nature and value of the transported goods that I doubt.

(There is a definite sense of ritual to the thing that I do, here; a sense of connecting with some other place, definitively apart from our mundane here-and-now, and likewise more important/primary/etc. than the latter. Hence, perhaps, my tendency to not-write for long stretches, and then write in long sustained bursts for many hours at a time, which need a good deal of preliminary building-up-steam before they fully get going; it takes time to pierce, and then fully cross, the veil between worlds. And the various imprints of this stuff on the works themselves are not hard to see, once you're looking for them; they are of course especially transparent in TNC.)

All that being said, I do suffer persistently from a different anxiety.

When Michaelangelo said the thing about the sculpture "already complete within the marble block," he said it as... Michaelangelo.

As a famous, incontrovertibly masterful craftsman. Not a guy likely to suffer from doubts about his ability to put the chisel to the marble block, and reveal precisely that shape which was already there, inside.

But I'm not Michaelangelo. I'm not even sure I'm a good craftsman, much less a great one.

Certainly I've never conceived of myself in this way, even aspirationally. (Well, maybe I did in childhood and adolescence, but that was a very different thing from what I'm talking about now.)

I don't do what a person would do, if they wanted to be a Writer, and strove to be the best one they could. I don't, for the most part, practice my craft. I write because there's a Real Thing that only I can see, and it's not going to make into Existence any other way.

And since I don't write by habit or as practice -- since I only write at times when a Real Thing is in need of some incarnating-work, and I'm the only one around to do it -- I'm not exactly an ideal candidate for the job.

I am like a man who never especially wanted to be a sculptor, never practiced the trade, and was never more-than-ordinarily good with his hands, even... who is then, suddenly, struck with a very literal version of the experience Michaelangelo described.

Who, suddenly and inexplicably, begins to actually see a sculptural masterpiece lurking inside, whenever he looks at a faceless marble block.

What is our protagonist to do? Naturally, he will find a chisel, and begin chipping away. He will feel that these things need to be freed from their prisons, released and revealed to all the world, so that all the world can delight in them as he already does.

But he will be very aware of the unfamiliar way the chisel sits in his hand; of the way that hand trembles, and fails to meet the mark, and sometimes shaves off precious bits of what was really and originally a beautifully formed hand -- so that the hand, in the realized artwork, forever bears some oddity of shape which was not a part of what he saw inside the block, but only a consequence of his own shameful incompetence.

He will feel that his works, such as they are, are an odd mixture of amateurish craft and direct, divine inspiration. Insofar as he is Great, it will be because he has had Greatness thrust upon him, from without. He will feel, sometimes, that his successes have been obtained through a kind of cheating, not won fair-and-square.

And he will feel, always, a particular kind of (justified) impostor syndrome: an awareness that what he is doing, when he sits down before the marble block with the chisel in hand, is a very different sort of thing than what is usually called "sculpting," and what is being practiced by careful, hard-working aspirants just down the road, at the local workshop. The students there call themselves "sculptors," and our protagonist supposes he must call himself a "sculptor" too -- but he knows that behind this coincidence of language, a vast and strange chasm is hidden.

(I worry that this metaphor sounds flattering to me -- I am divinely inspired, they are merely toiling away and following the rules -- when I don't mean it that way at all.

In particular, note that there is nothing in our story to rule out some of the "real" sculptors down the road from also being visionaries who see the finished work in the block. Indeed, I got the metaphor from Michaelangelo, who was precisely this way.

I am only saying that all the conceivable configurations of craft/inspiration are in fact possible: just as it is possible to be skilled but uninspired, it's possible for inspiration to strike someone who lacks the capacity to fully realize its content. And that is how I feel, about my own attempts to create.)

----

When I was getting near the end of Almost Nowhere, and struggling with this kind of feeling, Esther would often reassure me by saying: "you are the light, and you are the glass it shines through."

In other words: you are a transmitter, and you are the source of the transmitted signal. Remember that in actual fact, the "real thing in the marble" came from your own little brain, just as much as the rest of it did. In actual fact, if there is a Muse and a Higher Power, it is really just an additional part of the same creature that holds the chisel, and worries over its trembling hand.

I did, indeed, find this very reassuring. And that's a funny thought, in a way! I imagine that for some people -- and indeed for me, in many other endeavours -- the same sentiment could easily have the opposite effect.

"It's all on you. It's all your responsibility. If any of it is bad, there's no one else to blame. If there is any 'Higher Power' at all, it is only the one inside you at all times, and not able to save you through unexpected intervention, from some true outside."

But I already believed, thoroughly, in the magical potency of the goods I was charged with transporting. If I was (somehow!) their maker, too, then (somehow!) the root of that glimpsed, alien magic was in me.

And so, perhaps, I could trust myself to ferry them into Existence without ruining, without even much dimming, the fairy-gleam from elsewhere that made them what they were.

#writing

243 notes · View notes

weaselandfriends · 2 months

Text

And yet if ever something I wrote got famous I feel like even if a team of literary analysts pored over it and added meticulous footnotes I feel like there'd be stuff that would be incommunicable in the true visceral sense because of lack of personal exposure to the Homestuck zeitgeist and the nuances of its symbolic and thematic vibes when it was still super huge.

I saw the film Skinamarink. It was funny afterward reading the critics comment on it, clearly emerging from a world of traditional film media, and try to pinpoint its exact filmic influences. Lynch, Kubrick, et cetera. To me, though, it was painfully obvious that rather than any of those names, the film was influenced specifically by YouTube analog horror: Mandela Catalogue, Gemini Home Entertainment, and so forth. It did not surprise me to learn later that Skinamarink's director did indeed run an analog horror YouTube channel prior to creating Skinamarink.

Homestuck's influence is notable to me in how singular it is. Skinamarink was influenced by a bunch of analog horror series, all of which emerged around the same time and had similar elements that are then reflected in Skinamarink. Homestuck is a singular point from which the works it influenced emerged. Undertale isn't influenced by a genre, it's influenced by Homestuck specifically. Hussie's web comic artist contemporaries, with whom he was often friends (Ryan North, Bryan Lee O'Malley), perhaps shared his sense of humor, but they didn't share his narrative sensibilities, and what Hussie created is pretty clearly distinct from their output. Homestuck wasn't part of a zeitgeist, it didn't emerge from a zeitgeist, it created a zeitgeist of its own. That's a testament to its utter uniqueness as a work.

Thinking about how everything I personally create and any commentary on or experience I have with a piece of media will intrinsically be in conversation with Homestuck in a fundamental way that will be entirety incomprehensible to anyone who wasn't on the MSPA forums from like 2012—2014.

Very wistful about that. It's like a cultural mindset. Calling Homestuck "influencial" on how I create and interact with media is like saying that the Biblical canon was "influencial" on European history and culture. Homestuck was my culture. It was omnipresent and foundational to every artistic sensibility I developed as a teenager and young adult.

Or maybe I'm underestimating the degree to which others can grok foreign context, but it's for sure something most people will miss when just, talking to me. And I spent so many years assuming other people I spoke to had that same experience that sometimes even now I forget most people don't share it.

#homestuck

519 notes · View notes

weaselandfriends · 2 months

Text

Pokemon Fic Update

Been some time. Here's what's happened.

After writing and rewriting the first few chapters of the story for months between October and December, and not liking the output, I took a step back, reassessed some things about the story itself and about my mentality toward it, and started on a new draft (the sixth) on February 3. This sixth draft has so far been going exceedingly well, and as of today (February 28) I've written 32,500 words.

I expect to keep up my current pace, as I have the full story fairly well planned at this point. About two weeks from now I'll have to take an unwanted but mandatory week-ish break to deal with another obligation, but that's the only roadblock I foresee.

I expect the story to end up around 100,000 to 150,000 words (i.e., around the length of Modern Cannibals or Cockatiel x Chameleon), so at this rate I should finish the draft around June. Then I'll spend some time editing it and post it serially at an accelerated rate.

The story also now has a title:

WHEN I WIN THE WORLD ENDS

#bavitz

14 notes · View notes

weaselandfriends · 2 months

Text

Unfortunately Jeff Bezos did not pay me to write Cockatiel x Chameleon

so Anaïs Nin wrote Delta of Venus, a collection of erotica that includes smatterings of adultery, rape, incest, necrophilia, homosexuality, pretty heavy stuff for the 1940s, but it wasn't actually published until decades later as it was commissioned for private consumption by The Collector, an American business magnate who was also ordering smut from other writers like Henry Miller.

this is really fucking funny, like these days if Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates wanted to get a little hot under the collar they would just go on AO3 like everybody else, but how much better would it be if they threw cash at Legit Writers and then when they received some Legit Writing they ordered them to take out all the poetry... add more graphic scenes... make it clearer who is sticking what where... no I said no poetic language, cut it out!

but I think it would be even funnier if The Collector turned out to just be a framing device for any artist who wants to let their freak flag fly but is worried they'll be judged for it (probably doesn't apply to Nin), or needs a way to overcome the internal sense of cringe (also not applicable): it's not me that wants to make this filth, I'm merely engaging in work for hire here, I'm the blind instrument of a myopic muse!

basically any time you make something that other people scorn just say oh yeah some crazy American paid me the big bucks for that one, wild isn't it.

247 notes · View notes

weaselandfriends · 3 months

Text

Found out what this video is from. It's a game called Disillusion ST, which can be downloaded for free on itch.io.

I recommend this game, which combines exploration through surreal landscapes with grim, frequently bleak and depressing quests. I've played it for about 10 hours and it's wormed its way into my head.

youtube

Odd video I found that I liked

#disillusion st

10 notes · View notes

weaselandfriends · 3 months

Text

Tokyo subway sarin attack (the "Aum Incident"): March 20, 1995

Neon Genesis Evangelion premiere: October 4, 1995

Further changes to the plot were made following the Aum Shinrikyo sect's sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway in March. Azuma Hiroki has said that the original Evangelion story was "too close to reality" from Anno's point of view. Anno thought that the original scenario was not suitable for broadcasting, and he feared censorship. However, he also criticized Aum Shinrikyo, because "they lost any contact with reality". For this reason, Azuma stated that Evangelion "is an intrinsic critique of Aum". (From Wikipedia)

(Image source: 16bit Sensation)

#neon genesis evangelion #16bit sensation #aum shinrikyo

18 notes · View notes

weaselandfriends · 3 months

Text

youtube

Odd video I found that I liked

#Youtube

10 notes · View notes

weaselandfriends · 4 months

Note

I just binge'd your Hymnstoke series. Now that HS^2 (HS^BC) is back up and running with James Roach at the helm, I was wondering if you could share your thoughts on the direction that HS^2 and Homestuck Beyond Canon are taking with the new updates?

Before I begin, I'll point you to a previous post I made on the topic of HS^2, back when it was under the previous management.

Truthfully, I still haven't read HS^2, either the old version or the new. I remain uninterested in it conceptually. For me, the Epilogues were the perfect finale to Homestuck and I no longer have any desire to see its story continued or its characters expanded upon.

I think I'm somewhat mismatched with the typical fans of Homestuck. From talking to fans, it seems many of them started reading as teenagers, who found in its something relatable and became invested in the journey of its characters. I wasn't like that. I began reading Homestuck in college. I was not introduced to it via fandom osmosis or seeing art of it or cosplays or so on. I didn't even learn of it from word-of-mouth from one of my friends. I was reading a post someone had made about so-called ergodic literature, which cited House of Leaves and Homestuck as examples. Having read House of Leaves only a few weeks prior, I was intrigued and looked up Homestuck, going into it almost as blind as possible.

As Hymnstoke probably indicates, my interest in Homestuck was literary from the start, and what impressed me most about it was always its boundary-pushing approach to medium and narrative. Even late into Act 6, past the point where most fans might say the story "gets bad" or whatever, Hussie was always, always concerned with that, and that is why I actually prefer Act 6 to Act 5 despite this being a fairly controversial take. I think in Act 6 Hussie is far more experimental, far more willing to take artistic risks and pursue innovative formal exercises. So, even as more traditional markers of narrative quality like character and plot stagnant, meander, or suffer altogether, Homestuck to me always felt like it was still growing in new and exciting directions.

At least until the series of super long pauses that ended with the whimpering and frankly pathetic Collide + Act 7 combo, two tragically substanceless flashes that really add nothing new or unexpected whatsoever.

The Epilogues, however, were a return to form on the formal front. The competing Meat and Candy narratives, though told in arguably Homestuck's most traditional format yet (prose narrative), are intertwined in ways that push even this ancient medium to new, unseen limits. In that sense, even ignoring all the plot/character stuff I mentioned in my previous HS^2 post, the Epilogues were a culmination of all Homestuck meant for me. A thematic capstone: A return to a traditional format that is then enlivened through daring experimentation. My Hymnstoke series often mentioned the theme of the meteors wiping out Earth so that a new society could be created out of recycled detritus from the old and stagnant world. The Epilogues are that simply in how they are made, and to me that is peak Homestuck, the chief thing that matters most about it.

HS^2 has not seemed interested in formal experimentation at all. The pre-Roach group was mindbogglingly retrograde in eschewing flashes altogether and even, really, art, preferring instead long script-style dialogues. Long pesterlogs were part of Homestuck before, but far from the only part. But there simply seemed to be zero interest in innovation, in doing anything new, in even trying anything new. To me, that's not Homestuck.

I'm not super keyed into the fandom drama, but my understanding is that the old HS^2 group was nasty and combative with the fans, while Roach has attempted to establish goodwill in the fans and repair some of the burned bridges from yesteryear. To that end, his approach seems to be succeeding. But there's a part of me that sees it as being similar to the Star Wars prequels and sequels. The prequels were an unmitigated trainwreck that the fans despised; the sequels, by contrast, began with a soft remake of New Hope that seemed tailored to tell fans "Look! Star Wars is Star Wars again! We're back! It's real! We have practical effects, and on-location filming instead of green screens, and the plot is straightforward instead of trade dispute politics!" It was like JJ Abrams watched the infamous Plinkett review of the prequels and decided to address everything directly, all to reestablish goodwill with fans.

For Episode VII, it worked. Perhaps if the rest of the trilogy were 1-to-1 soft remakes of the original trilogy, it would have continued to work. But the instant the new creators attempted any kind of innovation in the criminally underrated and over-hated Episode VIII, they were raked over the coals, and in the process of backtracking furiously wound up creating something on the same level as the prequels with Episode IX. And nobody was happy in the end.

In the position Roach is in, he can at best muster the kind of nostalgia-baiting soft remake that is so popular and common in Hollywood today, a Homestuck 2.0 rather than a Homestuck^2, something that is not in fact Beyond Canon but enslaved by it. By appealing to the goodwill of fans that's what you have to do, because what the fans love is the ghost of the story they remember, and the reason they come to Homestuck^2 over any of the endless amount of content online is because it has the name Homestuck in it, and they remember Homestuck. Waiter, I'm the critic from Ratatouille, bring me the thing I remember.

But that is conceptually antithetical to the thing I remember. And so, it'll be difficult for it to engender much interest in me. I think there are a lot of exciting, talented creators making amazing original content online today, new boundary-pushing content, a new avant garde, and that's where my interest will lie. I think the members of the Homestuck fandom who had the talent to create content like that, like Toby Fox and perhaps Tamsyn Muir (who I have not read but Gideon the Ninth is certainly popular so it must have some spark to it), have gone ahead and done it for their own original works outside the Homestuck label.

Anyway, those are my rambling thoughts on the matter, again without having actually read either the old or new HS^2, so take them with a grain of salt.

#homestuck #hs^2 #hsbc #homestuck beyond canon

21 notes · View notes

weaselandfriends · 4 months

Text

Some more art of Clownmuffle! Art by Ludmila V, commissioned by a friend of mine.

#clownmuffle #chicago #pmmm #madoka magica #bavitz

12 notes · View notes

weaselandfriends · 4 months

Text

Fascinating series of takes on LitRPGs and progression fantasy, a "dark corner of the internet" I was somehow introduced to via fans of Fargo and Modern Cannibals.

I love these "dark corners," where insular groups of writers develop their own conventions completely divorced from mainstream narrative style. I was introduced to a Pokemon fanfic called The Most Evil Trainer due to someone finding similarities between it and my own idea for a Pokemon fic. I love the stickied post at the top of the story's thread:

How the author wants to treat their Self-Insert character is their own business. Some people like writing basically about an original character. Some prefer maximal realism from a person. Some audiences also find it easier to identify with a SI character than a blank slate character, and other stories treat the SI as a vicarious 'we' experience. This is not one of those stories. It is not necessary for the reader to know everything about a character's motivation. Sometimes things just need to remain in shadow until needed. Delay gratification; character development does not mean spoonfeeding the reader all that can be known about the character. Some things might even be assumed as a more realistic normal human reaction, that a SI is not by default someone who would be alienated from their old life in favor of new adventure. Do not try to force your own preferred motivations on someone else's character that is being written. Fanfiction is still a form of literature, and consciously or subconsciously, writers may be challenging common themes in their genre. Remember, there used to be isekai where people's motivation was clearly 'get me the hell out of here'. InuYasha, Magic Knights Rayearth, Spirited Away, even Digimon counts. So wanting to come home is not any insufficient motivation. So what is the actual problem here?

In short, the author has received flak from commentators because his isekai'd character's primary motivation is wanting to go home, rather than remain in the isekai world. As the post points out, of course, most older isekai had that as the main character's motivation; it's only a relatively recent trend where isekai is seen as a power fantasy and thus the isekai world is preferable to the real world. Yet audience expectations in this insular circuit of literature are primed to expect the protagonist to want to remain in the world, and chafes against a motivation that explicitly counteracts the power fantasy that is seen as core to the genre's appeal.

The original poster in the chain I reblogged smarmily dismisses this sector entirely, but I think small pockets with insular communities and rules is a good microcosm for how popular opinions on literature and film at a larger scale can be distorted by relatively transitory social mores.

For instance, I often see writer's advice that will tell authors to follow the Campbellian hero's journey, or the Pixar three-act model, or some other kind of structural formula that has been tried and tested and found true at a widespread societal level. While these models can indeed work, there is often a subtext to this advice that suggests these models are the only thing that can work, that there must be a beginning, rising action, denouement, et cetera. Even for Campbell, who proclaimed his Hero's Journey an integral part of the human collective subconscious via Jungian pseudoscience, such models are never all-encompassing.

I always recommend authors read literature from a wide variety of cultures and time periods. It's so easy to see works follow conventions that were, at that time and place, considered ironclad and mandatory for any good story, only to skip to another work from another era in another country who thoughtlessly ignores those conventions wholesale in pursuit of their own time's conventions. And, of course, there are works that eschew convention even within their own time and place, and remain timeless anyway.

One of the most startling experiences to my development as a writer was when I discovered anime, which did not happen when I was a teenager, but only after I graduated college, having spent my teen years as a cinephile who gobbled up all sorts of well-regarded (and not well-regarded) films, and having spent my college years delving deep into literary canon. Going from The Iliad and King Lear to Angel Beats and Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-chan (which I initially thought was Angel Beats with an alternate title translation) completely demolished many of my ideas about what was necessary for a "story" to function; Lucky Star in particular put many narrative ideas in my head that would eventually be integral to Cockatiel x Chameleon.

Anime of course has its own conventions, but those conventions are often incredibly alien to the conventions of mainstream western media, which is probably why so many people turn up their nose the instant anime is mentioned. I think you can learn a lot by escaping your own notions of what a story must be and examining narrative from a completely different angle, however.

As a final note, I'll take the time to once more recommend Worth the Candle, a LitRPG progression isekai that has absolutely none of the "fundamental flaws" of the genre described by the original poster in this chain.

so back in the day i read HPMOR, right? like many people. and as it went on (& yudkowsky kept talking about his writing process on tumblr) it became more and more clear that this was fiction approached from an angle i had never really considered before. i had been vaguely aware of places like the spacebattles forum or the dark lord potter forum, where apparently people wrote stories that were mostly just a long-form way to debate “would the USS Enterprise win against a star trek star destroyer”, or whatever. yudkowsky kept saying wild things like “the point of this scene is to vicariously enjoy somebody solving a problem” or “all characters should always do smart things so the reader doesn’t get frustrated with them” or “i wanted to add a short arc where this character doesn’t instantly solve all his problems but i was worried it would alienate the reader”. (see also.) just like, expressing this conceptualization that the point of fiction was to… write a character stomping through a little fake world going from victory to victory so that the reader could enjoy the vicarious glow of having a hard problem presented to them and then immediately resolved. how smart you are for following the line of thought of the main character, who did this smart thing!!

so that was very weird, but it was mostly a singular kind of weirdness. another weird, out-of-touch artifact from the rationalists, like roko’s basilisk but harry potter fanfiction instead.

anyway a while back i stumbled across “Mother of Learning”, and i think my initial response to it was ‘this is less a story with a plot and more a series of obstacles that are presented to the main character to be sequentially overcome’. there was a furry webcomic years ago that was a calvin & hobbes knockoff – small child, stuffed animal companion who became alive when they were alone, whimsy, etc – only where calvin & hobbes left the premise unstated, this comic, roughly 30 strips in, had a whole plot explaining: okay so these are a special kind of magical creature that bonds with children. in this metaphor susie’s mr. bun is also a magical creature. eventually they start going on adventures together. my overall thought was like, oh i guess i was assuming this was a narrative framing device structured around the themes of the work, but actually this was all meant to be fully diagetic and fully explained as part of the work’s “worldbuilding”.

anyway mother of learning is like that but for groundhog day. the time loop isn’t an unexplained device used to inspect a character through a lens, it’s a dragon ball-style training chamber. there are “plot developments” as more information is revealed, but all of that takes a back seat to extensively and exhaustively describing every ability and technique that the main character learns and how they use them to be more powerful. mother of learning is 800,000 words long. the time loop is because they’re actually duplicates of the ‘real people’, in a pocket universe constructed inside of an eldrich monstrosity that was designed to be used every x years by some kind of fated hero to keep it sealed. the main character has to escape partly to make sure some evil cultists don’t unseal some stuff, but mostly so he doesn’t lose all his experience gains.

anyway so reading that brought me to royal road. (i’ve always found the name very funny since my main familiarity with the term is the phrase “there is no royal road to geometry - euclid”, aka there is no shortcut to learning something; you always have to put in the hard struggle of comprehension. it’s actually named after… something from a light novel or something? it used to be a fan forum for a specific work before branching out into a publishing platform.) anyway it’s a place to post stuff, like fanfiction.net or fictionpress or whatever. there is a strong genre constraint: they mostly want to hear about their protagonists getting endlessly more and more powerful, and sometimes collecting a harem of sexy women. it’s for that kind of fiction. reading a few stories there was very illuminating, in that finally i could place HPMOR in a genre: that of the ‘progression fantasy’, a profoundly self-indulgent and formulaic genre that’s mostly just an action story with a lot of the bits stripped away so they can describe how much more powerful the protagonist is getting. a subgenre of this is the ‘litrpg’, which are stories with a diagetic video-game-mechanics layer. people are checking their stats and getting experience from killing monsters and leveling up and all that. a lot of them read like text LPs of videogames that don’t exist. where the author is, of course, executing a min-maxed run.

(there’s a lot of overlap here between progression fantasies and like, xianxia stories? cultivation stories are generally all progression fantasies, and so there’s a lot of overlap thematically.)

anyway so that was kind of a grim awareness of a dark corner of the literary world. this stuff is popular. royal road is pretty aggressively farmed by publishers wanting to license stuff so they can make ebooks or w/e; there are author patreons there that make like, thousands of dollars a month for writing chapter 1394 of “my character with a cool spear levels up more”. i’ve read a bunch of progression fantasies but i wouldn’t say i really enjoyed any of them, partly because a lot of them are really bad at like… constructing a narrative with any kind of stakes. it’s all gonna be jettisoned away in favor of talking more about level ups. it is actually almost exactly the experience of grinding for levels in an RPG: it’s not really fun, but it can be engaging in the moment, and also you get to see a number go up, so that’s like a reward.

(i started writing one of my own as a writing exercise b/c i wanted to try some short-paced serial work that wasn’t porn, and it shot up to uh #40 top-rated on the entire site. it was in the top 10 for a few days. i have some complicated feelings about that.)

recently, i’ve been reading a lot of, uh, gay incest teenage mutant ninja turtles fanfiction. a lot of it is incredibly overwrought. 200k words of characters pining guiltily over each other! soap opera antics with miscommunications and secrets! genre cliches piled up in a big heap and remixed! and like, fanfic as a genre can be real formulaic too, right? a lot of people who read&write fanfic don’t read much else, and there’s absolutely a ‘house style’ for most fanfic. but when i read fanfic i get the sense that the authors are, you know, aware of some literary conventions, of the various aspects that make up a story, and they’re struggling to convey concepts and themes. apparently i’m responsible for inspiring somebody to write what i think is the only sincere donkey/shrek porn fanfic in existence, and personally i think that porn fanfic has a million times the literary and artistic merit as chapter 1400 of randitly fucking ghosthound, because porn, overwrought incest soap opera dramas, is at least saying something about the nature of human desire, whereas most progression fantasy stuff is an utterly self-absorbed thesis on “writing somebody cool and powerful is escapism so i can feel cool & powerful”, stretched out to a million words.

like i guess 'i want to feel powerful’ is an expression of human desire but it’s a particularly flat one. i think a lot about that bit in dead zones of the imagination:

Violence’s capacity to allow arbitrary decisions, and thus to avoid the kind of debate, clarification, and renegotiation typical of more egalitarian social relations, is obviously what allows its victims to see procedures created on the basis of violence as stupid or unreasonable. One might say, those relying on the fear of force are not obliged to engage in a lot of interpretative labor, and thus, generally speaking, do not.

[…]

To be more precise: violence may well be the only form of human action by which it is possible to have relatively predictable effects on the actions of a person about whom you understand nothing. Pretty much any other way one might try to influence another’s actions, one at least has to have some idea who they think they are, who they think you are, what they might want out of the situation, and what their aversions and proclivities are. Hit them over the head hard enough and all of this becomes irrelevant.

a fantasy of having power is, i think, fundamentally a fantasy of never having to know anything you don’t want to, of never having to deal with the consequences of your actions. i feel it’s a particularly grim thing to enshrine into a millon-word epic.

anyway, hi, i’m back on tumblr, i guess. who can say if this will last. i’m still not happy about the porn ban! for reasons hopefully partially explained by the whole bit about porn above. also the increasing sidelining of custom layouts in favor of a uniform interface. sadly even with that it seems like tumblr is basically the only well-travelled social media site that’s not a total algorithmic nightmare, although the first thing i did when i remade this account was to go into the settings and turn off like a dozen algorithmic switches that were all defaulted to 'yes’.

i ended up moving cross-country during the peak of covid b/c my former housemate started having screaming panic attacks literally any time somebody stepped outside the house (literally literally, not emphatically literally). i would not recommend it. now i live somewhere where 'fire’ is a season, which is introducing new complications to my life. we’ll see how things go from here.

oh yeah, also my icon has more points now. i leveled up V:

#litrpg #web fiction #isekai #progression fantasy #writing

512 notes · View notes