Writer's Block Daily

Yesterday, I finally finished chapter four of my magical girl web novel thingy! Yay! I'm so happy :)

Magical Girl web novel, you say?

Congratulations, and well done! ^_^

For myself, I finally took the step of officially withdrawing a story of mine from a publication.

... I'm not sure that the email address that I used was still valid—the publication had undergone a change in the meanwhile. But, while they had previously expressed interest in the story, I hadn't heard anything more from them in years.

So I decided to call that email "good enough", and move on.

My intent for the story now is to try self-publishing over on Amazon, doing so along with other stories that I have.

I'll second this. There's a religious character I'm fond of from an otherwise rather cliché alternate history novella, who's memorable to me specifically because his faith is grounded in scepticism. The line I remember is "how are we to know false gods from true except by doubting both"?

Yep! I love magical girl stuff, and I keep trying to make my own. I'd say this is my best attempt so far. I made a site and everything. If you want to read it, I put the link in the Shameless Self Promotion thread in Yack Fest.

Had a dream that tried to give me an ending to my story. Unfortunately it kills off the characters I want to have live, so, not really sure about that one

Time to Kill Your Darlings? >:P

Oh, they ain't my darlings. They the villains. I just got plans for em.

So, I decided to just sit down and write my story after months of doing nothing but trying to perfect the outline. I still don't have much of one, but I do have a general idea of where the story will go.

I found my current session to be surprisingly productive (1,000 words is a productive session for me.)

I think I got too caught up in the planning stage because the story is a conspiracy thriller and thought I needed to have all my bases covered.

Hey, 1000 words ain't bad at all.

"Oh, you don't get to die just yet, my sweet. I have...

"Plans for you... >:D"

:P

Congratulations on making that start! I'm glad to read that it's been going well thus far! ^_^

Edited by ArsThaumaturgis on Apr 24th 2024 at 9:53:02 PM

Just crossed the 78,000 word mark on my low fantasy pirate story this morning. Still got a ways to go.

I think you can do it.

Edited by iowaforever on Apr 24th 2024 at 10:25:09 AM

Wow, that's a lot of words! I hope I can reach that point on a single story too one day.

Have no idea how many words I'm at because I keep starting new documents. It's only really for me and my boyfriend anyway, at least right now

@iowaforever: Good work on that, and well done! ^_^

@IncognitoAlbatross: Good luck in doing so! That said, let me say that a story isn't necessarily better for having more words; a shorter story can still be worthwhile and affecting, I daresay!

(I still remember well a famous short story of only two sentences.)

~

As for myself, ah, the old trial of: "I want to [make a work in medium X], but I don't have a specific concept in mind for it"—and the "blank-page" trouble that follows. ^^;

To clarify, I've decided that I want to make a gamebook—or more accurately, a visual novel taking after the gamebooks of old, in particular Fighting Fantasy.

Whiiiich... doesn't actually give me a plot to work with. ^^;

Still, I think that I may be slowly working my way towards something. I have some desires regarding narrative/gameplay structure, and have more recently found a broad type of plot that I'm enthused for, with some nascent ideas as to potential specific directions the story...

(I also have some ideas in mind for mechanics and visuals.)

Edited by ArsThaumaturgis on Apr 25th 2024 at 10:44:52 AM

After three years of serialization, I'm finally at the last few dozen chapters of my alternate-history WWII webnovel and now covering the final boss battle.

About damn time, let's freaking GO!!!!

What's the final boss like? Mecha-Hitler?

God, I wish! Sadly no, just the Yamato class battleship and the entire remaining forces of Japanese Navy.

Edited by dRoy on Apr 28th 2024 at 9:08:45 PM

Are you implying Operation: Downfall happens or not quite?

Either that or Ten-Go goes a bit better than it did in real life.

Just wrote a scene in my story where the protagonist fakes a mutiny aboard his ship to get out of a locked down harbor (he distracted the town guards watching the docks so his men could unmoor them, then used the fake mutiny excuse on the idea that the guards were going to catch on anyway- may as well have some plausible deniability).

okay, so I'm looking into appendixes for a project later in the year. specifically lore snippets. I want to ask how you would do those types of apendi?

Random thought: I'd like to set a one shot in the verse of a Translation Train Wreck. Something like Pokémon Vietnamese Crystal or whatever. The dialogue would be the same, but then I'd write prose around it or something??? Idk, it's hard to explain.

I saw a fanfic once where a normal person who was familiar with the Pokemon canon (can't remember if they were from our world or the canon Pokemon world) found themself in the world of Pokemon Vietnamese Crystal and was trying to fumble their way through the plot with all the characters screaming gibberish at them and their Pokemon not understanding normal English battle commands. The protagonist spoke normally and their thoughts and narration were written normally, but since the original game's protagonist is a Heroic Mime, nobody acknowledged anything the protagonist said except for Yes/No at certain times. It could be funny if the protagonist of this story also had to speak Translation Trainwreck gibberish in order to be understood by the other characters, like Spongebob having to constantly blow raspberries when he got stranded in Rock Bottom.

Assuming this is for a work of literature (and not a comic or something audiovisual), there's lots of ways to handle lore snippets. But one thing to keep in mind is that they should ideally be serving more than one purpose in the story- delivering worldbuilding info, and also foreshadowing something in the plot or showing characterization.

The Temeraire series puts them at the beginning or end of the novels. The excerpt from the man positing that dragons are no smarter than dogs at the start of the fifth novel introduces that character before he appears in the story proper and a dragon makes a fool of him, and also gives the reader an idea of where public sentiment towards dragons sits. The excerpt from a leading dragon scientist at the end of the first novel, who also appeared during the story proper, provides extra context about this setting's dragons and their usage by the military, common knowledge for the characters that would have no reason to come up in the story proper. A few different writings from another character dated to a few decades after the events of the series appear at the beginning of one novel and at the end of a different novel, conveying not just worldbuilding information about how the Alternate History setting diverges from ours and that the protagonist will become an important figure later despite all the hell he'd gone through previously, but also showing, with the mere existence of these writings, that the writer will survive the events of the series and eventually be taken seriously as a scholar.

Stand Still, Stay Silent, on the other hand, is a long-running webcomic, and lore and worldbuilding pages appear as interludes between chapters, information that may not have direct bearing on the story for many more pages or possibly ever. That the comic took multiple real-world years to complete was likely a factor in why the lore pages are scattered throughout the entire story, but using lore interludes between chapters in a work released all in one go like a traditional novel can give a feeling of immediacy, and they can be used more often for foreshadowing. One drawback I see is that you'll have to balance the length and pacing of these interludes carefully to ensure they're not so long that they slow the reader's momentum, but also not so short that readers are wondering why the story was essentially halted to deliver information that could've been trimmed down and conveyed in the story proper.

Hm, this is making me think about using lore pages in my own writing. I have a lot of worldbuilding details that may never appear in any story.

Edited by CrystalGlacia on Apr 28th 2024 at 10:15:24 AM

its for literature. The idea was to retroactive add some short snippets to the end of the chapters to either

• fit in world building details I couldn't add in the narrative yet (while trying to keep it germane of course)
• foreshadow certain elements in advance (how much would vary)
• and characteristic and focus on people that arne't so prominent in the narrative so far, maybe even set some up in preparation for alter appearances.
• flavor.

Dune usually prefaces its chapters with in-universe snippets and minor lore dumps, usually in the form of Princess Irulan's memoirs on her interactions with Paul and the rest of the Atreides line. Might that be something close to what you were thinking?