Serpentine Squiggles

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.

Note: this was originally a post on tumblr.

so, my kneejerk reaction to the finale climax was ‘that looks cool, but it’s kind of underwhelming and underbaked. what does any of this mean in the end?’

but i decided to actually give it a moment of thought and no, the show actually does hangs together thematically and this is what it’s been building to all along

I read a profoundly good Harry Potter fanfic and there's so much I have to say. Efflusive praise, small reservations, and a sense of satisfied disappointment.

(Author’s note: this is an edited version of a long discord post, not a full essay.)

How do you write blurbs?

My philosophy, when I’m reading or writing blurbs, is that it needs to say a) what the protagonist is like, b) what they spend time doing, and c) the direction the story is going on.

If the story you’re writing is any good, there’s an answer to those three questions that, when a target audience member hears it, will go “yeah, that sounds interesting, tell me more.” The true appeal might be too subtle or complicated to convey in a blurb, but for at least one or two of them, you should be able to pique my curiosity in a single sentence.

This post is unfinished, but it’s 2025 at this point; it won’t be finished.

2023 probably marked the year of my most active engagement with music since first getting into the hobby as a teenager. (In those days, I would listen to half a dozen new bands every day after school; I’m not sure I’m ever getting back to that).

Enough that I felt compelled to assemble the fruits of that exploration into a end of year review — the first I’ve ever done. And yet, after all of that… I do find myself disappointed with my progress. When I conceived this project, I hoped to give at least a cursory listen to all the major metal releases of 2023, skim the top of RateYourMusic or something. But I have other hobbies, and a growing need to dwell in my comfort zone. As a result, there are only 45 albums I feel familiar enough to slot into rankings.

I opened up a random chapter of Mother of Learning, and I have come to decision. MoL’s prose is alright. In fact, with a very reasonable definition of what “prose” is, I would outright concede that MoL has good prose. But.”

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?”

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 on a specific server, 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.)

Ra is a critique of itself. Ra is a proof of its rationality, a justification of its setting, that doubles as a argumentum ad absurdum that it could never have been otherwise.

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.

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 bookmarks.

(Also on Royalroad)

Evocative and thrilling, cathartic and emotional resonant — this is my favorite story. My usual pitch for this one goes:

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.)

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.

Once you’ve described your character, decide which curse afflicts them. (see below)

he just like me fr

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.

A dancing array of droplets swirls before you. In the midst of this storm stands a slender but extremely tall female clad in gray robes. She has no facial features other than her vivid blue eyes. With a graceful motion, she beckons to you.

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. 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 2028. ES updated weekly till late April 2019, then exhausted my backlog. The next three chapters were published irregularly, and a fourth was never published.

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.

A review of Advent.

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).

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.