#oneaday Day 430: Poisonous fantasy

So I picked up Blade of the Poisoner last night, as offensive as the Kindle version's cover is to me, and started to read it. As predicted, it is pleasantly easy to read, and the fact that each chapter is less than five minutes "long" at the speed I read means that I suspect I'm probably going to power right through this in short order. As noted yesterday, though, that's no bad thing; sometimes it's nice just to read something that stimulates the imagination a bit without challenging the more "technical" parts of your brain too much.

I'm actually surprised how much of Blade of the Poisoner I'm remembering — and I don't necessarily mean the details of the story, I mean certain little turns of phrase that have, for one reason or another, stuck in my mind for many years, even without having touched this book for probably several decades at this point. There were a few in the first chapter alone: protagonist Jarral's hesitant question "Can we go and … look at the village?" after his village has been burned to the ground by the evil Prince Mephtik, and the description of the character Archer falling to the ground, "sudden blood staining her brown curls" after being lamped over the head with the butt of a crossbow. Neither of these are particularly remarkable pieces of writing, but they are, for some reason, apparently lodged in my long-term memory, and I'm sure they won't be the only ones.

Thinking about it, despite a longstanding interest in and appreciation for the genre, one thing I don't think I've ever really tried my hand at writing myself is straight-up fantasy. I've done sci-fi, I've done "real world with fantastical elements", I've done "gritty realism", but one thing I don't think I've ever done is create-your-own-world-with-its-own-rules fantasy. And, dipping into Blade of the Poisoner for the first time in a long while last night, I feel like that's something which might be fun. I'm still yet to do anything with my "Scratch Pad" creative writing site that I've set up, largely because I haven't really been struck with any sort of "inspiration" just yet. But I think this might be it: it might be time for me to have a go at fantasy, and see what happens.

Fantasy is interesting because it has a whole different set of considerations to other types of writing. By its very nature, you don't have to follow the "rules" of reality, but you are then faced with the challenge of ensuring your world is internally consistent. How does magic work, if it is present at all? What species call that world home, and how are you going to ensure none of them accidentally end up as thinly veiled racial stereotypes? What social structures are in place? How do you strike a balance between giving the baddies threatening-sounding names and ensuring they don't end up sounding like medical terminology? Is there any connection between that world and ours? Is that world an "alternate Earth", or is it a completely different planet, perhaps with its own rules?

Lots of things to consider, and establishing a setting in this way can, at times, be a really fun part of writing. It is also an easy part to get very bogged down in, so one has to find a good balance between making notes on things that are important to the story you want to tell and the setting in which you want to convey that story, and not getting carried away writing what effectively amounts to a Dungeons and Dragons sourcebook. Of course, there's also a certain amount of value in fleshing out your setting to a ridiculous degree, because that can lay the foundations for future stories you might want to tell in that setting, but one shouldn't lose sight of one's main goal. As with any type of creative project, particularly if one hasn't indulged in such things for a while, it pays to start small and see where things go from there.

So yes. I am thinking. Hard. I can't promise if and when anything will appear over on the Scratch Pad, but I'll be sure to link it here when something does. And in the meantime, perhaps just a chapter or two more of Blade of the Poisoner, you know, as inspiration…

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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#oneaday Day 420: Scratch pad

Well, I did what I said yesterday and set up a new site purely for creative writing shenanigans. You can find it at https://scratchpad.moegamer.net — there's nothing there yet, but feel free to bookmark or subscribe or whatever if you feel like it. I'm making no promises as to the regularity with which I'll post over there, but it is there for me to use when I feel like it. Long-term, I might like to try and make some sort of "commitment" to doing some creative writing on a regular basis, but as with anything, it's going to be a case of establishing the habit first of all before you can actually really make it into a full-on habit.

I've been thinking about what I might want to write over there. I think I might start with some short stories rather than attempting to do anything too complicated or ambitious right away. While complicated, ambitious stories are always a delight to get started on, it's easy to get bogged down in the middle section and never get around to finishing them. One thing I found with my "NaNoWriMo But Not Really (Especially Now They're AI Weirdoes)" posts on this site was that it was those middle parts which were the most challenging. You may have a strong opening (ooer missus) and a solid finale in mind, but it's getting from one to the other that is often the challenging bit. Particularly when you're trying to ensure you meet a word (or, in the case of those projects, post) count.

So short stories would seem to be a sensible thing to start with. I can perhaps use them to explore or establish some characters, and those characters can perhaps grow into something I want to do more ambitious things with. Perhaps a collection of short stories focused on a particular character or group of characters is a solid foundation for a longer work? Or perhaps what begins as unconnected short stories can end up telling a complete narrative? I don't know. It's been quite a long time since I've done this, so my mind is, frankly, fairly awash with possibilities at the moment.

One thing I am going to take care of on the new site is to ensure that things are categorised nicely. I'm envisioning a page where you can just browse through short stories, then anything which ends up being more ambitious can, of course, have its own page also so anyone who cares to do such a thing can read from the beginning to the end without interruption. And it goes without saying that this site will remain ad-free for the foreseeable future — given that I don't have any ads on my most successful site, MoeGamer, I really don't think having them on a creative scratch pad is really going to achieve anything.

And, of course, the site will remain proudly AI-free. Not a single bit of generative AI will go anywhere near that page, and absolutely definitely not for text generation. The whole point of the site is for me to indulge in some unadulterated creativity for the first time in quite a while, so dicking around with AI kind of defeats the object there, doesn't it? Also there's plenty of quite convincing evidence right now that using ChatGPT turns you into a dribbling cunt that is totally incapable of thinking for itself, so there's that, also.

Anyway, yeah. That's the announcement, I guess. Now to figure out something to write over there!

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#oneaday Day 419: I wanna write a story

It's been far too long since I actually did some proper, honest to goodness creative writing that isn't burbling stream of consciousness blog posts or video game analysis, and I have to admit, I've been feeling an increasing hunger to just write something recently.

But what? I don't really know. There are lots of possibilities in my head, ranging from simple slice-of-life affairs to ambitious sci-fi epics — plus, of course, the Dreamwalker story I've had in my head since a teen but never quite got around to figuring out how it would finish, particularly as it started life as a Klik 'n' Play game — and I think it would probably be fun to write a murder mystery, given how many of them I've been watching of late.

I am beset with the odd mind goblin*, though. I feel like I can't write a murder mystery because I can't think through a crime logically enough to make it convincing — although honestly, with some of the absolute nonsense they get up to on Death in Paradise, I feel like particularly elaborate, bafflingly complicated murders are perfectly fine in the genre.

I feel like I can't write slice-of-life because it would either be too boring, or too unconvincing, or come across too much like wish fulfilment — although, again, thinking about the slice-of-life anime and TV shows I've enjoyed over the years, none of those things are necessarily a problem.

I feel like I can't write sci-fi because I don't know enough science to make it convincing — although, again, if you lean hard on the science fantasy angle you don't necessarily have to worry about.

Mostly, my biggest mind goblin, though, is the big question: who would read it? And its closely related question, does that matter? No-one reads this fucking blog and I'm still tapping away every night, so surely if I'm taking some time on the semi-regular to write some fiction and I feel satisfied with what I've achieved, that should be enough, no?

I think that's probably the case. So I think I'm going to figure out what I might want to write, then set up a place where I can post it easily — likely another blog, separate from both this and MoeGamer. And then all I have to do is write, whenever I feel like it. And who knows? Maybe something will come of it in the long term.

^{*Mind goblin deez nuts? Yes, I got you good. Don't try and pretend like I didn't.}

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#oneaday Day 395: A place for authors

One thing I've found myself wondering about a fair bit of late is whether the world still has a place for authors. By that, I mean people who primarily write books as their main contribution to existence; people whose job it is to write things that are, by their very nature, more long-form than your average 500-word Internet article.

Because, you know, I'm a little concerned. I'm a little concerned that a lot of people simply don't seem to have the mental capacity to digest anything written that is more than 250-500 words these days. Worse, there are people out there who genuinely believe that getting ChatGPT to "summarise" books for you is the same as "reading" them.

Part of me wants to write a book, or perhaps more accurately, multiple books, both fiction and non-fiction. I've always wanted to do this, and to my shame I've never pursued it to any particular degree, when I probably should. But these days I find myself wondering if I haven't left it too late. Is anyone even reading books any more? If I were to write a complete book that was all me, conjured up from the depths of my imagination, would anyone even believe that it wasn't AI-generated these days?

There's also the question of what to write about. There are numerous things I've started writing over the years, but only a few I've actually finished. Some of them you can read on this blog; one I even turned into an actual, physical self-published book. But that big question always hangs over my head: would anyone give a shit? Would anyone care enough to read it? Does that even matter?

Well, of course it matters to a certain degree. Writing a book is a significant amount of work, and putting all that effort in only for no-one to actually read it is… a suboptimal outcome, to say the least. And the trouble is, I feel, that the longer I leave it, the more likely that suboptimal outcome is to come true. The fewer people will be reading books. The fewer people will ever care about me, a nobody in the grand scheme of things, having found some means of expressing my creativity.

I've just been back and had a rummage through my "Creative Writing" folder that I have on my Google Drive. There's a few things in there that are the start of a good idea. Perhaps I should develop some of those. Perhaps I should try and start something completely new. Perhaps I should try and actually finish the story I've had half-complete in my mind since the age of about 15.

Or perhaps I should just accept the world as it apparently is today, recognise that I have maybe left it too late, and attempt to content myself with the other creative things I do.

I dunno. That last one doesn't feel altogether satisfactory. I still clearly have some thinking to do in this regard, it seems.

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#oneaday Day 333: Scribus Interruptus

Yes, I know that's almost certainly not correct Latin. No, I don't care. I just wanted a post title that wasn't just "catching up" again, because I missed yesterday and, as such, you are getting two loads of nonsense today instead of just one. Aren't you lucky?

The reason I forgot to write anything was because yesterday and today were my monthly trip down to the office, meaning last night I was staying in a hotel and, after having spent a long drive getting there, I doubt I would have felt like typing much of anything meaningful on my phone even if I had remembered to write something. But anyway, enough of that. You know by this point that my stays in hotels tend to result in short posts that either involve me talking about cop shows on TV or ranting about AI adverts I saw in between cop shows on TV.

Instead, today I want to call back to something I wrote about in the previous post: my previous creative writing projects. I actually went back and read the one I said I didn't remember writing or remember anything about. Turns out I did actually remember writing it and what at least some of it was about, though the exact details were actually something of a surprise to me come the conclusion. So I guess that did its job, or something.

I have decided to dub that particular work my name. for reasons that will be apparent to anyone who has read it. I actually rather enjoyed revisiting it, and while I think there's probably a bunch of work I could do to it before "publishing" it, I'm overall satisfied with it. Judging by the time I wrote it (November 2012), it was almost certainly as much a therapeutic exercise as anything else, and there are a lot of things about the main character's journey in particular that I can directly relate to my own experiences. I, unsurprisingly, do that in my own creative writing rather a lot; it's a means of processing the things I've felt and the things I've experienced, and by exploring them through another character, even if I'm writing from a first-person perspective, I can sort of take a step back and contemplate them from a slightly different angle.

One thing I do enjoy playing with when creative writing is perspective. I went through a phase of writing a lot of things in first-person present tense, and it's a style I still like very much. I forget exactly what inspired me to first do this, but I'm pretty sure it was something we were looking at in English Literature classes in school — likely something along the lines of Jane Eyre (which isn't first-person present, but is first-person) or its companion piece Wide Sargasso Sea (which introduced me to "stream-of-consciousness" narrative, a form I was also rather taken with, if that were not already very apparent.)

Out of curiosity, the other evening I happened to look up if there have been any novels written using second-person perspective — i.e. placing the reader in the role of the protagonist by narrating using the "you" pronoun. Of course, things like Choose Your Own Adventure and Fighting Fantasy automatically fall into this category, but no; I was thinking something more "conventional" and non-interactive.

I was pleasantly surprised to discover there are, in fact, several novels that have been written at least partially in this style. One that I found particularly intriguing was an Italian piece by Italo Calvino known as If on a winter's night a traveler. This novel is about you, the reader, attempting to read a novel named If on a winter's night a traveler and continually getting distracted. The story apparently jumps back and forth between what "you" are doing — which is the main plot — and the first chapter of a variety of other novels that, for one reason or another, keep distracting you. Supposedly the themes of the various novel extracts are weaved into the main narrative, and it all sounds very clever and, yes, post-modern. It may well be completely insufferable to read — and I'm not going to try until I've finished my Jane Eyre re-read that I started recently — but it definitely intrigued me, and made me think I might try something with second-person perspective at some point.

Anyway, I think that's probably enough for the first post of today. Please feel free to go and read my name. now I've given it a name, or indeed any of my other past creative writing pieces, which you can find in the menu bar at the top. I've even set it so they display in chronological order rather than the usual reverse chronological order — though WordPress' limitations mean that when you want to read the next page you have to press the "Older Posts" button rather than "Newer Posts". But I'm sure you can figure that out.

Enough! I have another post to write. So it's time to do that!

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#oneaday Day 332: From the brain to the page

I've been feeling kind of in the mood to do a bit of creative writing recently. I have not yet actually acted on this impulse, because I haven't yet decided what the optimal means of doing it is. Longtime readers may recall that I did not-NaNoWriMo (before NaNoWriMo became a dirty word) a few times on this very site, using my daily #oneaday posts to compose a story 1,000+ words or so at a time. If, for whatever reason, you're interested in reading those, you can find them with their first chapters starting at the following links:

Wasteland Diaries, a post-apocalyptic tale I inexplicably decided to write as someone who isn't the biggest fan of post-apocalyptic settings.
Untitled, a story I don't remember writing and can't remember anything about. I'm going to have to re-read this one, I think.
Special Measures, a novel about a teacher in a struggling school. (There's even an Actual Book version of this, though I did it through Blurb before I found out about their absurd shipping costs. You're welcome to buy a copy though.)
Unfinished, an unfinished project.

There are also a few other bits and pieces here and there, such as an extremely short-lived "collection" of two short stories about a school (number 1 here, number 2 here), and another extremely short-lived collection of short stories based around the themes of "beginnings and endings" starting here. And probably some other stuff I've forgotten. Like this!

I think I just want to "write a story" again. It's something that used to bring me great joy when I was younger, particularly when I was at school — I was notorious among my English teachers for creative writing projects that were several orders of magnitude longer than anyone else in my cohort — and I feel like it's one of those things that is probably good "therapy" of sorts, too.

The thing I'm umming and ahhing over is whether I should start a new site specifically for the creative writing stuff, or if I should just do what I've done previously and host it here. My concern if I host it here is that I'll lose it, or forget about it, such as what has apparently happened with Untitled, above. But then at the same time it's nice to dive back into the archives sometimes and stumble across something like that. So perhaps I will just host it here, and maybe make a bit more of an effort with the menus to make accessing things like those past stories a bit more straightforward.

Okay, then it's settled. Maybe. I will start Writing Stories again. Whether these stories will form part of my #oneaday efforts or be something completely separate I haven't yet decided. But creativity will happen. Oh yes, it will happen. You just wait. And without even a whiff of generative AI bullshit, because generative AI, particularly anyone attempting to make out that using it is somehow "creative", can eat my entire ass.

Now to ponder what I might want to write about, I guess!

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2286: Disappointment

This post is a response to WordPress' "Daily Post" writing prompt for today.

My immediate reaction to the word "disappointment" when seeing today's writing prompt was… well, disappointment in The Daily Post's prompts of late.

Longtime readers may recall my occasional use of The Daily Post's writing prompts and the fact that they led to some interesting explorations of topics I might not normally explore on this blog. My default go-to topics for writing about are video games, games journalism and mental health issues, but the prompts from The Daily Post gave me a nudge to consider other topics now and again, whether they be nostalgic, hypothetical or just plain weird.

Lately, though, the prompts on the site have just been single words, and these don't inspire me nearly as much as the questions or phrases that used to make up The Daily Post's bank of writing prompts. I'm trying to pin down exactly why the change to this style of prompt fills me with such disappointment, and I think it's because it provides the opportunity for too broad a range of things to write about; single-word prompts are too flexible.

Let me explain what I mean. When I decide to make use of a writing prompt for a day's post, I like it being in the form of a question or an exam-style "Phrase. Discuss." prompt because it provides some sort of direction to the writing. Creativity is, to me, at its most interesting when you work within some sort of constraint, because you then have to not only use your creativity to produce the work itself, but you also have to use your creativity to perhaps bend the rules of the constraint in question, too. A single word doesn't constrain me at all; I can still pretty much write about anything tangentially related to, say, "disappointment", and I've technically fulfilled the brief. That, to me, isn't a helpful writing prompt. That, to me, makes me feel like I should have just started writing any old thing off the top of my head rather than looking for a prompt.

I'm aware that my experiences and feelings about this aren't going to be the same as everyone else's, and that there are doubtless plenty of bloggers out there who relish the chance to tackle the challenge of a single-word prompt and make it interesting. But for me, I always found The Daily Post much more enjoyable when it provided much clearer briefs and prompts on what to write about — and much more interesting to see how other people interpreted these briefs, too.

Hopefully we'll see a return to form for The Daily Post at some point in the near future. If not, well, I may have to contemplate setting up something of my own. I can't be the only one feeling disappointment in this way!

2273: One an Hour

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(11:23) Today I am going to write one sentence each hour.

(12:35) It's going well so far; I've remembered to follow up the first sentence with this one.

(13:26) Could do with a poo; not currently in an ideal situation to do so.

(14:22) Still need a poo, but I will survive, dammit; I will survive!

(15:07) Semicolons sure are useful for exercises like this; they effectively allow me to cheat the system and write more than one sentence at once.

(16:15). Lacerated my thumb on a security box; now both of my thumbs have been mangled by retail work.

(17:31) I'm having a poo; at last, sweet relief, and after this I'm going to go and play some old Atari games before dinner thanks to the excellent compilation Atari Vault.

(18:58) Ooh, nearly forgot to write something this hour; got in there with two minutes to spare.

(19:53) Gave the Prison Break heist in Grand Theft Auto Online another go; we still can't nail that last part, though this time our failure was more due to the game glitching than actual incompetence for once.

(23:05) GOD FUCKING DAMMIT.

See, I could have been dishonest there and just made up sentences for the hours I forgot about, but my integrity means too much to pull the wool over your eyes in such a manner, dear reader.

Oh well, it was fun while it lasted; certainly made working on a Sunday a smidgen more palatable. I have tomorrow off, which is nice; I do like a nice midweek day off, although I only have one before it's back to work for three days. I shouldn't complain, I guess; it's money, and the place where I work so far appears to be inoffensive enough for the time being.

Tomorrow will be spent sleeping, completing some freelance work assignments and playing lots of video games, in that order. The remainder of this evening will be spent playing video games, too.

2227: Filling the Days

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Anyone who has been out of work will know how frustrating it is to be in that "waiting" period while you have some applications out and no idea whether or not you're going to hear back from any of them. It seems that most companies these days use the catch-all get-out clause of there being a "very high volume of applications", thus absolving themselves of any responsibility for actually delivering an answer to unsuccessful applicants — or even acknowledging them at all, in some cases. (I know that rationally speaking there probably is a very high volume of applications and it would be very difficult to respond to all of them, but it's still fucking rude.)

As I noted a while ago, I've been trying my best to fill my days while this waiting is going on. I've been looking for jobs in various fields — preferably those I can perform a bit more flexibly and/or from home — and applying to a few as well as continuing with the trickle of regular-ish freelance work I've been undertaking, but doing that all day every day is a sure-fire recipe for wanting to fall asleep and not wake up again.

So there have been a number of ways I've been keeping occupied. There's video games, of course, but those aren't especially "productive", though they do provide useful fodder for writing about various topics, which is handy, as well as something I can talk about with people. That's something that's actually quite important, particularly when you're stuck at home: it's a tremendously awkward position to find yourself in when you're at a social occasion and you realise you have literally nothing of note to contribute to any conversation. (As a socially anxious person, I feel like this most of the time, so it's best not to give myself any actual ammunition to back this up.)

I've been continuing to work on my book. I figured out that my writing software Scrivener has a "target" option with exciting progress bars that fill up for both your complete project and your session target, so you can have that RPG-like experience of filling bars and feeling all happy and satisfied when they're full. I'm not yet sure what a reasonable target for each session is — I can knock out 1,500 words in one sitting without too much difficulty, but that doesn't feel like very much and I kind of want to try and keep my momentum going without burning myself out. I'm sure I'll pin down a suitable target; perhaps I'll increase it little by little from 1,500 with each session and see what feels comfortable. As for the book itself, recommendations online seem to suggest a length of 80-100k words is a suitable length, so I'm aiming at the lower end of that spectrum as a minimum target; since I'm a verbose sort of chap, that leaves me some leeway to go over, whereas if I aimed specifically for 100k as a minimum, I'd have to excise big chunks to get the word count down, which is something I don't like doing; every word is sacred, or something.

Currently, the project is at 21,000 words or so, which is quite good going — or about a quarter of the way through, if you want to look at it another way. I'm enjoying getting back into the swing of things; while I write on this blog every day and have even indulged in some creative writing on here on several occasions, simply sitting down and writing a story for the sake of writing a story rather than "because oh shit I need a blog post for today" is an enjoyable experience that stimulates my already rather overactive imagination; I'll probably write more about how I feel while I'm writing on another occasion, as I think it's an interesting discussion.

Aside from this, I have some other things to be getting on with, too: there's a second edition of the Digitally Downloaded magazine in the works, and I have Japanese studies to be getting on with. Or indeed restarting to refresh my memory, since it's been a little while since I last engaged with them. I am pleasantly surprised how much hiragana have stayed with me since my last dedicated effort to learn, though; my next hurdle — and the one that tends to stall me each time — is katakana, but I'm sure with a bit of effort I'll be able to conquer it. Then I can get depressed at knowing I'll never, ever know all the kanji.

Anyway. That's how I'm filling my days at the moment. While none of this is making me any money, sadly, a few of these things do at least have the potential to lead somewhere in the future. Perhaps my book will sell. Perhaps I'll learn enough Japanese to be able to do something with it. Perhaps the magazine will take off and we'll be able to start charging for it. Who knows? While I have this time, it's worth exploring these things rather than getting depressed about the fact that jobs in the traditional sense seem to be extremely, frustratingly, infuriatingly difficult to come by these days, particularly when you yourself aren't really sure what you're qualified and/or skilled enough to do…

2219: Picking at the Scab of Creativity

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That's a horrible metaphor, I know, but the more I think about it, the more that it seems to make a certain amount of sense.

I've been picking at said scab for the last few days, as I said I was going to. I haven't been spending all day on it or anything, but an hour here and an hour there has meant that a story I've been wanting to finish since my teenage years is finally making some progress further beyond the point where it typically stalls any time I attempt to form it into some sort of… well, format.

I'm taking a different approach to what I usually do, and it feels like it's working. Those who have read my various month-long sort of NaNoWriMo projects and other creative pieces will know that I have something of a tendency to write in a fairly spontaneous manner — in other words, I don't really plan anything out in advance, and this usually serves me well but occasionally sees me writing myself into a bit of a dead end I'm not sure how to escape from. In contrast, then, said scab-picking has involved not just continuing on with what I've already written — which is a substantial number of words that I'm actually quite pleased with so far — but instead planning out a synopsis, chapter by chapter, of what's coming next.

Doing this has helped me get over the biggest creative block I've had with this work — a creative block that has lasted a good 15 years or so at last count. The trouble with this story is that I know how it begins and I know roughly how it ends, but I've never quite figured out what happens in the middle of it or the specifics of the ending. Now I'm planning each chapter out in general terms rather than trying to write meaningful scenes as I get to them, I feel like I'm developing a much stronger sense of the work's complete structure, and those middle bits are starting to fall into place naturally. It's that old thing where a huge job looks daunting if you look at the whole thing, but if you take it a single task at a time it suddenly seems a lot more manageable.

So picking a scab then — why? Well, because I've been picking at it for the last few days, and each time I do so, I feel my creativity loosen up a bit. It's surely — hopefully — only a matter of time before that scab comes off completely and creativity comes gushing forth from a newly reopened wound, splattering the walls and desk with… you know what? Maybe I didn't think this metaphor through as much as I thought I had.

Anyway. Disgusting mental imagery aside, I'm pleased with my progress, even though it's relatively minor in the grand scheme of what I need to do to finish the damn thing. It is progress, though, and while I'm still not feeling great about bumming around at home all day rather than having a proper job, it is at least helping me to feel like I'm achieving something, however miniscule that something might be. And that's pretty important.

Let's hope I can keep that motivation going, a bit at a time.