Re: Peak 2018

I think what amuses me most about the “thicc girl” otter tweet is that the backlash has resulted in the reemergence of “c h o n k,” which I have seen almost every single person I follow on Instagram use at least once during the past week.

“She chonk” comes from Homestuck, by the way. It was filtered through Something Awful (thus the space between letters) before ending up on I Can Haz A Cheezburger, and from there it spread to Facebook before being picked up by animal accounts on Instagram.

I am ashamed for knowing this.

Plotting and Characterization: How Does It Work

I’ve been playing around with my concept for The Demon King, and I think I’d like it to be a trilogy, each narrated from the perspective of one of the three main characters. As always when I plan a longer story, I can see a vague outline of the plot from start to finish, but the end is much clearer than the beginning.

One of the big reveals of the second book is that the “present” of the narrative is actually a dystopian future for the demon king. He’s not a bad person; but, in his mind, nothing he does in the present of the story matters, since his goal is to change the immediate future of his time, which is technically in the past. If he has to kill people and destroy an entire city in order to gain the power to do that, then those are sacrifices he feels can be justified. It’s not that he doesn’t care about the people in the present, but he doesn’t come from their world and, in fact, wants to erase its entire existence.

What this means is that I have to write the entirety of the first book knowing that this is the case but not overtly stating or even suggesting it, and I’m not sure I’m talented enough to pull this off, especially in terms of consistent characterization.

The children of Tumblr seem to enjoy trashing the Harry Potter books, but listen. It’s a lot easier to nitpick minor details of characterization than it is to write a densely plotted series of novels in a way that allows each book to stand on its own as a cohesive story yet still connects to a larger narrative, I’m just saying.

Get Your Words Out? Maybe???

I’ve been thinking about signing up for Get Your Words Out 2019. I’m garbage with wordcount goals, but I’d like to hold myself accountable for spending fifteen minutes a day working on my novel. I’d also like to spend ten minutes a day working on comics, which is not technically writing but is still storytelling, damn it.

Also, I think I enjoy writing about writing more than I enjoy actually writing, so there’s that as well.

Fiction writing is lonely work, and I could use all the encouragement I can get. I am a shambling mess of psychological complexes held together by scotch tape and twine; and, although I’m constitutionally unable to believe in myself, it might be nice to cheer on other people.