I would probably not do a disease unless you are are trying to evoke feelings related to covid, or it’s very, very different in symptoms. (and maybe not even then) - only because I feel like that’s carrying a lot of baggage right now for some folks.
Be aware how slow and gruesome dying of radiation poisoning can be unless the dose is immideately fatal. including a day where they feel much better, the Walking-Ghost-Phase
This would be a massive burst from all directions, absorbed through a faulty radiation suit. In my rough plan, the protagonists find a secret research station underground, where experiments were run involving delta radiation (which is a real thing, look it up).
I’ve been really busy at work dealing with issues with backups and migrating data and the gaps I found in our software and with AWS.
I wanted to do a presentation and update our docs about it. I was promised that I’d have the time. All of a sudden I have no projects and new requirements and I’m always stressed out.
I like the concept of writing because it’s like a weekend to your work. Gives you a chance to put the full top at the end of a sentence and helps solidify what you’ve done in your mind.
Hobbyist/wannabe writer, but here are my two cents. I actively try not to convey my mental picture exactly the way I picture it. The only exception is for first impressions of people, like a specific fashion style or characteristic that says something about the person. If I find that something else depends on a very specific mental picture, then I’ll try to rewrite it so that it doesn’t.
Just write to the best of your ability. Writing is a written medium, not a visual one, so unlike a film, TV series, or game, you can’t guarantee that a reader will always see exactly the same thing as you. The imagination is a funny thing, which runs a full spectrum from aphantasia (an inability to imagine at all) to fully photorealistic “movie in their head” mental images. Nothing you write will ever allow those on one end of that spectrum to see what you’re seeing, and writing all the details to make the other’s mental images 100% accurate will bog down your writing with a lot of detail that just isn’t relevant to the story. Also, the more specific you make your descriptions in an attempt to beam what you’re seeing into the readers’ heads, the denser your prose becomes, which risks losing readers with average reading comprehension skills.
If there’s a specific aspect of the movement that’s very important, then describe it as best as you can. Readers don’t need, and won’t remember, irrelevant details. If they do picture something incorrectly and something you write later contradicts it, then they’ll edit their mental image and/or go back to check what you wrote earlier. I do this all the time when reading if it turns out I’ve pictured something incorrectly, and I’d say I have a pretty average visual imagination: I can picture things fine, but I don’t have a “mental movie” that creates photorealistic detail. You could describe something in massive detail, and my mind will generate an Impressionist painting, not modern CGI.
My contribution to beehaw so far is this comment. I have confidence issues, and have been essentially radio silent on social media for the past ten years, but I’m at a turning point in my life and writing is the only thing that makes sense I need to start now. I have a few sketches of ideas but none fully realized.
I’m primarily interested in short stories which I would like to potentially narrate in the future, but I’m slowly trying to get over the confidence problem at the moment.
My contribution to beehaw so far is this comment. I have confidence issues, and have been essentially radio silent on social media for the past ten years
Well, I feel honored that you are responding to my post! 🙂
but I’m at a turning point in my life and writing is the only thing that makes sense I need to start now
Turning points are precisely where you change direction in your life, so it sounds like you are doing the right thing! 👍
I’m primarily interested in short stories which I would like to potentially narrate in the future, but I’m slowly trying to get over the confidence problem at the moment.
While I can’t possibly know exactly how you feel or what factors may have led to this, I do somewhat understand. I had general anxiety issues and maybe a tinge of depression when I put my feet on this path. I barely touched the project for the first 6 months or more after I decided I was doing it.
My really very amateur advice is - take positivity from everything you can. For example, what helped me was a BUNCH of honestly sort of small sounding things that seemed to bear fruit over time. Two examples -
I made a playlist called “Positive” and added any song to it that made me feel good. Even if it wasn’t explicitly a song about positivity - if it made me feel energized and happy to hear it, it went in. I would put that playlist on every time I sat down to write.
When someone crossed my twitter feed who looked like they were spreading positive feelings to people, I followed them to ensure I’d get those positive messages in my feed.
I’d also suggest finding a writing podcast that you enjoy listening to. I’ve been listening to a few of them - at least one episode a day, and on one of them I’m about to start their back catalog for the third time. There are a lot of them out there, and they are all just a bit different from each other. One or more will click with you. It will not only educate and motivate you, but it will also help you feel more confident. Every one of these published writers that I have listened to has complained about the same feelings of doubt regarding their writing, the same difficulties with confidence and impostor syndrome, and really almost all the same problems that we beginners seem to have.
Although I don’t intend to plug a particular one, the Writing Excuses podcast often discusses short fiction, and gives specific advice for short story writers. At least one of the regular hosts has extensive experience with short fiction. Their show is also a little bit different every season - they change up the structure of the show and have guest hosts, and other things to add variety and to cover a lot of facets of writing.
I’m not qualified to give you any advice about how to write, but I will say this advice from B. Dave Walters is in my head all the time - I’m paraphrasing: The worst thing you write is better than the best thing you don’t write. (because it’s the only way to get better and that won’t happen if it stays in your head)
Could you describe the movements relative to the rest of the scene you’re setting?
“Part of the mechanism moved along the west wall, as though guided by (mechanical/spooky action related to plot). It stopped, then rotated towards (character) but came to rest on its corner before completing even a quarter rotation to the east.”
It’s hard to say. You definitely don’t want to be too specific, but you do want to hit the high notes. What parts of the movement are important later, even if “later” is only a sentence or two away?
Congrats! I was planning on doing NaNo this year, and then life got in the way, and now it’s almost over. Ugh. I have a completed story I need to edit anyways I suppose.
It's good work, but just to let you know, your formatting is breaking when it's posted across instances - getting a code block with a bunch of <span style> tags over here on kbin.
Reprint as it appears beeshaw if your view is broken:
Her presence
intoxicating as
the smell of sweet honey
her touch sends shivers
down deep
to the marrow of my bones
her gaze icy
yet it burns me
and everything within
every time
I pray
to hold her
just for a minute longer
yet when the sun comes up
she is no longer there
my silent wish
unanswered
the sheets next to me
devoid of her warmth
yet full
of her fragrance
I sigh and close my eyes
only to meet her again
in my dreams
As someone who showed up a month late, can I just say I find both of these ideas wildly interesting! Now I’m a little worried that they don’t look bad to me. 😀
The disgruntled younger sibling of the “Chosen One”
The main character has traveled back in time to kill Hitler. Little do they know is Hitler is now a skilled killer of time travelers.
I think the second one especially could be a lot of fun. Not sure I’m clever enough to come up with all the interesting traps he would have to devise, but it could be a little zany if ultimately the story was entirely focused on their battle of wits, completely leaving the holocaust angle out of who Hitler is until the very end…
This is great. I honestly hadn’t given the downvote thing much thought. The bit about promoting discussion really hits it home. Tell me why you don’t like it!
It reminds me of restaurant reviews. I eat at Chili’s pretty regularly, and if you pay on the little tablet kiosk thing (Ziosk?), it wants you to complete a survey. If things were great, I do the survey. But if they were bad, or even just fine, I skip. I’ve heard too many tales of disciplinary action being taken on non-five-star reviews, which just kills the whole point. Do you want my honest opinion, or do you want a yes-man?
Back to the piece, it’s a great write-up. Though I do want to point out that you used “apart” instead of “a part” at least twice. 🙂
But don’t worry, the XMPP article linked at the bottom has way more errors.
This is fine while we’re still small, and the number of intentional bad actors is limited. If our user sign-up vibe check filter ever fails, though, and we get inundated with a thousand alt-right trolls, the inability to downvote is going to majorly suck. Having to sit down and compose a well-worded, sourced comment every time they brain-dump a load of reality-distorting rubbish onto my feed is a huge time- and energy-sink, which is exactly what they’re going for. It takes them 3 minutes to type some pile of complete nonsense, and it takes me half an hour or more to debunk it. By the time I’m finished with my “this is why you’re wrong” comment, they’ve gone on to copy/paste their own fuckery 30 different times over 10 different comment threads and 6 different Lemmy posts.
Eventually, nobody will have the energy for these chuds any longer, and their screeds will stay up unopposed or only marginally opposed, which is their intended goal.
Downvotes make it simple, quick, and easy to fight this bullshit-shotgun tactic, because clicking one time is faster than the fastest-typing sealion. While they outpace my ability to sit and debunk their “arguments”, each one of their posts can accumulate double-digit downvotes before they even finish posting it on the next thread, hiding them from everyone who’s not sorting the comment section by “dumbfuckery”.
We’ll see how it goes, though. I tend to be cynical and doomy, and maybe the things I worry about will never happen, or will shape up differently than I predict. But the fact that none of the “Yay, no downvotes!” people ever address this concern is something that reduces my level of confidence in the scheme.
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