First, the flavor and framing. You go to sleep as normal, but when you awaken, you find yourself transported to a dark, underground lair, all tunnels and chitinous furnishing, ornamented with distended protuberances and segmented geometries. You glance around for any indication of what’s going on, and then…

Your abductors reveal themselves as changelings who’ve been surveilling you and those around to you for several years. One of the changelings you can see has already copied your face. After all, they have extensive observational data draw on.

When you reblog a post on tumblr, you create a new post.

It’s one of the weirder parts of how that hellsite is implemented. In programming terms, this is the difference between passing by reference and passing by value. On other sites, sharing a post is just a fancy way of linking to it. If the original gets deleted, it’s gone. Unless you saved a screenshot.

A friend mentioned how frustrating it is to try to come up with powers, only to realize “Worm already did that,” and the exercise becomes less fun as a result of that lack of novelty.

I can sympathize. I’m not the only one to notice that parahuman powers have a particular flavor or to grapple with it while trying to generate powers.

But I don’t find myself worrying about copying Worm. (In part, this is because I have often copied Worm on purpose; the lack of originally doesn’t stop me) but I also don’t feel that I’m recapitulating Worm when I don’t want to. But am I right to think that?

First, let me reintroduce Newcomb’s Problem.

For this thought experiment, imagine there is a predictor capable of observing human behavior and correctly deducing how one will behave in the future. Maybe this predictor has psychic powers, or is really good at reading body language. I often see it described as a superintelligent AI system. More on that later.

imagine a omniscient god-like entity, or some hypertechnological race, or anything of the sort really — this is just the background premise that isn’t too important. what matters is the profound accumulated knowledge they have access to amounts to a near-perfect fidelity data-mapping of an entire world.

they know the location of every atom and electron on the planet and beyond. but there’s a problem: this is too much information. what can you actually do with all that? you don’t care about a cloud of a trillion atoms, you care about the objects and what they’re doing.

a well-known bad way to write about nonhuman characters is using mere synonyms. this is what it meant by accusing someone of “calling a rabbit a smeerp.” the writer uses a weird alien term for a familiar concept as a way of evoking its ostensible alienness. but nothing about how they use the concept is alien. it, to speak in oft-trod writing jargon, is telling instead of showing[Sensory Reification].

You are a snake wizard and you’ve got $20 to buy the power to devour the world. Choose wisely.

In retrospect, there is something quite fitting about the concept of a “scissor statement.”

Rationalists are fond of it; just hanging around them over the years, I’ve heard brought up as casual shorthand many times. I myself have used it! It was coined by Scott Alexander almost eight years ago in the short story “Sort By Controversial”. There’s something so amusingly Scott Alexander about it.

Eusapience is what comes next, a state of cognition beyond human consciousness.

This comes in up the newest Vermin Cathexis short[When Winter’s Thrall Eludes], but in summary: eusapience is the trait that distinguishes our minds from a true hivemind. Just as eusociality is organization and cooperation far beyond simple sociality, eusapience must be cognition and awareness much further beyond sapience. But what does this actually mean?

This is a blog post about technical considerations of markup languages — and I’m writing it on a site I built myself. If there’s an impulse more codified and vacuous than artists waxing poetic about the power of creativity, it’s programmers blogging about how their blogs work. In the years I’ve been erecting this monolith I’ve resisted that siren, but for once, I’ll indulge.

Short answer: No, I don’t use “AI” and don’t want to. The long answer is about what you’d expect; I do not offer a novel perspective. Nevertheless, humanity delenda est.

By far my favorite plotline, and something I so desperately want to see executed better, is the parasitoid singularity.

This can take a lot of forms. Probably the most recognizable is when it leans mostly to the “singularity” side. This is the hard takeoff of misaligned artificial intelligence. Skynet, universal paperclips, and so forth. AI spreading itself across every medium it has access to, replicating and infecting computers, then leveraging its newly gathered swarm to expand its access further to gather even more resources, loop while true, break only when the planet’s devoured.

A concept sitting in my head for years is the idea of a fantasy setting being wizard complete. Let me explain.

This is about magic systems. On the face of it, there’s so much variety out there — in this world, you speak the true names of objects to exert power of over them; in this world, you train your body to harness and mold magical energy; in this world, you bind demons and compel them to do your bidding; in this world, every song evokes a unique spell; in this world, your soul is a computer to be engineered and programmed.

Hiveminds don’t make much sense. I love them, but I might love them more if more writers grappled with that rather than handwaving it.

Before anything else, I must note that this is an informal discussion of the topic, hardly a rigorous survey of the portrayal of the trope in fiction. I am unfamiliar with definining examples of group minds — I don’t know the Borg, I’m barely acquainted with the Formics, nor am I familiar with the Flood or the Zerg. I haven’t even watched Pluribus.

Close your eyes, breathe in deep, and bare your soul. Can you feel it yet? Open yourself up to the great beyond, and reach for the magic within you — draw from the well that was always there and bring forth power.

What does this power feel like? Which does it feel like? Mana comes in several types — not quite colors, and certainly not the shallow elementalism of earthly materials and reactions. It’s more… tangible than that.

hello question about writing advice

how do you flesh out scenes in revisions when they seem too short/barebones in initial drafts? what do you think about when approaching them, how do you identify what’s lacking/what you want to add, etc? I’m at a point in my writing where I can recognise that Something Is Wrong like, too short, but not How to fix it

Look afar, even through this frosted glass. The blearing world will shatter. We must outlast them all.

The nightmare tastes like bile. Oily, wet, and choking your throat. Flinch now, or wildly flail, but every limb moves as if underwater. No, even slower than that, heavier. Ooze weighs on your skin, the sting like vitriol gnawing at flesh. This is how it feels to be digested.

I might have just solved footnotes on ArchiveOfOurOwn? More specifically, I’ve developed tricks for displaying text popups using only HTML and CSS, so this works on sites like neocities too.

For the impatient, you can skip to the code & tutorial.

Now, I’m not super tapped into the state of the art for AO³ workskins, it’s possible and indeed very plausible to me that I’m not actually the first to think of some of this. AO³ is an old site and everything I’m using is just a clever combination of features HTML has had for decades.

So, I thought of a neat little time travel mechanic.

What I want to talk about today is yet another Fixed History Model. For mechanical reasons, instances of time travel are always paired sequentially. You could call this time splicing.

Or better yet, a time share :^)

Thresholder is a fantasy series by Alexander Wales. The premise is simple: chained isekai. You step through a portal into another world, then a book’s worth of plot happens, then another portal opens, and you get to keep some of the powers and loot you earned from the plot. In each world, you’ll find allies among the locals, some power unique to the world, and sooner or later you’ll encounter another person who stepped out of a portal, just like you.

Roko’s Basilisk vexes me. But I’ve hit this beat so many times I might as well put up a full write-up for easy reference. This is mostly a collection of rants I’ve written in several different venues from 2023–2025, gathered together to gesture at my thoughts on that favorite punching bag of TESCREAL critics.

abbreviated notes on improving conversations; it’s all about filtering and prompting

I tried tackling this a few years ago[Dissolving Identity], as a much less experienced writer, so here’s a more concise take.

You step into a teleporter, every atom disintergrated, and then reconstructed a new at your destination. You plug a wire into your skull and your brain is dissected and destructively uploaded into a computer. In short, you clone yourself — but which one is really you?

A fallacy I’ve engaged in, now that my writing has achieved some success, is to turn that success into the goal. When I contemplate writing, too often I’m no longer thinking about the story, I’m thinking about what I want the story to be. How I want the audience to be impressed with me, how I want them feeling about what I’m writing.

But all my best stories happened because I simply had an idea that I wanted to convey and so I explained it. No pretense, no expectation.

Dear reader, we need to cook.

I’ve written about characters[Actions are Louder] before, and I’ve written about plots[Outlines as Temporarily Embarrassed Drafts] at quite[Wheels Within Wheels] some length[My Act Two Reversal].

The word of the day is arc, that progression of a character from nascent beginnings to some more realized form. But need I say any more after pointing you at those posts? Does an arc not simply turn in the same fashion as any other plot, only with character traits as one of its gears?

When seeking to understand and replicate the human body, artists — especially traditional artists — make use of anatomical figure models. You see one particular type used a lot, simplified and stylized like:

What’s valuable about this construct is that you can physically pose it. Trying to actually draw a human freehand in 3D space — respecting both proportion and perspective — is fiendishly difficult without years of experience. So a figure model helps hugely if you want a draw some action pose more complex than a three quarters T-pose.

Anatomically correct bugfucking is in a dire state. It’s time to fix that.

The idea is simple: suppose you have detected a paperclip maximizer emerging on Alpha Centauri. Not paperclips per se — aliens wouldn’t have them — but an advanced technological force interested only in filling the universe with an abjectly simple configuration, tiled endlessly. All that’s good and beautiful, choked out of our future light-cone unto the heat death of the universe.

A few days ago, the youtuber Big Joel released a video about Godzilla (1954) called “We Must Destroy What the Bomb Cannot”. What did he mean by this?”

An antimeme is an idea with self-censoring properties; an idea which, by its intrinsic nature, discourages or prevents people from spreading it.

While working on some Black Nerve[Archive of Arete] worldbuilding, I had a thought.

Antimemes would need to be a kind of meme, wouldn’t they?

I dont mean this in some trivial “hey look, it has meme in the name” way, but an antimeme would be exactly the same kind of a infectious agent with highly evolved virality.

The Preposteriat, an agent from a doomed timeline, returned to erase the spire from history.

I’m writing this post as a response to a specific person in a specific chatroom, but this is a public site, so I’m going to lay groundwork that might seem elementary in the original context. Given how fundamental our differences are, it may yet be fruitful anyway.

Oh, and be warned: this has nothing to do with fiction, unlike my usual fare.

(For transparency sake, I will link my interlocutor’s summary of the ideas, which is shorter by far and less rambling.)

So, the first thing to get out of the way. This post concerns two stories:

Importantly, TSoH was conceived and started before most of Black Nerve[Archive of Arete] as a setting really existed, meaning little of it will cohere with its canon, other the vaguest generalities like ‘there are mantids and evil bats and magic’.

Silk & Ember was a revision of TSoH, reimagining its events within the more modern canon.

Whether it’s pokeballs in Pokemon, sealing scrolls in Naruto, or any number of other ‘hammerspace’ or ‘pocket dimensions’ effects, the ability to store large objects inside a much smaller volume is a common trope in speculative fiction. But it presents problems, if you want your setting to be consistent and systemic.

How does one truly begin to learn the craft of writing? That is a difficult question, and not one that anyone has actually asked me, so I won’t answer it. I do think it’s instructive to at least gesture at the books I consider of significant importance, though.

In no small part because, owing to how influential that reading had been on me, the many essays I have written on the subject would be, if judged by academic standards, guilty of inadequate citation (i.e. plagiarism).

Greetings, earthlings. Let’s talk about identity.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. It’s years and decades in the future. Technology’s advanced to the point where we have honest-to-god teleporters. To the point that real people (instead of just lizardmen billionaires) can afford to jaunt around at not quite the speed of light.

You hop in your car and ride out to what — long before you were born — had been an airport. You pay for your teleportation ticket and you step into the science fiction machine of chrome and blinking lights. The automatic door whirs shut and locked behind you. You take a seat inside the teleporting, and the machine proper switches on.

A friend mentioned how frustrating it is to try to come up with powers, only to realize “Worm already did that,” and the exercise becomes less fun as a result of that lack of novelty.

I can sympathize. I’m not the only one to notice that parahuman powers have a particular flavor or to grapple with it while trying to generate powers.

But I don’t find myself worrying about copying Worm. (In part, this is because I have often copied Worm on purpose; the lack of originally doesn’t stop me) but I also don’t feel that I’m recapitulating Worm when I don’t want to. But am I right to think that?

a well-known bad way to write about nonhuman characters is using mere synonyms. this is what it meant by accusing someone of “calling a rabbit a smeerp.” the writer uses a weird alien term for a familiar concept as a way of evoking its ostensible alienness. but nothing about how they use the concept is alien. it, to speak in oft-trod writing jargon, is telling instead of showing[Sensory Reification].

Eusapience is what comes next, a state of cognition beyond human consciousness.

This comes in up the newest Vermin Cathexis short[When Winter’s Thrall Eludes], but in summary: eusapience is the trait that distinguishes our minds from a true hivemind. Just as eusociality is organization and cooperation far beyond simple sociality, eusapience must be cognition and awareness much further beyond sapience. But what does this actually mean?

By far my favorite plotline, and something I so desperately want to see executed better, is the parasitoid singularity.

This can take a lot of forms. Probably the most recognizable is when it leans mostly to the “singularity” side. This is the hard takeoff of misaligned artificial intelligence. Skynet, universal paperclips, and so forth. AI spreading itself across every medium it has access to, replicating and infecting computers, then leveraging its newly gathered swarm to expand its access further to gather even more resources, loop while true, break only when the planet’s devoured.

A concept sitting in my head for years is the idea of a fantasy setting being wizard complete. Let me explain.

This is about magic systems. On the face of it, there’s so much variety out there — in this world, you speak the true names of objects to exert power of over them; in this world, you train your body to harness and mold magical energy; in this world, you bind demons and compel them to do your bidding; in this world, every song evokes a unique spell; in this world, your soul is a computer to be engineered and programmed.

Hiveminds don’t make much sense. I love them, but I might love them more if more writers grappled with that rather than handwaving it.

Before anything else, I must note that this is an informal discussion of the topic, hardly a rigorous survey of the portrayal of the trope in fiction. I am unfamiliar with definining examples of group minds — I don’t know the Borg, I’m barely acquainted with the Formics, nor am I familiar with the Flood or the Zerg. I haven’t even watched Pluribus.

Thresholder is a fantasy series by Alexander Wales. The premise is simple: chained isekai. You step through a portal into another world, then a book’s worth of plot happens, then another portal opens, and you get to keep some of the powers and loot you earned from the plot. In each world, you’ll find allies among the locals, some power unique to the world, and sooner or later you’ll encounter another person who stepped out of a portal, just like you.

Curating my favorite fanfics for my favorite web series about angsty murderbots.

Some stuff I read and thought was good. Will organize this page more At Some Point. There’s so many things to add and so many thoughts to put down. I may not make this as comprehensive as my murder drones rec page.

Right now it’s a couple of my favorites plus a couple of random things from my — at the time — recent bookmarks.

(Also on Royalroad)

An antimeme is an idea with self-censoring properties; an idea which, by its intrinsic nature, discourages or prevents people from spreading it.

While working on some Black Nerve[Archive of Arete] worldbuilding, I had a thought.

Antimemes would need to be a kind of meme, wouldn’t they?

I dont mean this in some trivial “hey look, it has meme in the name” way, but an antimeme would be exactly the same kind of a infectious agent with highly evolved virality.

Whether it’s pokeballs in Pokemon, sealing scrolls in Naruto, or any number of other ‘hammerspace’ or ‘pocket dimensions’ effects, the ability to store large objects inside a much smaller volume is a common trope in speculative fiction. But it presents problems, if you want your setting to be consistent and systemic.

This is a blog post about technical considerations of markup languages — and I’m writing it on a site I built myself. If there’s an impulse more codified and vacuous than artists waxing poetic about the power of creativity, it’s programmers blogging about how their blogs work. In the years I’ve been erecting this monolith I’ve resisted that siren, but for once, I’ll indulge.

I might have just solved footnotes on ArchiveOfOurOwn? More specifically, I’ve developed tricks for displaying text popups using only HTML and CSS, so this works on sites like neocities too.

For the impatient, you can skip to the code & tutorial.

Now, I’m not super tapped into the state of the art for AO³ workskins, it’s possible and indeed very plausible to me that I’m not actually the first to think of some of this. AO³ is an old site and everything I’m using is just a clever combination of features HTML has had for decades.

hello question about writing advice

how do you flesh out scenes in revisions when they seem too short/barebones in initial drafts? what do you think about when approaching them, how do you identify what’s lacking/what you want to add, etc? I’m at a point in my writing where I can recognise that Something Is Wrong like, too short, but not How to fix it

abbreviated notes on improving conversations; it’s all about filtering and prompting

A fallacy I’ve engaged in, now that my writing has achieved some success, is to turn that success into the goal. When I contemplate writing, too often I’m no longer thinking about the story, I’m thinking about what I want the story to be. How I want the audience to be impressed with me, how I want them feeling about what I’m writing.

But all my best stories happened because I simply had an idea that I wanted to convey and so I explained it. No pretense, no expectation.

Dear reader, we need to cook.

I’ve written about characters[Actions are Louder] before, and I’ve written about plots[Outlines as Temporarily Embarrassed Drafts] at quite[Wheels Within Wheels] some length[My Act Two Reversal].

The word of the day is arc, that progression of a character from nascent beginnings to some more realized form. But need I say any more after pointing you at those posts? Does an arc not simply turn in the same fashion as any other plot, only with character traits as one of its gears?

When seeking to understand and replicate the human body, artists — especially traditional artists — make use of anatomical figure models. You see one particular type used a lot, simplified and stylized like:

What’s valuable about this construct is that you can physically pose it. Trying to actually draw a human freehand in 3D space — respecting both proportion and perspective — is fiendishly difficult without years of experience. So a figure model helps hugely if you want a draw some action pose more complex than a three quarters T-pose.

How does one truly begin to learn the craft of writing? That is a difficult question, and not one that anyone has actually asked me, so I won’t answer it. I do think it’s instructive to at least gesture at the books I consider of significant importance, though.

In no small part because, owing to how influential that reading had been on me, the many essays I have written on the subject would be, if judged by academic standards, guilty of inadequate citation (i.e. plagiarism).

imagine a omniscient god-like entity, or some hypertechnological race, or anything of the sort really — this is just the background premise that isn’t too important. what matters is the profound accumulated knowledge they have access to amounts to a near-perfect fidelity data-mapping of an entire world.

they know the location of every atom and electron on the planet and beyond. but there’s a problem: this is too much information. what can you actually do with all that? you don’t care about a cloud of a trillion atoms, you care about the objects and what they’re doing.

a well-known bad way to write about nonhuman characters is using mere synonyms. this is what it meant by accusing someone of “calling a rabbit a smeerp.” the writer uses a weird alien term for a familiar concept as a way of evoking its ostensible alienness. but nothing about how they use the concept is alien. it, to speak in oft-trod writing jargon, is telling instead of showing[Sensory Reification].

You are a snake wizard and you’ve got $20 to buy the power to devour the world. Choose wisely.

Eusapience is what comes next, a state of cognition beyond human consciousness.

This comes in up the newest Vermin Cathexis short[When Winter’s Thrall Eludes], but in summary: eusapience is the trait that distinguishes our minds from a true hivemind. Just as eusociality is organization and cooperation far beyond simple sociality, eusapience must be cognition and awareness much further beyond sapience. But what does this actually mean?

The Wutherwyld is a forest that breathes enchantment, magic suffusing it on every level. Clouds scintillate above meadows of crystalline flowers, and all manner of fae and chimera dart and stride through its groves.

A cliffs’ descent demarcates one side from the world, and from that same height a river descends — the dreaded Scytherun, whose waters slice all those who dare sip or wade it. Its rapids draw the other line.

Close your eyes, breathe in deep, and bare your soul. Can you feel it yet? Open yourself up to the great beyond, and reach for the magic within you — draw from the well that was always there and bring forth power.

What does this power feel like? Which does it feel like? Mana comes in several types — not quite colors, and certainly not the shallow elementalism of earthly materials and reactions. It’s more… tangible than that.

Look afar, even through this frosted glass. The blearing world will shatter. We must outlast them all.

The nightmare tastes like bile. Oily, wet, and choking your throat. Flinch now, or wildly flail, but every limb moves as if underwater. No, even slower than that, heavier. Ooze weighs on your skin, the sting like vitriol gnawing at flesh. This is how it feels to be digested.

So, I thought of a neat little time travel mechanic.

What I want to talk about today is yet another Fixed History Model. For mechanical reasons, instances of time travel are always paired sequentially. You could call this time splicing.

Or better yet, a time share :^)

Thresholder is a fantasy series by Alexander Wales. The premise is simple: chained isekai. You step through a portal into another world, then a book’s worth of plot happens, then another portal opens, and you get to keep some of the powers and loot you earned from the plot. In each world, you’ll find allies among the locals, some power unique to the world, and sooner or later you’ll encounter another person who stepped out of a portal, just like you.

The idea is simple: suppose you have detected a paperclip maximizer emerging on Alpha Centauri. Not paperclips per se — aliens wouldn’t have them — but an advanced technological force interested only in filling the universe with an abjectly simple configuration, tiled endlessly. All that’s good and beautiful, choked out of our future light-cone unto the heat death of the universe.

The Preposteriat, an agent from a doomed timeline, returned to erase the spire from history.

So, the first thing to get out of the way. This post concerns two stories:

Importantly, TSoH was conceived and started before most of Black Nerve[Archive of Arete] as a setting really existed, meaning little of it will cohere with its canon, other the vaguest generalities like ‘there are mantids and evil bats and magic’.

Silk & Ember was a revision of TSoH, reimagining its events within the more modern canon.

Note to self: go back and compile all my old ideas from tumblr and discord.

Your character is victim to a terrible curse that will eventually consume them. To create a character, write a short paragraph describing them, and pick out traits. Rate the traits 1-3, where 1 is a significant aptitude and 3 is a near-supernatural affinity. The referee may veto characters deemed inappropriate for the game.

First, the flavor and framing. You go to sleep as normal, but when you awaken, you find yourself transported to a dark, underground lair, all tunnels and chitinous furnishing, ornamented with distended protuberances and segmented geometries. You glance around for any indication of what’s going on, and then…

Your abductors reveal themselves as changelings who’ve been surveilling you and those around to you for several years. One of the changelings you can see has already copied your face. After all, they have extensive observational data draw on.

When you reblog a post on tumblr, you create a new post.

It’s one of the weirder parts of how that hellsite is implemented. In programming terms, this is the difference between passing by reference and passing by value. On other sites, sharing a post is just a fancy way of linking to it. If the original gets deleted, it’s gone. Unless you saved a screenshot.

First, let me reintroduce Newcomb’s Problem.

For this thought experiment, imagine there is a predictor capable of observing human behavior and correctly deducing how one will behave in the future. Maybe this predictor has psychic powers, or is really good at reading body language. I often see it described as a superintelligent AI system. More on that later.

In retrospect, there is something quite fitting about the concept of a “scissor statement.”

Rationalists are fond of it; just hanging around them over the years, I’ve heard brought up as casual shorthand many times. I myself have used it! It was coined by Scott Alexander almost eight years ago in the short story “Sort By Controversial”. There’s something so amusingly Scott Alexander about it.

Short answer: No, I don’t use “AI” and don’t want to. The long answer is about what you’d expect; I do not offer a novel perspective. Nevertheless, humanity delenda est.

Roko’s Basilisk vexes me. But I’ve hit this beat so many times I might as well put up a full write-up for easy reference. This is mostly a collection of rants I’ve written in several different venues from 2023–2025, gathered together to gesture at my thoughts on that favorite punching bag of TESCREAL critics.

I tried tackling this a few years ago[Dissolving Identity], as a much less experienced writer, so here’s a more concise take.

You step into a teleporter, every atom disintergrated, and then reconstructed a new at your destination. You plug a wire into your skull and your brain is dissected and destructively uploaded into a computer. In short, you clone yourself — but which one is really you?

A few days ago, the youtuber Big Joel released a video about Godzilla (1954) called “We Must Destroy What the Bomb Cannot”. What did he mean by this?”

I’m writing this post as a response to a specific person in a specific chatroom, but this is a public site, so I’m going to lay groundwork that might seem elementary in the original context. Given how fundamental our differences are, it may yet be fruitful anyway.

Oh, and be warned: this has nothing to do with fiction, unlike my usual fare.

(For transparency sake, I will link my interlocutor’s summary of the ideas, which is shorter by far and less rambling.)

Greetings, earthlings. Let’s talk about identity.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. It’s years and decades in the future. Technology’s advanced to the point where we have honest-to-god teleporters. To the point that real people (instead of just lizardmen billionaires) can afford to jaunt around at not quite the speed of light.

You hop in your car and ride out to what — long before you were born — had been an airport. You pay for your teleportation ticket and you step into the science fiction machine of chrome and blinking lights. The automatic door whirs shut and locked behind you. You take a seat inside the teleporting, and the machine proper switches on.

Anatomically correct bugfucking is in a dire state. It’s time to fix that.

This text is taken from the Monster Manual V for Dungeons & Dragons 3.5e. Stat blocks omitted; this is just the flavor.

If you want a sense of how much I like Illurien, read this piece I wrote about her[Of the Myriad Glares].

A strange creature composed of countless tears and raindrops, Illurien of the Myriad Glimpses is a collector of information and a keeper of secrets. She is fascinated by the contents of other minds, believing it is her right to obtain and preserve such knowledge for herself.

I wrote several snippets of fiction in my high school composition notebooks; most of them are lost to time, though a few can be found in the old fragments page.

My writing career really began in November 2017, when I wrote the first drafts of what would become Endless Stars[Endless Stars]. My chief influences were MLP fanfiction and wildbow’s writings, and I had the ambition that I would “be like wildbow” in some way I never thought too deeply about. I sought to learn more about writing, and spent the next year revising ES, until around November 2018, where correspondence with Wizard-of-Woah! and Rhythminthemind convinced me to finally publish in November 2018.

Chapter Twenty-one of The Element of Eloquence by Mark Forsynth has the best explanation of poetic meter that I’ve encountered. I strongly recommend the full book as a delightful toolbox for the refining one’s understanding of prose style and figures of speech. (And I do mean delightful: each chapter goes down like a piece of intellectual candy. Or better yet, a potato chip — because you can’t have just one.)

This is an an review of Creep, written when Chapter 11 was the latest available.

There are perils of reviewing web fiction very early in its lifetime. Creep has twelve chapters and not terribly much more than twenty thounsand words to its name. In the web serial world, that’s scarcely anything at all.

But, particularly given the tame length of the author’s other serials, it’s enough to get a feel for what Creep will and won’t offer, if not enough to be precise about it.

Truly original worlds aren’t rare, but when there’s one which commands the attention like that of Pyrebound’s, it’s worth noting. This is a universe with two seperate worlds and two seperate suns, and on every fourth days the worlds trade places, and the wrong sun rises in the sky. Humans live on only one world, and the light of the wrong sun is deadly to them.

If my review of Fuji were one word, it might be “straightford” or “eager”. No one likes to have their writing called “simple”, but one of the first things you notice about Fuji is that is doesn’t easily get bogged down or distracted. It knows what it wants to convey, and it gets right to it.

This isn’t necessarily a good thing, or a bad thing. Fuji seems to value the destination over the journey, but there are roses I wouldn’t mind stopping to smell where Fuji insistently pushes on.

The New Humans is a story that tries very hard.

It’s a long-form serial that’s been updating irregularly for over two years now. It’s a kind of period piece, exploring superpowers in 60s Australia.

And it suffers from that common double-edge sword of serials: the writer is improving. The opening chapters are rough. And as you’ve heard many times before — for many different serials — it gets better.

Note: Written for high school English class around 2018 or before. Interesting for historical reasons, if at all.

The Star-Treader and Other Poems is a book of poetry, classical poetry, that, between its archaicisms and overwrought vobaculary, wouldn’t sound out of place had it been written a century beforehand. Many reviewers make comparisons to such lofty names as Milton or Keats. It is an apt comparison, because The Star-Treader… is a sublime volume of poetry.

Note: Written for high school English class around 2018 or before. Interesting for historical reasons, if at all.

John McCrae’s Twig is, in a word, a journey. It’s not a unreasonable description for most of his work. Rather than a traditional novel, McCrae writes web serials.

There are a few differences between a web serial and an ordinary novel. The biggest is that when a novel is available, it’s available beginning to end; while the web serial is posted in installments online—hopefully on some regular schedule, but this isn’t a rule (unfortunately).