Honestly, the pressure to get back to it may not be helping (at a guess).
I can understand the desire to not mislead (or seem to be misleading).
But as long as you come back to it some day, then—presuming that you didn't publish a timetable indicating the next chapter—you haven't misled. It may seem that way for a time, but it's only seeming, and will (presumably) be proven wrong when you do come back.
My Games and Asset PacksConsidering that I should be making progress and fulfilling some sort of writing goal, I think I will post my first chapter of novel 1 to some new places.
I'm going to run the risk of labeling it as "Post-Soviet Noir / Oligopunk". I would also put "Political/Crime Triller" but then people would be expecting shooting every five seconds, because they think that's all trillers are.
I have maybe two chapters that are in anything close to a state worth posting, so I'm going to do that and see how it goes.
@Crystal Glacia in the past has indicate that my title of "Darkness, Drudgery, and Death" has the ability to seem more over the top of comedic than I want. Overall, I'm trying to think of alternate titles.
My idea is to have two titles that I'll put up to vote, or I'll do "A/B" testing or IDK, have the story available in different versions.
I honestly like how it's titled "D III" on all my chapters.
I could call it "GNR", but that's Russian for "Rapid Response Groups" so I run the risk of no one knowing what GNR means till the second chapter.
Edited by WorkingOnBeingGood on Sep 13th 2023 at 12:10:29 PM
Have you considered asking in the "What's a good name for this" thread? You might get some useful suggestions there!
My Games and Asset PacksAnd I already made a book cover... because why the heck not?
I have some pride in it.
I'm a bitter, semi-old man judging all the romance on the platform I posted too... [I should look down at men's two fisted action the same way, but all the affairs and whatnot in Romance novels makes me feel like it's basically adult content but for women.] Basically the same nonsense that was popular during the American Civil War (The average reader hasn't changed the tiniest bit in this regard).
I only got two chapters in a readable state, but I'm still going to look down upon these other people. Especially those who didn't have dozens of people spit on their work, and thus they have work that obviously has never been editted or reviewed or critiqued or gone over multiple times.
I got 38 minutes of reading in a solid state. Feeling better thinking of it that way, than how I feel when I think about how long a novel/book of this genre usually is.
Edited by WorkingOnBeingGood on Sep 13th 2023 at 1:16:33 AM
Absolute Write is finally up, and I've read so many FA Qs, and it turns out the site is basically worthless to me.
I can't post something that I already posted, woops on Wattpad, and I can't post anything that is any kind of "draft". It has to be "polished".
It could be a year, maybe years before I have anything else in that state, and I can't post my best two chapters.
Salutations, everyone! So I am creating a new series. The synopsis is that it's based on East Asia during the early to mid-2nd millennium (admit with FantasyCounterpartCultures), but it features CivilisedAnimals, both real and mythical. I thought of this recently.
Any ideas would be appreciated.
Hi, I'm a guy who loves a bunch of random stuff.![]()
More news. So I've seen three different officials posts giving what looks like three different explanations for what status writing should be in before I post it. Each person seems to have a different take on it, so that's kinda weird.
I've also learned that I can burn my posts to Wattpad and talk to the mods, or maybe even leave stuff up.
Community reception to my personality has been both very positive and social, but also the kind that indicates that my personality is the kind others would find abrasive and such.
But yeah, the words "Any kind of draft", read to me like I wouldn't be able to post anything... as all my stuff is basically just draft 5 or draft six... Ect ect. You know how messy my work is, despite my best intentions.
It's my understanding that they try to cater to people who seriously want to get published and make a career out of writing, and, well, having grammar and spelling mostly down is sort of the bare minimum in that aim. Not to mention that copyediting and alpha reading, or critiquing and fixing the technical aspects of writing, can be very exhausting.
I just checked my password manager, and it turns out that I've never actually used Absolute Write; the writing community I was actually thinking of is Scribophile, where I introduced myself six years ago and ghosted the place, because I was in my final semester of undergrad and trying to get my stupid senior capstone project done without my head exploding. And then shortly after I graduated that December, I got a full-time job.
...That should probably tell you just how much energy I've had to devote to being serious about writing over the last 5-6 years.
Edited by CrystalGlacia on Sep 20th 2023 at 7:21:26 AM
"Jack, you have debauched my sloth."Well, a lot has happened since I last posted. Last night I put something up, it was detected as bad, and I had serious existential problems. I a lot of issues that would be very hard to address, and they require working against concrete aspects of myself (I believe you know what these issues are).
The community is very well behaved, and I have met some people that I find amusing or like interacting with, history people mostly.
However, this morning, a lot more feedback has come in. I am still daunted with having to change things and somehow remold myself. There was a bit of a shock with consistent calls to remove things, and you would think later calls to keep them would sooth me, but they leave me in a state of confused.
I'm starting to see that other people find it very easy to weight critiques against each other, to pick and choose.
However, I have been accused or declared to have not followed advice or read feedback so many times... I have a strong psychological motivation to put in advice I think is dumb. I also, because I'm me, have a strong drive to argue or reject such advice.
So I am both defensive and stubborn, and a gen Y person who is "humble" and "very aware of my faults".
This is just like how my parents disagreed so heavily in politics and religion, and instead of picking one or the other, I was left to pick both or neither.
Am I the only one who feels like they're being pulled apart?
P.S, considering how busy you are. I hold your past/current advice and feedback and hard work very close to my heart.
This is probably not the answer you want to hear, but if the conflict in advice is regarding artistic decisions, the fact remains that only you, the writer, can choose what's best for your story. Some pieces of advice are likely to make your story more accessible to other readers at the expense of your vision, and it'll probably be a hard decision. Sure, you hate doing this thing in your writing, but you're likely to get more readers if you do it. Which do you value more, a readership for a work that required you to do some things you didn't like, or a work created under your exact preferences that fewer people or maybe even nobody but you finds accessible? Sometimes, you can't have both, and one or the other has to give.
And if that's not enough, something else to keep in mind as you accumulate more feedback is that "too many cooks will spoil the soup"- meaning that if you try to accommodate everybody's idea of how to best tell your story, the ideas are likely to conflict and leave you with something that was designed by committee and is appealing to nobody at all. This is art- art is highly subjective by nature, and if this had a clear and unambiguous answer, it wouldn't be art.
Honestly, the moment when I realized I knew my story and trusted my vision for it came after that critiquing fiasco I had on /r/fantasywriters where people fundamentally hated that I was trying to write a character drama and not some kind of action/adventure number driven by people hitting each other. Up until then, I was a meek newbie writer who was very sure that I knew nothing about anything, and that experience shattered the illusion that these people were so much smarter and knew better than me.
Edited by CrystalGlacia on Sep 20th 2023 at 10:40:53 AM
"Jack, you have debauched my sloth."When I was seven years younger, I was very willing to sacrifice and change, and do this a lot. I had a lot of reasons. She was at least a thousand mini-Helens, she understood me, she was there for me, ect ect. It was a very rich and rewarding relationship.
I can't remember who exactly I was before the relationship. I can't remember what aspects of me are from her or myself, or what.
I'm okay with that. She was worth it, our partnership was worth it. I'd do it again if I could get another seven years, or even a year.
So blah blah blah, I can sacrifice... A little. I can make it assessable, maybe, to a few people.
And someone straight up told me to remove half the "ly" words in my first 1500 words. To me, that's like being asked to remove half the articles.
And lately, there has been a lot of calls for action.
I am pretty annoyed that I was told so many things were missing on Reddit, and possibly by you, and now I'm being told to trim so much "fat".
I'm going to stop now. I've been trying to explain this so much lately and it's wearing out my fingers... And it makes me worried and concerned about how I look to others.
Like, writing is really hard for me. I'm like a cornered and wounded dog. But, I don't want people to know that, or always be knowing that.
TLDR: I don't know if my "vision" is worth it. I don't know what is true. I see things that are better and worse than they are, and it seems to me like lots of other people are like that or worse. I have no means to easily figure out what to do.
I'm having thoughts about working on filtering. It's something I know is bad for everyone else, and while it'll be basically impossible or painful to fix... I just want to make some kind of progress. I want certainty in my life (When it comes to writing).
Edited by WorkingOnBeingGood on Sep 20th 2023 at 8:34:50 AM
So, i still haven't decided if the superpowers in Red Revengenote are hereditary or not.
There are the aquatics and the vampires, but they're species powers so obviously those are hereditary, even if the other parent is human though that might have some detail difference.
But there's also the nazi The Lightbearer
who got his powers from some sort if a chemical treatment, and british fascist Byron Ashford (codename WIP), resistance agent The Catalyst, and american supersoldier Freedom Fighter who all got the same powers as The Lightbearer from the same serum (well, Fighter's is an american reconstruction attempt with less strenght but more durability).
And the other two nazis Aryan Maiden and Thunderlight, whose power origins i haven't come up with yet. Vampire or aquatic ancestry isn't appliciable because their powers are completely different, and these doesn't fall into the purview of the serum either.
The Lightbearer has at least one child with a normal woman, and Thunderlight and Aryan Maiden have accident children with each other (twins). The Lightbearer's son is born in 1944 or 1945, but the twins are born somewhere in 1939-1941 so they would be old enough for any powers to show during the story.
The nazis make an attempt at Super Breeding Program, but nobody actually knows if they're hereditary or not and that's a source of anxiety for both sides because the serum and its variants have been lost. The nazis and the Allies both wish really hard their supersoldier's powers would inherit.
So. Should they or should they not?
~*bleh*~
Well, how does the Super serum work in your story?
Does it alter the person genetically or just "bunker down" inside the body like anchoring itself to the fat-cells or something without leaving it, allowing the serum to keep working by enhancing the person artificially for as long as it is in there?
If it is genetically, it might pass on.
"If there's problems, there's simple solutions."I just now came up for a very dark character study involving a náive young man getting slowly addicted to drugs and being put through various increasingly meaningful tests of character as his addiction blossoms and spirals out of control. I was considering writing a story recently so I might do this.
Once Upon A Time.
Hm, the nazis have literally six people. The Lightbearer and Byron Ashford aren't really that super, the limit of Thunderlight's speed is abouth 480 mph (he's no Flash), and Romano Marchegiano has hydrokinesis and gills plus water-adapted senses. The only really powerful ones are Aryan Maiden who's a powerful telekinetic and Living Inferno
who's a near-indestructible pyrokinetic flier, but they're just two people.
Everybody can only do the things mentioned here/in the bios and is vulnerable to everything normal people are unless mentioned otherwise. And there's literally six of them so they can't be everywhere, so they may not be actually able to stop the Soviet offensive. This is no Über.
Also, after The Lightbearer and Living Inferno die at the end of the war, Aryan Maiden actually defects to the east.
Edited by Nukeli on Sep 25th 2023 at 12:06:40 PM
~*bleh*~So, which way do you think would be narratively better?
The story does continue into the 1950s because the Allies let most of the nazis off the hook (and put them back into the police, and the government, and the army, and hire them) and there are also other threads that don't abruptly stop at 1945.
~*bleh*~
I don't know yet. I don't even know how many of these people are going to live to the late 1960snote note .
The Lightbearer, Aryan Maiden, Thunderlight, Byron Ashford, Freedom Fighter, and The Catalyst are the only listed characters who were given their powers. Müller only has a Power Armor, Living Inferno
is a complicated case and dead anyway, and everybody else's powers are species abilities (vampires, aquatics, hybrids) and not really unique or out of the ordinary.
Hi chat, back working on my next story.
So, for the pope (who will be a Civilised Animal), what should his species be? Any ideas?
Hi, I'm a guy who loves a bunch of random stuff.

Archive of Our Own? Why there and not uhh, what was that other place? Wattpad?
I use software to give me bad filler stuff to start with, and then I get mad at it and "fix it" into my chapters sometimes.
Often a lot of my ideas are not in the correct order for my novel, or even for the right novel. I can't be a lot of help, a lot of my books on writing say to sit down or have quotas, but I'm very bad at that.