I’m still daydreaming about the Digital Terrarium magazine, and this is what I’m considering:

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Part of my motivation for creating a magazine like this is that, as someone with a female-coded name, it’s 99.99% impossible to get anyone to respond to my pitch emails, even when we’re mutuals on social media and I send them a direct message to ping them about the pitch.

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If there’s still to this day no real space for soft and queer (and vaguely female-coded?) voices in video game writing – and if there’s no space for someone like me specifically – then there needs to be more space. Simple as.

Somehow I’ve managed to accomplish all of my nonfiction writing goals for spring. I still have a month left in the season before I move on to my big summer projects, which means that I have time to write two bonus essays. Here’s what I’d like to do:

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Quillbot AI Detector
https://quillbot.com/ai-content-detector

I've found that AI detectors tend to be hit or miss, but this one seems to work well. What I especially appreciate about the way it works is that it's able to detect text that was generated by AI and then altered, either by hand or by another AI program.

I learned about this through discourse in the Dragon Age fandom, by the way. Apparently, you can now enter a short prompt into Gemini with the name of a character or ship, and the AI can match this keyword not only with the fandom, but also with its specific writing tropes.

If you're curious about the wank, people have been arguing about whether it's possible to write a 400k-word novel in a month. What this ridiculous argument underlines is the fact that there is a substantial (and passionate) audience for novels written by AI. This is dystopian, and I hate it.

The problem with me being a writer is that I'm too stupid to understand 99.99% of things that happen in this world. Sometimes I read science writing in particular where I'm like, "I admire the craft of your sentence structure and the precision of your vocabulary, but I have no idea what you're talking about." Instead of being able to write, I often wish I had an actually useful skill, like fixing cars or installing drywall, but alas.

ETA: The context for this is me spending two hours trying to figure out carbon offsetting, and specifically why it's a scam. I understand the bits about money laundering just fine, but I don't understand how the science is supposed to work. I can't even figure out whether in fact the science was ever supposed to work tbh.

Anyway here's a random photo of some nice apple pie, which is about the level I'm on right now.

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The conceit for my Wizard Detective Fhiad stories is that Fhiad goes out into the world and investigates mysteries while occasionally writing to Agnes, who sits in the wizard university library and reads.

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The moral of this particular story is that: (a) necromancy is bad; and (b) I’ve got it down bad for lesbian MILFs.

I saw (this post) on Tumblr...

stories of people suffering for a long time and then healing in their 30s or 40s or 60s or something are the most important thing in the world and thinking about them is like wrapping my heart in a warm sheet

...and damn if it didn't resonate with me. I wasn't "suffering" in my teens and twenties as much as I was "desperately poor," and it's only when I was around 27 or 28 that I actually managed to achieve enough financial stability not to have to spend every spare moment working garbage jobs for pitiful amounts of money. It was only once I had that freedom that I was able to write and draw and play video games.

Ten years later, I realize that you're not actually that old in your late twenties, but there were a lot of people on Tumblr who were surprisingly mean to me at the time. Some of it was the general antifandom nonsense in the water during the 2010s, but some of it was personal, like accusations that I specifically was a sad and gross person for being on Tumblr at thirty years old. And that's a shame. The expectation that "adults" will spend all their time working (or caring for children) is horrible and depressing; and also, there's so much joy and creative energy that comes with the stability and perspective and accumulated experiences that are gained with age.

If I had to guess, I think that's probably why I write so many stories about people finding the courage to start the second act of their lives. They're good stories, and we need more of them.

> I just feel like Shinzo Abe is watching a little too closely.

Come to think of it, I would absolutely write RPF of Ghost!Abe jacking off Ali Khamenei while he tries to get people to breed. Xi Jinping and Mike Pence can come too.

I'm joking, but only a little. This seems like it would be a fun story to write, and I hope the FBI agents assigned to my case would have the courtesy to leave kudos.

Anyway, here's a true story: I used to live in the beautiful Woodley Park neighborhood of Washington DC, and my apartment building was along the route that Mike Pence's motorcade took home to the vice presidential manor. My building was also right across the street from the Omni Shoreham Hotel, which is where a lot of foreign political leaders stay while on official diplomatic trips to DC. During the week when Xi Jinping was in residence at the Omni, I wrote a 10k-word RPF fic about Mike Pence making a clandestine visit. I never did anything with that extremely cursed piece of writing (obviously), but it should still be on a flashdrive somewhere. If anyone ever needs to blackmail me, though, there are probably better stories to use.

ETA: I don't mean to flex about my zipcode in DC btw. My apartment building was rent-controlled, government-assisted housing. Which is to say that all the trashy fanfic I wrote in the late 2010s was partially funded by Uncle Sam himself.

The basic premise of my Modern BotW AU fanfic novel Malice is that Zelda is romanced by one of the Blight Ganons. It's taken a human form for plot-related reasons, and it retains some of the memories and personality of the original Ganondorf, but it's still a big messy scary monster.

While editing An Unfound Door, I wanted to reference how I wrote the Blight Ganon in the first four chapters of Malice, when it's almost completely inhuman. I thought this would be a chore, but I got sucked into the story and ended up reading 50k words of it last night.

The novel is surprisingly good, and that's distressing. I'm afraid that I might have been a much better writer in 2021. It's possible that I might have been a better artist, too. Goddamn it.

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Although I haven't quite finished the final chapter, I'm going back to the beginning of An Unfound Door to start the second-pass editing.

I didn't keep any sort of progress record, but I seem to remember that I got the idea for this novel in late August 2022. I wrote the first eight chapters in a flash between September and October 2022 before running out of steam. I then wrote five more chapters in October and November of 2023 before returning to the novel in earnest in April of this year.

In other words, it's been something of a fractured process. I was therefore worried that the early chapters would have no bearing on the more recent chapters.

Thankfully, everything that needs to be in the first three chapters is there. The two main characters have distinct voices and personalities, and their motivations are clear. The setting and background conflicts are introduced with enough detail to be interesting but still mysterious. All of the important characters are briefly mentioned by name, and their relationship to the two primary characters is clear. Two of the main fantasy elements of the story that will become much more important later are also briefly mentioned, albeit subtly. The foreshadowing doesn't draw attention to itself. The language is evocative without being flowery, and the two main characters have good chemistry. Also, if I do say so myself, the opening hook is original and compelling.

At 7,500 words, these three chapters present a self-contained narrative arc that will make a strong first thirty pages. Obviously it's not up to me to determine whether this project is viable, but hopefully it checks all the boxes that an agent would be looking for in the initial inquiry package.

Here is how you know something is written by me:

(1) There's at least one typo! Inevitably, despite everything
(2) At least one sentence is going to begin with "Still,"
(3) The quality of the light will be described. This is non-negotiable
(4) People will be drinking tea. I know this is cliché but I can't help it