Writer's Block Daily

Basically, what has been holding back my writing for a loong time. Right now I am thinking of giving each focus character their own timeline.

edited 3rd Nov '16 11:30:06 AM by EternaMemoria

Third day of Nano Wrimo. 1,194 words today. I only wrote about 900, but decided to end the chapter with a joke. I'm starting to get used to these characters, even if my story is a Random Events Plot about a kid and his robot buddy.

And even then, is mostly a Self-Insert Fic. Maybe it will evolve into something else later.

edited 3rd Nov '16 7:31:02 PM by Tomodachi

I once got a similar, smaller feeling. One of my fanfics started out with a sort of literary montage, and I was almost completely done with the chapter by the time I realized what I was doing.

Basically, it started with the protagonist arriving at the foreign land she was traveling to. Given that this was a fanfic, it was fairly easy to guess what had happened and why she was traveling, but I still wanted to show why. Every few paragraphs, I'd jump back a certain amount of time (usually a month or so) to show a few paragraphs of her highlights in making her decisions. I think it worked pretty well.

For you? I'd say go ahead and do it. Ambitious? Sure, but I love me a good nonlinear story. Besides, you'll never grow if you're not at least a little ambitious. I once programmed an English-to-Conlang dictionary to teach myself Java. It quickly revealed itself to be a lot more than I anticipated, but I kept at it, and I got it working eventually. I'm pretty proud of it.

I have already done two books and the third and last one will be released in Fall 2017. Its a trilogy and the final book is a prequel to the series.

My first trilogy is a Sci-Fi Thriller fighting against the belief that aliens are evil. All bad guys in those books are human but everytime the good guys first think its an extraterrestrial force. Okay, in Space Galaxies 1 the evil humans are controlled by an alien virus and Space Galaxies Zero has a plot about humans from another planet, but the evil is still embodied by a human.

The prequel plays with the fact that we always ask the question "is there another planet like earth in the universe?". But what would we actually think about it if we find out that the answer is yes and that this planet has a second human race? Would we think "Hey cool, lets meet them!" or would we say "This bad God created two human races! How humiliating! And what human race is superior? Which race does god prefer?

I completely forgot about Na No Wri Mo because of my feature screenplay. Darn! No new projects this November.

I'm holding off on it myself, since I'm actually working on a short at the moment.

Well. at the moment I'm waiting for feedback on it. But I will be working on it once I finally get that feedback. Or in a week or two when I get impatient of waiting for feedback.

Writing about gunpowder formulation in a medieval-ish period, and I can't decide whether I should call the potassium nitrate "niter" or "saltpeter" (both real, old names for potassium nitrate).

"Saltpetre" was and is more common, although "nitre" is the root of "nitrogen."

For what it's worth: "saltpeter" was a resource in Civilization III, which means it's likely to have a certain level of name recognition to anyone who's played that. I don't know of "niter" getting a similar reference.

In fact, Niter is a resource in Civ VI. So if anything it's the one with more current reference.

edited 5th Nov '16 7:09:17 PM by kegisak

I've seen both, even "peter". Niter I think might be more common in the premodern days.

Out of curiosity, have you guys ever done the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) on your characters? YMMV on the merits of the test itself, but I've found that it's a lot of fun to step into the shoes of your characters and answer the test based on how they would answer it and seeing the result.

Right now I've found:

• Main Character: ISFP
• Main Character's best friend: ENFJ

If anyone wants to do this but can't find the link I can post it here.

edited 5th Nov '16 10:17:18 PM by randomdude4

Heh, I used to give those to real people.

Here's something I was wondering that I wanted to her the people here's opinions on: Do you think that in comedy, a joke can still be funny even if it's very predictable?

Sure. Some jokes are funny because they are predictable. Such as the "oh god I know where this is going OH GOD" type of joke

The comic strip Pearls Before Swine has a style of sunday strip where the entire strip is a big setup for a pun (For example, miscommunication about eggs at a restaurants owned by Archie and Tina ending in, "Don't Fry for me, Arch and Tina"). The setup takes so much work that you know when it's one of those strips, pretty much from the beginning, but it's still enjoyable just because of the absurdity leading up to it, and the sort of growing sense of dread for the sheer mangled-ness of the pun itself.

And quite often there's a postscript or a stinger with various characters berating Stephen Pastis for coming up with the horrible pun.

Is this a deconstruction of Atheism?

In 2025, a atheist president is elected. He turns the country into anarchy where crime is legal and religious belief and faith is illegal and carries the death penalty.

Strawmanism, you mean.

You don't know many atheists personally, do you? They are generally sane people, whatever their non-beliefs may be.

EDIT: Plus, no president would have so much power.

edited 7th Nov '16 3:00:13 PM by EternaMemoria

The problem with attempting to 'deconstruct' any religion, including Atheism, is that a deconstruction relies on portraying something as how it would realistically work in our world. And religions already exist in our world. They're fundamentally impossible to deconstruct because people already know how they work. And the answer is: They vary.

For it to be a deconstruction, we'd first have to agree that it would be realistic for an atheist holding an elected office to abolish all laws and outlaw religious expression just because they're atheist.

Deconstructions are not about being dark. Either research what a deconstruction actually is, or just call ideas like these dark, if you call it anything at all. There's nothing wrong with letting an idea or story speak for itself.

edited 7th Nov '16 3:02:47 PM by CrystalGlacia

Uhmm, I'm at an impasse.

I'm writing another fantasy novel. As all the others, this one is heavily inspired by Mesoamerican cultures so there's themes of spirits, eldritch-like Gods, death and the underworld, and sacrifices. On the other hand, I'm also taking inspiration by World War One for the setting.

The general plot goes something like this: after the birth and death of twenty Dark Suns, each one occurring every fifty-two years, the sun is beginning to fade, signalling The End of the World as We Know It. Since She doesn't want to see the world end again, the Moon chose a hero to hunt down the Dark Suns and sacrifice their blood to the sun to keep him alive a little while longer or to buy enough time until the Gods can choose a new sun.

As all this happens, the world is thrown into chaos by nations declaring war on each other like there's no tomorrow as it happened in 1914 (with some changes). I wanted to add this because of Author Appeal and because I thought it was fitting that the Fifth Sun would end with a big war.

The problem is that I don't know how many protagonists I should have for my story. >.>

On the one hand, I feel the main quest (to call it that) would benefit from having a single protagonist hunting down the Dark Suns. On the other hand, I feel an ensemble cast would help me if I focused more on the war itself and how the world if affected by it (and by the end of the world). I also feel an ensemble would give it an epic feeling (at least when it comes to scale) which could be better for an apocalyptic story.

So, what should I do?

Well, I tend to hyperfocus on a single character or two characters, tops, in my stories so take this with a grain of salt.

One of the things I liked the most in the Eragon series, an otherwise fairly middling series, was in the second book when the main character's hometown was under siege by monsters. The focus of the book switched back and forth between the 'main' plot and this 'side' plot. The sort of humanity of the side plot, I found, helped me appreciate the context of the main plot. Buuut it does have the downside of that I enjoyed the side plot and it's characters much more than the main plot.

Still, the point is: Having an additional cast affected by, but not directly involved in, the core plot can help to ground and humanize the conflict, making the reader more invested in it.

I already posted this in another thread, but I figure I might as well ask it here. I've got something of a dilemma. I'm writing a book for Na No Wri Mo which features a suppressed latino lesbian as the protagonist, but the thing is, the more I write her, the more and more she comes off as a high-functioning aspie, so I'm tempted to just go all out and officially make her one in-story. The thing is though, she's already latino and a lesbian, so I'm worried that doing so might be seen as trying too hard to be diverse, if that makes any sense. I've also got a female Japanese bisexual and a female black bisexual, so it's not as though she's in slim company. (It just kind of happened to be honest.) But I'm worried that also making her an official high-functioning aspie might be a bridge too far. Should I just back away and cut my losses? Or should I maybe make her white so as to balance things out? (Again, if that makes any sense.) Or should I just throw caution to the wind and make her an honest-to-God high-functioning lesbian latino aspie? Any thoughts would be much appreciated.