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take the moon
Feb 13, 2011

by sebmojo

magic cactus posted:

I have a question:

I've noticed in my writing that I tend to have a lot of paragraphs like this:
.

imo you should take that sonic youth quote from goo??? and just flip some of the words around

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sebmojo
Oct 23, 2010


Legit Cyberpunk









Post some examples?

take the moon
Feb 13, 2011

by sebmojo
hmm im not sure what that's in response to but (pretension incoming)...

the quote reads:

"I stole my sister's boyfriend. It was all whirlwind, heat, and flash. Within a week we killed my parents and hit the road."

so basically that gets stuck in my head a lot and someone actually referenced it in byob the other day. my point is essentially, and i'll see if I can dig into it a lil, if your paragraph starts off with "it only took a few minutes" it should not take me a bit to read and it should not have much to unpack. like I get it, it's ez pz. inject some flavour into it like man idk. "it wasn't even a thing" would be how some millennial fuccboi would say it.

"... hardest part was [whatever] and we snorted xan off each others' chests to put a point on it... we got over it in a haze of [something]..."

or

"...we lost ourselves in a blur of mindless sex & serial streaming..." if your chars are norms. but what I mean is if your paragraph starts by describing how short and not a big deal something is id better be done reading it in an eyeblink cuz internally I've already moved on

haha if you meant from my own writing... ok ill dig some up but I actually make no claims to be v realistic or hold weight, I meant in terms of approach

General Battuta
Feb 7, 2011

This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.
Idk what the actual term is but I think of 'the form of the prose should reflect the content' as incarnation.

take the moon
Feb 13, 2011

by sebmojo
^yea exactly

realism (these are rough sketches)

quote:

"You've looked better." Tinges of concern like eyeshadow on a pale white face.

"You never left," Lore says. Arms in a loose fold, scarred wrists propping palms propping the Chalice tribute-orb. "Stayed here and projected to gently caress me up."

"To save you. gently caress your wrists, dude." Even now, any anger melts for her. She's taking time away from reading the Holonovel to talk to them, staring with piercing eyes. "I never asked for your little errand. You offered."

notice um profanity I guess. mild sarcasm.

holding weight will prolly be embarrassing to show.

k attempting

quote:

Altha’s lips are charcoal black, sun-kissed. “I know what you nurse. I know it’s torture.”

“Feels like an aeon,” Elise says. “Like my whole life.” As she speaks she knows that …



But when Altha speaks her words have thawed. “Life pushes and pulls, laps and flows, if you’re living it right.” She smiles at Elise, serene and so lovely it hurts. “This is just another current.”

old stuff. notice badness. loose idea is chars speak poetically/lyrically tho like to the extent that I am able. i was legit interested in what other posters tried for but not sharing is more than fine lol.

Stabbey_the_Clown
Sep 21, 2002

Are... are you quite sure you really want to say that?
Taco Defender
Flowery language is tricky - certain genres have more of it than others, and thus the readers of those genres will be more accepting of it. Literary fiction and romance novels would probably be better suited for flowery language, but science fiction and thrillers don't have as much of that and so a lesser number of readers would be used to it.

General Battuta
Feb 7, 2011

This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.
Europa life!

A gigantic, bristling drifter appears on the icebore camera—like a dandelion seed made entirely of arms. Bright red and yellow markings betray its evolution in shallow seas, where some light passes through the ice.

The limbs wave slowly to and fro, a motion which serves as both hunting and breathing. Gentle tides in Europa’s sea help the arms pump fluid. When prey drifts close, attracted by plankton that cake on the drifter’s skin, nearby limbs slowly fold and coil down to draw the victim into a central stomach, where thready parasites wait to crawl into the victim’s flesh and digest. Everything it does is slow and intestinal. Pulsatory. Brainless.

Sometimes the limbs bicker. Two are dead and fuzzy with rot. They strangled each other.

It is a colony organism. Without mind or higher structure. If threatened, it will discorporate. The limbs will coil and spasm, the core will tear apart in a puff of fluids, and all those hundreds of arms will slither away into the dark beneath the ice, fat worms of terror searching for a hide. Only the digestive parasites will remain behind. They are expelled in a wad so that their panicked squirming will act as decoy.

I despise it. I would have it killed, except that I am repulsed by the thought of its final disintegration.

Sitting Here
Dec 31, 2007

General Battuta posted:

Europa life!

A gigantic, bristling drifter appears on the icebore camera—like a dandelion seed made entirely of arms. Bright red and yellow markings betray its evolution in shallow seas, where some light passes through the ice.

The limbs wave slowly to and fro, a motion which serves as both hunting and breathing. Gentle tides in Europa’s sea help the arms pump fluid. When prey drifts close, attracted by plankton that cake on the drifter’s skin, nearby limbs slowly fold and coil down to draw the victim into a central stomach, where thready parasites wait to crawl into the victim’s flesh and digest. Everything it does is slow and intestinal. Pulsatory. Brainless.

Sometimes the limbs bicker. Two are dead and fuzzy with rot. They strangled each other.

It is a colony organism. Without mind or higher structure. If threatened, it will discorporate. The limbs will coil and spasm, the core will tear apart in a puff of fluids, and all those hundreds of arms will slither away into the dark beneath the ice, fat worms of terror searching for a hide. Only the digestive parasites will remain behind. They are expelled in a wad so that their panicked squirming will act as decoy.

I despise it. I would have it killed, except that I am repulsed by the thought of its final disintegration.

boss

Xelkelvos
Dec 19, 2012
I wanted to try and practice writing again, but if I wanted to post something more than a few sentences for critique, where should I post it?

flerp
Feb 25, 2014

Xelkelvos posted:

I wanted to try and practice writing again, but if I wanted to post something more than a few sentences for critique, where should I post it?

make ur own thread in CC

u can also link the thread here to get more attention to it

sebmojo
Oct 23, 2010


Legit Cyberpunk









Xelkelvos posted:

I wanted to try and practice writing again, but if I wanted to post something more than a few sentences for critique, where should I post it?

Thunderdome is good for getting your hand in, there's also a chance you'll get a cool avatar out of it

take the moon
Feb 13, 2011

by sebmojo
its cool that weve all mastered the art of writing to objective perfection in this quarantine and no longer need to consult this thread (closes thread, reads more, writes more)

Daric
Dec 23, 2007

Shawn:
Do you really want to know my process?

Lassiter:
Absolutely.

Shawn:
Well it starts with a holla! and ends with a Creamsicle.
I actually picked my book back up after hitting a massive creative rut last year and have been doing really well with it. Unfortunately, I'm now working more than I was before the quarantine and have school on top of that so I can usually get in 1k words or so a day but I don't have hours just to write.

Mirage
Oct 27, 2000

All is for the best, in this, the best of all possible worlds
A very odd question here: I'm plotting a series in which people are reincarnated in another dimension, ironically riffing on isekai tropes. Is there a way to tell whether the word "isekai" has enough "brand recognition" in the English-speaking world to be used in the title of a book?

I've checked Google trends and discovered that, in the past year, "isekai" and "reincarnation" are running neck-and-neck in the U.S., but I'm not sure how else to measure the recognizability of a word.

Fate Accomplice
Nov 30, 2006




I am at least one standard deviation geekier than the average person and I have never heard that term before

Staggy
Mar 20, 2008

Said little bitch, you can't fuck with me if you wanted to
These expensive
These is red bottoms
These is bloody shoes


Mirage posted:

A very odd question here: I'm plotting a series in which people are reincarnated in another dimension, ironically riffing on isekai tropes. Is there a way to tell whether the word "isekai" has enough "brand recognition" in the English-speaking world to be used in the title of a book?

I've checked Google trends and discovered that, in the past year, "isekai" and "reincarnation" are running neck-and-neck in the U.S., but I'm not sure how else to measure the recognizability of a word.

I stuck "isekai" into PublisherRocket and selected "isekai fantasy" and "isekai litrpg" from the suggested keywords. It estimates 283, 4042 and 326 searches on the Amazon.com store each month respectively. The vast majority of other suggested keywords related to specific series, usually with a Japanese title.

Make of that what you will.

flerp
Feb 25, 2014
i think if ur trying to deliberately satirize or parody isekais, you would want your audience to be familiar with not only what an isekai is, but the tropes of it, so having the name in it would help make sure ur getting the audience you need for it work

Mirage
Oct 27, 2000

All is for the best, in this, the best of all possible worlds
That PublisherRocket info is interesting, thanks for that.

I'm going back and forth on it myself. It may not hurt to have an unusual word in the title, since that would make it easier to search for if someone's already heard of it. Plus it's almost like an in-joke for the people who've heard the term before.

On the other hand, searching Amazon for "isekai" brings up a WHOLE lotta series that don't have the word in their titles at all. So, eh.

Sham bam bamina!
Nov 6, 2012

ƨtupid cat
What flerp said. There's no reason for anyone unfamiliar with the word to be reading this in the first place.

Safety Biscuits
Oct 21, 2010

They might know the thing but not the word. Anyway, your editor or agent should know, right?

Mirage posted:

I've checked Google trends and discovered that, in the past year, "isekai" and "reincarnation" are running neck-and-neck in the U.S., but I'm not sure how else to measure the recognizability of a word.

This can't be right.

TooMuchAbstraction
Oct 14, 2012

I spent four years making
Waves of Steel
Hell yes I'm going to turn my avatar into an ad for it.
Fun Shoe
Maybe I'm alone in this, but I feel like putting the genre of your work in the work's title is kinda artless. It's fine to use the genre when describing the work, but the title should be more implying things and evoking emotions, rather than just being a straight-up descriptor.

flerp
Feb 25, 2014
isekai's arent art so its w/e

Megazver
Jan 13, 2006
You might be better off asking in a specialized thread like Web Novel megathread, Web Serial Megathread and, heh, SF/F Kindle Unlimited Trench. But in general, I think you're better off with something like "Reincarnated as... " or "Reborn in another world...."

And just go for a full sentence-length light novel style title, they're hilarious! :D

Stabbey_the_Clown
Sep 21, 2002

Are... are you quite sure you really want to say that?
Taco Defender

Mirage posted:

A very odd question here: I'm plotting a series in which people are reincarnated in another dimension, ironically riffing on isekai tropes. Is there a way to tell whether the word "isekai" has enough "brand recognition" in the English-speaking world to be used in the title of a book?

I've checked Google trends and discovered that, in the past year, "isekai" and "reincarnation" are running neck-and-neck in the U.S., but I'm not sure how else to measure the recognizability of a word.

If you have to ask the question, the answer is that it does not have enough recognition.

Putting that word somewhere in your title will attract the audience who understands what that term means, and also keep away those who don't understand it (who are not your target audience). "Reincarnated as... " or "Reborn in another world...." would have wider appeal, though, and presumably your target audience who knows what that word is also speaks english and will connect those terms with that Japanese word.

Stuporstar
May 5, 2008

Where do fists come from?
Does anyone have fresh ideas on how to anglicize the aleph without it being awkward as gently caress and still conveying the phoneme to an English speaker? ʔ doesn’t really do that, but using a’ is making a hash of my conlang and the language also has the ayin so just using a doesn’t work.

I’m conlanging with ancient Egyptian. There are reasons for this.

Stuporstar fucked around with this message at 02:14 on May 6, 2020

magic cactus
Aug 3, 2019

We lied. We are not at war. There is no enemy. This is a rescue operation.
Does anyone have any ideas for writing a character without an "inner life", so to speak? I'm working on a story and I want to incorporate the idea of philosophical zombie. The philosophical zombie is a kind of thought experiment in philosophy of mind that proposes someone who acts as though they were conscious and has inner experience when really they do not. So for instance from the perspective of a different, fully conscious character, if this zombie character were to (say) drink a beer and say something like "wow this beer tastes good!" the other characters would believe them, since they don't know (or maybe some of them do, I haven't quite figured that part out yet) that this character has no inner experience of their own. But from the perspective of the zombie character, there would be... nothing, I guess. One way I've thought of doing this is via something like using italics for the things the character thinks they feel as a way to distinguish zombie thoughts from real thoughts, but this feels.... clunky and hard to justify in the story. If it helps, this is supposed to be tied to the withdrawl of a powerful and illegal hallucinogen in the story.

The one thing I'm trying to avoid is leaning too much on stuff like "he felt slimy alien tentacles probing his mind" kind of phrasing. I was thinking of modeling it on something like Alzheimer's disease, where you have neurological degradation that leads to a kind of phenomenological unmooring of temporal experience, but I'm not sure how to get that across because this character can't really have access to their inner experience (because they don't, strictly speaking, have any), and I don't really want to give some long expo-dump-by-proxy via another character (like say the medical officer on a ship saying something like "interesting it appears brain area x and y are degrading due to drug use, it looks like he's in effect turning into a philosophical zombie, which is...."

So yeah, I'm at a bit of an impasse here. Ideas appreciated.

General Battuta
Feb 7, 2011

This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.
Have you seen American Psycho?

magic cactus
Aug 3, 2019

We lied. We are not at war. There is no enemy. This is a rescue operation.

General Battuta posted:

Have you seen American Psycho?

I have yeah, but it's been a while and I'm not seeing the connection. What were you thinking?

SelenicMartian
Sep 14, 2013

Sometimes it's not the bomb that's retarded.

Read something on Joseph Weizenbaum, who created the first chat bot Eliza, and spent years arguing that a computer is not a person and does things because a pile of numbers tells it to.

take the moon
Feb 13, 2011

by sebmojo
lol I'm writing a pzombie too. great minds!!!!

I'm cheating by adopting an outer pov tho. My thesis is there would be tells

take the moon
Feb 13, 2011

by sebmojo
American Psycho dude is def not a pzombie imo

take the moon
Feb 13, 2011

by sebmojo
u might as well just read trainspotting for the sick boy povs

General Battuta
Feb 7, 2011

This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

take the moon posted:

American Psycho dude is def not a pzombie imo

“...there is an idea of a Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory, and though I can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable: I simply am not there.”

take the moon
Feb 13, 2011

by sebmojo
I'm aware of the phrasing but he's clearly just a sociopath. Pzombies aren't driven to violence and sex. I think it's lazy theory crafting to assume they would be. I think sick boy is better example and in context u get to contrast him with a norm. Its really effective iirx

Just my op

General Battuta
Feb 7, 2011

This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.
I thought the style of performative social excellence and obsession over superficial traits might be useful or inspirational.

take the moon
Feb 13, 2011

by sebmojo
sure (shutting up after this post) but pzombies want to maintain normalcy. more likely they'd be obsessed w staying static than an external aesthetic of material supremacy.

I'm ykno like I don't know everything. But that's how I treat the concept

the fact that there's an I in Bateman to be not there is a tell I feel

General Battuta
Feb 7, 2011

This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.
The idea is they're exactly like a normal person just with no qualia. No first-person experience of cognition.

magic cactus
Aug 3, 2019

We lied. We are not at war. There is no enemy. This is a rescue operation.

take the moon posted:

lol I'm writing a pzombie too. great minds!!!!

I'm cheating by adopting an outer pov tho. My thesis is there would be tells

At the risk of starting a derail, how do you figure there would be tells? You'd need a character who would be able to know for sure that the zombie in question has no inner experience. I'm genuinely curious what your solution would look like. Because if i recall my grad classes correctly, a p-zombie should theoretically not have any knowledge of being a zombie. So anything it says or does would just be seen as normal human action, except if we were able to see inside it's head or "access its experience" in some manner to see that it does not have any kind of inner experience. So yeah, I'm genuinely curious what your tells would be. The best I can think of is lack of emotion, since emotion (on some readings) is both public and private experience. So maybe on some reading sociopaths like Bateman might have zombie-adjacent characteristics but (I guess?) textually speaking he can't be a zombie because the audience has some level of epistemic access to his thoughts. (I'd flip your idea on its head and say that the fact that there is an "I" in bateman's monologue is a tell that he is not a zombie, unless I'm misreading and that is your thesis, in which case sorry, dumb mistake on my part.)

take the moon
Feb 13, 2011

by sebmojo
well magic will be involved. I'm actually re-evaluating plot based on this convo so ty for starting it

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magic cactus
Aug 3, 2019

We lied. We are not at war. There is no enemy. This is a rescue operation.
Yeah I mean I have no idea how to do this either so I'm just spitballing.

I suppose the problem is that if you want to go "full p-zombie" so to speak, then the audience has nothing to hold on to. At best what you have is a character with no inner monologue who just does things. You couldn't even really do some kind of traditional "mind is in a fog" kind of thing because there would be nothing for the character to introspect on. I suppose textually speaking you could do something like dropping indexicals ("I" "he" and so on) as the condition gets worse, but that's it really.

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