So I was talking with my ex-marine biologist mom about space competition on reefs and no-man's-lands between coral/sponge colonies and how if the no man's land gets too wide, sometimes another colony will recruit there and start growing. And now I want something where aliens arrive at Earth and look at the DMZ between North and South Korea and go like "sweet, nobody's here, we'll take it."
@whimsicalobservant, are you willing to go into more detail about the whole 'being reconstructed as an abomination' thing?
In that setting, people can attune, link to primordial monsters / entities that were either present at the creation / shaping of the world or were created shortly after. That link slowly twists them into being less human and more like the monsters. Caeri went up against someone who had brought the empty shell of one of those monsters under his control, and the attunement process started, but was cut short due to two reasons - the entity proper has been split into two, who are already attuned to different people, and she got skewered and killed by the entitie's icicles. The process, interrupted, incomplete, starts going out of control on her side, and turns her undead. And gives her a headstart on the whole Blue-and-Orange-Morality thing.
so I wrote the beginning of a magic instructional.... "manual" from the POV of one of my protagonists that (of course) got half-covered up when I was putting the image together, so I'm just gonna dump it here for posterity. Spoiler: weird analogies incoming Tenets of Magic According To Thaddeus I. Lomax, In The Year of our Lord Nineteen-Eighty-Seven A.D (or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Eldritch) Float like a butterfly and sting like a bee. To paraphrase the legendary boxer, magic can't touch what your eyes can't see. If you need a wand, go for the big guns. Nothing stops your S.O from blabbering about their rough day like a heavy wand in one hand and your fourth G'n'T in the other. If you're going to be doing lots of incantations, try chewing on a mint after. It is quite refreshing. Like a walk in the rain with David Cassidy. Some spells might contain ingredients which, while not necessarily deadly, might be rather unpleasant if ingested. (If you stand to inherit large sums of money, feed some to your parents and stand well back.) Be extra careful about doing anything magical in high-intensity regions. In theory, you feel invincible. In practice, you end up vertically challenged and getting harpooned from the place like a blubbering minke whale. Don't shortchange on ingredients. As Roxanne said to Christian; 'You give me milk instead of cream.' You wanna be a choirboy, go to church instead. Magic ain't a spectator sport, it's a religion.* *Though personally, I found religion at the bottom of an absinthe glass. More shall be added as I come up with it because fuck editors. god I love writing this guy.
hmmmm okay sorry to double-post but something's been bugging me what do you guys do when, say, you've put a ton of effort into a Thing, for an extended period of time, but now when you think about it you're not sure if the Thing (or part of it) is working, and you can't decide between 'plow on forwards' and 'start again and do it better'? for context; thing I've been writing and illustrating since 2012 now, trying to keep a regular update schedule, alternating between character POVs a la ASOIAF. except now I'm starting to worry that it's too long and meandering, and getting bogged down with side plots/characters and stuff like that. which kinda sucks because I love those characters a whole lot! and I'd planned for them to be all ~intertwining stories~ and shit. but now I'm just worried it's getting overly complicated to its detriment. idk, advice?
I mean, if you're still into it then I feel like you should definitely keep at it. If it doesn't turn out how you want you can always come back to it sometime down the line and fix it up a bit. And if it's that complex, odds are it isn't gonna feel quite right till everything's all wrapped up, yeh? Maybe think of it as a prototype? If it doesn't work in the end, then you can always try again, better informed and with a good idea what not to do.
Years of homestuck writing made me start a 3rd person fic with "The spell starts with swirls of bright green and dirty yellow and cold grey stone, and the sensation opposite of suddenly awakening, like a cold chain in your gut pulling you inside instead of out" instead of. any other turn of phrase that indicates 3rd person. I love how one of the most obscure pov persons just became the default for writing because of this one webcomic
I'm writing! A couple weeks ago I had a nightmare/stress dream (it wasn't so bad on the fear part and explaining it to people got "wait how's that a nightmare" reactions because it was being the protagonist and on the run/feeling hunted that got me) that I've turned into a plot. I've done a crapton of world building and finished the prologue and am working on the Actual First Chapter (fucking decoy protag). Feels good to be working on something again. I got invited by an old friend to their new writing forum, and they do a weekend thing where you work on a project only on the weekends and compete for how much you wrote/how many hours you clocked/most interesting subject matter. I've scrapped my unfinished NaNo and am turning it into a series of shorts for my Weekend Write-Ins, until eventually I tie the whole thing together. So that's two things I'm making headway on! And I'm poking at a character's story that I had piecemeal in my head but without solid connections, but that's backburnered to keep me from getting too overwhelmed.
thinking thoughts about stories that i'll never write. there's a kingdom in not-africa, and they've created this impossible paradise with little regard for how it affects the world around them, all these god-kings and their obscenely powerful magics layering spells atop one another to draw water and materials and good fortune, and it's a hollow mess that can't sustain itself without these spells that have to be constantly cast and undone and recast, and it's all gone rotten in the middle, but people just keep layering spells overtop, like perfuming a corpse. But the people don't know how bad it is, all they know is the kings give them everything, and without them their little paradise is a bone dry crater, like all the settlements around them. The people don't know jack about magic. Only high ranking men know about magic, and also evil vile witch women who get their power from a two-faced goddess who tried to curb their god's power at one point. The king knows magic best of all, cause the king is their god. And peeps get upset, cause yunno, it's a bad scene. Stuff needs to get fixed, or else these guys are gonna suck the world dry. So there's a coup. A violent one. Cause the bloodline needs to be wiped out, so all the magics can be undone. Cause at this point it's like ahlf the world is so much rotten spellwork that it's like an extension of the royal family's soul, and it;s so tangled up in their blood that it can't be undone if they're all still here to ancor it(or at least that's what they think). So, peeps die. But the king's eldest daughter, then thirteen, manages to escape, and she takes her little brother, the next god-king to be, with her. And the story is from their POV. She and her little brother duno what's up, they're just kids and she's a girl besides. All she knows is her family was murdered and they tried to murder her and her baby brother, so she has to fight back, yeh? and she meets a witch, a skinwalker who shares her soul with a hyena, and she's not interested in the world or politics or nothing, she sees a girl who's angry and hurt and wants revenge, adn she's like "i wanna see where this goes", so she shares her secrets, and little princess ends up a skinwalker herself, which means she rips out a young lion's heart and exchanges it with her own, and now so long as one of them still lives, the other will survive(so to kill them, you gotta kill both at around the same time, or else they'll just heal right back up). Also they both shapeshift, because pfffbt, i like it. And little brother learns magic himself, but while his sister is all about kicking traitors off their land and reclaiming the throne and revenge and junk, he grew up talking down his sister and depending on the kindness of strangers, and he just wants to make people happy(cause if people aren't happy, he goes hungry and his sister gets hurt on his behalf). And so they grow up and learn things and maybe fight crime, I dunno.
gladiator stuff is always super fun, and also werewolves. i wanna write a thing about criminal android gladiators, like murders and junk sold to peeps who upgrade them as they please and make them do cool action movie stunts and junk for their amusement. and like there's one chick who's a real sadist who mods her droids so she can fuck wioth their heads in weird ways, she drives them fucking nuts and makes them perform more and more outrageous bullshit so they can have a few moments where their heads are their own. i was thinking it might be interesting if you could turn sections of an android's brain on and off, so they're incapable of processing speech, so they depend on their owner for even the barest hints of human contact, cause they can't even understand people unless she lets them. but i'm no good with plot, so. how do your werewolf sewer gladiators work? if you wanna talk about them.
well in the story there is a group of pure born wolves who are dicks and think bitten wolves are lesser so... they catch them and drag them to this arena that was built in some sewers and they bet on them and the bit werewolves are like wow fuck you a lot. lmao
is it an 'avoid making more and kill the ones we got' kinda revulsion, or will they bite people then toss them into death matches, like 'haha, these guys are suck and i am super good cause they are the suck' kinda ego boosty hate? do all matches end in deaths, or can there be peeps who throw fights for praise and privilege? where do the bitwolves stay when they're not fighting, and what poor shmuck has to look after them? if you wanna, sorry
well bit wolves and born ones have different strengths so bit ones tend to be more dangerous. also betting is a lucrative business for the born wolves lmao. its like dog fighting. not always to the death. biting people with the intent to make them a gladiator is considered illegal in the game. it still happens but if youre caught its bad news bears lol. throwing fights for praise and prestige is common and they have some barracks for the bitwoofs to live. usually an older bit wolf is the defacto leader and takes care of everyone else. there are more than one ring throughout the world.
Came up with a few ideas in the wee hours last night that I knew would require more bashing my face into the keyboard to actually write coherently, so I just tacked it onto the end in the form of dialogue snippets and half sentences. Also, apparently, "wweh wweh I'm an annoying dick wweh" Needless to say, they barely make sense in the morning and now I'm curious what margin notes y'all have left yourselves when the words don't words right.
In my notebooks I have found things like "he needs more jazzhands", "pretty sure this needs more werewolves", "no one cares about the dog dong", and "this is needs burned with fire its perfect"
Critique, anyone, by any chance? This is the beginning of a story working-titled 'Human Sacrifice'... Spoiler: HOOMAN SACCYFISE Mellicent Purceval stood on the brow of the hill and watched the rye wolves run below her. She remembered her father clamping a dark, work-roughened hand onto her five-year-old shoulder and pointing to the ripples in the growing wheat, speaking with immense solemnity of the hungry wolves they represented, ready to pounce on and devour any small child stupid enough to venture where her parents couldn't see. It had not been hard to make her believe utterly in their reality, and it had been such an effective deterrent that even in her twenties she still felt a prickle of unease if she set foot among a crop. She was going to have to soon, though; the road that wound through the valley was far too narrow for a whole army. Scrubbing thoughtfully at her broad, blunt nose, she pondered the scene before her. It was awfully normal, really. Harvests were the same everywhere, it seemed; this one wasn't yet in full swing, but tiny figures were still visible, assessing and planning and testing the ripeness of the stalks. From what she could see, it looked like they'd done extremely well this growing season. The farmer's daughter in her made peevish noises at the idea of the damage several battalions would do. She wondered what they made of the plumes of smoke starting to rise from the top of the hill, where the forces that would be their liberation were setting up camp. They didn't look much like they needed liberation, to be honest, but her commanders had been clear on the fact that appearances could lie as well as people could, and quite frankly she didn't see how they could be truly free with that hanging over them all the time. So it was for the best, even when it came to trampling grain into the mud. Perhaps, she thought idly, she could volunteer to stay behind and help salvage what she could, afterwards. With a huff, she turned and tramped back towards the corner where her unit had erected their tents. Tirry, one of her squadmates, was sitting outside and doing his best to coax a campfire into life; he looked up and smirked at her approach. “Ho, Melli, I thought you'd been carried off by the fairies, you've been so long!” Mellicent gave him a cuff around the head as she passed him by way of greeting, and smirked back. “If I'd been kidnapped by fairies at least I'd've gone knowin' I'd got more girls than you!” Not quite succeeding in ducking her hand, Tirry provided a whap on the leg in return and turned back to his efforts with a parting jab. “But I've got more guys than you, so we're even!” “In your dreams,” Mellicent replied cheerfully, and ducked into the tent.
Stumbles in here, muttering about kingdom hearts, tales of the abyss, and spite fanfic, stumbles back out
so I got an idea on the bus recently about a short-ish story thing where my protagonist and her eldritch abomination friend go relieve stress by setting an abandoned building on fire and dancing around the wreckage as a means of destructive catharsis I don't really know what do do with that [also I've been writing a fic recently that's going p well and I'm actually really proud of it but I feel awkward sharing it bc it's for a tiny subfandom off smth I feel awkward about letting people know I like rrrrrrghhrhubarbrhbarbrhubarb]
