Rynling R&D

I think "being a good writer" is...

33% practice. The more you write, the better you get at writing.

33% life experience. The more stories you're exposed to, the better you get at telling stories.

33% editing. Unlike practice or life experience, editing is a skill that can be taught and learned. It can also be outsourced, but watch out. There's a serious Dunning-Kruger effect when it comes to editing, in that the people who are the worst editors are often the least aware that they're bad at it. This cognitive bias also applies to self-editing, unfortunately, but practice and experience will help the skill develop.

You may be thinking that the extra 1% is talent, but no. The extra 1% involves being broken in a very specific way that makes you feel compelled to write instead of doing literally anything else with your time. Alas.

This is another story for another time, but I'm starting to understand that there's no such thing as talent when it comes to writing. The specific incident that sparked this realization was me reading something published (well, "published" in scare quotes) by someone I used to think was immensely talented. The quality of this guy's writing that I saw as "talent" when we were both in college was really just good third-party editing. His actual writing, after more than a decade of not writing anything, is genuinely kind of shit. When it comes to writing, talent isn't real; it's all practice and experience and good editing.

Hey, I hear you've been down lately. Maybe you'll feel better if you do your annual drawing of Terra.

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Hollow: Ten Tales of Fallen Knights
https://digitalterrarium.itch.io/fallen-knights

This zine collects a series of original short stories about knights who have found themselves in unfortunate circumstances. In the shadows cast by crumbling kingdoms, what inspires these knights to continue fighting?

Many of the stories contain mild elements of horror, but they’re primarily inspired by the dark fantasy genre of entropic romance, in which human (and inhuman) connections still shine brightly as civilization fades.

My flash fiction zine about lady knights is live! It's free to download; and, at 4,000 words, it should be a quick read. I just sent the file to the printer, so hopefully I'll have a paper version in my hands by the third week of September.

Right as I was putting the finishing touches on my zine earlier this week, I learned about a larger zine project focused on knights (this one here) that just opened preorders. That's so cool. Two cakes!!

It’s a bit early, but let me share two books, an anime movie, and two video games that have been making me happy this month.

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The past two weeks have been really rough for me in terms of mental health. I thought maybe I would feel better if I repotted all the plants that had major growth spurts over the summer. I’m not sure this actually helped, but at least now the plants are repotted. Which isn’t nothing!

This week I also finished Tears of the Kingdom, and by “finished” I mean I completed all the shrines and sidequests. Ganondorf isn’t hurting anyone, so he can stay where he is. Meanwhile, I’d forgotten how amazing the three Lomei labyrinths are in this game, and I had a fantastic time with them. The moon gravity sections of Tears of the Kingdom are a miracle and a blessing.

It’s difficult to summarize the premise of Revolutionary Girl Utena, a three-season anime that goes from being surreal to becoming even more surreal, but here are the basics:

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What’s super interesting about this story is the character arc of Utena trying to understand what it means to protect someone. Here’s the basic development:

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Essentially, the message is that feminism is complicated but necessary. Even for (and perhaps especially for) people who are, shall we say, extremely gay. It’s a good message!

And then I remember how grown adults used to send death threats about Steven Universe, and I think it’s probably for the best that Revolutionary Girl Utena was circulated mainly on bootleg DVDs and pirated torrents during an era when internet use wasn’t widespread.

We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility
https://www.404media.co/we-tracked-a-shipment-of-rare-books-it-ended-at-an-amazon-ai-training-facility/

Amazon is buying massive quantities of books, scanning them for AI training data, and destroying them in the process. A 404 Media investigation was able to reveal Amazon’s book buying operation, which hasn’t been previously reported, by placing a tracking device in a rare book we suspected would be acquired by an AI company for training data, and following it around the country to its final destination.

The AI-generated logo for this particular book scanning office makes me want to...

...celebrate and support libraries, archives, and the underpaid and underappreciated people who work to protect books and ensure that knowledge is freely available to everyone.

Apparently, Sir Cameron Needs to Die is a lighthearted PG-13 sex comedy written from the perspective of someone who is nonbinary, genderfluid, pansexual, autistic, and living with a chronic illness. It's a high fantasy story about a (shapeshifting) himbo knight romancing a (shapeshifting) dragon wizard, but I can still tell that it reflects the author's own life experiences. And, despite the marginal identities of the author and their characters, the book is very silly and unobjectionable to an almost extreme degree.

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What I'm trying to say is (a) we have got to let queer people write about their own experiences of being queer without burning them at stake, and (b) no-mercy speech policing and ostracization is not a nice way to treat queer creative people (such as myself) who are just trying to keep a candle lit in the middle of a gigantic hellish tempest of bigotry.

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This was not the point of any of these articles, but now I have two questions:

1. There are companies that specialize in deconstructing Shinto shrines?
2. What do people think happened / was going to happen at these shrines?

I also want to share the two stories I received for this year’s summerofhorrorexchange!

A Seaside Romance
The Shadow Over Innsmouth . 4,424 words

This story is set in Innsmouth in the current day. A data center is scheduled to be built next to Innsmouth, which has managed to resist gentrification by generally being not such a nice place to live. This story is narrated by a semi-professional protestor and community organizer who moves to Innsmouth, starts dating a mixed-species resident, and ends up getting herself involved in the local cult. The narrative voice of this story is truly fantastic, as are its descriptions of the decrepitude of this horrible little town.

As an aside, I want to say that this story was written by the author of (this) viral post on Tumblr about the value of darkfic, as well as how fandom purity politics are garbage. If you’re curious about how a legendary villain defender actually writes darkfic, the answer is that they write it extremely well.

An (Unfinished) Report from the End of the World
Final Fantasy VI . 1,012 words

This is a series of land surveyor reports on the fate of various locations in the World of Ruin. It’s filled with lore and local color, as well as a sense of mystery surrounding what happened to the surveyor. This story reminds me of the small bits of flavor text often included with the video game guides published in the 1990s, of which Final Fantasy VI had several (of both the official and the unofficial varieties). I got so nostalgic that I ended up going back into an old FFVI save file and finishing the game. Which is an amazing bonus joy of good fanfic.

This author also wrote (this) story that imagines the contemporary Zelda from Zelda I and the now-woken ancient Zelda from Zelda II meeting each other and learning to communicate despite centuries of linguistic drift. This has long been one of my favorite stories in the fandom, not to mention a huge inspiration.

In both cases, it feels like Shakespeare took time out of his schedule to write fanfic for me. I’m afraid my head will explode if I think about this too hard honestly. But I'm not complaining!