Just dropping bomb after bomb in this manuscript. #Writing #excerpt from a current project. #booksky #sci-fi #xenofiction 💙📚

I'm getting the vibe that the key to getting published is having some letters next to your name. Seen some absolute tripe stories published, but the author was a Ph.D. so that made it okay.

Oh, yeah, I'm going there. #Excerpt from a current #writing project. #booksky #💙📚 #scifi #xenofiction

Jesse Hamm had the take to end all takes on children's media. "People who disdain writing ‘just for children’ fail to realize that those children will remember what they read, maybe for the rest of their lives. You’re not writing for permanent children; you’re getting an early start on adults.”

My setting simply wouldn't work if everyone was human, nor would its themes. The whole point of my stories is the struggle of exercising compassion between creatures of desperate needs. That humans "need" a human protag to make a story work would probably make them villains of my setting.

#Writing #excerpt from a new project started today. #booksky #scifi #xenofiction #💙📚

[long ago] King: [waking up amidst mess] oh god King: how messed up was i last night King: i must have huffed 100 markers King: i don't remember anything King: oh shit King: did i write cujo??

Zarkans are nocturnal creatures that are adapted to a cold environment, so sometimes will wear white hooded clothes in warmer environments for comfort. Zarkans feature in my book: books2read.com/u/4NVEDz

Chances are it was something we had to cut because we couldn't get to fit and had resigned to the ether. Something else AI bros don't get.

A reminder that Iron Circus is gonna get WALLOPED with Baker & Taylor bankruptcy backdraft for the next several months, turning our usual distro payout into bills. If you'd like to help a small business making weird-ass comics weather the storm, a 💥30% OFF💥 sale is on now! store.ironcircus.com

A Harsmeg warrior showing off. #art #sci-fi #alien

I want to apologize to the dick-pill scammers who would flood my inbox back in the day. I failed to appreciate your craft at the time, and I am sorry.

I'm probably going to steal "We come from fire and return to fire" as something that some of the more fanatical Burning Sun adherents would say right before they commit an atrocity.

I can attest that writing some short stories have helped me develop my setting. It's one thing to write in your head but it is when you try to get those ideas onto a concrete medium were the details start to become clear. ...now if only someone would buy them...

One avenue of speculation about the virgin birth is that it was a cover story for Mary being raped by a Roman soldier. Being forcefully made to foster a being against out consent by agents of colonization is a fair description of what is happening with "AI," though.

Been doing some #speculative sketches of fashion choices for the Illitani species so I can visualize it better, with some notes about how it works. That I made the Extras example look like a weird Puritan is entirely accidental.

I named my fists London and Paris, because it is about to be the best of times and the worst of times.

#Writing #excerpt from a current project. #booksky #💙📚

Some of the authors I've read have been...annoying... #booksky 📚💙

#Excerpt from a current project. #writing #sci-fi #xenofiction

This. Whenever local government reviews the library budget and asks, "Why should we give you money?" We want the library to be able to say, "Because we provide a valuable service used by many people!" Libraries are like muscles, using them more makes them stronger. 💪

If I had the time or the brains, I would tackle the "conservatives have no media literacy" meme used whenever some popular media is appropriated with the depth it deserves. Since I have neither, I'll just say that its a bit hypocritical since fiction is not inherently didactic.

This is kind of how I envisioned the Illitani stage actors from The Mask to work.

The more I learn about cover letters, the more I think they are a waste of time.

Nothing really illustrates the failure of credentialism quite like reading short stories by Ph.Ds and Hugo Award winners and it turns out to be the most mediocre, boring writing. There are people who have worked cash registers their whole lives with more interesting fiction than this.

People who say the Star Wars Prequels are "good, actually," are just remembering the story better than how Lucas told it. Lucas's intent was to crank out a six-hour ad to sell merchandise, and it comes across in the execution.

"Huh, half the internet is timing out, lemme try a traceroute... ohhh, shit, either it's raining in Virginia or someone parked on the internet again."

do you believe in ghosts or are you like me, a person who finds themself saying all the time “I absolutely don’t believe in ghosts, but this place has ghosts.”

“But you can bounce lasers off of mirrors the Apollo astronauts put on the moon yourself!” I mean; ok, pretty good, but have you tried, “Yeah, the government /did/ lie about the moon landings…for example, every time an Apollo astronaut said ‘sunofabitch’ the official transcripts read ‘garbled’.”

I usually have a good idea of what the ending is going to be even before I start writing. I feel like without that anchor, I would meander directionlessly. That doesn't mean I don't realize I could have a better ending in the middle of writing, though.

I did it. I finished a draft of the short story I started a couple months ago just before Halloween, which was the deadline I gave myself. #booksky #writing #💙📚

Another spoopy #excerpt from a current project, appropriate for October. #booktok #📚💙 #scifi #xenofiction

Ouch. This one cuts to the bone.

More writers need to watch all the seasons of HOW IT'S MADE because they for whatever reason have NO idea how the world works, or how things work, or how things work in the world, and then it shows up in their fiction and makes me yell and swear and pace and weep and rend my clothes in despair.

There is such thing as too much, but this, absolutely.

With many authors treating writing as their second job, they should not need a third job as social media influencer and become a walking brand in order to have, yknow, a chance at a career. Also bring back the midlist.

Authors shouldn’t need day jobs

We teach the classics because they are thoroughly explored topics which enables a standardized approach to teaching literary criticism, something which you can't do with a more free-form curriculum. Less an unhinged opinion and more something some of the unhinged takes needed to be reminded of.

All novels are fantasy novels. It's just some novelists lie about this.

Moore predicted this.

The author might be dead, but Thiel is doing unspeakable things to the corpse.

One of the more distasteful forms of story promotion, I think, is comparing a story to another story. "It is just like X," is not a good selling point. If I wanted something like X, I would just go back to X. If I am out looking for something new, then don't give me re-heated leftovers of the old.

On a planet orbiting one of the last glowing embers of an old universe, two alien species have ended their generations-long war, and now an actress struggles to make sense of the new peace as she performs a play for her species' former predators. books2read.com/u/4NVEDz #scifi #booksky #💙📚

It seems that in any kind of social interaction that there are unspoken agreements that once they are spoken, they are undone.

Another writing excerpt, this one from a spooky short story I hope to have done by Halloween. #writing #booksky #💙📚 #scifi #alien

Illitani arms are supported by a breastbone instead of shoulderblades, so their backwards range of motion is actually greater than their front. Illitani are an alien species from my fiction. #art #alien #speculative #speculativeanatomy #📚💙 #booksky

I really ought to write a short story about how the Dark Forest hypothesis is really stupid.

I got a writing hot take: Dues ex machina endings are not bad writing. The dues ex machina refers to how old Greek plays would have an actor dressed as a god to descend onto a stage by a pully system, like a god descending from heaven, to resolve a crisis point in a story.

Casual reminder that I too make stories about blue aliens, and I do it without AI. You don't need a huge budget to make an interesting story. You could have probably slashed the budget of A1 in half without changing a thing about its story and it would have still made bank.