The Index

This is an index of things I've written and posted online, with minimal descriptions because most of them have blurbs if you click the link. This list is not exhaustive, especially because there are a bunch of short stories and dribbles in various places. If something you liked is missing, let me know.

Web Serials

Worth the Candle - Juniper Smith is a teenaged Dungeon Master who ends up in a world filled with all the things he dreamt up for his campaigns, along with signs of his friend who died months earlier. This Used to be About Dungeons - Five teenagers live in a house together, bake bread, tend the garden, and occasionally fight monsters in dungeons. Thresholder - Thresholders travel from world to world, fantasy one minute and scifi the next, always encountering an opponent, growing stronger as they battle. Shadows of the Limelight - Fame gives you superpowers, and Dominic just saved the world's greatest hero from defeat in full view of a large audience. Glimwarden (unfinished) - A small town huddles around lanterns that keep the darklings at bay. Four teenagers must grow in power as the darkness encroaches. The Dark Wizard of Donkerk (unedited) - Two men steal a baby from an orphanage, then find out he's too cute to sacrifice and raise him as their own.

Fanfic

The Metropolitan Man (Superman) - Lex Luthor attempts to unravel the secrets of the alien. A Common Sense Guide to Doing the Most Good (Superman) - Superman gets really into effective altruism. Instruments of Destruction (Star Wars) - A fable of project management aboard the second Death Star, through the eyes of Admiral Tian Jerjerrod. Branches on the Tree of Time (Terminator) - Sarah Connor is working as a software engineer at UCLA when a naked man shows up on her doorstep. A Bluer Shade of White (Frozen) - Elsa can make life, and Olaf is smarter than he looks.

Shorts

Eager Readers in Your Area - Artificial intelligence has left authors scrambling for readers. Charlotte clicks on an ad. Variations - An orc visits an art exhibition where she feels out of place. Contratto - Julia takes a job as a marketer, working for the vampires to keep their secrets safe. The Randi Prize - James Randi offers a prize for anyone who can demonstrate supernatural abilities. Coming Home - After a long time isekaied to a fantasy kingdom, an errant father has coffee with his estranged son. Drips and Drabs - A collection of microfiction

I also post short stuff to this very tumblr, which can usually be found under the #microfiction tag unless I forget. Usually this is mirrored on AO3, unless I'm lazy.

Web Comics

Millennial Scarlet - Lamont Pearce is a gig economy demon hunter whose mother ran a government agency meant to defend against Hell. Worth the Candle - A webcomic adaptation of the web serial

Non-Fiction

The AI Art Apocalypse - Slightly outdated thoughts from 2022. Why to Write a Sex Scene - Observations on the narrative purpose of carnal pursuits. Game Review: Underhill - This review contains no screenshots, because this game does not exist. Writing: An FAQ - Accumulated wisdom from 4 million words and counting. Creating Interesting Magic - A much-requested post on making interesting magic systems (and characters, and plots, and worlds). How to Write a Web Serial - It's both easier and harder than you think. The Trouble with Writing Nazis - On giving villains too much credit. Interesting Things to do with Time Loops - Exploring the boundaries of the conceit.

One of my favorite Flaming Lips songs is "Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots", but today I learned that I had one of the lyrics wrong:

I always thought this was "But you won't let those robots beat me, Yoshimi".

And now I have some questions about why a robot would be eating a person. Why does a robot even have a mouth? The song establishes that these are evil robots, which Yoshimi will destroy, but were they made with evil intent in mind? Was there some engineering reason that they're even capable of devouring human flesh?

It's changing everything that I thought I knew about the pink robots.

I dropped my son off at school after an appointment, and when I was signing him in, had a chance to look at the list of reasons that kids were out. Most were just "appt", but there were a cluster that said "DST", i.e. "day light savings", which I thought was pretty funny.

Got really in the zone writing last night, the hours just flew by. Woke up this morning and it turns out it was just daylight savings.

Initial thoughts on Slay the Spire 2: yup, that's more Slay the Spire. Enough so that I'm left wondering why or whether a sequel was necessary? I guess there are things I might unlock later I'm not seeing now, but if the core gameplay is largely identical, I'm wondering why there's a "2" here. The art is much improved, and it clearly has a larger budget, but ... I don't know, maybe mods of the original game have spoiled me. Maybe I was thinking that it would be a major change, some leap forward in design.

I watched the Megalopolis doc Megadoc, and I think it's underlined something that I've been thinking more and more over time: pantsing is pretty much strictly inferior to plotting, with the exception that pantsing is a lot more fun.

Now, it's different for film than it is for writing, because film is horrendously expensive and, taking place in physical reality, requires physical objects that take time and labor to make. You have a shooting schedule that you have to stick with, and a budget that you can't balloon too much, and if you want someone to wear a different dress than the one that was prepared, you have to wait for wardrobe to get everything in place, during which time you have to pay everyone who's on set.

But having just finished writing Untitled Villainess Otome, which was largely on the improvisational side of things, and while it was fun, and while I'm approximately happy with it as it stands, I kept thinking about how much I was learning in the process of writing, and how much work it would be to shape it into its "final form".

So the correct thing to do, IMO, is just to get everything exactly correct on the first draft, and to do that, you have to understand where and when you can improvise, and also preplan as much as possible so you have a framework for improvisation later. You want to be able to bring the bones in and lay the meat and skin down on them, but do it in such a way that the bones are robust to changes in the muscles, and so you don't wind up with an abomination.

And if you're making a film and you really feel the need for everything to be "alive" and not pinned down, to have freedom, then for fuck's sake make a low budget movie where you're not pissing money every minute you're waiting on wardrobe or set design or actors.

I just finished Esoteric Ebb, a game that's very clearly taking enormous inspiration from Disco Elysium, but with D&D. It's got a detective, his sidekick, a bunch of politics, the voices in his head, a similar sort of humor ... I think what's shocking to me is that it actually works?

That is, of all the games that you might be tempted to take heavy inspiration from, Disco Elysium seems like one where that ambition is most likely to go wrong. And here, somehow, it has not.

There's a really effective rhetorical trick you can do where you say something pretty innocuous and vague, but phrased in such a way that everyone knows what you're talking about. This means that if anyone wants to address your blanket statement, they have to not just bring the nuance, but introduce the actual topic of discussion as well. And then you can say that they're telling on themselves!

Example:

There's some kind of cheating scandal in sports.

You: People shouldn't cheat. Them: Why are you so obsessed with [athlete name]? You: Oh ho, but I never said [athlete name]! You said it. So you agree they cheated.

The rhetorical trick is exceptionally effective in modern screenshot-oriented discourse, and a cousin to vagueposting where it's understood by everyone reading the original message will know exactly what topic you're talking about.

From what I've seen, it's really easy to get people with it.

One of the things about being a writer is that you have scenes that get stuck in your head, and the only way to release them is to write them. I think this is pretty common for writers, but what they don't tell you is that sometimes the scene isn't even all that necessary or compelling.

Case in point, I have this scene, disconnected from any actual project, of a fast food manager explaining that their burgers have exactly one slice of cheese and exactly three pickles, and that adding any more than that is, in some sense, theft. And I feel like there's some meat there, something that I want to express, but it's definitely not a set piece, and doesn't even have a project it can be plopped down into.

But I know it'll keep rattling around in my head until I get it out on the page, where it can be safely forgotten.

I'm bad at frying eggs, I think mostly because of heat control. I make eggs only once a week, on Sunday, and whatever lessons were learned the previous week, they seem to be entirely forgotten.

I told my wife that we should just eat eggs for three meals a day, so that I would get some high-repetition learning in, and she told me that she would rather just eat "perfectly acceptable" eggs.

Now, if she knew me, she would know that "perfectly acceptable" is a slight against my honor ...

I'm always impressed when I'm watching a movie and someone gets a phone number or a code and remembers it immediately. Wouldn't be me.

Sometimes automated movie recommendations are just so fucking funny.

The question I find myself asking is, is it going to be easier to train occult detectives to be deep sea divers, or to train deep sea divers to be occult detectives?