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Tonight I saw the same version of Twelfth Night that I saw just over five years ago. Of course, the cast and location were completely different. I didn’t think that I remembered any part of the show, but every time I heard one of the¹ musical numbers, it was like I was transported back to my time in London. The sense of deja vu was almost overwhelming at times.

Much like my musings in those days, I find that it’s late enough I have nothing else to say. Tomorrow I’ll do a comparative review, but tonight I must sleep.

Flash Fiction Friday

Draft 2: 18 November 2023

I find that I’m struggling to begin this second draft. On the one hand, I want to simply reflect on what I wrote last night. On the other, a reflection is its own post, not a new draft of a post. So, let’s rewrite my very scattered thoughts from last night into something a little more coherent, and then reflect?¹

As I mentioned last Friday, there is a weekly writing event called Flash Fiction Friday. I really like it as a concept, especially since they limit submissions to 100-1000 words. There’s something really nice about having to tell my narrative in such a tight format.

This week is apparently the 227th that they’ve put out a prompt. The prompt was “sands of time.” My mind immediately leapt between a number of ways that I could respond to the prompt, and I think it could be interesting to reflect on some of how my creative process works, if only to see if it helps me to construct narratives better in the future.

I do not think that I am alone in first thinking about an hourglass when thinking about the sands of time. There are so many ways that the concept is used in fiction that I’ve loved. Right now,² the first usage that popped into my head was Death in Discworld.³

I’ve taken to rejecting the first idea that pops in my head reflexively. The second idea that pops into my head, by contrast, gets an inordinate amount of consideration. Yesterday, my second thought was how glass and sand relate.

As most people know, when you melt sand down, you get glass. As a person who has taken some coursework in material science, though, I am fascinated by the way that they two substances are so fundamentally different. Sand is crystalline, which in some circles of the world means that it is solid.⁴ However, in bulk, sand behaves like a liquid. You can pour it, and it does not hold together without something to bind it.

Glass, by contrast, is definitionally a glass material.⁵ It behaves, on incredibly long timescales, almost as though a liquid. This is because⁶ it is completely amorphous.

An interesting consequence of this fact is that glass, even when ground down to particles the same size as the sand it was initially formed from, does not return to being sand. Instead, the tiny beads of glass remain completely amorphous. Now, I’m certain that over some time scale they eventually reconvert to crystalline, if only because I know a priori that a lot of the sand is, in fact, crystalline.⁷

With that fact in mind, I started to think about what the metaphor becomes with sand and glass. Sand is a collection of completely discrete and stable particles. Glass is something solid and yet not static at all.

From there, my mind immediately moved to glass as memory. Memories feel and seem stable, but there countless studies that show how intrinsically fluid they are. At that point, I had sand as moments of time, and glass as the meaning someone constructs.

I tried framing the story in a few ways, though I ultimately ended up with something that felt more like literature or philosophy than a short work of fiction.⁸ I ended my musing by saying both that I would read the post in the morning, and that I thought I would dislike it.

The friend I’m writing with this morning and early afternoon read my post and asked me to expound on my claim that “here is no genuine way to express something complex.” So, let’s go through the post and see what we think.

I feel like it’s a really rough post. As I said, there was not really a narrative. Reading it today, it really feels like what I have is the bones of a story, rather than the story itself. That being said, I don’t find it pretentious, which is a nice change.

Alright, let’s explore why I feel like expressing complexity inherently relies on artifice. I find that I’m immediately drawn to a conversation I had with a friend on Wednesday. As it turns out, this friend has a degree in poetry⁹, and he told me about an experience he had in one of his upper level classes.

One of his classmates refused to rewrite any poem. The classmate tried to justify it by saying that the poem expressed what it tried to express. To edit a poem was to compromise the artistic vision.

That anecdote came as we discussed the way that learning to revise is such a difficult skill. Separating the created work from the inspiration of creation is a difficult endeavor, especially as the creator.

I’m struggling to articulate how that prior sentence connects to my feeling of artifice. I think that, at first, everything is black and white, at least to me.¹⁰ To add nuance is to explicitly reject the initial impression.

I suppose that takes us to the question of what genuine means. Is my most genuine reaction the first impulse I have, or is it what I decide to believe when I have the chance to explore the consequences of each belief? I don’t have a good answer, for all that I have some more ways of musing about the difficulty of being genuine and nuanced.

I’ll use an example from my own life. When I write these posts, I often start by using identifying information about the people in my life. However, I do not want to harm them in the real world, and I know that there is a chance that anything I say here, regardless of how innocuous it feels at the time, could later come back to haunt one of the two of us. With that in mind, I scrub the identifying information as best as I can, until I’m sure that sometimes I’ve referenced people in a way that they would not even recognize as themselves if they were to read my blog.

As I keep writing each post, though, I fall into the mindset of anonymizing information. By the end of each draft, I instinctively write about others in a way that makes them faceless beings who exist solely in the context of the narrative I’m telling.¹¹

Which register of my writing is the real me? Is it the one who uses friend’s names, or the one who writes this blog?

I find that my gut reaction is to say, here, at least, the way that I construct the narrative as I write it is the genuine article. At the beginning of the post, the real me refers to friends by names. By the end of the post, the real me refers to friends only in how they intersect the story.

When I go back to add nuance, however, I have to choose which register to use for the entirety of the post. Since I made the conscious decision long ago to have this blog not name others explicitly, that is the register I shift things to. Given that I write each musing with the understanding that it will be posted, there’s an easy argument to be made that what I meant to construct from the beginning was something that did not refer to people by name.

Abstracting back to the general question of what it means to be genuine, there is a tension between what is created and the vision. Naively, the creation feels like the most genuine version of an act of creation. After all, there is no way to perfectly recreate the conditions that lead to every decision we make. No man can cross the same river twice, and everything we effect affects us.¹²

However, like most naive conceptions, that idea does not hold up perfectly to scrutiny. If I write a song about love, I almost always want there to be rhyme, because I feel like the sing songy nature of rhyming couplets fits well with my conception of what a love song should be. If I end my first line with something difficult to rhyme, though, it does not compromise the idea to change that word.

After rambling far further than I meant to for a revised and trimmed draft, I think I do believe it’s possible to discuss something complex in a genuine fashion. I think that it requires a separation of intent from creation, though, which feels artificial in a lot of contexts.

Draft 1

It’s another Friday, which means that it’s time for another musing about the Flash Fiction I’m planning to write today. It’s far later than I’d like to be starting this musing, but I don’t regret the time that I spent doing other things today.¹³ The prompt today is “sands of time.”

Probably because I have thought about sand for the book I’m writing¹⁴, I immediately thought about the fact that sand is crystalline, while glass is amorphous. While walking home, I considered a little more in depth how I could use that to a narrative.

I think that there’s something to the idea of each individual grain of sand being an explicit passage of time. Regardless of how we feel about it, there exists an objective way to measure the time displacement that occurs on earth. What’s more meaningful by far, though, is the way that we turn these objective passings into a narrative. I’m not entirely sure how to make fire or heat into the metaphor, but maybe there’s something about lightning which forms fulgerites.

So, let’s reconstruct the narrative from there. A fulgerite is a place where lightning has melted and reformed the sand into an interesting shape. Sand, as sort of given in the prompt, is the passing of time. Lightning is a person constructing meaning out of a series of events. The result is a memory.

This feels like something that might be better expressed as a poem, for all that I refuse to do this as anything but prose.¹⁵

Ok, let’s go through the same sets of questions I asked myself last week. My FFF question set apparently is:

Alright, time to try writing this. I think that I’ll let it be more poetic in phrasing than I tend to emphasize, in large part because I find that I wax poetic the later at night it is.¹⁸

Well, I wrote it, and redrafted it at least four times. I switched between first and third person accounts of the narrative as I went through the different drafts, which I think did a lot to help me tell the story that I wanted. In my author’s note, I admitted that I don’t know if what I wrote really counts as prose or poetry, but I am as happy with it as I think I will be. I’m sure that in the morning I’ll read what I wrote and feel like it was too pretentious or trying too hard to be deep.¹⁹

It’s now well past time for sleep, so I’ll do my questions and head. Daily Reflection:

that feels like a reasonable ordering↩︎
and I think yesterday too,↩︎
Wow I really need to reread Discworld soon. Now that I’m in the part of my life where I want to focus on craft, the fact that Pratchett manages to tell such deep, complex, and interesting stories in such a small number of pages. Given that the majority of what I’m reading these days is serialized fiction, which, much like Dickens, uses hundreds of words where a single could suffice, I think it will be interesting to focus on how to tell a tighter story. Anyways, back to the musing↩︎
there are places where solid and crystalline are definitionally the same. I hate that as a concept, for all that I recognize the use of describing things like that.↩︎
it bothers me more than I can express right now that the material science term for the entire phase of matter that melted sand becomes is glass. Like I get it, the vast supermajority of the cases where we use that phase of matter are when we’re dealing with actual glass, but it still bothers me.↩︎
I think, don’t quote me. Most of this information comes from vague recollections of the polymer class that I took the semester I started this blog.↩︎
the rant about a priori knowledge having value is going to come at some point, as soon as I can figure out how to make it cogent.↩︎
the line between the three is incredibly hazy, I’ll happily admit. It just feels like there’s something to the fact that there was only implicit story in my writing, rather than the explicit narrative that I shoot for normally. Actually, as I think about it, that tends to separate the prose and poetry I write from a lot of what I think of when i think of literature or philosophy. There tends to be explicit change in the writing I do, a way in which the world the story or poem is placed has changed as a result of the story being told. (That phrasing works with my apparent goal for FFF, which is trying to find a way to describe the fact that the action of assigning meaning is, itself, meaningful.)↩︎
on some level, I didn’t really ask exactly what the degree was, but I know that the friend wrote a senior thesis of poetry (I wonder if there’s something inherently dehumanizing about the way that I try to anonymize everyone else that I refer to in these musings. It certainly does something to remind me that this posting is, on some level, artificial (shoot that belongs outside of the footnote. Will bring up to explore))↩︎
there are essays about how that phrase is problematic, and I’ve considered how I feel about it. At this point, I don’t know that I have a phrase which works better, and I find that policing language with the explicit goal of never saying anything even potentially harmful is itself a way to harm. Shoot, that also belongs in the main text↩︎
hmm I wonder if that tendency is part of why people have commented so much on the characterization in my books.↩︎
ooh I love that ending phrase, for all that I also know I would hate having to read it↩︎
more or less from 4:30 on tonight I’ve been celebrating a close friend’s birthday, and that seems more important to me than an arbitrary writing goal. I’m sure that there’s something to be said about finding a balance for writing where it can be the main thing that I do, but still takes a backseat to the important parts of my life. I should reflect on that further, and this footnote feels like as good of a place as any to do so. (I don’t want the main content of this blog post to be my reflection on writing, because I decided arbitrarily that it would be planning for the flash fiction (as you might have seen from the opening line))

I do very much appreciate the fact that I write. I love looking back at the content I’ve read, and there’s a part of me that beams whenever someone tells me they’ve enjoyed anything I’ve written. I can look at the writing I’ve done through the years and see a clear upward trend in quality, or at least quality per unit time. I feel like, at a general level, at least, the second draft of anything non fiction I write is about twice as good as the first draft, and it often takes far less time. However, all the content that goes into the first draft is important.

Last week’s musing on the readings is a great example. Before I had written the very long reflection, I don’t think that I would have gotten to the musing that I had. The second draft is strong, in large part, because the first draft is willing to take so many detours.

So, how do I square that reality with the fact that I find my writing improving? There are two ways. First, I find that the rabbit holes my mind explores are generally better the more I’ve written and read in my life. I continue to grow as a person, and continue to find better ways to express a truth that I see or feel or believe. Second, I get through each diversion more quickly. For all that I am willing to ramble through these musings, I strongly prefer being able to do them in a single sitting. The composite reality that the more I write, the more comfortable I am with spending a continuous amount of time writing and the fact that the more I write the physically faster I write means that I get through a lot more content in a first draft of a rambling musing. There’s the part I’m not addressing here which is that the quality of my first drafts is also increasing a fair amount, simply because my mind is getting better at plotting how a small narrative will end from a beginning.

All this to say, I think that the healthiest thing for me is to have writing be an important part of my life, but a part that is always able to be superseded by a friend or other social event. I know myself well enough to know that I am healthier when I spend more time with friends.↩︎
Jeb not NaNo↩︎
entirely because I want to practice prose this month, and not at all because of any legitimate reason↩︎
the clock is rapidly ticking down to the end of the day, or I would be more tempted to do so now↩︎
fourth in the sense of like “one can imagine”↩︎
whether that’s something intrinsic in me or the fact that I have spent more than a few months writing a poem as the last thing I do before sleeping is another conversation for me to have with myself.↩︎
Then again, that’s almost always true for me. There’s a part of me that does really believe that to express something well is to express it ingenuinely. Or, at least, that part believes there is no genuine way to express something complex. I don’t think that’s universally true. Certainly when I read a book of theology, for instance, the depth of thought there feels more genuine. I think that I don’t trust myself enough to let myself make that, though. We’ll see. Maybe I’ll love the post tomorrow.↩︎
if only slightly↩︎
I’ll be seeing a show with friends that I think I saw in London, so I’m excited to rereview it!↩︎

Ib Thesis Prep

Draft 1

his morning, after my more or less daily writing session for NaNoWriMo¹, I realized that I had no clue what I wanted to write about tonight. It was suggested that I could muse on fan fiction, generally as a concept, and that seemed like a strongly potential idea.

However, my day ended up being far more eventful than I had expected. I’ll go through the particularly notable events as a series of vignettes, before seeing if I have something I can find a title for as a musing. If not, hopefully I’ll be inspired to find something to muse about from my journaling here.²

While walking to work, I realized that I haven’t updated my yearly goals, which is a big oopsie. It’s a little late for that³, but I put it on my to do list for tomorrow, so hopefully I remember to do it. Anyways, among the exciting things of the day was reading a really interesting old paper.

The paper itself was fun, but it cited a few textbooks for explanations of derivations. As it turns out, the textbooks were simply early quantum texts, and just framed how the Born Oppenheimer approximation⁴ is justified. I realized how much I really appreciate older textbooks. There are absolutely a number of reasons for that. One major one, I realized today, is due to the limits of the system.

I read recently about how absolutely weird it really is that we can have so many images in all of our scientific papers these days. In earlier times, it was a massive pain to get images into books, especially if you didn’t want to dedicate an entire page to them. As a result, rather than simply being able to go “as you can see from the graphs,” authors had to consider how to best⁵ communicate information without visuals.

I think that there’s also an element of novelty that modern textbook authors miss. The textbook I read today, for instance, explained that it is clear that there is an optimal location for all the nuclei in a molecule that is neither totally compressed⁶ nor infinitely separated⁷. I said that to my group mates, and most of them rolled their eyes and said it was obvious. It is obvious, to me, who has now taken three semesters of explicitly quantum chemistry and had the concept implicitly taught in any other number of courses. If it was my first semester in quantum, though, I think that framing would be helpful. That is, we know that there is an optimal structure, and we can constrain it slightly.

Honestly, I kind of just want to go into my rant right now, but I said I’d do a few vignettes, so we’ll rush through them. Probably because of the way I loved the textbook, a few group members started to joke about how long my thesis will be. One phrase that came up more than once is “you should really be getting a degree in philosophy”, which makes me kind of sad. The degree that I’m going for is explicitly a doctorate of philosophy. Just because the modern world has moved past the idea that a Ph. D. is meant to represent philosophical reflections on the field, I don’t see why I need to.

Anyways, I realized that there are a number of ways that I could write an absurdly long thesis, if I felt so called.⁸ There are a few ways that I could pad the length, which I will discuss after finishing vignettes.

I then found out that my choir rehearsal was cancelled for the night. Almost immediately after that, someone in the choir asked if I wanted to sign up for a date auction with them. I had no reason to say no, said yes, and then went to a young adult social night, which was really fun.

I also went to a cool seminar and got lunch with the seminar speaker today. I think that’s most of the vignettes. Onto the meat of today’s post: my path to an infinite thesis.

There are really two paths that can increase the length of my thesis: going deeper and going wider. To go wider is easy, I just have to make a wider claim of what I did that is relevant to my degree. Since I have given talks as part of my degree on a variety of subjects, there is an argument to be made that I should⁹ dedicate some space to them. Of course, a long discourse on tuning theory may feel slightly off tone in a chemistry dissertation, which is where going deeper goes.

Going deeper can mean a lot of different things. Especially since I’m doing a fairly heavy computational project, I feel like having a description of how we can start at a molecule and get to rotational numbers would not be bad. However, since I like to take things to an extreme level, there are other ways we can frame it.

One joking idea was the history of the universe as seen through the lens of rotational spectroscopy.¹⁰ In the beginning, there was the big bang. There were no molecules, so it’s not interesting.

The first stars formed. They also didn’t have any molecules with dipoles, at most having diatomic hydrogen, so are also not interesting.¹¹

As much as I think that could be a fun thing to do, and may try as a creative writing exercise, that is not quite as academic as many might want for a thesis.¹³ However, there’s another way to go deeper. As I said, I could go through how we go from a molecular structure to rotational constants.

There’s no reason that I need to stop at molecular structure, though. We could go one layer deeper, to how atoms create molecules. Now, if I were a particle physicist, I could go the step lower to how atoms are constructed, but, again, the degree is philosophy. Especially since the conception of an atom is an interesting historical trail, it could be fun to trace that. One other cool thing could be to take some metaphysics.

I could¹⁴ go into a whole discourse on what matter is, not as a matter of physics but as a philosophical thing. I did say a few times that one goal I have for a thesis is that I can¹⁵ use it as a text for any course I could likely teach in the future. Now, does anyone really think that’s an appropriate idea? I sure kind of do, but I don’t know if it will be approved.

Oh! Right, I was going to rant about modern textbook design. I think another issue is that people today are too afraid of using words. There are reasons for this, to be sure.

First and foremost, writing is no longer emphasized at any real level of education for a growing scientist. You can see this in who gets recruited for technical writing. Companies find it easier to teach English majors science than science majors how to write.

It goes deeper than that, though. I think that most of the scientists I know only try to speak to other members of the field.¹⁶ There are shades of this, obviously.

I’m only going to be writing to people fluent in English, for instance. That does cut out a large portion of the world. If I cut it down to chemists who understand basic chemical nomenclature, that cuts it down significantly again. Most people would argue that a Ph. D. thesis can be targeted to at least the level of an upperclassman undergraduate in a field, though.

The issue I have is that people go even further than that. They repeatedly use phrases that only have meaning to people within their own specific subfield, sometimes to the point that there are maybe twenty people in the world who can understand the jargon. In a research paper, I can understand and even respect that choice. After all, a research paper is meant to focus towards the field. There are other avenues to share research with the broader public.¹⁷

I think that in a lot of people’s views, a thesis is just a continuation of that thought. Ok, think is probably a bit of an understatement. Given that the prevailing way to construct a thesis that I’ve seen recently is just stapling papers together, it is exactly the thought process.

Ope I never said why I respect the choice. Jargon has a purpose, and I will never deny it. There are shades of meaning, and it is far more efficient and effective to use a word with shared meaning rather than dancing one’s way around it for a paragraph. If I want to talk about benzene, for instance, there is no reason that I should have to describe it as a structure where each of six carbons is joined in a ring with on average one and a half bonds to its two neighbors.¹⁸ If I’m going to talk about benzene to a broader audience, though, I might need to do that.

Of course, if I’m talking to a broader audience, I might have to take the step back and explain what a bond is, and what exactly separates carbon from every other element. I might also, depending on the context I’m speaking about benzene, not need to reference its structure at all. If I’m describing the fact that there are many clear liquids, for instance, I can just say that benzene exists.

I do agree that I think a little more philosophically about my research than most of my peers, I’m realizing during this musing. Much like a child that asks “why” to each successive answer, I’m dissatisfied with ending my field at something above first principles. Of course, first principles means different things in different situations.

I cannot think of a way that I can meaningfully connect the Higgs-Boson to the rotational constant of a molecule, for instance. There are reasons for this.

One major reason is emergent properties. An emergent property is just when an ensemble of something behaves differently than you would expect from a single piece. It’s related to another concept that I can’t remember the name of but that I’m sure I remember an XKCD about. I can’t find the comic right now, for all that I remember it clearly.¹⁹

Ok the concept is called reductionism, and it says that you can explain something by just explaining its component parts. The comic points out the ridiculousness of this approach, by separating the word “reductionism” into its component letters and their specific meanings. I don’t really like reductionism as a concept, and particularly not when looking at my molecules. They are fundamentally different than a collection of quarks, and I don’t know how much learning about quarks helps you to understand the rotations.

Of course, the same is true for any piece of information. On its own, it has no use. It gains value almost by existence of any other piece of information.

Anyways, while I don’t think that it’s useful to describe first principles in Chemistry²⁰ as anything smaller than an atom. Of course, there are other orthogonal directions we can take.

Ensemble averages in statistical mechanics, for instance, are only really useful when you explain the quantum classical divide. Rotational spectroscopy, when I take a step back and look at it, is kind of wild. It’s inherently a statistical mechanics problem, because we’re probing millions and trillions of molecules and seeing how they respond in ensemble averages. However, the way that they respond still correlates really neatly to discrete quantum transitions. I’m sure there’s something analogous between the way that pressure broadening makes multiple lines look like one line and the way that energy levels become bands in metals.

Oh gosh, energy levels are something I haven’t even thought about or addressed. In general chemistry, they’re all over the place. Despite the fact that I’m doing quantized transitions, we never really use them in rotational spectroscopy.²¹ I wonder why that is.

A few reasons pop to mind immediately. For one, we often work with well over ten thousand energy levels. In order to represent that on a page in any meaningful way, the page would need to be massive.

Ope ok so returning to the essay. People today are afraid of language, which has a lot of reasons. I’m not afraid of having a distinct voice in my thesis, which I think will help, and I’m not against making it broadly understandable. I’m willing to put forth the extra energy to make it theoretically approachable.

Older textbooks come from a place of authors also not knowing as much, because the fields had so much less information. As a result, if they had five pages to fill on quantum mechanics, there was less information they needed to cram, which meant there was more time that could be taken to explain. Anyways, this feels like a good place to end for the night. It’s a rambly musing to be sure, but I plan to spend some time in the coming days and weeks revising some of these rambles.

the more or less part is referencing the fact that a friend and I try to go together every day. I do my NaNo every day, even when we don’t work together↩︎
the fact that I treat this site as a journal is certainly an interesting change. Oh! I just remembered that one other idea I was given/ came to was reflecting on whatever I posted about five years ago today (the first year of the blog, and the most successful iteration). It’s a little strange to realize that I started this blog almost a fifth of my life ago. It feels both like far more than a fifth of my life has passed me by and like I’m exactly the same person I was then. I’m sure that’s not too uncommon of a view, though.↩︎
wow is this foreshadowing? Why is author writing the post so late? Will we ever find out?↩︎
you can treat the nuclei of a molecule as stationary when solving for most molecular transitions↩︎
that phrasing felt wrong for a second. I realize it’s because I’m splitting the infinitive, which was frowned upon in early American grammatical conventions. The reason, like many, comes from the fact that everyone agrees that Latin is the best language. Since Latin has one word infinitives, you cannot split them. As a result, people thought we should not do it in English either. I hate that for a lot of reasons, not least that I like the fact that to go quickly and to quickly go have shades of different meaning. By labeling one as inherently incorrect, assuming that usage doesn’t change, all you do is pressure people into one framing of a situation↩︎
because positive charges repel↩︎
because we know a priori that molecules are real. I have a whole rant brewing in my mind about how much of science is not really provable, but rather relies on “well yeah, of course this is right, look”, and how we diminish the importance of that in a lot of scientific discussions. Of course, part of that rant belongs in the vignettes section of today’s musing, so we’ll wait for it↩︎
my group members tried to argue that I wouldn’t have the time to write such a long thesis. The fact that I can regularly put out five thousand words a day did not seem to sway them, for some reason. I do think that they underestimate the quality of my sprint writing, but I will acknowledge that most of it is not directly ready to go into a thesis (maybe)↩︎
or at least could↩︎
or, later, through the lens of a bunch of different disciplines.↩︎
ooh, I suppose D existed, so you could have like DHD+, which does have a dipole. Shoot↩︎
I think you can see where this is going. In some regards it’s a play on a semi famous quote in astronomy that things are either chemistry or interesting.↩︎
hmmmm, I wonder if there’s a way to phrase and structure the chapter so that it is interesting. Cosmology as seen through rotational spectroscopy is limited, of course, but also hmmmm. I will consider more↩︎
initially typed we, because I thought of this as a science thing, and as we know, science uses the royal we (a phrase not all my friends know about for some reason)↩︎
changes in scientific understanding independent↩︎
I know that it is a fairly common reaction when I say that I give a lot of public talks that scientists don’t like to do it (this is phrased badly, and is a sign I should start wrapping up this musing before my brain goes too much more to mush)↩︎
for all that no one really uses them ever↩︎
especially since that’s slightly inaccurate.↩︎
I found it! Reductionism ↩︎
generally. I fully acknowledge the fuzzy edges of the discipline, but here I’m speaking for at the very least the chemistry I’m doing, which relies on molecules only barely being constructed of atoms (in that like we abstract away atomic information as quickly and fully as possible)↩︎
I’m realizing this isn’t true. We do when discussing coriolis coupling, which is where two rotational transitions of similar energy both shift slightly to have even more similar energy. I’m a little unclear why that happens, but I think it’s something about how vibrational and rotational energies aren’t actually separable, we just pretend they are and add fudge factors↩︎

Book Review of The Creative Writer’s Survival Guide

Draft 1

It’s been a while since my last book review! Looking at the site,¹ I’ve reviewed seven books so far on this blog. I’ve read far more than seven, so let’s see if there’s something in particular that links the books I have reviewed.

Well, I can’t find anything that directly links the books. There are some I had a bit of a historic connection to, some that I read for external reasons, and some that I just chose to read on my own. With that long introduction⁹ out of the way, I’ve figured out what this post will be about.

I recently read The Creative Writer’s Survival Guide: Advice from an Unrepentant Novelist by John McNally. If I remember correctly, either my father or one of his colleagues was getting rid of a lot of his¹⁰ books. My father thought that my little brother and I might be interested in books on writing, and we each saved a few.

One of the books I saved was a book on how to do NaNoWriMo successfully, which I annotated and gave to a friend who’s doing the event with me this year.¹¹ In addition to the other books, which I have yet to read, I got the aforementioned survival guide. I realized about halfway through reading that it was an ARC¹². I can’t imagine too much of the content changed before final publication, but who can say.

Despite the fact that I have no intention to make a career out of writing,¹³ it had a fair amount of advice that seems relevant to me. Most of it was given as asides to his main points, but I don’t think that makes the advice any less useful. For instance, he talked a lot about the resistance that many young authors have to being told that their writing can improve. I know that there are strains of that still within me, and I should really get rid of it. I know that I am not a great writer, for all that I think I’ll start to defend myself as a good writer these days.

Other relevant advice was that you need to treat writing as a commitment, and that inspiration only strikes when it’s made incredibly easy.¹⁴ That is, while sometimes a short story or poem comes out incredibly easily and polished from an early draft, it only comes because of a heavy grind. This is one place where music is absolutely a great analogy, for all that it’s also true for me in writing.

In music, if you just practice scales and tone every day for like fifteen minutes, any song you attempt after three weeks will suddenly become easier. Small composition exercises on voice leading makes writing interesting and singable lines almost second nature. Writing a sonnet a day starts out feeling impossible, but a few short weeks later, is incredibly easy.

Other good advice was generally remembering that everyone you interact with is a person.¹⁵ That is, when you talk to an editor, for example, the editor will remember you after the conversation. Even if that doesn’t directly make it easier to publish with them, it does mean they’re more likely to point you to a place you might be able to publish. If you give a reading, anyone who comes can be great or terrible publicity for your book.

As someone who’s steadily making a more public presence by giving talks, that’s probably worth remembering. Every time that someone leaves a talk of mine and thinks better of science or the University¹⁶, I’ve done a good thing.

Anyways, the book as a whole gave me a lot to think about, and it has a long list of books to read on improving my craft, so I’ll probably try to read more of those in the future. I don’t know if I’ll reread this book, but if any of my readers have been considering a career in writing¹⁷, I would recommend it. He did make it very clear that most writers end their careers at their best writing, which makes so much sense to me now that it’s been pointed out.

read: going to the git repo on my terminal and searching for all instances of book-review↩︎
if this phrasing feels weird, that’s because I misread dates, and thought it was the first.↩︎
review or the book could be it, I suppose, but I meant review↩︎
appropriate here because if my memory serves, the first book is written in first person, and also I like the fact that book two is written in person two. I guess that can’t work if there’s more than three books in the series, because fourth person isn’t a thing. (I wonder what fourth person could mean. If we think about it, first person is referring to self, second person refers to the other participant in the conversation. Third person refers to something not a part of the conversation. I know that there are languages that divide the world differently, but I don’t think linguistics needs more people. Ope. I’ve looked it up, and there are evidences of persons after third. Apparently some languages treat referring to someone nearby and somewhere far away differently. When they do, the latter is sometimes considered fourth person. There’s also a reference to fifth person, so that’s interesting. Otherwise, fourth person is sometimes used in languages that treat generic referents differently than the standard third person (e.g. one should not). That’s kind of cool, and something worth thinking about for any future ConLang I work on.) Ok, so it could work with more than three books when translated.↩︎
when, before she died, I do not know.↩︎
though honestly, at this point they’re almost all sweet. There was a part of me that felt like I didn’t value my grandparents enough while I had them, but that part of me knows things that I couldn’t have known then. I’m working on growing as a person, and part of that is letting go of regrets.↩︎
what a delay wow↩︎
though as mentioned yesterday, I recently read a book on being a novelist (more focused on the financial and professional consequences of the choice, rather than a style guide or anything, which meant it wasn’t particularly relevant for my life. For all that I do enjoy writing, and for all that I do intend to continue writing for the rest of my life, I don’t know if I really want to try to make it my full time career. I like it being a dedicated but amateur (in the sense of doing for love rather than money, which I think tends to be a newer distinction than I tend to use in my writing) hobby, and I worry about how little I would enjoy it if I were compensated. That’s probably an attitude I should investigate (I should read my old posts to see how often I say the word investigate, because I have a gut feeling I think that I should investigate a lot of my thoughts in the future. Unfortunately, it’s always the present). Actually, that might be a good book to review here. Anyways, the book talked about how there’s a sense in which you should, upon reading something you do not enjoy, ask yourself what is wrong with you, rather than asking what’s wrong with the text. As he points out, if you read something for a course, that means a professor (ever since I made the choice to capitalize all professions in my book and then shift it to a school arc, where there are, obviously enough, a lot of Professors, I feel the urge to capitalize the word whenever I use it), who presumably has expertise you wish to acquire, thinks that it was worth reading. Even if you were not assigned a book, the fact that it’s published (the guide was written before the age of self publishing had really gotten started) means that a lot of people, all of whom are experts in their field, thought that the book was worth publishing. It’s an interesting thought, and one that I feel is useful. I’ve realized that I have started to think of writing and words (there’s a better way to phrase that, I’m sure, but I can’t think of it) with the same part of me that thinks about music.

That is, I have two very distinct mindsets when I listen to music. (I think, let’s see if two is the right number or if I should’ve said N and then fixed in post). Most of the time, I treat music as an accompaniment to my life, something that I listen to because I enjoy, not trying to pick up anything in it. Other times, though, I treat music as an academic exercise, looking and listening deeply to see what makes it do what it does. When I listened to music that I did not find matched my aesthetic in undergraduate, I learned how to appreciate it for what it did well. I should really get better at doing that for literature. After all, anti intellectualism isn’t cool anymore (it was never cool). Wow that was a long diversion from the book I reviewed↩︎
about fifteen hundred words↩︎
the colleague was (is?) also a man, so technically his works regardless of which person was getting rid of books↩︎
and I know that the friend reads the blog. Since I know I’ll forget to ask you in real life, are you still reading the book? Do you find it at all helpful?↩︎
Advanced reader’s copy, which means a usually free copy sent ahead of the official release date. I’m unsure why either of them would have had it, since neither seem to have a connection to the author, but I suppose that the author went to a writer’s workshop at the same place that my father ended up going to a while later, so it’s possible that he got it there. We also have a shocking number of ARCs (ARC? because copies is still just C. Idk) in my home, I think at least.↩︎
see the footnote on After the Dragons↩︎
Ok, that’s two very different things, but I think that they’re kind of the same.↩︎
having now moved past the paragraphs I discussed and come back to this footnote, I think that I explained it badly. In part, that’s because it’s a summary of like a third of the book (if taken in very narrow slices). It was given as equally important when submitting work to be published, speaking to professionals, and speaking to fans and publicists.↩︎
hey look, a place where capitalizing was appropriate. I want to bring back the early modern English trend of capitalizing any important words in a sentence, for all that I know that there are probably good and legitimate reasons that we discontinued the practice. That does remind me, though, I read a fascinating legal brief today about double spacing. Why, exactly, the definition of double space was relevant to a federal case, is still a little unclear to me, but it was a great read, as everything petty by lawyers tends to be. Something about being highly educated in the art of argument and using that well honed skill to be petty is just very fun for me to spectate↩︎
and, presumably, are pre-college somehow, since that kind of seems to be the focus group↩︎
part of↩︎

On Writing Again

Draft 1

First, let’s address the elephant in the room. Yesterday I said I would be musing about my Pathfinder game tonight. However, schedules ended up misaligning, and so we did not have pathfinder tonight. Instead, I’m going to¹ discuss some writing advice I saw today, and what my initial reactions are to it.

The last time I mused about writing was apparently a few months ago. In that post, I talked about what was and wasn’t working for me in writing during that period of my life. Let’s see how that’s changed or stayed the same.

I was using an app called Stimuwrite at that point to motivate me. It was a great app, and I would still really recommend using it, especially in places with less than high speed and reliable internet. Thankfully, right now I have that constantly, so I have been using a web based app called 4thewords. It’s a really fun rpg style writing app that I may have spoken about before.

In case I haven’t, I was very curious how they would make the fact that you fight monsters in this game work with the fact that it’s an rpg. For those who don’t know, games in that genre tend to have different upgrades for your character as the game progresses. 4thewords has an interesting approach, where it takes fewer words typed to defeat monsters the higher your attack stat is. It’s fun for me, because it really does help the typing feel more meaningful. Instead of a dopamine hit every one hundred words, for instance, right now I’m at the point where I get it about every seventy.

That, combined with the fact that they have a whole story line, including a side quest series for the month of November, makes it really motivating for me to write. There are so many times that I look at the page, not wanting to write, but see the counting down of the clock and feel the words start to flow out.

I was struggling to write poetry then. Now I am not. Now, this is not because I suddenly got over the mental block which stopped me. No, I took the easier route and stopped wanting to write poetry. It at least aligns my actions to my goals, even if I don’t necessarily want it to.²

I was in a good habit of writing letters to friends, which I’m trying to get back into.³

I wasn’t journalling, which I kind of forgot was something I was trying to do. I feel like this is a place that I spend a lot of time and words journaling, though.⁴

In writing that last post, I had just gotten a fountain pen. Since then, I’ve written almost exclusively with it, and it really does make the writing process feel so much better.

I think that one major difference is the ritual involved. I keep the pen in a small plastic/metal⁵ case, and there’s something really satisfying about opening the case to pull out my pen to start writing. It’s also, as I mentioned in the first musing, heavy. The weight is really nice, because it reminds me that what I’m doing is an act of creation.

I think that I’m writing more again, though I don’t know if it’s all in the journals I keep. I have been doing a lot of derivations for my research, and I’ve filled pages of my notebook in dense scratching text.

One benefit of using a pen with replaceable cartridges is that I get to change the color. I apparently write through about one cartridge a month, which means I get to swap what I write with about once a month. It’s interesting to me how different my writing feels when I change up the ink even slightly. I almost feel like it’s the advice that is often given to guitarists: when it stops being fun to play the guitar, switch your strings. Something about the new color just makes me want to write by hand a lot more.

It also flows so smoothly. I didn’t realize how much I would hate using ball point pens until I stopped having to. When I use them now, it feels like I’m using a pen to write something down, rather than the pen feeling like a natural extension of my hands.

Anyways, one thousand words of rambling in, let’s get to the meat of the discussion. The writing advice I saw today came courtesy of a fantasy author I follow on tumblr, who shared a screencap with annotations of writing advice from Chuck Palahniuk. It’s framed as a six month process, wherein you are not allowed to write in certain ways.

Now, this is not a restriction like the sorts of constrained writing where you can’t use certain letters, or you need to have certain cadences or rhyme schemes. Instead, it is focused on the content of the writing, and making a point to show not tell. It’s filled with examples of how the process works, so I will do my best to synthesize the content here.⁶

First, no “thought” verbs are allowed. That is, we are not allowed to say how a character feels.

Rather than “Jim wondered whether Jill was mad at him,” I instead would have to describe the scene. “Jim had grown accustomed to Jill’s bright wave every morning when they crossed paths. Lately, though, she had given half hearted waves, if she bothered to acknowledge him at all.”

I still don’t know if I did that correctly. The author specifically says the goal is to show the reader through sensory cues exactly what the characters are feeling. Characters cannot want or feel something, I must make the readers want or feel.⁷

The author of the advice points out that many authors hamstring themselves by writing a paragraph that begins with how the character is feeling, killing the energy of the rest of the paragraph.

Alex knew that he would be late to work today. Five busses had passed him by without stopping, and another five just hadn’t shown up. Taxis seemed in shockingly short supply, and the wind precluded his running in any direction.

When rectified, the paragraph could begin Alex was late to work that day.⁸ Or, at the very least, the think can be moved to the end of the paragraph.⁹

One particular piece of advice he gives is to minimize time that characters are alone. Especially given the sort of writing that I’m prone to, that seems infeasible. I really like the fact that my book has a deep exploration of a single person studying, for all that I can see, reading his advice and looking at my writing, exactly why my writing has been described as so impersonal.

Forgetting and remembering are also considered no nos, but he used it in the context of like remembering childhood. Most of the time that I use remember, it is to spark something from a conversation that happened on screen a few chapters earlier.¹⁰

He also rails against the verb to be, pointing out that most of the time, it’s unneeded. Rather than saying “Phillip had red hair,” I could do something more like “Phillip grinned and ran a finger through his scarlet locks.” The homework is to go through my writing and get rid of any instance of thought words, then do the same to a published text. I don’t know if I’ll actually do that this month, especially since it seems better used for an editing/revising phase of writing, at least at first.¹¹ Still, it is probably worthwhile to at least try drafting a chapter normally and then going through and seeing how differently it reads when following this advice. I’m beginning to understand why some people treat learning the craft of fiction like they and others treat learning music theory.

For those who may not know, there’s a common trend among amateur musicians¹² where they believe that learning too much about the craft will lessen their creative potential, making their writing like everyone else’s. As a musician, every time I hear that take, my response is either:

As a former student of music¹³, I will admit that those people have a point. During my first semester of learning theory explicitly in particular, my writing became much more stilted, following the conventions as I was taught them badly.¹⁴ After that initial growth period, though, I can see where my music really becomes my own.

It does bring an interesting issue, where you have to weight the audiences of trained and unskilled. Let me try describing that better, using an analogy.¹⁵

My first semester sophomore year, I took a composition class. In that class, we were tasked with a number of compositional exercises which culminated in our final project: an original composition that we played live in front of the class and whoever came to watch.¹⁶ Of course, writing a solo piece is incredibly difficult, because a single instrument playing tends to be boring unless it is being played by an expert.¹⁷ As a result, almost all¹⁸ of us chose to write a piece for an ensemble, which we were responsible for assembling.

My ensemble was two clarinets, a piano,¹⁹ and an oboe, and many of the other members of the class also wrote for strange voicings, based on what friends we had available. One early draft of my piece had a series of chained 2-1 suspensions²⁰ between, if my memory serves²¹ the two clarinets. It was an intentional choice, because I really liked the way that they sounded.

My professor advised me that I should get rid of them. He said something about them being a mark of someone who doesn’t know how to compose. At the time, I, like every other young creative,²² bristled at this intrusion onto my creative vision. However, I did really trust the professor and his advice, so I changed it to a series of 3-2 suspensions. The entire piece clicked much better once I did, and it was a choice I’m really glad was made for me. Also, now when I write I have a much better intuitive feeling for suspensions and the ways that our ears, living in the western canon as we all do, are trained.²³

Ok wait, no that’s not a good example of how experts and non experts have different taste. Shoot. It does help illustrate the way that learning helps you to create the vision of what you want, though. When I took the step back, I realized that my goal was not to create 2-1 suspensions. That is, my goal was not any individual part of the creative process. My goal was producing something beautiful at the end. By learning what the typical standards of beauty were, I was able to channel my creative impulse more effectively.

I guess a better example of what I mean by expert and non expert ears is a lot of contemporary classical music.²⁴ Or, if not that, then at least like twelve tone serialism from the early twentieth century.²⁵ Those who know what they’re listening to²⁶ get to see interesting and beautiful theory worked out on a page. To the untrained ear, however, it just sounds like noise.

Of course, anyone writing music is aware²⁷ of the audience they’re writing to. Or, rather, they should be. I certainly write differently for myself on guitar, my band, choir, and other ensembles. I had to learn how to do that, though, which is another point for formal learning: it gives you access to different registers.²⁸

What I mean to say is that I don’t plan on writing literary fiction.²⁹ As a result, if getting rid of words like think and hope makes my writing read less like the fiction I want to write, I will probably stop doing it quickly.

Then again, as I’ve mentioned, I only know how to write music in different registers because I’ve tried and failed to write the same register for incompatible uses.³⁰ I suppose that until I know what it means to write at different levels, my writing will always have that same issue.³¹ So, in conclusion, I like the advice, for all that I don’t know if it will be like classical counterpoint for me³² or if it will be like learning melodic motion³³. In either case, it will be helpful for me as I grow as a writer.

Ok, I said that this would be a two draft musing, but then I wrote continuously for twoish hours. It’s now bed time.

in a meandering manner, as befits a first draft blog post (especially since I really don’t want to write my book tonight but want to get more words on page, because it feels good to do so) of hopefully two↩︎
I forget if I’ve said on here, but I think that next month, instead of writing a novel, I might consider doing daily poetry attempts again. I’ve set aside so much time for writing that it will hopefully be enough of a habit that I can continue. Then again, I’ve recently started thinking about an idea for a series of stories or books that I’d like to write, but I’m unsure how workable the idea is. The series would be Modern Myths, and I’ll probably muse about it another time.↩︎
it’s shockingly hard to remember what to put in letters. I feel like this summer I had a pattern down and knew what to write, but that doesn’t feel true anymore for some reason. Probably worth interrogating myself as to why that is (not that I don’t already have ideas or anything)↩︎
neither of the two (different) spellings was accepted by the spell checker, so I have no idea what it should be. Instead of being consistent, I’ll probably switch between them in a pseudo-random fashion↩︎
it feels too cheap and flimsy to be metal but moves too easily to be plastic↩︎
if you can’t tell, one of the main purposes of this blog is to give me a space to write through how I feel about something. I type far faster than I write (maybe I should learn shorthand to rectify that), so this works better for me by far than trying to journal. Also, when I journal, I feel an urge to at least nominally work on my penmanship, which is a bit of an issue because I write even slower.↩︎
which is strange, and not something I necessarily think translates to all my writing particularly well. I absolutely think that as an exercise it’s worth doing, if only because I can see how prescriptive my writing style is. I worry that I’ll go to far with it, though, ending up with purple prose. As one person I saw commented on a similar sentiment, not every sentence can be profound and breathtaking. Sometimes the character just needs to be on the other side of the room.↩︎
i guess I see where getting rid of think could help, it does read more snappily↩︎
which also does a lot to help. Maybe there’s something to this published and well renowned author’s advice↩︎
now, is that itself good writing practice? maybe not. I feel like a lot of advice is not written presuming serialized formats though. By nature of the staggered releases, it is almost certain that the audience will not remember as well as if they had the entire book in front of them when they began to read↩︎
as a friend put it, otherwise they’d spend too much time editing while they write, which is against the core ethos of NaNoWriMo↩︎
and, as I’ve recently learned, amateur writers↩︎
in that I formally studied music, not in that I think I know everything now↩︎
that is, I was bad at following the conventions. I was taught the conventions wonderfully and excellently↩︎
which just for this, I’ll try to use the writing advice I’m nominally still reflecting on↩︎
our professor advertised, and I went to a small enough school that people actually went to their friend’s class presentations, which doesn’t really seem to happen where I am now. It’s also possible I’m just out of the loop here, or that it didn’t happen as much as I thought where I went to school. Who can say for certain?↩︎
now, we can get to the whole “wow that’s incredibly elitist and western music centric of you, look at (insert any other solo tradition here) or think about all the singer songwriters out there.” That is a valid critique, and it is a sticking point for a lot of theorists that western music analysis more or less ignores words. I’m now realizing that might be part of why so many people make such a big deal of madrigalisms (a lot of the madrigals (a style of polyphonic music) that still exist are sacred. There are some conventions in writing for them, such as having either a unison or triad on the word G-d and Trinity (respectively for the first level and counterespectively for the spicy “look who understands theology” version) and rising on words like rise, falling on words like down), since they’re really the only genre in western canon that has that (as with anything in music, exceptions apply) universally applicable) As a result, artists like Woody Guthrie or Bob Dylan, though they uncontroversially write beautiful and wonderful music, are less interesting to study from a music perspective, as they intentionally rely on the stock nature of their arrangements and compositions to allow their words to shine through. (Wow this is a lot of words, maybe worth not being a footnote, but too late)↩︎
i think all of us, but I might be wrong (footnotes don’t count, because they’re not part of the narrative, so I don’t have to write correctly according to the style)↩︎
I forgot about this at first, and then remembered↩︎
for the non music nerds, a second is when you have the two notes next to each other, and suspensions are when you have a dissonance because one voice holds while the other moves. In this case, they move to a second, then resolve to a unison, move to a second, on and on↩︎
see, that’s the thing about this style guide. Sometimes I do not know what I’m trying to remember, and the effort is worth mentioning. Maybe there’s a way to make it work, I should consider that as I think about this advice↩︎
I feel comfortable saying this, since I read a book that said it’s common for writing teachers↩︎
there are a lot of arguments about how much of what we think about music is innate and how much is learned. It’s really hard to test these days, as basically every population we can interact with has been exposed to tons of western music, through the radio if nothing else. Global hegemony has its downsides, and anthropologists are the ones to suffer. That being said, it is uncontroversial to say that in general minor chords are sad and major chords are happy. Whether this is because of something innate or learned does not matter, because it will work on your audiences. (That’s another way that learning is good. I now know that when I want to showcase a sadder part of a text, I want to rely more on minor chords and motions to subdominant keys rather than dominant keys)↩︎
oof those two words hurt to put in that order because there are so many contradictory meanings for them↩︎
to be fair, that is where most music theory classes stop. After that, there’s not a lot of canon, for all that there is absolutely development happening. There’s a lot to explore in the ways that mass production and dissemination of musical recordings changed the concept of musical eras, even before we get to the fractured space of modern music, where there’s a lot of talk about there being no real cultural zeitgeist.↩︎
often because they’re studying the score↩︎
in my experience at least↩︎
shoot, need to focus on the thread, for all that I lost it far far ago↩︎
which I hate as a concept, much like I hate academic music as a concept, for all that I respect it more. I’m positive that if I ever took courses on literary fiction that I would feel much better about it, because it is absolutely the anti intellectualism speaking when I say I don’t like high brow stuff. Of course, there’s also explicit elitism in creating that’s probably worth analyzing. Certainly all the early pioneers into really weird music that I read about hoped that audiences would learn to like it, while it feels like a lot of writers disdain the common listener. Who knows? Might be worth musing about in depth later↩︎
word to the wise, singer songwriter guitar songs should be basic in melody and chord progression↩︎
my beta reader does often comment on the fact that the targeted reader reading level changes a lot based on the chapter and scene in my book. That’s probably bad. Just as much as I don’t want to have one scene of “this is bill. See bill run,” in the middle of a high brow discussion, I also don’t want to have something very high brow (I tried to write one, but realized I don’t know how to do so consciously. That’s probably bad. I think it involves like verb splitting (to boldy go) but don’t know that for certain) in the middle of like an action scene where the goal is fast paced words. I did also see something about how sentence length can be used to control a reader’s reading. That’s absolutely something I should get better at. Really what I’m saying is I want to read books on craft and learn to apply them↩︎
something I’m aware of and make notice of when composing in style↩︎
something I use by reflex now, and then refine and double down on when revising a song↩︎

Dungeons and Dragons Again

Draft 1

As I mentioned last week, I’ve started a new dungeons and dragons campaign. I found out after this first session that we’re supposed to be in a like turn of the first century time period, which makes my decision to play a plasmid somewhat of a choice. The session started as most first sessions do, we all were introduced to each other in a tavern.

My character immediately drew a lot of attention, because I finally decided on a shape and build. I was a vaguely humanish shaped blob, and my skin was shaded in reds blacks and browns, as though a lava flow. As a result, while I was known to Giants as Goob¹, I was known to most of the smaller races as Ember.

We met a small girl named Margaret, who was a Paladin on a quest currently to destroy the pirates who had kidnapped her. The first combat went smoothly, and Goob easily withstood all of the damage that it had drawn, keeping the rest of the party safe. It also managed to free a Tiefling from her captivity, and was pretty sure that she watched and followed the party as they continued on to find the rest of the pirates.

As we marched, the party found an arrow at our feet with a message in Elvish. Thankfully, Margaret knew Elvish, and was able to translate. The note said that we had allies.

Some members of the party were less than thrilled with this turn of events, feeling as though it was a bad idea to trust people we could not see. The rest of us, Goob obviously included, felt like we were in no position to turn down help, and it wasn’t as though they’d really offered us a choice. We were ambushed by six pirates, who our unseen allies quickly dispatched. With them gone, we looted their corpses.²

Adventuring a little further, we came to a staircase which descended to 25 or so pirates. Goob had some fantastic attacks, dealing well over forty damage on multiple turns.³ Because Goob played his role as tank admirably, most of the party took minimal damage.

Margaret, of course, being young and known to the pirates, also drew a fair amount of fire. Goob, seeing this, rushed to draw the aggression of the other patrols. In a few almost sickeningly powerful blows, he dispatched almost the entire patrol in front of them. Unfortunately, the surviving members of each patrol focused their fire onto Goob, and it died.⁴

This was, as I learned afterwards, the GM’s first ever player character death. He felt terrible about it, which I feel bad about. I was not super attached to this character, for all that I think it was fun.

I did really enjoy trying to get into the mind of an alien who had been raised by giants trying to interact with humans and astral elves. I roleplayed the fact that, having an amorphous body, I was not going to be constrained to typical biology.⁵ Among other things, this meant that I tried to copy the gait of members of the party, and that I had two eyes⁶ which rotated about my head, one traveling clockwise and the other counterclockwise.⁷

I also often forgot that people could not just move their head or body in directions, doing so. In character, at least, the party was sad to see me die. Out of character, I think that they’re mostly just excited to see what character I bring next week.

One thing I realized when I rolled my first critical of the night was just how much I love rolling large numbers of dice. For all that I don’t have a ton of time in the next few days,⁸ I might spend a bit of time finding the way to build a character that gets to roll a lot of dice.

It’s not a great list, I’ll fully admit, but it at least is a place to start looking. Barbarian does have the benefit of the Zealot subclass, which gets an extra d6 on the first attack of each turn while raging. That was a lot of fun tonight, especially on the one critical I had.¹⁰

I guess one thing is that rolling 2d6 is better than 1d12, even though the damage output is slightly lower, so I should look for melee weapons that have more than one hit die as well. Also, because it’s already late¹¹, I’m not going to revise today’s post. That’s a shame, because it does limit the word count for today, but such is the way of life.

not that anyone in the party learned this↩︎
My character was neutral evil, which I took to mean was very willing to spill blood if it meant that my character was compensated for the time. Since Margaret, being twelve, did not have coin to offer, my character took on itself the choice to loot the people we killed instead.↩︎
wow a zealot barbarian with the Fire Giant Fist Feat is a fun thing to play. It would have been better if I hadn’t treated Strength as somewhat of a dump stat, but I thought that having higher Constitution would be a good choice. It was, as it turns out (spoiler alert) but not a good enough one.↩︎
more accurately, despite the fact that I took half damage because I was raging, the final attack did 40ish damage pre reduction and I had eight health. I then failed my first death saving throw and they stabbed me to make sure I was downed.↩︎
technically, as written I am unsure if that is allowed for the plasmid, but the GM was willing to let it slide, especially since there was no real mechanical benefit to be gained. There’s a lot to be said for “this is cool and I promise I’m not going to use it to try to do any game breaking shenanigans” (though there is also something to be said for “I am absolutely going to take this as far as you will let me, up to and including breaking the game. Tread warily”)↩︎
normal!↩︎
abnormal↩︎
shoot, I have to prepare a lecture for next tuesday. I should probably do that tomorrow? I don’t think I have anything explicitly scheduled or any experiments that are particularly time sensitive. I even have a few long calculations to run, and didn’t have a ton to do while they did. Great↩︎
we’re fourth level↩︎
2d6 plus 2 necrotic damage from being a zealot, 2d10 fire damage from being raised by fire giants, 2d12 plus 4 damage for raging and swinging a battleaxe was really fun↩︎
see the fact that I’m writing this after the game ended↩︎
presumably, at least↩︎

Reflections on Today’s Gospel

Draft 2

In the first draft of this post,¹ I thought a lot about what the Gospel message was, and then remembered that other, better read, and smarter people than I have asked the same question before. So, after I reflected on the readings, I read through some reflections from Doctors of the Church and other Saints. In this draft, I think I’d like to go through the three readings in order, because that feels like a better way to construct the narrative.

We begin with the First Reading.² The reading today comes from Wisdom³, and more or less exhorts the reader to seek wisdom. In reading commentaries, I was reminded of how much of the faith has been so effectively handed down through the centuries. These days, it feels obvious to say that seeking wisdom means seeking the Holy Spirit, but that was not always a settled question.⁴

The Second Reading is also pretty straightforward. St. Paul explains that we should mourn with the hope and knowledge that those we love are asleep in Christ, ready to be raised up on the last day.

With both of those readings priming us, we are taken to the Gospel. The Gospel passage today concerns the parable of the ten virgins waiting for the bridegroom. As you might expect, there are a number of interpretations of nearly every part of the reading, and what, exactly, they symbolize. What is not in contention, though, is the meaning of lamps and oils.

Lamps represent a belief in the Almighty, and the oil represents the good works we do. Works without faith are meaningless, as oil without a lamp is fairly useless. St. Augustine points out that, at some point, we are unable to create oil ourselves. That is, while we can press olives to make oil, we cannot cause an olive to grow. In such a way, any good we do is only through He who is Goodness itself. But, just like a lamp without oil cannot shine, so to is faith without works dead. It’s interesting to me how clearly that was seen in the Early Church, given the controversies that arose a few centuries later.

The fact that all ten virgins fell asleep is seen as a euphemism for the fact that all die. When the bridegroom, Christ, returns, not all will be ready. Rather than explicitly punishing, as he does in other parables, though, he simply ignores the faithless.

Two parts of the Gospel that I did not immediately think of as speaking to any truths were the fact that there were ten, and the fact that the ten were virgins. Most of the commentaries I read, however, made a big deal out of both points. A common refrain was that not every virgin ended up being invited to the feast. That is, we are not saved by an absence of sinful action. Instead, that is the bare minimum. We still require the Almighty’s grace to be able to love truly.

In connection to the First Reading, the Gospel divides the virgins into the foolish and the wise. Wisdom, as the commentaries said, is knowledge of the three Divine Persons. It’s said that to know G-d is to love Him, and I think that’s an appropriate sentiment for this reading.

Draft 1

As with yesterday, I think I’m going to do this musing in two drafts. I found that it was much easier to write the first draft knowing that I would be able to revise anything I said, and I felt like I was able to explore much better. With that in mind, let’s see where my mind takes me.

Today’s readings, as is apparently always true at the end of a liturgical year, concern death and the afterlife. For once, the second reading actually connects really well to the Gospel, in that both are incredibly oriented towards the end times and the Christian message of awaiting the next life. The second reading definitely explains where the concept of the rapture comes from, at least to me. If I read the line about the faithful being carried to heaven, I could absolutely see where people would think that is what happens, especially if I come from a tradition which rejects Tradition.

Anyways, one thing that the priest mentioned today’s homily was a question I hadn’t thought about when I listened to the readings today. Why didn’t the women waiting with oil share it with the ones who did not have enough to keep their lamps lit? He brushed past the question, but it’s been sticking with me since he mentioned it.

Of course, the answers I come to need to work both in the context of the parable and in the context of what the parable is implying. I’m going to address only in the context of the parable for now, throwing out plausible ideas without exploring them, and then explore them in the context of the parable, and only then explore them in the context of the Gospel message. I feel like there’s a benefit in that approach, which is that it lets me get past the initial impulses I have much more quickly.

Ideas for what the maidens⁵ who did not share their oil were thinking, in no particular order, and assuming nothing about the maidens’ intent:

That’s really as many ideas as I can think of right now. I should read some commentaries to see what theologians have said, and I might spend some time doing that right now.⁷

Ok, let’s see how each interpretation stands up to textual scrutiny, for all that I’m not going to read the passage in any sort of explicit context.⁸

So, after considering the way the metaphors could work, let’s rank them. I’m going to use a fairly absolute scale, calling them each plausible, probably, improbable, or wrong, completely based on my interpretation of the text of the parable as meant for itself.

Cool, now let’s look at what each of these mean in the broader Gospel message, where the virgins awaiting the bridegroom are Christians awaiting the second coming.¹² Using that message, let’s try reading each of the proposed ideas¹³. What does the idea mean, in context of the parable’s intended meaning?

Ok, so having now reflected a lot on the Gospel, let’s look a bit at the other readings.²¹ Or actually, thanks to the footnotes, I know that there’s still more to say about the Gospel.

Reading the commentary annotated bible that I have ready access to²², there are a few things that stand out:

Ok so that was interesting and informative. I should absolutely spend more time reading commentary from Doctors of the Church, because much of what they said just instantly resonated within me. Let’s see what takeaways I have from my notes.

Alright! That feels like a good place to end my thoughts on the Gospel for this draft. In revising, I’m certain that I’ll have to tie all of this together in a less rambly fashion²⁷, but for now I think I should move on.

Let’s look at the first reading. Oh gosh, it’s all about wisdom. Since the Gospel is all about how there are wise and foolish virgins, there is absolutely something related in those. Still, my thoughts at the time of reading it were fairly simple. Wisdom comes to those who seek it²⁸ and is something you grow in, not something you innately possess.

Rather than spending tons of time²⁹ trying to come up with my own interpretations, let’s see what the commentaries have to say.

Though I suppose that there’s some value in reflecting on the Psalm, I don’t know if I really feel like I want to. It seems a little ambitious to try to interpret the Pslams when I didn’t even think to investigate the listed numbers in the reading today. The second reading feels like it should be pretty straightforward, but I’m not sure if it will be. My immediate interpretation is just that death is not the end, which is a pretty easy Catholic take. It connects pretty clearly to the Gospel, since the early Church writers connect sleep to death in the parable.

Anyways, this feels like a good place to finish this first draft. I have some ideas floating around for structuring the second one, but we’ll see how I end up feeling when it comes time to write it.

readable below↩︎
that feels obvious in retrospect, but it feels important for segue reasons↩︎
also known in some circles as Wisdom of Solomon↩︎
and, to be fair, in some belief systems it still isn’t settled↩︎
I knew there was a word instead of virgins. I don’t remember which verbiage (Idk if that’s an appropriate usage for the term, but I like it, so will keep it in this draft at least) the translation we used at Mass had, but I’m willing to bet there’s at least a few bibles with Imprimaturs or Imprimi Potests that have either word↩︎
as you might be able to tell, at this point I don’t have the Gospel in front of me, so I can’t say for certain exactly what is and isn’t a valid reading of the text. I’m pretty sure that the maidens whose light went out asked for oil, but I’m not completely sure, so this interpretation gets to stay↩︎
hmm or should I wait to do that until after I’ve exhausted my thoughts of how the metaphor works within the context of the parable? Or, should I wait even longer and do it after I’ve connected to the Gospel message? I think that I should do it at least after the exploration of the message within the story, so let’s go through those now.↩︎
of course, I know that there’s the context that this comes from Christ’s sayings and in Matthew in particular, which means that it’s targeted towards the Jewish people. I also carry with me a lifetime of exposure to Catholic and general Christian ideology, which shapes how I view the world.↩︎
Mt 25: (I don’t know specific verse because my wifi won’t let me access the bible right now. All I have is the email with today’s readings, which tells me that it’s somewhere between 1 and 13.)↩︎
there is, of course, the voice in my head which screams at me that the concept of standardized anything is incredibly anachronistic, but I’ve got a lot of practice ignoring those voices.↩︎
Matthew 25: also unknown in this draft↩︎
I don’t know for certain that this is the correct interpretation, but it’s what I’m going to run with.↩︎
even the wrong ones↩︎
for all that I’ve seen interpretations suggesting that his father was not yet dead and he was awaiting an inheritance↩︎
saintesses?↩︎
I am absolutely mangling something profound and beautiful↩︎
that’s probably the same section, as I think about it. Probably worth having a bible with me if I’m going to keep referencing it in these reflections, which is probably a good thing for me to do↩︎
I think that’s the right Latin↩︎
to within any standard rounding error, and little t traditions of immortals that Christ raised during his earthly ministry aside↩︎
I suppose an argument could be made that if we treat the bridegroom coming as the day that each of us individually dies, then there’s the whole every day we get the chance to serve the Lord better, but that feels like a bit of a stretch↩︎
I feel like this reflection is lacking right now, but I can’t quite think of why. Ope, wait, that’s wrong. I know two ways in which it’s lacking. 1: I didn’t read any commentaries, and 2: I didn’t ever connect the parable to the Gospel message explicitly/pick an interpretation I like. Let’s do that instead of moving on↩︎
the Catena app↩︎
which I don’ quite understand↩︎
I’m beginning to realize I did absolutely no numerology, but that was probably relevant, since they didn’t just say a number, they specified five.↩︎
hey nice, I overlapped slightly↩︎
a seventeenth century Jesuit, as it turns out,↩︎
under 3500 words shouldn’t be too hard. In fact, I feel like I’d be hard pressed to be as or more rambly↩︎
her?↩︎
can you tell that I’m getting tired of typing?↩︎
wow what a fun name. ah it’s not a person, but writings incorrectly attributed to Augustine↩︎
I think, I’m bad at reading comprehension↩︎
we’ll ignore the fact that my daily blog post is shaping up to be well over five thousand words as a reason to not do Jeb↩︎
should in the I think I would be happier if I did, not in the I’ll judge myself if I don’t way (there’s context but I feel like it’s pretty obvious)↩︎

On Embroidery Continued

Draft 2

Earlier this month, I wrote a post where, among other things, I discussed the fact that I’m now learning to embroider. Specifically, I’m trying to learn counted thread embroidery, in a style somewhat inspired by Bargello. I’ve finally finished the small squares of vertical and horizontal stripes that I had been using as a way to figure out what the stitches looked like with different numbers of threads. I now have to make a different set of decisions when working on future projects.

On the one hand, more strands makes a prettier looking design.¹ On the other, it is a massive pain to thread a needle, especially when I start threading it with large numbers of threads. Along with the friends from the first embroidery adventure, I went to a local tea shop, where we all worked on our own threadcraft and drank tea and chatted.

I, as mentioned, finished the test swatches and immediately started work on a test swatch for how to use color. The cross stitching friend continued cross stitching,² and the other two friends both practiced new skills. One kept working on a woven bookmark that they started near the beginning of the month, and the other started a free form³ embroidery project from a kit. It was really nice to spend time with friends, and it was equally nice to work on something creative⁴ without having to connect it to anything profit oriented.⁵ There’s something really fulfilling about being able to go from a half formed idea to something real and tangible in just a few minutes. The fact that embroidery, at least how I’ve been doing it, has a really nice texture is just an added bonus.⁶

I think that in the future I might start looking at higher hole density fabric, though, because as mentioned, threading enough threads onto the needle to make the fabric as thick as I want is a bit of a pain. The smaller the separation between holes, the smaller the thread needs to be. I’ve also learned that there’s a real and legitimate benefit to doing even numbers of threads, which boils down to only needing to worry about ends at the beginning of each thread, because you can loop and double them over.⁷

Draft 1

I had an idea earlier today to try writing this post in two drafts. There were a few reasons for that. First, as you may have noticed, these posts have been getting longer and ramblier the longer the month has gone on. There are a number of reasons for that, to be certain, but the net result is still a post that gets longer, even when the content may not deserve it. Second, this ’blog⁹ was initially created to journal, at least in part, the way that my writing changes as I go through drafts. Though there are still remnants of that process¹⁰, that part of the idea has more or less fallen by the wayside, for a number of reasons.¹¹

And so, I thought it could be a fun idea to see what differences come from writing and rewriting the same post. Unfortunately, as I tend to do, I lost track of time. It’s now late enough that I don’t really feel like writing two posts.¹² Still, I know that I have a tendency to overinflate the difficulty of tasks before I start on them, and there’s a chance that the same is true now. If so, then that just means that I need to write this post, and I may have the energy needed to rewrite the draft. We’ll see what happens.¹³

Anyways, onto the meat of the post. I’ve written before about how I’m learning embroidery. Today, I finally finished with my blocking to see how many strands of thread I should use and started on another project.¹⁴ I went to a local tea shop with some friends¹⁵ and we all worked on our own crafts.

I did my counted thread embroidery, the friend of mine who cross stitches cross stitched, another friend is learning how to weave bookmarks and worked on that, and the final friend¹⁶ worked on learning how to do traditional¹⁷ embroidery with a starter kit he got. It was really fun to spend time with friends, and it was also really fun to spend some time working on a craft for its own sake, with full knowledge that the skill will likely never benefit me in any professional sense.¹⁸ There’s something really fulfilling about having a rough idea for a pattern, trying it out, seeing where you can improve, and then trying again in a matter of minutes. It’s even nicer when the failed attempt is still pretty and has a nice texture.¹⁹ I think I might want to start looking at getting higher number aida²⁰, because it’s a massive pain to thread six or more distinct strands of embroidery floss onto a needle to sew. The larger the number, the tighter the grid.²¹ Right now I think I’m using 20 or 24, which I saw a recommendation online for six strands when embroidering. In either case, I’ve also learned that doing even numbers is nicer, because then you can just cut a length of floss twice as long as you want to use and then double it with the needle. There are a fair number of benefits to doing that, most of which revolve around the fact that you don’t have to worry about the floss falling out of the needle as you sew.²²

Ok so wow this post absolutely needs to be cleaned up. Even though it’s been dark for hours,²³ it’s still pretty early, so I should have time to revise.

to me, at least.↩︎
which is, as it turns out, a form of counted thread embroidery↩︎
that feels like the better term than traditional↩︎
in the sense of creating↩︎
as opposed to my writing, which I’ve recently learned also helps me to write for the work that I do↩︎
it’s soft and well oriented. What’s not to love??↩︎
I don’t know if I’m explaining it well, but I think the concept should be easy to grasp↩︎
which tends to come in asides like this (wow (though I did initially type ow, which feels equally fair) that’s really meta)↩︎
hey look I remembered to do it that time↩︎
see the fact that every post starts with Draft 1 and has a first posted date↩︎
ooh I do love lists within lists. Still, I’ll refrain from doing so here, if only because I’m already almost two hundred words into explaining how I was going to write today’s musing, which is about embroidery, without even mentioning the skill once.↩︎
truthfully, I barely feel like writing one.↩︎
oof, three hundred words of filler before I even get to the embroidery. If I do draft 2, this is all absolutely being cut. That does raise the interesting question, though, of what the point of my drafts is (are?). If the goal is to tell the same story with each draft, then I should repeat this content. If, instead, the goal is that each draft attempts to muse most effectively, then I probably shouldn’t. Eh, we’ll see what I feel like doing to that bridge when it’s time to cross it, and not before.↩︎
ok, to be fair, the new project is also a test swatch, but it’s a test swatch with a much more intricate pattern, which is like a real project.↩︎
I’m realizing now that the group of us who went to the Embroidery Guild and who went to tea today were identical↩︎
not that I only have three friends, just only four of us did all the embroidery events.↩︎
honestly I have no clue what the relative age or prestige of different embroidery styles is. He was working on a free piece of fabric doing non bit-wise (is that the term? if not, I feel like it should be) stitching.↩︎
that may sound sarcastic, but I do truly mean it. Ever since I realized that my habit of writing a lot of fiction also transfers to writing academic text faster, I feel bad, as though I have corrupted that joy somehow by making it useful. It’s a similar feeling I get when friends tell me that I should set up a way for my readers to financially compensate me. It isn’t that I’m opposed to making money off the work that I do, it’s that a part of me feels like it will stop being a hobby and start being a job, and that will change my desire to write/what I write. I don’t know how valid that fear is, but it’s one that I’ve had for a while, ever since I read an article talking about how paying children to solve puzzles makes them solve fewer puzzles than just telling them to do it because it’s a fun activity. Once again, I feel like I’m getting off the point of the post, though. It will be fun to actually do a word count versus footnote count again for this post, because I’m beyond certain that there are more footnotes than in text words for this post.↩︎
like wow I love the texture of embroidery floss that’s been stitched. It’s soft but also incredibly aligned and ordered, in a way that’s a little hard to describe.↩︎
I’m sure that this has to be an acronym of some sort, but I couldn’t tell you anything about what it stands for↩︎
I’m positive that the number is holes per inch or holes per cm or some other metric like that, for all that the specifics don’t interest me right now (right now absolutely the key phrase, because I know that I’m going to geek out about everything related to embroidery someday soon, I just don’t want that day to be today)↩︎
I can’t help but feel like sew is the wrong verb here. Maybe it is the right one, though, since I guess it does describe the action taking place? I guess that’s something I should look up before I do this musing again↩︎
wow I love the winter (this one is sarcastic)↩︎

Flash Fiction Friday

Draft 1

There’s a tumblr called Flash Fiction Friday Official. I’m not entirely sure why they feel the need to call themselves official, given that I haven’t seen anyone else claiming the title, but it’s that nonetheless. The concept is fairly simple. Every Friday, they¹ post a new prompt, and anyone can respond to the prompt for the next 24 ish hours.

I’ve done it a few times. At first, I tended to do some short form fiction. As time went on, and I felt less inclined to write small short stories, I used it as a way to write some poetry. Of course, I’ve fallen almost completely off the wagon of doing the prompts at all.

Today, since I’m a little over a week into my one month goal of writing as much as possible, I looked to see what the prompt was. It was “By any other name”, which of course made me initially think of the Shakespearean reference. I immediately wrote that line down and thought about how untrue it was in so many situations.

Of course, that immediately pushed my mind into something poetic. I don’t think that I want to write a poem today for the prompt, if only because poems take me far longer per word and I haven’t really been writing any poetry recently. So, that means I need to write prose.

One interesting thing I’ve realized about my FFF² responses is that they tend to be far more emotionally driven and first person centered than most of my writing. In part, I think that’s because they tend to be far more poetic, and I find that my poetry tends to be much more emotionally connected than my prose writing.³

Since I didn’t want to write a poem, I then started thinking of what story I could tell. Because the prompts are “Flash Fiction”, there is a maximum word count of I think 1000.⁴ That’s both a lot of words and not very many all at once.

I’m not writing fanfiction, unlike a large number of the people who respond to the prompts.⁵ In some regards, this adds to the struggle. In the very limited words I have, I need to not only introduce characters and scene, but then have something happen. When working with fanfic, these constraints are slightly different.

With a single name, you can give the audience the entire background of a known character. There are of course many difficulties to writing fanfic that are not true of an original story. Because I’m creating the entire world wholesale, nothing I do in the 1000 or fewer words can be contradictory to what people know about the characters. If I was using established works, though, then I would have to be careful to explain why my own interpretation diverges from the canon, if it does.

I’m not planning on writing the actual story for the day in this blog post, if only to keep the slightest barrier between the different online presences I maintain. I do want to spend some time and words considering the story I want to write, though.

I think that I want to talk about how changing a name does, in fact, change the thing it describes. Maybe it’s just that I spend too much time around scientists, but there’s a lot of thoughts around me that language does not, in and of itself, contain any meaning or power. I’m sure the fact that I read lots of fantasy inspired by Earthsea also leads me to the idea of names being important in and of themselves, but.⁶

Probably because of the literary inspirations, I have the initial idea to write something fantasy adjacent. I’ve also got the voice in my head telling me that I should write a very emotional and relationship focused story, for a few reasons.⁷ Something that keeps popping into my mind is also the idea of how a relationship is, in many regards, defined by the words we use to describe it.

I don’t want to write a didactic story, where I expound on that explicitly.⁸ However, being too subtle comes with its own drawbacks. I don’t have hundreds of thousands of words to carefully dance around a topic. The medium really encourages direct, if not blatant writing.

Ok, I do feel pretty strongly that it’s in my best interest as a writer to do some realistic fiction exploring relationships. Now I suppose I should figure out the perspective. First person has the advantage of feeling intimate right away. Third person has the advantage of seeming objectivity, which contrasts to the emotional statement that I’m trying to make. Second person has the advantage of being a little weird, and in many ways feeling even more intimate.

From that little reflection, it definitely seems like I’m leaning towards second person. Ok, so then the question becomes who I’m addressing.⁹ That question also goes hand in hand with the presentation style.

Lately I’ve really fallen in love with epistolary fiction.¹⁰ Some famous examples include much of Dracula and This is How You Lose the Time War. I like the fact that there’s an explicit passing of time, and I also like the way it connects me to the letters I write to friends generally.

Ok, so then the question becomes how many letters to send and what story/ plot I want to send out.¹¹ So, things that I know I want are a relationship developing. Since I have such a limited word count, it could make some sense to start not at the first meeting.

I think I want it to take place more or less in the present, so I probably need to address why they’re writing letters to each other. Starting it with just like “I see why Dr. so and so recommended we write each other letters” could be fun. Ooh hey, look at that, we’ve got an implication of them going through marital issues. Ok so I guess that is a question, do I want the couple to be married already?

Ooh, something fun I could do is start each of the letters with a different name, like (person), then love, then etc..¹² That feels maybe a little forced, but maybe it could work. With a thousand words, I have room for five to seven of the standard length letters I write, which is pretty nice for storytelling purposes.

Ok to frame this for me¹³: second person, directed in an epistolary fashion, where I use the openings of each letter as a way of framing what the emotions are at each point. I should probably brainstorm a few different names, but I think I’m ready to try writing the story for today! Exciting.

Well, I have a rough draft done. It’s about 500 words, which is nice and in the middle of the allowed word count. I don’t know if I love the story as a whole, so far, but I think that there’s some potential in what I have. I think that author’s notes are allowed, so I might throw one in and go “so this is what I was trying to do, idk if it worked though.” There’s always a part of me that cringes at author’s notes that try to explain what their goal was in creating a work, but I don’t really know if there’s any way around it. Anyways, I feel like I should probably try to revise the story.

Update a few hours later: I no longer feel like there’s enough time in the day for me to feel like I want to edit the short story. I also don’t know if I’ll post it. On the one hand, it isn’t bad writing, and I kind of like the story. On the other, I can tell a bunch of ways that it could be much stronger, which is almost always true for something I write. I don’t know what my goal is in putting the writing out there, I guess.

I suppose that for the people who make the prompts, seeing responses is probably validating on some level. They do also tend to repost anything you submit with compliments. Ok, the more I think about it, the more that I feel like I should just post it and accept that it’s not as strong as it could be. Maybe I’ll be lucky and someone will be willing to comment on how to make the story better.¹⁴

Well, it’s posted now. We’ll see if I get any interaction with it. In either case, I will probably forget it exists for a while, because I posted it from my writing tumblr, which is very far from connected to my real one. My real one is also kept fairly isolated from any other social media that I keep, which probably says something, but I don’t really want to get into what it says.

I might try to look at the post/ the prompt in the future when I run out of things to write about, but for now, I’m just going to leave it in the drafts.

For all that this is probably a rambling mess, I think that it was actually really helpful for me to think about what I wanted to write today. Maybe I should spend more time doing free writing to plan out the books/whatever I want to write in the future. It’s certainly something that’s worth thinking about. Maybe tomorrow before I write for NaNo I’ll spend some time thinking about where, exactly, I’m trying to lead the story.

since it’s a collective, as I’ve learned↩︎
the obvious initialism for the site↩︎
is there something to unpack in that? Probably. Do I have any intention of unpacking it? Not even a little right now↩︎
though I should really confirm this number↩︎
not in a judgemental way, just in a statement of fact way↩︎
but nothing, honestly. It absolutely does, and it’s wild to me that people forget that she kind of created that entire genre trope.↩︎
in short, because of the aforementioned desire to do things poetically, and because I don’t do much of that writing generally, so practicing seems like a good idea right now.↩︎
though why I don’t is probably worth investigating. It certainly has something to do with the fact that I don’t love didactic fiction, but there’s probably more to it than that↩︎
obviously the reader, but that’s too meta for me right now↩︎
that is, fiction told through letters.↩︎
hmm, is this what people mean when they say that they’re plotting a book? Because I kind of like this, and would like to get better at it. Right now my NaNo book is kind of stalled because I feel like I’ve got nothing to do but fill space before the final climax of the book, since I’ve hit more or less every plot point that I meant to hit.↩︎
it feels weird to put two periods back to back, but I think that’s the proper stylizing for etc. at the end of a sentence. I suppose I could look it up, but that seems like a lot of work that I don’t really want to do.↩︎
since I’m about to go try and write the story, will report back with findings↩︎
for all that I do sincerely doubt that will happen. The site is not super encouraging of unprompted criticism, which I generally think is a positive.↩︎
more on that later↩︎

Pathfinder Again

As I alluded to yesterday, I’m currently playing a Pathfinder 2E campaign with some friends. It’s an interesting concept, where we groundhog’s day¹ back to the start of the dungeon every time that we die. Due in large part to that being the agreed upon mechanic, the game is primarily combat focused.

Our GM had the stated goal of getting better at creating and executing combats during the course of the campaign. He is one of my alleged cousins,² and the party consists of me, my brother³, the GM’s brother⁴, and the GM’s former roommate.⁵ It’s been a fun experience, in large part because of the lack of consequences. Often when I play DnD or an equivalent game, I try very hard to both focus on the specific combat and having a good time there and also on the broader story arc. That can be a little exhausting, because fighting optimally is fun for me, but is not necessarily reflective of the characters I enjoy roleplaying outside of combat.⁶ In this game, however, I’ve decided to play a character who is concerned about the fact that he hasn’t died yet.

More than that, the DM has given us free reign to rewrite our character sheets between attempted delves, which adds a layer of dehumanization as an RP’er. My character no longer really knows what is real, since he truly remembers being born of Black Dragons, but now seems to be born of Blue Dragon.⁷ It’s been really fun, and I’m excited to play again. The rest of the post will be written tonight, when we’re finished with the session. It may be a first person log, from my character, depending on how I feel.

Well, this time I was the only fatality. The issue with playing a game where everyone⁸ has an undergraduate degree in chemistry, and the majority of us are getting degrees in something at least vaguely related to chemistry is that you run into some dangerously real world interactions. In PF2e, there’s a Class⁹ that allows you to create metal structures. There are a number of monsters which create acid, which our GM ruled can erode metal structures, because metal, as we know, dissolves in acid.

One of our group members, being a chemist, recognized the redox reaction that implies. Iron, when dissolved in acid, converts to Iron Oxide. The oxygen, obviously, comes from somewhere. In the case of dissolving in acid, that tends to come from water.

Now, water, as we all know, is made of two hydrogens and an oxygen. When you pull the oxygen out of water, you are left with hydrogen. Through potentially relevant situations, the monster we were fighting ended up on fire.¹⁰ When the monster then ate away what the GM decided was 60 pounds of iron, that meant that we had reacted away approximately 550 moles of iron.

That ended up making something around 1200 liters of hydrogen gas.¹¹ The GM ruled that was worth 40 d6 fire damage. I, stupidly, had just jumped next to the monster, and so was caught in the blast as well. Had I been at full health, it would have almost killed me at once. Since I was doing my job as a bartender and tanking the hit, I completely died at once. I’m excited to be revived next week, and to have learned absolutely no lessons from the experience.

Update a few minutes later: I apparently got to come back to life.¹² Now we’re going sailing, for some reason.¹³ Thankfully, I have taken the nicest feat in pathfinder¹⁴ We found a river drake, and through situations completely outside of our control¹⁵ it tried to fight us. It’s very fun being a barbarian, because my strategy is very simple. If I am close enough to punch, I use a war flail and smash it. If not, I either throw a bomb or a javelin, depending on how much of a threat the object appears.

In the case of the water drake, it was very easy to dispatch, likely due to the fact that we are all fifth level and got a turn off before it did. With a couple of lucky criticals, we dispatched it before it had a chance to fight. A part of me feels bad, but that voice is a small one. I realized the group did not know that I dislike dragons, which is the only part I feel bad about.

We then encountered some other creatures that also do not speak Draconic. As a result, we were able to tell them that the river drake had attacked us for no reason. Unfortunately, they also wanted the eggs, so we had a bit of a disagreement over how to make that happen. After offering them other foods, they tried to fight us.¹⁶

Annoyingly enough, I failed my single attack roll, which meant that I mostly just stood around as the rest of the party killed the monsters. I did my job, however, and soaked up the damage that they wanted to output. In such a regard, I really do a great job of playing damage sponge for the group.

I’m not capitalizing this even though it’s a holiday (should be capitalized) and referencing the movie, which was then verbed (should be capitalized). If pressed, I’ll argue that it’s like a double negative, for all that I just really don’t want to capitalize it right now↩︎
if you don’t know what I’m referencing, just substitute family friend↩︎
the one I have actual blood with (if you know from outside of this ’blog that the number of brothers by blood I have is not equal to one, you’re welcome to ask me for clarifications, because I presumably know you in real life↩︎
who is technically the person I claimed to be cousins with, but that was more a system of convenience than anything else↩︎
who I don’t know if I’ve ever actually met in meatspace (an expression I love)↩︎
for those not seeing the issue, the optimal way to fight in a game like DnD is to be a complete sociopath. I generally like to play characters with empathy, which makes killing hordes of defenseless creatures have some cognitive dissonance↩︎
Barbarian with the Draconic Primal instinct. We started fighting monsters that were resistant to lightning, so changed the design so that now I deal Acid Damage instead.↩︎
I think, at the very least 4 of the five of us↩︎
I think, maybe it’s an ancestry↩︎
persistent damage in pathfinder is great, and my only regret is not having more sources of it↩︎
don’t ask me for that conversion, because I just relied on a friend’s number↩︎
in universe reason: we keep respawning because shrug. Out of universe reason, it was early and everyone else wanted to continue exploring.↩︎
being totally honest, I tuned out a little bit while I was dead, because I role play very hard.↩︎
assurance, which just lets you always roll a 10 and ignore any circumstances on a skill of your choice. As a barbarian, that means athletics, which is my most useful skill, and meant that we navigated with no struggles at all↩︎
read: I am the only member of the party who speaks draconic, and my character hates dragon related creatures, though the party doesn’t know that↩︎
this time I don’t think it’s my fault, because I tried hard to make peace and failed unintentionally↩︎
got a pr for it i think, with 2819 net words at the end of the hour↩︎
I really don’t trust the count on this site, so I don’t use it for anything real↩︎
I write with a fountain pen, yes, why do you ask? I really like the ink color, and wow it just writes so smoothly, it’s such a nice change. I tried to write with a mechanical pencil the other day and it was so hard.↩︎

Musings

I'm just copying my father

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