So how's that novel coming along /tg/?

Fuck you.

>>49572672
I'm 4 pages in, I have no idea where I'm going, and I'm beginning to think YA Weird Fantasy can't be done.

>>49573178
Honestly anything YA can be done as long as it resounds with a target audience.

>>49573251
I have no idea how I could make "boy travels across planes of reality to attempt to stop avatars of eldritch abominations from tearing a hole in the worlds and massacring everyone who lives within" appeal to the 12-15 demographic.

>>49573337
At the risk of sounding like a jackass, make him an awkward but charming boy who likes nerdy stuff and is quirky.

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I am going to make a story out of loli wizards and vampires and yuri and damn it it will work

If stephen king's weird ass shit can get published so can I

>>49573386
Follow your dreams, anon. I belive in you.

>>49573337
Make the boy what that group wants to be or wants to fuck.

>>49573386
Lord why

>>49573400
Okay even I don't have that low an amount of self-esteem.

>>49573413
Because I've had a half-formed story kicking around my head for ages and that's just how it is

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I've written almost 600 pages (about 330,000 words). Today I rewrote a scene linking up two fragmented parts and kept in an element of the story I was planning to cut out.

It's far too autistic to ever be published. As a result I am writing it entirely for my own satisfaction because the story gives me,serious feels. I've probably spent hundreds of hours working on it and I can't ever even show it to my family. No one will ever read it but I need to write it. I even won writing contests in high school and college which means fuck all.

I might write one other novel, because it's actually a vaguely original premise. But beyond that, why bother writing except for personal satisfaction? The market is flooded and over saturated and it feels like hardly anyone reads anymore.

>>49572672
Terribly, I have resorted to disguising my fantasy stuff as "literary" so It can get workshopped in class.

>>49573357
I can do "awkward but charming", but I'm not sure how to do "into nerdy stuff" when his home plane is so different from ours.

>>49573544
Make analogous nerdy shit that's not our nerdy shit but has the same overtures.

>>49573568
but it's based off the old west, though

>>49572672
I want to write and I have ideas but actually sitting down to write is torture since all I do is self pity about prose.

So I'm still trying but I've stalled out. Mostly because I really don't want to put in the work to establish a relationship in the book because I don't want to write mushy teenage crap.

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Do homebrew rulebooks count? The Setting, races, and lore are basically done. All of my systems / diagrams are being updated every couple of days. Then I just need to hunt down and artist and make it all look nice.

>>49573642
Rocks. Space rocks.

>>49573502
I feel the exact same way as you do. I have characters, interactions, and a semi skeleton of a "plot" which is more like scenes between the characters all in my head, and at this point I'm only writing so I can get it out of my head and onto a physical medium.

Even when I look at the premise (analyzing how a clan of immortals tasked with internal peacekeeping between groups of immortals as these groups do "experiments") I get the exact same feeling of "this is far too autistic and niche to ever be published". Certainly my friends and family would never be interested.

But it's kind of fun. I like being able to get these characters down on paper, and feel like they actually exist in some sense of the word. You aren't alone anon.

>>49573733
"Tell me about your character."
"He collects rocks."

I wrote 3 novels years ago, the creativity in me died at some point. I'm still trying to revive it.

If by book you mean a Jojo fanpart for Super Stand Sundays than I'm working right hard on it!

I'm also righting an actual book in my spare time but I'm starting to get the feeling that it'd work much better as a comic book or manga then a novel. Unfortunately my hands shake like a 90 year old man with Parkinson's having a seizure so that's right out.

>>49572672
I'm 200 Pages in and stuck.

>>49572672
I don't have the patience to write one. I'm sticking with short fiction for now.
Not like it's worth the effort of trying to make money from it, because I'm not that good a writer. I'll stick to writing what I like instead of what people want, and share it with friends.

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>>49573337
>I have no idea how I could make "boy travels across planes of reality to attempt to stop avatars of eldritch abominations from tearing a hole in the worlds and massacring everyone who lives within" appeal to the 12-15 demographic.

Got some bad news for you friend

>>49572672
Some cunt already made Percy Jackson.

>>49573502
>>49573818
I'm the same as you two. But how do I start organising it all, making all these random scenes and interactions start fitting together? Where do I start? And how do I keep track of my notes ugh

31 days until NaNoWriMo baby.

Thinking about cheating and doing a second draft of last year's.

>>49578294
I use onenote to organize character dossiers, visio to make little character webs, and then I just start figuring out how they met, what they want out of one another, and I write snippets until it ties in to something bigger.

So far the main "chain" is a series of summoners, who after they die, turn into summons themselves, and the next generation of summoners repeat the cycle. Find a theme that you like and focus on that perhaps

>>49573142
Best reply on 4chan this month

Not working on one. Does working on a short story count?

>>49572672
I am literally outlining it right now.

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>>49572672
Stop reminding me of my dead dreams!

>>49572672
Putting the finishing touches on it now. After I hear from editors and people I asked to review it for me, I'll see if it will need polishing or more actual work.

IF I hear from the editors. The economic situation had deteriorated somewhat since the last time I sent anyone anything, and genre fiction never sold that well down here.

>>49572672
Writing my third one. First two didn't sold too well but I'll keep writing.

>>49572672
I'm still working on it. I want to finish the arc so I'm able to have some more growth with the other characters.

Shit I need to write a novel?!

Why did no one tell me?

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>>49577538
Pullman!

>>49572672
Decently. The problem is wondering if anyone will be willing to read it.
It starts out fairly generic fantasy, kingdom of men beset by the undead, farmer girl is found out to be a powerful latent mage, is sent to the front lines to try and turn the tides of the war, etc.
It's later in the book when shit gets interesting, when it turns out that mages are dime-a-dozen and farmer girl is actually a pretty shit mage, they just have a super high mortality rate so they need all the mages they can get. In addition to that, the army of the dead are actually perfectly sane and have some pretty compelling reasons for attacking the kingdom.
I'm trying to make it as a deconstruction of many of the ideas and ideals of the high fantasy genre, but the problem is that I first need to set it up as generic high fantasy and as somebody who is bored to tears by generic high fantasy I could see people getting bored by how comparatively uninteresting the first half is.
But then I remember that shit like the hobbit movies made a bazillion dollars and generic shit sells the best anyway, so who knows.

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Going swimmingly.

>>49585280
I think you need to sprinkle the generic tropes with stuff that >imply "but things aren't what they seem" in a way that doesn't insult the reader's intelligence.

I have a sweet-ass idea and now I'm trying to figure out how to get from that to an actual sensible explanation

>>49585441
>>49585280
This. Hints of things being wrong are like fucking catnip. Start lacing the first half with all that liberally.

>>49585863
Readers will see the twist coming, and lose interest.

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>>49573502

Also curious if I should resurrect a dead character like the ghola in Dune,because one of the main characters dies and is succeeded by his son and daughter. I miss him badly, it was just a few weeks ago that I started to feel this deep dread and regret for killing him off even though it felt like it had to happen. Now his daughter is having visions of him and thinks she can find him even though he died falling into a pit of energy and pulled himself out before expiring. Her brother thinks she's full,of shit but I haven't decided yet. I know it's bad writing to do this shit but I'm never going to publish it so I don't care much about that. What I do care bout is that he might overshadow his son as the main character.basically there have been three different "main characters," each fathering the next. So the transition works out because the father dies around the time his son comes of age.

I really fucking regret killing that character, though. I just feel fucking,miserable about. Do you think it will pass or should I take steps to resurrect him? I've even been distracted at work. I feel like I ripped up a childhood toy, even though he had a hugely bad ass death and his wife is dead anyway so it'd be his son and daughter, and his Nick Caraway-esque friend,as the only people he knows.

Also his son is "heir to the throne" in a way so he'd probably be pissed that his father returned to overshadow him.

>>49585395
>French reddit.jpg

I actually managed to write 6000 words during a particularly sleepless night at the behest of my therapist.

It's a pinch of Firefly with Weird Aliens and bits and pieces of different space opera that I particularly like.

it's probably complete garbage

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>>49572672
If I ever wrote one, it would be hailed as either the greatest thing ever by up and coming preteens, or absolute nonsensical garbage.
Probably both. Right now I'm in a really weird state of life where if I dropped off my meds and pumped myself full of caffeine, I could probably hack out a novel of midding quality in a few months at the cost of my sanity.
Any fantasy I write would be a mixture of completely mundane day-to-day life and incomprehensible subplots, drama, and hackneyed deconstruction/reconstruction of the fantasy genre.
It would be very hard for me to not make a book I write a soapbox for me to beat the shit out of my personal pet peeves of fiction writing, specifically, the abuse of fiction to shill the author's own personal beliefs and have the hero take a moralizing stance on everything.
Especially the oh so common bullshit attempt at something vaguely resembling existentialism, which amounts to 'It doesn't matter what you believe or what you do, so long as you have friends and you're a 'nice person at heart''.

>>49588697
why not bring the father back, but make him act behind the scenes? So like for whatever reason, his kids don't know he's alive but then meet him later

>>49572672
>tfw inspiration strikes and it all starts falling into place
>racistfrogsmiling.jpg

>>49572672
I posted about it in the last thread about this.

Basically a series of short novellas about how a bunch of guys got recruited to a corporation security team.

I'm outlining it by selecting a bunch of scenes that pop out to me as important and I've listed them chronologically by keywords that immieditly summarize the scene to me in my head.

The tricky bit is turning out to be connecting those important scenes with the pointless but at the same time important shit in between them.

>>49585280
this could actually be really cool anon, keep at it

Reminds me a bit of Evangelion when you mentioned that the mages have a high mortality rate and she's actually pretty shit

>>49580014
That's fuggin' cool.

>>49577538
I read these when I was 13 and fucking loved everything about them; do they still hold up as an adult? Are they worth reading a decade later?

>>49572672

I don't write until its November, like. >>49578474

>>49572672
I'm considering posting a few stories on here of my group... Said group happens to be members of my Polycule, and the sessions can sometimes be ERP intensive.

>3000 words in my book about a wierd war 2 setting
>realize it's probably shit and this has been overdone probably

Well fuck it.

If by novel you mean my fanfiction of two cartoon characters I like being lesbians together and falling in looOOOooOOoove, then I'd say it's going okay.

However, if by novel you mean a supernatural young adult book that I'm gradually losing focus of, because the deuteragonist is way more interesting than anything going on with the actual "main character", then I'd say it isn't going very well. Not even to mention that as much as I love mapping out characters down to the last detail, writing dialogue, and all that jazz- prose is a bit of a chore. If only I weren't a talentless hack, maybe I'd be able to avoid it by just doing a comic. But alas I'm a """writer""". And even if I tried, I wouldn't be able to put enough quotation marks around that.

My doctor who audio-play fanfiction, you mean?

Horribly.

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>editing

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>>49573142
This is exactly what I clicked into this thread to post. You, sir, win the internet.

To answer OP's question: Haven't worked on it in almost a year now. But I still think about it at least every other day.

Yeah, I fucking hate myself.

>>49578474
Oh shit, two years ago I wrote 40 pages in two weeks, as a warmup for finishing my main novel that I was going to write for nanowrimo. The main novel is currently at 30 pages.

I have a lot planned out, but I finish individual scenes way too quickly and don't know how to flesh them out. Those 30 pages are about 10 chapters. I'd like to consider my conciseness as a virtue, but I know I'm not building characters up enough or using my scenes the best I can.

>>49589316
>3 pages a chapter
The fuck

I'm currently trying to follow my dream by writing a story about a rebellion of humanity against the High ones, that are some kind of lesser gods.
Currently developping MC and 50 pages in. Had to cut around 20 pages since childhood and training are such a hassle and a boring thing to write.

>>49589343
From my personal experience when you start you often do things a bit too short. I'm not surprised I had a similar problem.

well it was going good until I realized I was writing The God Emperor of Dune.

>>49572672
Horrible, I'm no good at narrating thoughts. The protagonist seems to just go Nanaya-mode and murder a guy who stole a car battery by leading him gunpoint into an abandoned subway a shoggoth has moved into.

>>49589492
original guy here, I've always been surprised because the typical thing you hear is of writers being too detailed, and needing to cut a lot of things out. That makes sense though because the most recent thing I'm working on for it is the prologue, and that's at 8 pages already. Glad to hear I'm not the only one.

>>49589528
The only way to get good at narrating is reading and writing as much as you can.
Keep trying my friend.

>mfw I thought I was a wierdo for trying to write a novel for so long
>actually I'm not alone

>>49589972
It seems that most people take several years to finish their first book, and then write several more much more quickly. Just gotta power through that first one

>>49573818
>(analyzing how a clan of immortals tasked with internal peacekeeping between groups of immortals as these groups do "experiments"
This sounds interesting!

I had the surreal experience of having dinner with a well-published author with a friend who knew him a few years ago, and he started to talk about a premise involving immortals too. I started to realize that published authors are really no more gifted or talented than we are, just perhaps more practiced or more connected?

>>49590092
This actually fills me with determination.

What are your main character's goals, why do they want to achieve those goals, and what's keeping them from instantly and effortlessly achieving those goals?

If you know that, then plotting your story becomes easy. It's purely a case of asking yourself "what does this character want?" and then having them chase those wants through every single scene.

If you can't answer that question, then you do not have a story. You have a big pile of nothing that will never get anywhere.

>Also, if your character's only motivation is "it's their destiny", just kill yourself right now, you fucking hack.

>>49590186
What if their motivation is "It's their destiny, and they're trying to screw fate over to gain free will while on the surface trying to meet the conditions of the prophecy to prevent them losing all control over their body and being turned into a living puppet?"

>>49577538
That's one interpretation of that initial premise, out of a countless number of others. Fuck "it's been done". Has it been done by YOU? Then it hasn't fucking been done yet.

If I wrote a story about a girl falling in love with a vampire, I can guaran-fucking-tee that my interpretation of the premise would be original, because I'm the one writing it. I'm the only person on Earth with my life experiences, my perspective, my creative biases. No-one else can write like me, so no-one else could write the story I wrote before I did.

>>49590209
still sounds like some mary sue bullshit but it all depends on how it's written. I'm personally adverse to any strict rules to story, since there are several popular novels that seem to break any rules of good storytelling and still become huge hits

>>49590209
Then that's not their motivation. Their motivation is "I want to be free". Their destiny is an obstacle in the way of that goal that they need to overcome, not the goal itself.

Any tips on constructing a story where both the "hero" and the "villain" (quoting because I mean to make it more shades of gray than morally black and white) and their respective milieus get equal screen time?

Does anyone have any recommendations of books that split screentime between the protagonist and antagonist?

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>>49573502
why not just toss it out here for quick stress test?
you're anon, nobody will give you shit personally either way

>>49590186
>What are your main character's goals, why do they want to achieve those goals, and what's keeping them from instantly and effortlessly achieving those goals?
I'm actually struggling to answer this.

I got a motivation, a desire to do something, but actual goals are nothing. Which is kind of the point of the character but still.

>>49590257
they could have visions of each other at night, thus you could give both of them screen time without really changing the point of view

>>49590312
Your character could want a goal he could pursue in his life.

>>49590186
>What are your main character's goals, why do they want to achieve those goals

How do I proceed if my MC left his home because he was fed up with his father's bullshit. He didn't really have a goal beside getting off the planet on first transport.

>>49590369
Wouldn't fit for him.

He's supposed to be this drifting guy whom people kind of push along roads. No real purpose or goals in life beyond a vague murky desire to do more martial arts.

Which is a goal that can be used for by the original post but one that doesn't connect to the story bit because he easily accomplishes it within a chapter.

>>49590382
well, what now? Does he need to find a place to live? A job so he can eat? Does he have to steal food to get by? Are there immigration laws where he's going? Cultural differences? Racism (against him or others)?

If there's no conflict after he leaves, then the whole story is probably just him dealing with his shitty father and the resolution is him leaving, and it can end there.

I got stuck on a plot point.

The Queen has these two mages in her service that never take their hooded robes off and always wear these masks that hide their eyes, leaving only their mouths in view. They are both named Sam. One is male and the other is female, but their voice is identical, so nobody knows which one is which.

The Queen is able to tell the difference between them and she has become quite fond of the two of them, but right now, the plot is at a point where powerful political figures are demanding to know the truth about them. Many people in the court don't like the Queen's very unsettling companions and want to know where they came from and why they're so goddamned creepy, but I'm drawing a blank.

>>49590408
Look up the reluctant hero archetype

I have a collection of ideas that aren't coming together. Occasionally I get a new idea, but it never works with enough other stuff to get the whole story going. There's one idea I like, and it might drive a story, but I need to do research for that. I'm hoping that I'll just learn that information in one of my history classes, but if I don't learn it by the end of the semester, I might actively research it.

>>49590413
Uhh, can you rephrase the question? You gave us some background information, but not the real crux of the matter. Is the Queen on shaky political ground, and that's why she needs to answer? Are you stuck on what the backstory of these mages actually is? I'm confused.

>>49590408
This is pretty bad, if I'm honest. An aimless character is a boring character. Either give him a solid reason to be the centre of the story (like blowing up that martial arts desire to "wants to be the very best" levels, where he's roaming the world in pursuit of fighting mastery), or put someone else centre-stage who actually has solid, proactive goals.

>>49590238
Characters trying to escape fate is literally the oldest story in history. It's the plot of Gilgamesh, for crying out loud.

>>49590448
Yeah, sure, I'll try again.

The problem I'm having is I can't actually figure out WHERE they came from.

As far as anyone in the story is aware, they just showed up and pledged their services to the Queen and didn't ask for anything in return.

As it stands right now in the actual text of the book, they've never explained to her the following
>Where they came from
>Why they refuse to remove their robes and masks
>Why they sound exactly the same

So I guess what my tired brain is trying to ask for is suggestions that could help me reboot my thought process and actually come up with their backstory.

>>49590476
I'd say that we can't suggest where they came from unless we know more about the setting. Of course, the question I'D ask is WHY they showed up and pledged their services to the queen. Them not asking for anything in return implies an ulterior motive, some reason they should be in the queen's service. If you've not got their backstory or motivations, how can your write their future actions? I guess I'm asking if they're important in the grand scheme of the narrative?

>>49590439
I just remembered I had another idea that I really liked. Hopefully my psychology class will help me write this story. The villain protagonist isn't right in the head but I assume what's wrong with her isn't a real psychological abnormality. One of the problems with this story is I can't decide on the setting, because the most important thing isn't dependent on the setting. I'm a little afraid of making it realistic fiction or a similar genre because I'm afraid I don't know enough about real life.

>>49590186
Not really tho, a lot of pretty famous books have flimsy plot which they pull off because they write it so well.

Like to give one example, Moby Dick is basically just the 19th century version of "I'm On a Boat (Dude Whales Lmao)" for 500 pages, interspersed with a story here and there.

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>>49590476
>>49590506
I'm a total sucker for characters that show up offering help and then screw over everyone halfway through the story/they're actually playing both sides against each other because they hate them all and want them both to die.

If that's not applicable though:
- identical twins is the obvious answer for why they sound the same, but let's twist it a bit and consider that perhaps one of them starts identifying as a different gender? (that would also help explain why they want to remain concealed)
- where they came from and why: would need to know more about the setting to come up with ideas here

>>49590417
He's not really a hero.
He's from this idea.
>>49589038


To expand on the guy himself and why he's so goalless. He's weird.

He wrestles for his high school and he's good at it. He's hardworking by nature and decently intelligent. Any future he chooses he'd probably make a good go of it by virtue of those two traits.

His main thing, the reason I got him as a main character is that his morals are there but they're warped. Violence doesn't phase him, and he doesn't really seem to care about people beyond a sort of I understand social norms kind of way. He's more like an engine than a human.

It's actually kind of hard to describe him. Writing him is easy as hell though.

>>49590506
>>49590543
Well, their main role so far in the story has been to aid the Queen in her attempts at researching the arcane. Magic isn't common in the nation she rules over, and it makes a lot of politicians uneasy to hear about their monarch researching it (with rumors circulating about her searching for a way to restore the magical qualities of the royal family's bloodline). They often appear together in the homes of nobles to relay the demands of the queen.

It's worth mentioning that early on, I had considered having the two of them be sent from a foreign nation known for their abundance of magically inclined citizens as a sort of olive branch, and had thought about tying that into the rumors about the queen's interest in the royal bloodline (if you're curious about that, the royal family is supposed to be descended from a dragon that had taken the form of a human woman and mated with the first king).

Now that I think of it, the twins could very well be dragons in disguise... unless that would be too much of a stretch.

I'm sorry if these posts don't seem very coherent, insomnia is a bitch.

>>49590556
It's fine. I write best with insomnia taking hold of me.

You know what I'd recommend? They're a single dragon in disguise.

>>49572672
Which one?
>Have like twelve different projects
>Keep trying to trim them down
>Only end up with more new projects
I'm stuck in a hell of my own making.

>>49590536
And Moby Dick is an absolute slog to read unless you're really, really interested in learning about whaling in the 1800s.

As a rebuttal, I offer all of Shakespeare.

>>49590556
Yeah, I'm kinda liking >>49590567 's suggestion.

Fellow insomniac rambling ideas:
- they're part of a dragon cult? they want to turn into dragons??
What is this foreign nation's relationship with the Queen's nation?
- they want to somehow insert themselves into the royal bloodline or usurp the queen eventually somehow?
- they're honestly in love with and admire the Queen (and perhaps want to have a threesome); they're actually perfectly loyal with no ulterior motives
- no matter what, i'm thinking mage-fuckery is involved.

>>49590554
He's a psychopath.

You literally just described a psychopath. He doesn't care about people because he is pathologically incapable of empathy. He is unfazed by violence, because he doesn't see the people he's hurting as human. That is psychopathy to a T.

Are you writing from life, perchance?

>>49590567
>>49590613
A single dragon in disguise as two twins that keep switching the gender they identify as and only the queen can tell them apart because of latent dragon blood... I can work with it.

As for the other nation, they're a very reclusive nation that prefers to keep their magic to themselves, but the Queen (who is intended to be the main character) rules over a nation that is rapidly discovering new technologies that have allowed them to gain a position over all of their neighbors. Because of this, the reclusive magic nation has decided that establishing a relationship would benefit them, and if their assumptions about the queen are correct, require her to rely on them.

If I go with the idea of the twins being the avatars of one dragon, I could potentially write it so that people in higher political positions in the reclusive magic nation are either descendants of dragons or dragons themselves or perhaps just worship a specific dragon.

>>49590629
>Are you writing from life, perchance?
What?

>>49590382
Sounds like he needs to discover who he is as a person. Hell, it may take him some time to figure that out (certainly took me some time in my 20s), and part of the story can be about that. Just remember to actually resolve it and end the story with a feeling of conclusion and certainty.

>>49590439
>>49590513
>The villain protagonist isn't right in the head
How so?

Are you asking for any advice or are you just sharing? Because if it's the former, we'd need way more details before we could comment.

>>49590600
I had the same problem. Take a week and write a 30-ish pages novels, then do that again and gradually increase the size of your works. You'll end up being able to finish your thing

>>49590629
>Psychopath
That's a loaded as hell criteria.

There's more to psychopaths than that.

>>49590556
It sounds like you're just throwing ideas together, with no clear idea of how your story is going to play out.

That's seriously one of the most useful things you can do in writing a story - decide how it begins, and then decide how it ends. Then filling in the middle part becomes easy: it's just a case of getting the main characters from A to B.

In this case, it seems like you don't know what the motives of your twin-mages are, because you don't know what you need them to be, in order to facilitate the plot you had in mind. What is the plot of your story? How do you want it to begin, and how do you want it to end? What do you want your story to say?

>feeling the urge to write
>can't function because people are behind me
the struggles of autism

>>49590685
I know how it begins: Queen's coronation after her brother dies, childless. Nation rejects her rule at first but eventually comes to accept it as she ushers in the accelerated technological development. The course of the story is supposed to address her attempting to reshape the kingdom while also looking to restore the supposed divinity of her bloodline and I know it will end with her own death and she is succeeded by her younger brother that was not the claimant due to him being a small child at the time of his brother's death.

I know the plot of the story, and I know how most of the characters will behave throughout it. The problem lies in the fact that I know I want the twins to be essential to the queen's goals, but realized after writing around 100 pages that they didn't have much substance beyond "the unsettling twins that do the queen's bidding."

I guess, in short, the story is about how the crown went from a traditionalist king to a questionable queen to an unprepared and immature king.

>>49590684
Yeah, seriously! I take offense to this shallow assumption! Psychopaths are deep and interesting people, like myself

>>49590713
I know this feel. I can only write when extremely comfy in bed. And even then I end up fapping and/or writing porn than my novel. #FirstWorldProblems

>>49590716
Honestly, published authors get away with a lot of shit like that. If the rest of the story is interesting enough that no one asks "wtf was up with those twins, tho?" until a week afterward, you're fine.

>>49590716
You could always play up the mystery angle of it, maybe leave conflicting information that desribes their nature. People love figuring shit out, doubly so when it's mysterious shit, as you can see by most lore threads on here.

>>49590684
Of course there is. But a lack of empathy is still one of the biggest symptoms of psychopathy.

There's a reason people get worried when they hear about children hurting or killing animals for fun. The suffering of animals triggers the same empathic response in humans as the suffering of other humans. If a kid has no empathy for animals, they're probably not going to extend the feeling to their fellow man, either.

Just because someone is a psychopath doesn't mean they're a monster. It does, however, mean they have a neurological defect that makes it very hard for them to see other human beings as people, instead of automatons.

>>49590755
Well honestly I stayed the fuck away from the Psychopath and sociopath labels because that shits kind of complicated and once people start using it they start making assumptions.

The automaton bit for example. The social norms bit wasn't supposed to mean that he literally doesn't understand why he should on an emotional level care about the suffering of others.

He just doesn't extend himself to others or seem to care for the company of others. It's a recurring point in his novella that he kind of exists on an island of his own and that people have to reach towards him. The two biggest human connections he has are people who made an active effort to reach out to him.

>>49590629
>Are you writing from life, perchance?
No. It's something that popped up purely from the imagination.

That's why it's interesting.

>>49590755
>a lack of empathy is still one of the biggest symptoms of psychopathy.
being resistant to knowledge of others' suffering doesn't have to mean you lack empathy.

>There's a reason people get worried when they hear about children hurting or killing animals for fun.
I wonder how much of that is a genuine empathy though.
I can watch islamic beheadings while eating.
I've seen bodies of little girls torn to bits by bombs from Ukrainian jets, didn't even shrug.
Doesn't mean I can't put myself in those people's shoes and acknowledge a horrible fucking thing has been done to them and call for the blood of the perpetrators.
I can administer utter verbal beatings to people, but I won't poke someone's old wounds on purpose.
Just because you don't feel physically ill, when someone else suffers doesn't mean you are emotionless machine or that you perceive other human beings as things.
This is utter bullshit.

>>49572672
>tfw I wrote shitty fanfiction novel a couple years ago just for a few laughs
>got to about 60,000 word mark, and wait until people catch on to the joke that I'm intentionally writing it awful
>everyone loved it, and posted great reviews, and wanted me to write more
>stop writing it almost immediately, because people calling an awful fanfiction "great" made me realize how retarded an average reader is, and how I don't want to pander to those people
Feels Batman.

>>49590870
>how retarded an average reader
You mean average "fanfiction" writer, right? You said it was a fan-fictin: that is not a genre know for particularly discriminating audience.

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>>49590870
Just wanted to let you know that you are a horrible fucking person.

>>49590651

The idea I alluded to in >>49590439 and idea I alluded to in >>49590513 don't have anything to do with each other.

Also I was just sharing.

>>49590178
When you boil down any idea to a short pitch they all sound the same, it's in the execution that they differ. Professional authors are more practiced, yes, but skill isn't apparent in such a short conversation.

>>49573386
This reminded me I need to finish reading Carmilla. The first lesbian vampire story (I don't think there are wizards). Come to think of it, I have a few gothic horror stories I need to read. Thanks!

>>49590186
The best story writing advice I ever received was to ask yourself three questions:

>Who wants what?
>Why can't they have it?
>Why do I give a shit?

Stories of people wanting things and struggling to achieve them fall flat if the reader doesn't care about the protagonist.

>>49590851
There's cognitive empathy and emotional empathy.
Cognitive empathy is you know what someone is feeling.

Emotional empathy is feeling what you perceive other people are feeling.

>>49590851
Empathy is the ability to place yourself in the mindset of another person or animal, to the point where you feel a bit of what they feel. It's why people wince in pain when they see someone else in pain, why people yawn when another person yawns. An academic understanding of another person's emotions is not the same as empathy. People with antisocial personality disorder are capable of reading other people's feelings but struggle to extend compassion towards them.

Keep in mind that people will need to identify with your character if you're planning to put this out into the world. A character who doesn't like anyone and has no emotional connection to the world will come off at first glance as being a psychopath. Find some way to convey their complexity to the reader and make them interesting and sympathetic.

>>49573337
IIRC the podcast writing excuses did an episode on demographics.

>>49591124
http://www.writingexcuses.com/?s=demographic

>>49591079
He has friends. Actual friends, not drinking buddies and gossip dispensers. He also cares about complete strangers, disturbingly almost. IF there is a way he can help you, he will try.
However, he will be utterly baffled why someone bawls because a cat got thrown against the wall on youtube. Not because he doesn't feel bad for the creature, or god forbit, finds it entertaining himself, but because he's got a completely different priority ladder when it comes to empathy.
He cannot realisitcally process how can a person get so emotional watching a cat being thrown against the wall, and not suffer total mental breakdown when listening to a history lesson and learning 70 fucking million people perished in World War Two. To him, the cat is a speck of dust falling from a super volcano eruption.

>>49591393
concept of fairness taken to extreme

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I have a visual novel project going on and I want to make some decent narrative with it, but since I'm working on my master's right now I barely have any free time at home to work on it.

I've been considering writing while I commute to uni which are pretty much 2 hours a day, but writing a novel on a cell phone while standing up and auto correct feels like shit. I've been pondering about getting one of those cell phone keyboards or a tablet, but I dunno which one could be more comfortable.

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>>49591439
a notebook?
you know, an actual notebook, made of paper?
even recycled paper is good...

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>>49591457
Well sure, I usually use notepads for taking notes and understanding plot elements, but I mean about actually writing the novel in a way that it doesn't become an unintelligible mess since I keep going back to fix mistakes I made with the narrative. Also, my handwriting sucks, once it was described as the handwriting of a doctor while having a stroke.

>>49591550
It may be a hassle to do but i wrote on a note then copy it on the computer and fix my mistakes in the process. It works.

>>49591439
>writing a novel on a smartphone

dedication.

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>>49572672

I haven't written anything in months, /tg/...

I dunno what I'm trying to do. Also kinda stuck working on the synopsis of a novel because I actually want to try and publish it. I just haven't worked on it in a while and don't have a drive. I've written like 2 and a half 60k-word novels. I wanna publish them. Idk who to send them to, even. Who'd accept a budding fantasy writer without an agent?

>>49591439
I used to write at work using a keyboard attachment for a small tablet. It works well enough, but be aware that some of those note-taking apps can't handle huge word counts: once I got beyond 10k words in one file the lag between keystroke and letter appearing on screen became untenable.

>>49591439
I have a MacBook Air pretty much for that purpose and I'm incredibly happy with it: it's small, light, comfortable to write on and has very long battery spawn. That said, I got mine as a present, as I would never actually spend THAT much money on a piece of convenience electronics, no matter how handy it is.

Alternative is, of course, pen and a piece of paper. Hard-cover notebook, a good comfortable pen, and a steady hand writing.

>>49591418
>concept of fairness taken to extreme
Not really, no. It sounds more like a projection of a person with low social intelligence into a Mary Sue character that also lacks that social intelligence but still is supposed to come across as totally cool flawless person.

Also, is the thread broken or something? It takes like six attempts to post anything...

>>49591654
Nah dude. I think the thread is fine. This is my first attempt.

>>49591654
If we're going writing laptops the Chromebooks are pretty good for that purpose (if you can handle Google Docs, some folks can't those people are weak at heart)

I have a Toshiba Chromebook 2 and damn is it comfy. Eight hours battery life, boots up in seconds, and has about 8gigs of hard drive for those times when it can't be a cloud computer.

>>49591697
>Nah dude. I think the thread is fine. This is my first attempt.
Weird, seems like 4chan in general is acting up on me.

>>49591703
>if you can handle Google Docs,
Google docs are Satan's invention and a part of a long-term plan to drive humanity insane by frustrating them in the most petty, small and obnoxious ways. It's essentially the very first manifestation of the Warp in our world, where the dark powers of chaos and despair intermingle with our technology and subtly hints the horror that we will have to face in the future. It's the beggining of the end, the glympse of Eternal Insanity, the true form of hell.
I don't like Google Docs very much.

>>49591644
That sounds pretty annoying, I thought tablets could at least handle text files decently already. Thanks for the heads up.

>>49591654
A macbook air sounds pretty comfortable, but it may be a bit awkward to pull it out in the metro train. It would be perfect for writing at school though.

>>49591703
Damn, those little chromebooks are adorable and they can be pretty handy

>>49591638

Nevermind, my synopsis and cover letter are completed. I just really need to find a good publisher. I want these things to be published, /tg/. I just do. I don't care if I have to work on em a million times. been editing sooo much since Summer of 2012.

This is the anon whose story is about a 'chosen one' girl whose supposed to bring an end to an evil empire, but in reality, there is no chosen one. The rebellion made up the prophecy, and the wizard dude she has been traveling with has been lying to her face about her being this chosen one character.

The empire is shitting itself. Everyone else is praising her. And she believes it completely while this wizard is trying to stretch himself thin to keep the lie alive.

Is she the chosen one? Is she a fake? Is she actually the main character? I don't even know.

>>49591731
You are a base knave, sir.

>>49591654
>person with low social intelligence
>Mary Sue character
>totally cool flawless person

I'm genuinely interested where the fuck did this come from

>>49591750

Do publishers NEED 70k to publish? Or is a bit over 60k good?

>>49591741
>but it may be a bit awkward to pull it out in the metro train.
Never had that kind of an issue, outside of being given some odd looks and some hipster folk complaining how only duchebags use Macs and that kind of shit.
Yeah, it was also amazing for taking notes. I basically used to live 90% of my waking life sitting either in a library, a coffee house or a tram/metro/train so I found it just incredibly convenient, it pretty much changed my work routines.
Hell, it's so light and small I basically carry it EVERYWHERE with me, pulling it out in a middle of a forest or beneath an eave of a fucking temple in Japan to jot down what was going on in my head at that moment.

But the thing is, once again: MacBooks are OVERPRICED as fuck. I never had to do the research, and I never had any other machine, but I don't doubt you can get something that is a better price deal. Yeah, they are sturdy and well made, but my god nothing justifies that price tag, at least not in my country.

>>49591799
Mary Sue is a product of poor social intelligence. It's an attempt to model a human being (according to authors understanding of human beings) but based on very poor understanding of other people.

What I've heard there is "this character can't understand how and why people care about some things, but because I've heard cool guys are supposed to understand and care about others, so I'm gonna make this character be actually super emphatic and understanding (except when he is not, but that does not matter somehow) because that will make him cool.

>>49590873
>You mean average "fanfiction" writer, right?
Yeah.
The point of my entire exercise in futility was trying to intentionally mimic the awful and obtuse writing style of, well, fanfiction in general.
I succeeded, I guess?

>>49591951
>I succeeded, I guess?
Yeah. I don't understand how you could get mad at those people for that.
They enjoy fanfiction. Writing a text-book example of fanfiction is of COURSE going to get them to like it.
I would understand if you wrote something considerably BETTER in style than classic fan-fiction and they told you it's shit: like that would be reasonable to be pissed and say "you know what, I'm done with this shit."

If you are marking your food towards people with obsessively sweet tooth, and you sell them basically just sugar, you don't get angry at them being happy with it mocking them for not understanding that you were just making fun of them by making it all sugar: THEY LIKE IT BECAUSE THEY LIKE SUGAR, dammit.

>>49572672
It's not, I write short stories.

>>49572672

I have failed.

I keep double checking the science. Then one of my old flames got close to a guy from the culture the protag is from, so I changed the protag.

Et al, et al. I'm going to try to get into a magazine first.

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>>49591731
>>49591703
>hating on Google Docs

I exclusively write in google docs.

get on my fucking level.

Also, bump

>>49594934
I like it because I don't have to schlep my planning documents between three different computers

>>49594934
>get on my fucking level.
I'd rather not to.
I don't hate it. The way I don't hate Hell or the notion of Suffering itself. I fear it. There is no space for hatered when you stare in the face of true terror. There is only awe and fright.

I use google docs quite a lot, actually, for sharing documents among larger groups of people. But I'd rather actually write in a notepad than the fucking thing. It's absolutely terrible, has a constant delay on everything, the formating is FUCKED all around, the synopsis function is broken half the time, and you are fucked if anything goes wrong with your connection. I generally use Scrivener for larger scale writing and notepad when I write on my Mac (because Mac version of Word is botched and Papers are a format-nightmare) and then copy-paste the finished texts to google-docs.

>>49595077
>I'd rather actually write in a notepad
notepad is only good for little blurbs and notes.

to write anything more is a hassle.

>>49595146
Most of what I wrote are stories only few paragraphs long. But I wrote some longer things in it too. The reason why I do it is because I routinely switch between four different systems and I need something that is going to spare me a headache with formating.
I eventually use other software to put in the finishing touches, and The Devils Vengeance against Proper Formating for sharing them.

>>49591829.
>What I've heard there is "this character can't understand how and why people care about some things, but because I've heard cool guys are supposed to understand and care about others, so I'm gonna make this character be actually super emphatic and understanding (except when he is not, but that does not matter somehow) because that will make him cool.
Okay first of all you're really kind of projecting at this point. Like from the beginning, and I don't somebody has been trying to make the joke or maybe insult that he's a self insert or some kind of reflection of me. I don't know why because as I said in the first post he's one of four main characters. Not one.

Second of all at no point was "super emphatic and understanding" used to describe the guy.


Where are you getting that?

>>49595381
This is /tg/.

Half the shit being written here is self insert shit because the board is filled with people who do that so they're going to assume everyone else is as well.

Just ignore it.

>>49573178
The basic premise is heavily ripped from- er, INSPIRED by the Dreamlands Cycle of H.P. Lovecraft fame, albeit with more of an industrial fantasy feel to it. Essentially, 250 Million years ago, a precursor race figured out how to tear holes in the universe, and populated 4 other empty planes before weakening the universe enough to allow two murderous races of godlike ayylmaos to run rampant through the universes, wiping the once mighty precusor race from history, and eventually battling on earth, which killed 95% of all life as collateral damage before the dying builders figured out a way to seal them off from their home planes, a process which eventually killed them. Eventually, one of the trapped races bashes their collective heads against the walls of reality for long enough to create minor avatars, and the protag has to figure out how to stop them from getting out before they fuck everything up once more. Only problem is I have no idea how he does that.

>>49595381
>he's one of four main characters
Who are the other three?

>>49595741
Getting builders artifacts ? Mgic ? Technology ? Spirits ? Calling otherwordly gods ?

>>49595771
There's Ronin the main recruiter. His story, unlike the others, takes place nearly twenty years before the rest and begins right after his father, a kung-fu master is strangled on live television.

DCDG whose story starts right after his grandfather dies and he's left with all the bills.

The old man whose story starts right after his wife divorces him.

>>49595991
Well, likely by using builder tech, but I have no idea how to get my characters embroiled in the story.

>>49596091
Get tricked into working for said minor avatars, then discovering something is eldrichtly wrong with them and understanding the tech they are trying to destroy is actually valuable ?
Just suggesting though.

Friendly reminder that if you don't regularly post on /lit/ you're probably not going to write anything that isn't cringy af.

Friendly reminder that if you don't read LITERATURE, you won't be able to write it.

>>49596402
>Friendly reminder that if you don't read LITERATURE, you won't be able to write it.
If by literature, you mean classic fiction, sure.
However, I doubt most people in these threads have ambitions and interests in writing classic fiction in the first place.

>Friendly reminder that if you don't regularly post on /lit/ you're probably not going to write anything that isn't cringy af.
/lit/ is a shithole populated by self-righteous pricks who would not know a good book if it smacked them in their face, because for the past few years they have been too busy wanking off and slupring their shitty board culture to actually enjoy a book once in a while. As somebody desperately looking for a good place to discuss classic fiction, I can attest that you'll get better results doing that on /v/ than there. /lit/ has managed to turn the virtue of knowing classic literature into a vice somehow, It's actually quite fucking amazing.

>>49596470
>If by literature, you mean classic fiction, sure
How is it this possible to be this dense. Classic fiction? What the fuck do you mean by that? "Old fiction that has a good reputation"? Is Borges and Pynchon magically worse for not being classic yet? And is Sherlock Holmes magically not utter shit because it's old, and people who've never read it think it's good?

I don't know what you're trying to excuse here.
>/lit/ is a shithole populated by self-righteous pricks who would not know a good book if it smacked them in their face
Aw, did they insult your favourite shitty YA author? Was it Abercrombie? King? You need to get over yourself. Sometimes, you just have shit taste.

The fact you need to run to /tg/ and /v/ so nobody hurts your feelings speaks wonders for the virtues of /lit/.

>>49596526
>How is it this possible to be this dense.
That is a good question. Just not directed towards the right person.
"Classic fiction" is a literary concept (that is, an arguably useful heuristic with some seriously fuzzy borders but it gets the job done) that serves as an opposition to "genre fiction".

The notion being that genre fiction is primarily focused on fulfilling reader expectations as they are established within the genre, but has little to no ambition to make a more profound statement about the nature of human condition, while classic fiction does the opposite: focuses on making meaningful statements about what is (relatively speaking) universal human condition and not making sacrificies in favor of focus on fulfilling the expectations associated with it's particular genre.
So for an instance, despite having elements of magical and fantastic or science-fiction, Borges or Bulghakov or Abe are generally considered authors of "Classic fiction" as they works are deemed to primarily make meaningful commentaries, while Howard or Sapkowsky or Dan Brown are considered genre fiction authors, as the majority of their works focuses on the established tropes and expectations of their genre.
Comparing Brown's Da Vinci Code to Eco's Foucault's Pendulum might yield even better results, perhaps, seeing how both authors follow a seemingly very similar formula and could be argued to fall into very similar genres, but I doubt you'd disagree when I claim the results are drastically different.

I have to say, this is very basic literary theory and at least as an orientational guide/terminology it's used across most literally schools and among majority of literary scholars, so I find it rather baffling that a person trying so desperately to push his big literature knowledge ego onto us would not know this.

>Aw, did they insult your favourite shitty YA author?
You see, everything you posted so far can be pretty much labeled "And this is why I stay away from /lit/."

>>49596402
>Friendly reminder that if you don't read LITERATURE, you won't be able to write it.
Yes.
>regularly post on /lit/
Lol no. /lit/ to literature is what /v/ is to video games.

>>49596470
The divide between mainstream and genre fiction, while completely arbitrary initially, had long since become a self-fulfilling prophecy of a sort. Devoid of prestige, visibility, serious editorial review and other forms of quality control, genre fiction had devolved into a mess of writers with no literary background writing for readers with no literary background, awkwardly perpetuating the same ideas and styles they read when they were young readers themselves. If you want to learn how to write well, you NEED to study serious mainstream literature.

>>49572672
Querying agents, trying to get one interested in my cyberpunk.

Writing short stories in the mean time. Will probably grind through something for NaNoWriMo

>>49596667
>"Classic fiction" is yadder yadder blah blah
Normal people call that "literature", anon. So yes, by literature I meant literature.

Though this only makes the denseness question even more mysterious.
>You see, everything you posted so far can be pretty much labeled "And this is why I stay away from /lit/."
Because you posted there once and got butthurt when they said Grrmartin was a shitter. We know.
>>49596745
>Lol no. /lit/ to literature is what /v/ is to video games.
Yes, everyone should post lit on fucking /tg/.

>>49596745
>Devoid of prestige, visibility, serious editorial review and other forms of quality control, genre fiction had devolved into a mess of writers with no literary background writing for readers with no literary background,
I don't think that is true. To be perfectly honest, the divide between classic and genre fiction has been SYSTEMATICALLY dissolved for the past sixty years pretty much with the push for postmodernism and artistic relativism, and all the dissolution of the divide achieved is even worse mess. We had reached a point where even refering to the classic and genre fiction division drives a lot of people stark raving mad (because it makes them feel insecure with the implication that what they like might be considered "inferior" to something else) and actually a great deal of literary criticism has turned towards genre fiction and popculture, but it did no fucking good for anyone.

The distinction has it's serious problems and it's always good to know it's orientational, not definitive, but it also has the beneficial implication of non-relativistic value model and an actual standards to uphold, which is what creative media desperately need these days: plus it's simply pragmatic: while the borders may be fuzzy, on general genre fiction works one way and classic fiction works the other.

>>49596797
>Normal people call that "literature",
Not really, because "literature" also carries the meaning of "entire cannon of existing books", which is why the term "classic fiction" has been popularized.

>Because (...)
No, because it's populated by people who desperately crave attention and chances to insult other people over literary knowledge but actually not know much about books or literary theory to begin with.
Because instead of finding people I can actually discuss Borges or Pavic or Shiga with, I find a bunch of people who name-drop them, insult someone, and then run away like a terrified school girl when you bring up an actual element of the books.

It's not.

I have a setting that has about 20 minutes worth of real effort to actually developed combined over the last two years **compared to endless obsession during said time**

I have characters who are the same "buddy buddy dynamic duo/trio" bullshit teams that have no real character to them except for vague personality traits that make no sense when compared to what they do and where they come from **If they come from anywhere**

And I have no idea of any story I could possibly tell, except origin stores that are nothing but extreme justification for autistic powerwank inside my own head.

I lack the ability to actually describe things so ten pages of exposition will leave people with just enough of a picture of whats going on as most people get away with by writing "The".

Also I have shit tastes in both fantasy and sci-fi, even though I don't want to do actual sci-fi everyone is going to call it that because it has space in it.

>>49596864
>Not really, because "literature" also carries the meaning of "entire cannon of existing books"
You're really unable to work out what I meant by context? Like how it'd make no sense to suggest people read literature specifically? That sounds pretty autistic.
>which is why the term "classic fiction" has been popularized.
So popular that it's never used that way.
>No, because it's zzzzzzzz
You're just making shit up, now.

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I always wanted to write some short stories in English but I find it difficult, I find myself constantly stalling and looking for the correct words and phrases to translate my thoughts.

What are some good online resources to get some training?

>>49596978
If writing in english is hard for you, the best exercise for it is writing in english

>>49596864
>the divide between classic and genre fiction has been SYSTEMATICALLY dissolved for the past sixty years..
You are correct, of course, but all the benefits of that boil down to too little, too late. Genre fiction is now its own thing, and has its own reader base. It might seem to be recovering a bit, but I feel that's mainly because it's low expectations meant it got oversaturated with crud in the 90s/early 00s and the publishes had gotten more picky. And the success of the LotR movies meant that superficially ripping off Tolkien is no longer that easy to pull off.

>>49596978
You're wasting your time. Write it properly in your native tongue then translate.

>>49597043
>>49596992

These are probably good ideas, thanks.

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>>49596761
wait wait wait

IS ANYONE ELSE in this thread done with their novel?

>>49597229
Is that supposed to be Molly Millions?

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>>49597314
I think so, downloaded it from here, so I have no idea of the sauce.

>>49597332
she's more anime than I remember

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>>49597021
>Genre fiction is now its own thing, and has its own reader base.
Genre fiction existed before literacy became a thing, actually. It always had it's audience and always worked very much the way it does today, nothing changed about that. The idea that there was some kind of artificial divide between the two somewhere in the past century itself is a fucking artifical notion pretty much heavily pushed forward by left-wing ideology because it was a useful icon to illustrate their alleged class/identity based conflict.

Makura no Sōshi was a textbook genre fiction of fucking 1002, while Borges, one the the worlds ALPHA literary snobs was writing tributes to Lovecraft in 1920's and to fucking Bradbury in the 50's: this whole "oh genre fiction was so hurt by our snobbish delimination" is bullshit: the delimination always existed, always hurt some authors and benefited others, always made mistakes and over looks but also motivated people to try harder and hold higher standards: it's how culture works. It's how art works, it's actually what art basically means.

The real problem only started when we getting angry about it and turning it into some kind of essentially political problem, which eventually and unavoidably ended up with diverting the attention from the actual literary value to some kind of bullshit ideology. And even that did not happen for the first or last time.

Our main problem REALLY is that we struggle to reestablish the prestige and importance of classical fiction. And it would be great if in the process we could improve and broaden our standards, it would great if we could make sure more authors don't get foolishly overlooked just because their works feature dragons and space-ships, but we NEED the notion of classical fiction to be relevant to begin with, to even start building fiction standards again in the first place.

Sorry for the rant. I feel passionately about this.

>>49596926
>You're really unable to work out what I meant by context?
I've pretty clearly had, considering that I just correct you. The reason why the term "literature" is not used by most sensible literary critics and scholars is because it's needlessly misleading and frankly makes you sound like an asshole. It's actually only really used by people who ENJOY the attention derived from the confusion and the antagony the hidden "what you read is not REAL literature" arrogance in that.
The term "classical fiction" has been around for equally as long and proved itself to be far more useful and less confusing and antagonizing. Actually it has been YOU who clearly wasn't able to figure out what I was talking about, considering the whole tantrum you threw earlier.

>So popular that it's never used that way.
Again you prove yourself actually incredibly ignorant to the reality of the medium and surrounding theory. By the way: this guy >>49596745 immediately knew what I was talking about.

>You're just making shit up, now.
You have done nothing so far than act like an asshole, insult people, not know basic realities of the medium and constantly accused of others having poor taste despite having literally no knowledge of what they read and enjoy.
And you claim to be from /lit/.
So I'd say that I'm absolutely and perfectly spot on about at LEAST one person from the board.

For the record, I left /lit/ not because they disliked some author that I did like, but because I found it actually incredibly difficult to find anyone to hold a reasonable discussion on the authors THEY claimed to like.

>>49572672
So it turns out writing smut on commission plays more than a 'not so successful' national level novel when you compared the time spent on it vs the money you get.

So I turned away my work on my next one do instead write smut on commissions, and I made so far an average of 250 dollars per week. Which isn't much, but it's more or less same pay from my day-job. If this grows and the pace seems constant enough, I might be able to quit it.

Hey, an anon can hope right?

>>49597542
Damn, where do you find the commissions? I've been wondering about writing smut - I don't particularly enjoy doing it, mostly because I can't write about my own fetishes (that would probably get me to a jail) but I'm apparently pretty good at it. I have no idea where to fucking sell it though.

>>49597542
You should put in a clause in your commissions that says you can resell it after X amount of time and start double dipping on those commissions. Self-publish it in anthologies of smut.

>>49597578
What country do you live in where writing smut could get you sent to jail?

>>49597704
Not a bad Idea my friend. I mostly give the buyer license to use it commercially if they want, but I guess pointing that I can do that too could allow me to collect and resell them when i have a good number of good ones. Solid advice...I should get an agent. I dont have the knack for business even obvious things like this elude me.

>>49597578
Started on /d/, then one guy introduced me to two friends that also wanted it. Got a few more on /d/ and posted in a couple fetish forums, including F-List. People aren't willing to dish a lot of money for big works buy they are more than happy to pay a small amount for a short quality story. I do am afraid the source might dry some time.

>>49597728
Small enough to force me to write in english because the market of the country where I live would never make it worth the time (actually, I don't think anyone in this country would even pay for smut...)
I was of a bit exaggerating about "being thrown in jail", but I'm a pedophile and I don't have exactly good experience with people handling that, even in the notoriously perverse smut community.

>>49597745
>Started on /d/, then one guy introduced me to two friends that also wanted it.
So mostly connections, no reliable regular market place... Damn. Not sure if I want to fish for customers like this.

>>49597314
No implanted shades.

>>49597363
Nah, it's always useful to be told when you're talking nonsense. And I should have recalled that cheap shitty novel as an institution has a tradition long half a millennium in Europe. But that's not what I was trying to say. Awful consumer literature had always existed, true, but for most of its existence it was just that, awful consumer literature. In the early XX century, however, it was semi-officially set apart from mainstream literature and given a derisive name. It is defined by themes it tackles, and by association those themes are considered less worthy. There are authors who make them work - I always adored Lem's exploration of The Other - but as a rule those authors rarely get any awards or acknowledgement, and in these murky water things like Eragon and the whatever series are left to breed undisturbed. I've read enough mainstream literature to know that Sturgeon's Law applies, but in genre fiction I always felt that the average quality is lower. It's not just a nominal sept of literature anymore, it's a ghetto for writings inspired by d&d manuals and misinterpretations of Orson Welles. It's defined by sucking, and no self-respecting literate should want to touch it with a dredge-hook. And, by sharing themes with classical fiction, it had dragged it down as well. If not for postmodernism it probably wouldn't even be allowed into serious literary discourse.

>>49597869
>No implanted shades.
You sure? Take a closer look at her eyes.

>>49572672
Not so well.

I have a pretty well-developed setting and narrative of events, but I struggle to settle on a specific character to use as the protagonist. I'm thinking of pulling an HP Lovecraft and just writing a bunch of related short stories in the setting instead of a novel, but I don't know if there's much of a market to publish something like that now there there aren't really periodical genre fiction magazines anymore.

>>49598172
You could always go the Thieves World route and publish an anthology.

>>49597745
Do you accept future money as payment for a smut commission? Because I just made you a chunk of change by pointing that out. Just saying.

>>49598172
Have you ever read "The Count of Monte Cristo," anon? I mean the full unabridged version that's 1200 page long?

Dumas ends up getting around the problem of having a story too big for one protagonist by shifting the viewpoint between any one of a dozen different major characters from chapter to chapter.

>>49573708
Playtested?

>tfw you spend all your time worldbuilding, and none of it writing

I'm trying to rectify this by writing a sort of 'historical document' that is basically just a rip-off of Herodotus's The Histories, just to get my thoughts straight.

Anyone else have this problem?

>>49598172
>I have a pretty well-developed setting and narrative of events, but I struggle to settle on a specific character to use as the protagonist.

There are two problems I see in that particular post. One is your problem to come up with a character to propel the plot. This is indeed a problem because as anyone with a bit more snobish attitude to literature will tell you, good stories are almost always character driven, and if you can't actually figure out who the character is/are even when you have the narrative outlined, you might have made a bit of a mistake already. Multiple authors warn against the idea of focusing on world-building as the basis of your fiction for good reasons.

>but I don't know if there's much of a market to publish something like that now
The market exists but it seems to be small and it's more leaning towards classical fiction than genre fiction, which basically means that to sell something like that, it will need to be very good.
Personally I love that kind of stuff, I am constantly on a look-out for good frame-base short story collection and even had two projects like that of my own laid out (though never finished). The challenge is that in this kind of literature, you need the stories to be each one good on their own accord, you can't hope that it's their interconnection that will save them. It's a pretty challenging thing to do.
Basically, the way you have to think about it is that every single one of your story needs to be sellable on it's own, without the reader having to read every single one of the rest of them to still find it enjoyable and worth reading. Which in a world-building heavy scenario is actually seriously hard because you will be used to the notion of "accumulating" knowledge of lore.

>>49598262
The problem with that example is that even despite its size and multiple viewpoints, it was still the story of Monte Cristo, an archetypal grand tale of on a single character, that tied it all together.

>>49591951
Maybe you're just better than you thought, even when you're trying to tank.

Alternatively, give me the name of the fanfic and I'll tell you why it's shit.

>>49598356
>Anyone else have this problem?
I had that problem. I solved it by keeping my world building and my writing two separate things. I have this complex, fancy and well detailed world I've build, and then I have this fantasy traveler diary and several collection of fantastic short stories not taking place in the same universe as the one I've build, and I'm not even trying to set my writings in the same world I've so carefully build.

It may sound counter-intuitive but worldbuilding is frequently one of the biggest enemies of a fantasy writer.

>>49589178
I'm in the same boat, unless my memory is wrong the science and large scale parts have to be good still and with nostalgia the rest is probably good too. I don't like re-reading books but otherwise I would, it changed me.

>>49597919
If I have to take a closer look it's not Molly Millions.

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>>49590282

It's severely autistic but sure.

Most of it needs to be completely rewritten. The beginning past the first couple pages is awful, most of it has horrible drawn out over-described action scenes. I have been working on simplifying them as best as I can. It's never going to be very good but I at least want to imrpove it while staying true to the story I created as young child.

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>>49596926
Wow, you are really crushing this argument, anon!

>>49598511
Haven't gone through it completely, but consider making the first lines of your story sink like a stone on the reader rather than just narrating a scene.
I dunno, something like "I bet my life against death, and I lost" feels really powerful and hooks you quickly

>>49598390
>if you can't actually figure out who the character is/are even when you have the narrative outlined, you might have made a bit of a mistake
It isn't so much that I can't come up with strong characters that show development as the events of the story progress, but rather that I don't have a single character whose life would reasonable have them present at every place/time I want to show the reader.

I think my problem is really just the indecisiveness that comes with chronic worldbuilding; I don't want to leave things out, but to create a single coherent story, I'll have to.

>>49598676

I've tossed and turned thinking for good hooks. I have great ones for other stories but I can never think of one for this one.

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I'm trying to turn a Call of Cthulhu one shot I designed into a pop horror bovel. It's about a group of people who are trapped in a hotel in the Rockies by a freak snowstorm and accidentally awaken an ancient evil within it.

So far it's still in planning but I have a very good sense of where it's at and it's just about ready to turn into a first draft.

>>49598879
It will come soon enough, probably once you're done with the novel. Just consider it

>>49572672
I'll get to getting past the introduction eventually I swear...

>>49598262
The only thing Dumas ever ended up 'getting around' was the chronic poverty of writers in his time. He was paid by the word.

>>49595077
That's interesting, I've never had any of those issues with Google Docs... Maybe the version on the Chromebook has been improved somehow.

I've learned that I really dislike writing narrative-style. I'm working on a screenplay, and it's coming along quite well.

>>49600182
Thank god for that. The more words he writes, the better.

George Orwell can shove his "5 Rules" up his ass. Concise writing is only suitable for depicting brutal fascist/communist dystopias, precisely because it embodies everything that those nightmare-futures stand for.

>>49598979

Sadly I'll probably never finish the novel.I have so much ground to cover.....

>>49600364
You can do it, anon. I believe in you

Every time this thread comes up it's the same situation. Finished the novel, nobody's interested, spinning my wheels on short stories because feelings of defeat that won't go away no matter how much I tell myself that this is normal and I've just got to keep going.

>>49600282

Have you actually read "Politics and the English Language"?

>I have not here been considering the literary use of language, but merely language as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought.

It's explicitly about writing to communicate ideas, and explicitly not about saying all writing should be like this. I also think that this:

>As I have tried to show, modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy. It is easier — even quicker, once you have the habit — to say In my opinion it is not an unjustifiable assumption that than to say I think. If you use ready-made phrases, you not only don't have to hunt about for the words; you also don't have to bother with the rhythms of your sentences since these phrases are generally so arranged as to be more or less euphonious.

Is a valid point for any writer. Choose your words individually, deliberately, and fit them together with care.

>>49600420
Well it probably won't help much to hear the same thing from somebody else, but writing is pretty much a matter of repeating the same thing in different ways until you find something that finally clicks, or die trying.

>>49600420
How many people said they weren't interested?

Actually I write short stories as a side gig. When my players a good, I write them short stories about their adventures and favorite NPCS before/after whatever campaign they are in. They can't seem to get enough of them so I assume they enjoy them. They want me to publish them but I feel without the context of playing in the game, even if I do recap and explain in the story, that it'll leave outside readers confused and toss them in the trash.

>>49595039
I just use Dropbox for that purpose.

how do you know when to stop planning the story?

>>49601688
When you feel bad because you don't haven't started the actual novel

>>49601697
>tfw you've felt that way since 2 days after beginning to outline

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>>49601724
Then it's not time yet.
You must feel guilty, you must feel absolutely awful up to a point when the only thing you can do to feel better is to just start writing.
Or now, now is a good moment too.

>>49597229
Well, getting through it is pretty fucking difficult you know. At least for most of us it seems.

Almost done, but I realized I could do something different with the ending but I'm not sure if it's 'better' than the original plan.

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>>49572672
I just started the outline of a fantasy adventure after getting inspiration from a shitty dystopian story where Trump wins, its probably going to be shitty since its my first time writing but its fun , pic somewhat related

>>49601853
Just do both and discuss with eventual editor.

>>49572672
I have an idea. Vaguely cyberpunky. Wholesome all American boy falls under the spell of a drug addled heiress.

The question I have is on prose. I know there is no right way to do it but what do you guys think about the insertion of informal tone into third person narration.

>>49602982
Some people have certainly pulled it off well. When done right, it gets the reader into the mindset and attitude of the main character as effectively as first person does.

>>49600579

Pretty much.

>>49600903

34 as of last week, more haven't even replied after years.

>>49591750
This might help.
http://www.writingexcuses.com/?s=publish

No guarantees on it being helpful. I'm not near the publishing stage (nor am I sure I will ever get there, nor am I sure that if I do that said advice will still be up to date) so I haven't paid much attention to those parts (and thus don't know if they are a fit for your situation).

I wish I knew how to write well. Fucking sucks being full of ideas but having absolutely no idea how to work with them.

>>49603519
Just half ass it mate.

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>Somewhat talented writer
>absolutely love doing it, for 5 years I attended various poetry slams, took extra writing courses, and read as much as I could to further my craft
>give up on my dreams to pursue a career
>was a complete waste of time and instead of trading my passion for money, I traded it for nothing
>no one values the ability to write in any professional setting
>everything I went to school for was useless and a complete waste of time
>my garbage manual labour job just stopped scheduling me months ago, they explicitly haven't fired me because they refuse to pay me anything more than they have to
>my tutor job just stopped scheduling me the exact same way
>probably should just kill myself at this point
I don't know. No one will care if I write anything because I have no friends, no online reputation anywhere, and nothing of substance in my life. I'm just so... tired.

>>49603657
Why be so depressed ? You can still reconvert in writing. The thing is, once there are people that read what you do, they will actually care. Hell, I do care after reading this, since I might be taking the same path.

>>49603657
Keep writing, anon. Keep struggling.

>>49603695
>>49603694
But what's the point? It's never going to make me any money, no one cares about anything I write, and in the best case hypothetical scenario I get another short story published for free, then pretentious university students pay someone else to misunderstand everything I wrote.

Being able to write is like being trained as a typist. Sure, 20 years ago you could have been something with that skill set, but today google automatically edits your emails with "flavour enhancers", and "listicles" are a thing. It's just something every jackass and fuckwit thinks they can do, and something even fewer actually can pull off, so no one wants to take a chance on anyone not already established.

It's like I'm in the ironic punishments division of hell, and the only way out, ironically, leads to the same place.

Don't lose your dreams anons, when they're gone there's nothing left.

>>49572672
One is 90,000 words, not even half done.
The other is about 6000, and I'm tidying it up to submit to a onlinemagazine.
And about a half-dozen other things that haven't gotten past the first page.

It's going ok, I guess.

>>49603738
>It's never going to make me any money
>no one cares about anything I write

Keep. Writing. Just do it. The fact that your here winging about it, means that the dream hasn't been lost.

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My writing generally tends to be somewhere from midnight to 2 am on the nights before I have to go to work. Not the most productive in terms of words/hour, but at least I can focus on it then somehow.

>>49603761
You're not wrong, I wouldn't bitch about it if I didn't still care, I'm just discouraged and lacking inspiration.

Honestly, if I could do anything in the world, I'd write for a living. I'd probably be much happier locked up somewhere writing all day than I am right now. I just don't know how to reconcile the gap between real life and magical christmas land where I get to do what I want. I know things would be better if I could afford my medication, but I can't write when I'm drugged up, and I can't justify begging for a mcjob when I'm not.

>>49603657
http://suicidepreventionlifeline.org

>>49589178
The second one is legitimately good. The third is the weakest IMO and the ending feels forced.

And I just discovered there is a spinoff novella about Lee and Iorek, who are the best characters, so I kind of want to read that now.

>>49603819
From people around me there are plenty of jobs that are just this, writing. You could contact every magazine, every editor, send your works to authors, and I also think that would give you determination.
Keep going anon. If you succeed we'll all have succeded a little.

>>49572672
You know what we need? We need a version of /ic/'s LAS for /tg/. Doom.moe is a website where you post 30 minutes of drawing everyday to build up a streak and gives you this sense of responsibility while not being too harmful to your schedule, and you actually build up a habit. It's been going for almost a year (268 days) and as someone who has been there since day 1 I have to say I've made improvement and definitely built a habit. We just moved to Doom.moe from lavaflake.com/draw because the original creator has gone radio silent.
Think about it, at least 30 minutes of writing a day, that's 180+ hours of writing a year. Better than zero, and you only need to invest a bit of your day writing that you spend daydreaming about now probably.
This could function by submitting 30 minutes of writing to a pastebin and sharing it in the site, where other anons can critique you and share their own writings too. It would double for writing rpg, writefaggotry and campaigns too.
It would make /tg/ great again.

>>49603920
>Keep going anon. If you succeed we'll all have succeeded a little.
Thanks, that helped more than you know. I don't want to be "that guy" and keep whining about my situation by making excuses to do nothing. Worst case scenario I could send out a bunch of my writing, so when I kick the bucket people might remember me. I was just bummed that I haven't got an interview anywhere in the past 6 months. I'm in limbo where I'm too qualified for shit work, even though I would be happy with anything at this point, and everything else expects 3-5 years experience in the field, without any entry level positions.

>>49590186
For goals I got to be left the fuck alone and for what stands in his way I got he's too strong to be left alone.

For those complaining about how they are unsure of whenever they are going to make money writing: Consider this:

In my country, it's LITERALLY impossible to make money writing books. It's a simple market logic: the country is small, the market is small, there are simply not going to be enough people to buy your book to make the investment return, even if you are damn good. Do you know what the words "best-seller" mean in my country? It means you sold 1000+ copies. That is what warrants you the title of "best seller". There are about two people in the entire country who actually make enough from their books to pay for decent living, both characterized by writing the ABSOLUTELY WORST, LOWEST COMMON DENOMINATOR bullshit imaginable, and with the constant increases of good foreign literature even they are struggling.
I've recently read an interview with a guy who is perhaps the most talented and critically acclaimed writer of my country in the last decade. He is popular, his works heralded as the top cream of our literally scene, proudly living up to some of the best foreign authors.
Do you know how much on average he makes on a single novel? Around 2000 dollars. That is your salary for a year worth of work, if you are damn good.

So that is the prospects I have to live with.
If you live in a country and speak natively a language that has more than 10 million speakers all together, you are still well off and still have chance. Don't lose your hope.

>>49604434
What exactly is your country ?
Though it would be kinda hard, you could still traduce or directly write in english.

>>49604030
Being depressed isn't being "that guy". It isn't a worst case scenario, just send all you works everywhere you may. I'm serious, do it today. That way you might get out of this shit earlier.

>>49604499
>What exactly is your country ?
Smaller slavic country in central Europe.

>you could still traduce
You mean translate, right? Traduce, I think, means "to violate something".
First of all, there is largely a massive bias towards our authors and literature, and nearly no interest in western publishing houses because slavic names simply don't sell well and their market is already heavily overstaturated with domestic talents.
There is some chance of getting translated into the languages of some of the neighbouring countries (Poland, most commonly, Russia, less that of Germany) but the interest is low and you still first need to be commercially "succesful" in your own for anyone to even consider translating and publishing your work, and the pay is even worse per book, because the deal has to be made between your publish (who takes a cut), foreign publisher (who takes a cut) and translator (who takes another cut), resulting frequently in net profit of about 0.50 dollars per sold copy for the actual author.
As far as westward releases go, as far as I know only like four or five of our authors in the past twnety years (including the one I mentioned) got English translations and never amounted to anything more than obscure curiosity for slavistic students in England.

As for writing directly in English, first of all: I'm not native in english, my literally skills will always be worse than those of a competent native speaker. It's a HUGE disadvantage. And second: You still have the issue of being completely distrusted by western publisher houses and networks.

Things MAY change with the slow emergence of on-line self-publishing, like Amazon Books, I don't know. But I don't hold my hopes very high.
I care about nothing but writing, but the reality is that the outlooks I have are that I'll have to work - hard - to be ABLE to write. Writing is a money sink, an expensive hobby, not a means of survival...
Which is an incredibly depressing prospect to me.

>>49590554
>Violence doesn't phase him
You're supposed to be a writer. lrn2english

>>49604575
I think the Witcher novel was written in Polish.

>>49604601
Yeah. Poland has four times the population we have, it's genre fiction and it's a very rare, run-away success - The Witcher became a CULT in surrounding slavic countries: My own, Slovakia, Russia, and unusually, also Spain.
Note however that it was STILL not even entirely released in English (and the English translation is horrible and cheaply done, too), despite the fact that the cult has been extended by the success of the games (which got far better treatment than the literature had, because the anti-slavic basis does not thankfully extend to game industry...)

So yeah. Even the pretty much biggest popular genre fiction writer in Eastern Europe whose works became the basis of cult cross-medial series was not deemed worthy proper solid english release yet. That very much speaks volumes about the situation...

>>49604575
>traduce
Pardon that stupid mistake. Otherwise I take your point, I can't deny much of it.

>>49604645
>Pardon that stupid mistake.
It's not even worth apologizing over, really. I was just making sure we understood each other correctly. Don't worry about it.

>>49604637
I'm spaniard I can confirm this

>>49604669
The popularity of Witcher in Spain always puzzled me a bit. I entirely get the popularity in slavic countries: both because there is an ease to translate the specific style and tone of writing, and because The Witcher has a certain "slavic" mentality tone and appeal to it. But why Spain? It wasn't nearly as succesful in Italy, France or Germany...

Just as it always puzzled me why Spain used to be THE number one Anime-obsessed counry in Europe (second only to Russia, out of all places) while no traces of similar cultural cult could be found anywhere else...
These odds and improbably spikes of cultural interests always really fascinated me. I usually can explain most of them (The popularity, of say, The Good Soldier Švejk in UK and in return, fascination with British 70's/80's TV shows like Yes, Minister in my own country) but when it comes to the taste particularities of Spain, I was always puzzled.

>>49604598
To elucidate on this unhelpful comment, you either are or are not 'fazed' by something. Phase has a different meaning.

>>49604703
Well, actually France is the biggest worldwide consumer of anime/manga, after japan of course.
It's also easy to find the witcher books in bookstores there, though not as much as in Spain I guess.

>>49603082
okay, you may want to write something new

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how to avoid cheese?

>>49604759
>Well, actually France is the biggest worldwide consumer of anime/manga, after japan of course.
Is it? And was it always like that?
Because back when I took interest in the matter (that was some 15-20 years ago, Jesus I feel old), it was Spain that was pretty much one of the few places where you could routinely get your hands on the stuff and the internet was mostly flooded with spanish translations and stuff. Even today, when you look at Youtube for anime openings and songs, disproportionate amount of them will be of Spanish origin, with Spanish subtitles etc...

Perhaps it was more a matter of the fan-user base (in Russia, for an example, official distribution of Anime and Manga was barely existent, but unofficial channels, bootlegs, and general public awareness was insanely high). Maybe Spain was a similar couse. Or maybe I was simply noticing the wrong things...

>>49604810
don't add rennet?

>>49604810
>how to avoid cheese?
By introducing nuance and complexity. Which is a hard thing to do, and like with most things, it's best achieved by experience and exposition to good fiction: that is by reading a lot and drawing inspiration from non-genre fiction.

Maybe I'm entirely wrong, but I think if you are full of impressions of characters from works of say, Dostojevskij, or magical motives from say, Borges or Bulghakov, you are more likely to think of non-cheezy characters and motives.

>>49604840
Well I've heard about France being number one for some years now, i'd say about 5 or so. About the internet part, spanish is much, much more present than French on the Internet due to Latin America, which might explain it.
And that's also probably because France has a very developped official distribution. Who knows ?

>>49604703
Because nerds in Spain are socially okay and open to newcomers. Normies want to try out rpgs, tabletops and mtg because of this. Literally 99% of the mtg community in Spain is the opposite of neckbeards. Engineering universities have popular tg groups, the mining engineering club is called Moria.
Anyways the Witcher appeals to spaniards because it somehow relates to our culture so much. I don't know how to explain it but it's so fucking cool.
tl;dr traditional games, anime and nerd stuff is normal in Spain

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Hey everyone, lots of harrowing tales of the publishing industry in this thread! I'll try to keep the interruption to a minimum:

I'm here representing a microfiction magazine called The Bard Quarterly. We do sci-fi, fantasy, some horror and other left-of-field genres with a bias towards talented amateurs.

We pay you money upon acceptance (though not a lot) and we respond to every submission, successful or unsuccessful, with feedback from two unbiased slush readers. If you want some feedback on your writing it's worthwhile penning something for the magazine, just to see what two people think of your work.

My image macro is over yonder >>49604950, and it answers all the little questions. We've had a few submissions already, but I'd like to see that inbox stuffed fuller than an analogy I can't make on a worksafe board.

Thanks for tolerating my little interruption. The storythread is almost dead, so if you have any follow-up queries ask me there, or otherwise message our fb page.

>>49604986
>I don't know how to explain it but it's so fucking cool.
That is kinda shame, because that is what I would be most interested in. I have a thing for shared cultural affinities for some reason. I admit that I don't know much about Spain, never spend too much time there, never really read too much Spanish literature or other media (at least not modern stuff), but I always assumed Spainish and slavic cultural affinities are about as far from each other as possible, and this could indicate to me I was very wrong about that...

>Because nerds in Spain are socially okay and open to newcomers.
Curiously enough, here in Czech Republic the attitude is very similar. "Nerdom" is not really stigmatized, playing table-tops is particularly popular among college students (frequently among the kind of "snobbish" elitists from departments of religionistics, philosophy, anthropology etc...), taking interest in things like fantasy and sci-fi are and always have been deemed to be signs of good taste and curiosity actually, etc...
The only exception to that is (or at least was) Anime and Manga, which was always looked down upon a lot, mostly due to it's inherent association to pornography and perversion.
It's an aspect of our culture that I always valued a lot.

>>49605028
I think you worry too much about "interrupting" or "shitting up" threads there, Bard. I saw the macro a minute ago in the Storythread, just send you a reply there: the Macro is not bad, but if I can offer a little advice, the excessive humbleness and defensiveness of statements like "in order to avoid shitting up the threads" does not actually look very good to outsiders. You don't really shit anything up and frankly, it kinda feels like you have not much confidence in your own projects.
Just a thought there.

>>49605101
>I saw the macro a minute ago in the Storythread, just send you a reply there: the Macro is not bad, but if I can offer a little advice, the excessive humbleness and defensiveness of statements like "in order to avoid shitting up the threads" does not actually look very good to outsiders
Interesting feedback, I will take it on board. I've been a 4chan user for a looong time and I've seen many people's projects torn all to hell when anon gets a whiff of shilling or unequal exchange. I'll be a little brighter and a bit less hangdog in the future.

>>49605151
>and I've seen many people's projects torn all to hell when anon gets a whiff of shilling or unequal exchange.
4chan is very touchy about this, but then again, a lot of it comes from people who are just genuinely insecure and angsty, which are people you don't have to worry about all that much in the first place. And at least /tg/'s writing community, as both this and the good old storythread threads prove, is rather unusually helpful and civilized in my experience.

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>>49605101
I think it's the medieval lore, the cathedrals and the way of thinking. It's almost the same, I remember visiting Prague and making friends at an LGS with some guys. We had trdlnik later and it was great. There were also a lot of arms & armour exposed in a gallery near the cathedral, like the Alcázar of Toledo.
Spaniard nerds tend to get a boner whenever we see something medieval/gothic

>>49603657
Consider treatment for clinical depression, as you've hit the point where you are talking yourself into feeling hopeless:
>But what's the point? It's never going to make me any money, no one cares about anything I write, and in the best case hypothetical scenario I get another short story published for free, then pretentious university students pay someone else to misunderstand everything I wrote.
I'm not going to argue with you about writing not being a viable career, though. Have you considered moving? My career didn't take off until I moved to NYC. Also, if you like the "worldbuilding/creating complex structures in your head" part of writing, consider seeking a job in product management at a tech company (the product managers at my company are pretty bad at the "big picture" stuff, and some do not write well at all), or anything in tech in general.

>>49604598
>>49604723
I do have to say, I'm a native English speaker, tested in the top 99%, and even I didn't notice this, so it's a pretty minor and easy-to-make mistake.

>>49605028
This is the definition of an advertisement I actually WANT to see.

>>49604434
>>49604575
For a non-native speaker, your English is pretty fucking awesome. I don't know if you understand just how shitty most English speakers are - /tg/ has about the best average writing quality I've ever seen.

>>49596978
There are two schools of thought about this, but even I as a native speaker find myself stalling and looking for the right words and phrases. The only thing I've found that helps is outlining in as much painfully shitty detail as possible (sometimes I have to do this in the style of a screenplay) what is happening in the story, then going back and cleaning it up later.

The best training is reading lots of English novels. Start with children's or young adult fiction. My German got worlds better when I started doing this.

>>49604986
Wow, that's amazing! I never knew Spain was so cool.

>>49605151
Just ignore the haters. Always avoid self-deprecating language. You may not realize it, but your subconscious is internalizing your low opinion of yourself every time you speak or write it.

>>49596978
Read loads. Also, often I find myself knowing a word but it's stuck on the tip of my tongue, so I just go to online thesaurus and search for something similar.

>>49605633
>Just ignore the haters
I don't know if you're a lifer like myself, but I've seen anonymous literally destroy projects that rubbed them the wrong way. Not just hate on it, but DDOS their sites, dox their admins, hack their emails, google bomb them in searches... Hell, I used to do it with relish when I was a young goon.

Hate is easy to shake off, but a pissed off legion? They'll ruin your day.

>>49572672
I've written four chapters of facesitting, but I have only barely started on working out the vampire viziers conspiracy

>>49605633
>For a non-native speaker, your English is pretty fucking awesome.
Thanks, but I think there is a difference between making yourself make sense and sound relatively natural, and being able to utilize the beauty of the language in a literary fashion.
I've realized this when I was translating some of my short stories for /tg/ storythreads and I've realized there entire stories that I can't translate because they rely on certain flow of language, or certain images that I just can't even construct in English. I've also got one of my stories published in the Bard, and it was pretty damn obvious when compared to the other stories that the language was just lacking in many respects...
Still, thanks. I'm working on it - I routinely write and read in english and I do my best to translate most of my own stories too, slowly improving myself. But I think the gap will still be noticeable there, at least for a good while.

>>49605633
>The best training is reading lots of English novels.
Actually, the best training is to WRITE. I can attest to this. When I started translating my stories in english, it was a painful process of constant, constant looking up words, checking grammar, getting stumped over and over again. And I felt really fucking stupid at times because I've realized at points I'm looking up the same bloody thing five or six times a day: getting it right and already forgetting it in the next paragraph.

But despite that, over time, the amount of time I had to spend double checking and looking things up gradually decreased over time. Until eventually, I actually find myself writing pretty fluently and naturally.

Of course, reading english is absolutely necessary to get make your language rich and beautiful and more natural. If you want your language to be good, you need to read in English.
But when it comes to the lack of flow in writing in english, it's not reading, but it really is practice of writing that helps the most.

>>49605693
There is a certain rough elegance to Slavic languages fed through an English filter. I'm quite convinced that no naturalized English writer could ever quite replicate the stark, brutal prose of a well translated Slavic tongue.

>>49605101
>here in Czech Republic the attitude is very similar. "Nerdom" is not really stigmatized
It was great in Prague, czech people are great. Keep being awesome. I could only find a single MtG LGS in Prague tho

>>49605676
You do raise a good point. I haven't seen such a thing with my own eyes, but I have heard of anon and SJWs wreaking disproportional retribution on things/people. Still, I don't know if self-deprecating language can save yourself from that, and I don't know if such mob violence can get started from just one post (unless it's spammed all over the place).

>>49605693
Fuck the beauty of the language. Honestly, that's the worst problem I see with native english speakers who write: their prose is too flowery. They say something in 200 words when it should only take 100.

But yeah, I understand it takes time. Language is really hard. I think a lot of us take it for granted.

If you really feel this way and want to improve, want to post a link to your story? I can take a look.

>>49605747
>There is a certain rough elegance to Slavic languages fed through an English filter.
I generally don't put too much trust in the "beauty of the language" itself, but rather in the layer of cultural and emotional associations that it carries for it's native speakers. It's for an example incredibly difficult to translate Japanese simply because there is an entire added layer of symbolic and associative meanings connected to many of their worlds that we simply don't have (I mean, Japan is a country where the have "seasonal words" for fuck sake...)
So I think the appeal of say, Sapkowski's writing being stronger among Slavs is not so much because the language has inherent beauty, but rather because he knows which words trigger which particular memories, associations and cultural or historical notions he needs to make is prose impactful and fun.
And I think the major translation difficulties lie in translating that.
English has the advantage that it has become the cultural language of the world: English language and anglophonic culture are much more shared among other nations than say, Slavic culture is with anglophonic ones.

>>49605770
>It was great in Prague, czech people are great.
As someone who has quite literally the view of Prague Castle out of his window right now, I'm glad to hear that. I don't know much about MtG fanbase in Prague, but I know there is a major fanbase in my other "hometown", Olomouc, among the college students there.

>>49604575
>on-line self-publishing

this

I work as the IT administrator for my country's largest book seller. We have a system where any author can upload their works and set their own price and we will only take a small %. Its a booming business as a lot of niche works are getting published this way and still make a decent buck.

Right now we are working on a system where we can actually help the authors by giving them insider information about the market (sales figures and such) so they can get a better understanding on what actually sells and what could be viable. A lot of the time lots of books are not written because the author just thinks that there is no market for it or its too hard to publish.

>>49605778
>Honestly, that's the worst problem I see with native english speakers who write: their prose is too flowery
Interestingly enough, I generally have that problem with English TRANSLATIONS of foreign texts rather than with native English writing. It always stuck me as bizzare how needlesly flowery and convoluted the language of say, Borges comes across in his English translations, while in the Czech and Russian ones I've read, and even from the little I managed to make out with my limited knowledge of Spanish from the original, his penmanship is most notable for how dense and efficient and elegant it really is.
I had similar issues with most English translations of Russian and Czech authors as well.
Native English texts however: when I think of Heller, or Poe, or Chesterton, rarely felt too flowery to me. Though it might be just the particular selection of authors I've read.

I think "beauty of language" and the richness of the experession are two different things, and as I've tried to explain in >>49605869 I actually think "beauty of language" is more about cultural notions and associations than the prose itself.

As for my own writings, you can check out this:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B_GIRAVT_V6TT1ZCclFpdVd0MWs?usp=sharing

It's basically all I've done in english over the last half a year (minus the story in Bard, see the story "Lost Transmission if you feel like it. It's not very good I'm afraid.

Otherwise, "Mirrors and Other Abominations" and "Deep Beneath The Sea" are arguably the most "complete" works I've done so far.

I don't think my English has a problem of being fundamentally broken or akward (most of the time, at least), but rather than things could be in general said in more elegant or evocative ways, which is something just looking at few individual texts and giving pointers won't probably save. It's a matter of creativity, rather than knowledge, I'm afraid.

>>49605870
>We have a system where any author can upload their works and set their own price and we will only take a small %.
You would not happen to be an English book distribution network, would? And if you were, you probably would not be willing to disclose the name of the company?
I'm still looking for places where I could try and sell my works, but outside of Amazon Books I don't even know where to start... Hell, I'd be willing to write fucking smut if it made some money and I knew where to find market (without having to hang around weird fetish sites): it's the whole "finding a way to market yourself" that frankly scares me the most...

>>49605869
Damn dude, if I had to choose a place to move Prague is definitely top10. I'd like to visit more of the Czech Rep. too

>>49606061
Ironically, I've moved away from Prague because I was sick of it. If an illness would not force me to move back again for a while, I'd be happily living in the small, university town of Olomouc right now.
I mean the city is damn beautiful, but I guess I prefer small towns and friendlier locals, and less tourists... Prague can pretty easily start feeling like an open-air museum more than a city to live in after a while.
Or maybe I'm just really poorly suited to large city life.

>>49606105
I don't know. It felt more or less as busy as Madrid, I'd say even a bit more tranquil in some parts. I can only complain about the public transport there, but apart from that it was pretty good.
Living in the country seems comfy af.

>>49606159
>Living in the country seems comfy af.
It is. Olomouc is particularly great in this, because it combines university town atmosphere, filled with young students, professors and academia, with a really small historical town full of great cheap pubs and coffee houses and bookstores: an intelectuals wet dream. Small town life with less of the redneckery that otherwise tends to plague small towns in my country.
I like it here, I would never want to live long term anywhere else, despite many... issues this place has.
Just wish the market was more fucking generous to aspiring writers, because that is one of the the prices we pay for being small, calm and relatively laid-back country.

>>49606059
I can speak well of Smashwords. Their ebook process to get 'certified' is a nightmare, but if you can get through it, their distribution network is huge.

>>49606261
Thanks, I'll look into it. Of course, I'll promise to save my best fantasy/sci-fi short story for Bard, though.

>>49605778
I remember, might have been 2007, when a guy started a little business selling Caturday images on T-shirts for like $1.50 profit each. He sold maybe 200 before anon caught wind of it. He was doxed, harassed at home, his website DDOS'd off the face of the web, his website name google bombed so that the first six results when you searched 'Caturday T-shirts' showed fetish pornography websites, his website was eventually hacked and replaced with a false FBI takedown notice for 'child pornography' and his MySpace (that's how old I am) hacked and filled with dick pics.

All because he didn't ask 4chan permission before he stuck their images on a T-shirt.

I don't even want to tell you what happened to the guy who started a 'FFFUUUUU-' comic website.

>>49606236
Stop, you're making me want to move there.

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>>49606338
>and his MySpace (that's how old I am)
you're saying it like this place was filled with people born after 2000 or something

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>>49598511
>hey, this is actually pretty good so far
>let's see how far along i am
>2/575 pages
pic related

Could you at least post a summary to whet our interest, or keywords/tags for themes and subjects this touches on?

>>49606025
Same for you, bro, could you add a summary/tags at the top of the entries that don't have a picture at the top? I know it's shallow, but I feel I'm a good case study for the average internet user with ADD and I like pictures and summaries.

I read the two of your stories that have pictures, and honestly your text is still too flowery. I'm guessing this is because you are trying to over-describe things to make up for some perceived shortcoming (that is probably not really there - if you know the phrase "hermetically sealed" I'd say you're pretty far along in english).

This is ironic, because I just edited a piece that had an overwhelming number of sentences that were short, choppy, and needed to combined, but you need to break your sentences up. Try for fewer commas per sentence and really question whether each clause (part between commas) is necessary.

For example:
>Yuko was sitting not far from us, her head tilted slightly to the side, left hand resting gently on the glass of a tube, containing one of the forest specimens - a small creature not unlike a ferret, but with a bright green fur, remindful of the color and texture of tall summer grass.
whoa nigga. This can easily be cut down to:
>Yuko was sitting not far from us, her head tilted slightly to the side [don't know if you even need this last clause - what does it communicate? Is she looking at the specimen?]. Her left hand rested on a tube containing one of the forest specimens: A small creature not unlike a ferret, but with grass-green fur.
Did someone tell you that you didn't use enough adjectives once? I'd try to cut down.

Also, try running your work through a grammar and spellchecker - I saw a few things that could be easily caught there.

>>49606390
>you're saying it like this place was filled with people born after 2000 or something
You and I are a dying breed, friend.

>>49605028
I wish I wrote in english simply to be able to try. I'll look up if such a magazine exists in my country.

>>49606398
>Could you at least post a summary to whet our interest, or keywords/tags for themes and subjects this touches on?
The links I've provided is a repository for materials I use mostly for my own needs - it's my own workspace, so to speak, not intended to "market" the things.
The two particular stories have images to them because they are quite literally just an exercises: It's a thing we do in story-threads: people post pictures and others write short stories based on those pictures for practice. One of them (just musings) is a failed one that I scrapped already.

I would honestly not even know how to make a summary of "Mirror's" and "Fragments", much less find a picture (which would also I think would be a little too forceful and influencing the process of creating your own images when reading it) because... well, read them and you'll see, I guess.

>and honestly your text is still too flowery.
I suspect this might be a matter of personal taste. I will certainly give you that my text is awkward and unwieldy at times, but I don't think the problem is with being two flower, rather than not finding the ideal words.

>but you need to break your sentences up.
This is something I had been struggling with. And it's by no means limited to my English prose. For some reason, I communicate and write in very long sentences. It has... a reason, but that does not mean it's always appropriate.

>don't know if you even need this last clause - what does it communicate?
An image of a girl sitting with her head tilted slightly to the side is a pretty commonly recognized image of a person being lost in melancholic thoughts, actually. Pretty much every scene she appears makes a reference to her body language and posture on purpose, actually. I found that to be more important than her actual looks.

>Did someone tell you that you didn't use enough adjectives once?
I graduated from Bradbury's school of writing...

>>49606338
Honestly, the t-shirt one does sound a bit deserved. I wouldn't take it to his home life, but I did get pretty mad when someone was taking OC from one of the generals I frequent and posting it to reddit and acting like "hurr durr guys aren't i so kewl?!?!" If I didn't have better things to do/wasn't lazy, I probably would have tried to shame him on places other than reddit and 4chan.

You aren't talking about that ragecomics site, are you? I genuinely enjoyed some of the output from that. But that was a comic creator, not a "I'm going to steal the content you create and repost it on my own website to make money off of it" case.

I too have been here for god knows how long (can't remember how long, but for sure over a decade), just didn't frequent /b/ as much back in the day so I probably missed out on a lot of the drama.

>>49606390
Nowadays I feel like everyone on /b/ has been born after 2000.

>>49606625
>Nowadays I feel like everyone on /b/ has been born after 2000.
You know that may very well be true for /b/, since 2000 was firign 16 years ago...

>>49572672
>>49572672
I have 10k images saved from art threads, categorized into over 40 folders that cover every area in the setting. Writing the book has been kind of dry so what I'm doing now is choosing 5 pictures a day and righting notes on them. The idea being that eventually I can see how a story would come up organically from all the pieces rather than just creating things for the sake of they story.

I've been thinking of streaming my writing now that twitch alllows you to stream that.

So, slow and steady.

>>49606781
That's a good idea. Someone mentioned a drawfag website which encouraged you to draw a little every day, maybe we could treat streaming twitches like that. Also, if the stories are short enough, there's >>49605028

>>49572672
Horribly. With the exams coming and all I've had hardly any time to write it. The story is pretty simple romance shit, and its for nanowirmo. A princess is sent as a political hostage as her country had failed to pay debts too a privately owned bank, and the owner of the bank decides that taking the young princess for his young, lonely grandson would be a good idea. The princess is about 10 at that time and the grandson is 8. Cut by about 8 years and the jist of the story begins.

The grandson is growing up to be a pseudo howard hughes and the princess is turning into a popular student, and both have developed a really close relationship. In addition, both have a truckload of mental issues and the story focuses on the two fixing one another and the eventual departure of the princess, as her country's debt has been finally paid in full and is pretty much centred around the fact that everything would end eventually, but has a realitively happy ending. Sorry if it's messy. Its late at night and i am on mobile.

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>>49606819
>>49606781
>>49603937
I wouldn't mind joining a writing group. forcing ourselves to write 30 min a day (or 500words a day w/e) and giving feedback to eachother at the end of every week. I used to co-write on forums a lot and it really helps when you're writing for at least a few people that take genuine interest in your work.

>>49607113
I'd be cool with that. I'm the pictures guy. I'm traveling back from a wedding right now but I'll try to set something up this week on twitch.

>>49607113
I'd love this too. This would be a fun ride

>>49607113
>>49603937
This actually sounds great, I'd join.

>>49607394
>>49608422
>>49608512
Thread is beyond bump limit though, so I'll keep us running.
>>49608739

>>49590677
It's going pretty slow, but that's about what I'm doing. At least one book is finally ten chapters done, now.