aesmael

So recently I had two things collide to influence my ideas about making worlds and cultures in them. One was a YouTube video, a conlang talk[1] demonstrating the rapid sketching out of a language and its rules. Part of the talk was about gender as a grammatical term and what it can refer to other than female, male and neuter.

The other was a twitter thread about gender as play, xenogenders[2]. The author talked about the symbolic associations attached to mythic creatures and how these might become a referent for one's gender ( an example given, "vampires are viewed in the modern era as sexy, androgynous, and hypersexual" ) attaching it to a narrative about yourself, as well as part of an effective project decoupling gender from biological sex.

In combination these have inspired me to consider worldbuilding that does not contain the categories of 'man' or 'woman' at all, and what kind of gender categories a society might have if it doesn't have to refer to that binary whatsoever. Perhaps gender might refer to your social role. Or to your favoured approach to situations, or some other organising scheme ( or contingent fusion of a couple of relic schemes ).

[1] Peterson, D. J. (2020, May 24). Create a Language in Just One Hour [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StcSHmBZj2k

[2] Jessica & Zena of TGT (Camarilla Arc) [

tgirltherapist]. (2022, May 5). Got this comment and wanted to share it and my responses in a thread. I think this is the perfect [Image attached] [Tweet]. Twitter. https://twitter.com/TGirlTherapist/status/1521893056529772545

Tired. Can't write much tonight.

A little more story backgrounding. Main activity was practising drawing again. Finished the exercise I have been working off and on for some days now. Likely start the next one in a couple of days. A little intro reading on Python, but hesitated to begin the work proper. Considering being foolish instead.

I have some notes to make. And then sleep.

Current Mood: tired

Reminding myself not to feel bad about not getting many things done today. May not have gotten any practise drawing or programming but that is because I spent most of the day writing. Or rather, laying the foundations for future writing. There is a story I have been wanting to write for a couple of months now and I spent most of today gathering together the assorted floating ideas I have had for it so far and trying to mark out the questions that need to be answered to proceed further.

Important questions like, what are the names of these characters? Or their personal goals and ongoing motivations?

For this story I feel I would like to try a heavier outlining approach than I normally do. Really go deep into planning plot beats and arcs and going scene by scene. I'm curious whether I will find that works better or worse than my usual approach of rough goal and get going - I find that style frequently leaves me with long pauses in the actual writing where I sit and think about what I want to have happen next. Perhaps deciding all that in advance will make the words on page flow smoother?

Also I better go back and add some of this to my notes too. I was so busy collating world-building notes I forgot to ask what the characters want and why. Ta!

Current Mood: accomplished

If I wish to be so idiosyncratic as to use in my writing such old letters as Þ I may do well to create a palette of samples with usage reminders, so I can have them to hand and be grow familiar with them. Otherwise I will both keep forgetting and not find them handy enough to actually make use of in my writing. Of course this will also make my work much less penetrable but, we hardly are going to reach a wide audience anyway.

I suspect if I write anything for a particular audience they will ask me to take it out. Most likely a pure fool's quest.

Today we:

Got to the end of the command line appendix in Learn Python 3 The Hard Way. That surprised me. Knocked the last few exercises out with much more ease than most of the others, and then found I was indeed at the end. So next time, going to the beginning of the book and starting with python itself.

Another couple of podcasts pulled down and catalogued for the playlist - The Science Show and All in the Mind, both produced by ABC Radio.

I created a first draft of that "writer's palette", listing a few unconventional punctuation and letters with names, usage notes and copyable samples that I can keep handy. This should make it a bit easier to persist with my bad decision, or more quickly be confronted with the fact it is a bad decision.

Current Mood: energetic

Making note of things I have done, to remind myself they have been done. Otherwise it is too easy to forget, too easy to spiral down into believing I don't do anything and beating myself up over it.

So. I have been up to plenty, despite not having much to show for it. Various bouts of practising my drawing with exercises from Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, getting familiar with the command prompt via exercises from the appendix of Learn Python 3 The Hard Way, and batches of podcast episodes being downloaded and metadata updated to compile into a playlist for my phone. A lot of activities that are of the 'keep plugging away and eventually see results' sort.

The playlist is a bit more mammoth than I had anticipated. I have probably mentioned that my routine in constructing those is to manually compile playlists to listen through my subscriptions in chronological order, as not all their RSS feeds extend back far enough to work neatly with a proper podcast player. I'm currently listening my way through 2009 and thanks to a few mishaps with some becoming unavailable by the time I reached them in my listening order, and some shenanigans with how far back some archives extend, my scheme ends up trying to span the entire year of 2009 in just two playlists. I only realised this after loading onto my phone a list spanning January to August and finding the rug pulled out from under me for what was expected to be an August - September list, now extended through to the first days of January 2010, adding about 2.5 times as much work as I'd got done, just as I got to the part where I would have been sorting the downloaded files into their play order.

I am actually worried I will not be able to fit the full playlist onto my phone when it is done, coming as it does on the heels of another quite massive playlist. Especially as several months back I actually outpaced the playlists I had loaded for the first time since beginning this project many years ago and turned to loading some audio books and dramas to fill the gap while I got the list loaded; I've decided to intersperse these playlists with more such dramatics. Not even bothering to try sourcing those until I have the podcasts themselves down and sorted. I suspect that I may have to break it into two chunks, with the first being what I'd downloaded before that rug-pull and treated as essentially a continuation of the playlist I'm currently listening to, and then the second to follow as the 'real new' playlist when I get past the current one and can delete it off my phone.

With my normal procedure of keeping three of those on the go - one for current, one to have ready to flow into when that one ends, and the third as backup in case I get through two playlists without making a new one ready - I will have a long while at this before I can be done and coast awhile again. Once I do I intend to get a bit more proactive and pull down the archives in advance. Too often, and especially of late, have I come to fetch episodes only to find the archive truncated, reorganised, or even the site entirely gone. I would rather guard against that by backing it all up locally if I can manage the hard drive space to hold them all.

Perhaps the curse of journalling so infrequently is my inability to remember what I have and have not recorded in the past.

For a while I've thought it could be fun to engage in solo-RP activities and turn the result into a story. And for a long time I believed the way to go would be to learn web formatting & styling so I could present the narrative as a 3/4 page column and the underlying dice rolls pegged alongside in a slide-in and slide-out 1/4 page column. The existence of the Beaker Browser project encouraged me to think this was a viable project especially as it could be hosted locally and I wouldn't have to worry about where and how to put this for people to read. But, with Beaker being shuttered I am at a bit of a loss.

I have also been wondering if I might do better to use a specialised document format. HTML is easy enough but maybe if I have any particular styling requirements it would be better to present in PDF, and maybe even style the document using LaTeX. The trouble with this is

The web isn't set up well to flow between such documents
I don't have anywhere to host them
I don't even have enough local storage to install LyX to do that editing

Current Mood: busy

Journalling is of course a foredoomed activity. Yet there are times when it becomes especially appealing. And so - why not indulge? Unlikely but perhaps we may even build a habit. There are far less healthy things I might do, and have been doing.

To get what feels the most obligatory topic out of the way, the family Xmas gathering appears to have gone well. Only at the very end did my siblings get into an argument about vaccinations. Unfortunately I do not know how further to press the case there that it is a very prudent thing to do about a very real danger to one's well-being. I have done my best, and would rather avoid burning any further bridges until they prove necessary.

For now I have some time off work. Likely this is why I have the energy to write anything whatsoever. So while I would like to at least nominally keep some record of an event or feeling for each day I doubt doing so shall be a persistent activity.

Today especially lamenting my lack of writing. There is a piece I sketched out early November that needs a thorough revision, and another piece I promised to write that needs to get beyond outlining. I'd like to write more completely indulgent fiction, because why not please myself?

Tonight I pulled up the old Guide to Darkmoon Vale, aiming to take some notes to flesh out a campaign idea I'd had to mix in the adventure series set there (that begins with Hollow's Last Hope) along with free-roaming activities likely kicked off by an employment offer by a disguised reclusive dragon known to live in the area. But by the time I had got my pen out and notebook open to the next page it all seemed too pointless and pathetic to bother with. There isn't really anything to hope for or look forward to, and I would be wasting my time to plot out yet another go-nowhere idea. Much better tomorrow to put my energies toward learning to program. Then I can focus on moving the dolls around by myself without worrying about other people.

Tomorrow shall be another day

Current Mood: cynical

I don't like that I've fallen back into starting diary entries, not finishing them, and leaving them abandoned. There is a good chance this will become another. It feels weird that life is both too much and yet it also feeling as though nothing is happening. I don't really believe that is a paradox, although it does feel like one. The mundane of life builds up and I have difficulty making space for the dream.

In fact my life isn't that hectic, so although I believe our lives are shaped and pressured into desperations which keep us too frantic for survival to do much beyond creating value for others and zonking out, much of my own problem is I suppose that technically I'm disabled? Or disability-adjacent anyway. Being certainly autistic and perhaps also ADHD makes it difficult to perform needful things effectively and to organise my time. So I feel like I could do more (that I wish to do).

Lately I have been interested in keeping a wiki as a structured and interlinked repository for my notes and projects. First I tried Instiki but was stymied when the build instructions failed - it looks like there is a problem either with the script they provide for windows or with the rubyinstaller tool. Easier to believe the problem is with Instiki as rubyinstaller is surely more widely used, and it wouldn't be acceptable if that just did not work. I'm hoping to pick at these and untangle them into something that does work for me, but the difficulties I described in the previous paragraph mean I'm not findign that easy to do. Meanwhile I'm trying out dokuwiki and zim, which were both straightforward installs.

It became much easier to find channels within my followed list on twitch when I realised that like all corporate social platforms, it would be structured to incentivise addictive engagement. A simple way to pursue this goal is to try and maximise the opportunity for diverting me into impulse watching by placing recent subscriptions and channels I've been watching VODs on at the bottom of the offline channel list. And of course the ones actively broadcasting are at the top, sorted by popularity. So far this hypothesis is holding up well.

Current Mood: tired
Current Location: on the verge

Dear diary,

I don't know what to write about today, so perhaps I shouldn't. But I can say these things: Today I read two comic books in their entirety, and as much as those are very light and swift reading, it's taken me multiple days to read the last few I've read, in moments snatched on lunch breaks and while waiting for things to happen, so it feels simultaneously relieving and disappointing to open up a book for the first time and have it evaporate so swiftly. I typed up a few pages of notes from a notebook that I'd written several years previously and never quite managed the intention and will to transfer to a digital form. And despite canned pumpkin apparently not existing in this country (still not shocked - I'd never encountered it in the wild before a recipe asked for it) I managed to find out how to process a raw pumpkin into similar form at home and transformed it into - if I do say so myself - a pretty tasty pumpkin and coconut cream soup. Some of the thyme got burned and I would have benefited by collecting that first batch of little bits into a bowl to dump into the pot together, but that's only a question of improvement. What I made was good already.

Current Mood: energetic
Current Music: www.twitch.tv/videos/45429366

[editor's note: this was written last night but not published until today on account of getting caught up writing about the below-mentioned comics]

Probably I've got to spend less time writing these so I can be doing anything else instead. Actually making, typing fictiony things?

Maybe I need a passion to create. Maybe that's what I'm feeling and it isn't really inertia pushing me to story without intent or desire.

Maybe what I need is to actually go and do and make more again. Is that something I can do? We can give it a try.

Proceeding sequentially, as is our wont, attempting to finish writing down my thoughts and feelings on Batgirl/Robin Year One before moving on to Power Girl: Power Trip. I can't decide if this insistence is sensible or harmful to my goals, to write these before focusing on making my own stories. I want to get that done and take stock and move onward.

Listening, while I type, to the two-disc Neotokyo album published by 0edit on Bandcamp.

Current Mood: energetic
Current Music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUcNOGSV4Yg

Yesterday afternoon [actually Monday] I had what might develop into a revelation. I hate the weakness and frailty of being human, having to deal with sickness or age or being provoked or whatever. So maybe that is part of why I latched onto adventure stories or still hold onto them, and why it tends to get to me when those stories do go into torture or mind control or, really, anything that forces either the protagonists to show themselves as mortal or else to run up against my suspension of disbelief.

Here's a common, trivial sort of example: a character is taunted by another, especially with insults directed at family. The taunted character responds with ill-considered violence and suffers for it.

Perhaps to develop this idea in the future, when I can think more clearly on it?

Tuesday, the drive home included an episode of Writing Excuses put some familiar advice back in my awareness. I should follow it if I ever put KMS into editing. The first story especially should be starting much later than where I began it. Not going to act on that yet, not until I've got at least a few more written, a better feel for the shape of the characters and the world and the stories.

Today: cool and grey and not wet enough. The branch library was very quiet. Most complex part of the day was having to refuse to make change for someone (would've been cleaned out) while simultaneously getting a cleaner access to a locked room. Newish casual co-worker so some getting-to-know-you and showing her how to do a few things.

I marked off a large number of books and other items across several lists, all confirmed missing from the shelves for definite. Feels like I didn't do much today but really, that was more than thirty pages of missing items. That was plenty.

This evening resuming chess with my pet after several stymied days. As I've been telling everyone who'll listen, I managed to confuse her king with her queen and made a move accordingly... after that I just couldn't get my bearings. Plus her defences are pretty formidable to my eyes.

What I've realised tonight is I only know how to move the pieces in chess; I don't know how to play. Something new to learn.

Now, bed. Up early again in the morning to get my car serviced.

Current Mood: happy
Current Music: Eldritch fanfic recitals

If I want to invent a town for an adventure or a story, and am unsure how to characterise it, having something like the Pathfinder Gamemastery Guide describing kinds of attributes a settlement might have is useful - it turns that blank page into some brainstorming categories.

On the other hand, if I have a strong idea already, I may not find such an aid useful, or only to round out some forgotten details. But we'd also want to be wary of the alternate trap - letting the design aid constrain ideas only into forms which fit in its boxes.

Current Mood: hungry
Current Music: silence

Of course I ended up going to bed shortly after finishing that last journal entry without having posted it anywhere. A lag time of at least a day seems currently endemic. Did end up staying home. Even managed to get docted - got some advice (rest, lots of fluids, don't fill this antibiotic prescription unless certain conditions are met), and a note of incapacity to work for today and tomorrow.

Am feeling a bit better. Feeling like resting today and tomorrow will give me a good chance of not over-exerting myself on Wednesday, which is normally only a light day at work anyway. Feeling like I've been sick a lot this year, or much more than is usual for me. Worried this is a foreboding sign and hoping it not to be.

But for tonight I think I can do some simple things. Revise liner notes maybe, or back up files from this computer, or write some character speeches for Pathfinder, or make yet another attempt at finishing the frequently interrupted Scrivener tutorial.

Right now I'm watching this video of a talk on interactive fiction by Emily Short which is inspiring the desire to add yet another layer to my never-quite-started THC project. Television series, Pathfinder module, ... text adventure? That one at least we shan't be starting tonight. Laptop is in big need of replacing and I've been telling myself not to try any IF stuff until after that's taken care. Not because interactive fiction is so demanding on the hardware (is it?) but to keep myself from taking on too much at once and then feeling like a failure when that inevitably collapses on me.

Current Mood: sick

I need to write something. That's a small determination within my power. I believe it is? Even though I'm putting a lot of my personal-time energy into getting to grips with Pathfinder and making that game happen I should be able to spare at least some time this week to compose words. That doesn't seem like too much to ask of myself. Next weekend, a week from now, I want to be able to say I've written some fiction. Even if it is only a handful of words. Even if they get deleted or replaced the very next time I open a writing implement.

Otherwise, what am I? Just someone who "wants to" and never "does". I need to do something and to feel that I am doing something.

Current Music: Heroes - David Bowie

If I were inclined to write fanfic rather than 'original' stories, would people like my stories more? If they had some prior investment and interest in the characters and what they get up to?

But this train of thought is rapidly derailed by the reminder that unless I actually write stories, no one is going to have opinions on them no matter whether they hypothetically would be fanfiction or not. So I should worry about making words happen at all before I worry whether and how people like them.

It also gives a bit of a lie to telling myself it's just me and what I want that I write, and the enjoyment of others is incidental. Probably the resolution to that conflict is I want to write things that please me, and for others to also tell me it's good.

Crossposts: http://aesmael.livejournal.com/692786.html

For a while I have been thinking about the fact the people I am emotionally close to are rather geographically dispersed, and do not seem inclined to address this error for my convenience. And it is long since I gave up my ambitions of selling my stories and being a 'successful' author. The odds are against anyone who tries, and I think the sorts of stories I want to write are not so much those liked by the science fiction or fantasy markets anyway[1].

I'm thinking more about trying to make some money from my writing in the future because it would help to have a source of income that doesn't tie me down from spending time with people I love. I can't yet write anything worth being paid for, but I'm practising again and maybe I will get there. These days even if I can't or don't sell to a traditional market there are other options, such as setting up a patreon or similar - assuming I show myself well enough that enough people like what I do enough to put some money into one. That is a lot of enough, and no guarantee it can be done even if I do improve my skill a lot and manage to produce stories on a regular basis. But if I could, even if it were not much, it might help.

I also write smut stories as well as adventure stories, and wonder whether I would be best served, or if it is even practically doable, to make those into distinct identities with their own subscribers. I don't know whether those audience-support sites let you split your work like that, but I do worry there wouldn't be much crossover in audience interest, and that the one might complicate the other. And on the topic of potential complications, I've been more interested in writing fan-fiction works the past few years but I suspect it would be inadvisable to take money for writing any such thing, so I might have to do those 'off the clock' or twist the inspirations into something I needn't worry about making available.

We'll see after I'm done with school, whether any of this can go somewhere or if it is just idle dreaming. In the meanwhile, practise and get better.

[1] Plus, and don't tell this to all the world but, they are so far not very good or interesting either.

Current Music: Sure is the Risk Made - conelrad
Crossposts: http://aesmael.livejournal.com/689545.html

I think the opening paragraph of this story, so far titled "By The Window" needs a lot of work.

Sometimes prospects in person grow thin and it seems necessary to turn to online realms for that freedom of self-disclosure without people taking immediate flight. So it seemed to Lucy, yet still most who found her from her profile were discarded for getting on her nerves. Or turning creepy. Or not actually reading her profile and then running.

As part of an introduction to Lucy, her relationships, and what she gets out of them, this repetition of people running or taking flight evokes images of self-satisfied "I am kinky and therefore too weird to handle" attitudes that I strongly dislike.

( Discussion of process on a work of erotic fiction, not explicit )

Put in my last assignment of the semester the night before last. Not best pleased with the job I did, but at least I got it done.

Now I have time to devote to other postponed life activities like enrolling in important school stuff before it is too late (hopefully it is not too late), seeking professional development opportunities and being prompt and organised for next semester's classes. Which are not showing up on the student portal yet, so I haven't yet failed on that one.

Also, making myself follow up on the offer of support services from the beginning of the semester, even though I have no idea what a disability accommodation that would actually help me might be.

Also also, entertainment stuff. Been aspiring to see more movies at the cinema and most of the recent ones I might see haven't stopped showing yet. Plus a series of concerts featuring Beethoven's piano concertos at the Opera House. I suspect these will exhaust my reserves for spending money on myself for a long while, but I've been looking forward to them for a year, so I suppose I had better try and go.

Feeling tired again just thinking about trying to do stuff.

I wrote a lot (for me) in April, but had to stop again through May because school and deadlines. Would like to do more of that again. Would be satisfying. Think there may have been more I wanted to ramble, but don't remember it now.

Feeling lately I would love to devote more of my time to writing. Wanting to put big chunks of days to making stories and delving into them, instead of just sneaking an hour or two before bed.

I want to approach writing as a dedicated craft, I suppose. But even if I did not have a job and school to worry about this would likely remain wishful thinking, as I am rather lousy at time management and would not balance it well with sociality and other things I would like to do - to the detriment of all, most likely.

Still going to want.

Conversation today had me realising how much longer it has been since I wrote much. If asked I would have said the last time I got much writing done was 2010, which is plenty long ago as-is.

But I went back and looked at my old writing logs.

2007: 49,251 words, about half of which went into writing the only (short) novel I've ever actually done.

2008: 19,523 words, mostly going into finishing aforementioned parody novel and an abandoned serial project from the previous year - should try reviving that someday.

2009: 43,367 words. Split between a novella written for NaNoWriMo and an erotic fiction novelette earlier in the year.

2010: 1,279 words recorded as written.

2011-2012: no longs kept.

2013: 4,155 words total. Resolution made to get back into writing and to have written some substantial amount for 2014.

2014: 4,314 written so far, mostly on sword and sorcery serial started last year with intention of being 'easy to write'.

That helps me feel a bit better. Did not realise had already surpassed last year. Shall strive with determination.

Been feeling tired the past several days, and consequently not written much of anything. Tired and upset sort of thing. Did have two weeks of being called into the library as if I were some kind of 'works every day' type person. Which apparently took a toll on my ability to engage in much mental activity. Also it has been hot, like right now.

So that means my NaNoWriMo attempt so far consists of one evening's writing that fell several hundred words short of the target. So on the 'bright' side I am not a whole week behind on posting that 'story' when I get up to doing so.

[note: I don't know what happened to the rest of the month as I made no further journal entries. did not really write any more fiction either.]

Current Mood: sad

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aesmael

May 2022

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Entries tagged with writing

Tributaries

Love is a free variable

Running headlong down winding grassy path with arms outstretched, and picking up speed

Stepping

At the lip of the great dark chasm

The spiral

A ramble a week late

In the land of failing to remember to post these same day

A rant

Days upon days

Thinking about RPG sourcebooks as antidotes to the blank page.

Twice in a Lifetime

Desperation

Sometimes I wonder

Meandering, wandering

Revising an old story

Something like anticipation

Wistful

Writing and not writing

20131107