well this is gonna be a weird reportback
i had been feeling frustrated with all the coding, and also pretty burnt out on writing porn stuff. and i keep still reading bad progression fantasy stuff. so i decided to write my own bad progression fantasy, just to try out some serial writing. so far it's going okay. i've been mostly sticking with 2k words a day 5 days a week, which is... a whole lot of writing. it's been fairly easy to maintain just because: i do not actually care about quality here. "writer's block" for me has always been about feeling like the words i write are bad, & here it's like... yeah like nearly everything on royalroad is bad. when my story first got approved it was approved right after somebody's "diary of a wimpy kid" erotic martial arts fanfiction, featuring explicit scenes of a 4 year old erotically drinking milk. the entire genre of progression fantasy is intensely formulaic. who cares about quality.
anyway my story is a "dungeon core" story, which i've always found to be a very funny subgenre because it inevitably ends up being like a mix between telling somebody about rearranging a terrarium and a text-only let's play of a game that doesn't exist. (tbh some of the most interesting stories on royalroad, conceptually, are the ones that are literally writeups of a play-by-forum game. people have put together entire custom rpg systems for polling audience response & rolling skill checks as part of writing the story. it ends up being, well, like a writeup of somebody's d&d campaign: kind of interesting but also wildly flouting every guideline for how to construct a narrative b/c the author has no clue where anything is going. definitely an interesting creative artifact though.)
also while i'm talking about this i might as well repeat, again, how wild it was to stumble across the progression fantasy genre? because it made me go, "oh, this is the genre of story that HPMOR was". at the time, reading HPMOR, i kept being like, "what are these narrative decisions that yudkowsky is making; this is a weird glimpse into a bizarre mindset of how fiction is written and engaged with". like his whole thing of how all the characters need to be cool and super powerful because it's impossible to empathize with anyone who is weak and has problems. or how it presented this idea that fiction is entirely about setting up a series of problems for your protagonist to solve so you can vicariously enjoy solving problems. yudkowsky explicitly said "oh yeah i wanted to have a bit where harry didn't win immediately but i thought that would be too alienating and boring for people to read". it was just this collection of downright grotesque ideas about the purpose of fiction, and it was singularly bizarre.
and then i found out it was an entire genre of fiction!! which made HPMOR less a singular bizarre artifact and more deeply pathetic (it's still the most prominent product MIRI has ever released, etc). like imagine putting your full effort into trying to save the world and all you can produce is some miserably formulaic power fantasy harry potter fanfiction.
anyway i don't exactly know how long i'm going to keep writing this thing, & i'm gonna try to actually finish it up soon, since the longer it goes on the less likely i am to actually finish it, and also if there's one thing i've learned from reading an enormous amount of royalroad fiction it's that once things hit the like, 300 chapter mark they have usually bled themselves dry of all their fun premises and after that point it's just grim power grinding for the next five million chapters.
(also on a somewhat-related note i've been reading through the start of berserk and that's also a fun look into the nature of serialized media. kentaro miura said like, "oh yeah when i started writing all i knew was that guts was really angry; i didn't know what he was angry about". griffith as a character was invented three or four chapters in; chapter 1 of berserk is just guts being super cool with an auto-crossbow. all the actual plot and characterization slowly evolved out of a need to keep producing more chapters on a fixed schedule.)
so aiming to place my serial writing on a scale between berserk and "the legend of randitly ghosthound", currently on chapter 1918 of miserable litrpg grinding, i would say i hope to rank somewhere in the middle.
anyway my dumb dungeon core story is over here and you can read it if you want to, but i wouldn't necessarily recommend it.
i had been feeling frustrated with all the coding, and also pretty burnt out on writing porn stuff. and i keep still reading bad progression fantasy stuff. so i decided to write my own bad progression fantasy, just to try out some serial writing. so far it's going okay. i've been mostly sticking with 2k words a day 5 days a week, which is... a whole lot of writing. it's been fairly easy to maintain just because: i do not actually care about quality here. "writer's block" for me has always been about feeling like the words i write are bad, & here it's like... yeah like nearly everything on royalroad is bad. when my story first got approved it was approved right after somebody's "diary of a wimpy kid" erotic martial arts fanfiction, featuring explicit scenes of a 4 year old erotically drinking milk. the entire genre of progression fantasy is intensely formulaic. who cares about quality.
anyway my story is a "dungeon core" story, which i've always found to be a very funny subgenre because it inevitably ends up being like a mix between telling somebody about rearranging a terrarium and a text-only let's play of a game that doesn't exist. (tbh some of the most interesting stories on royalroad, conceptually, are the ones that are literally writeups of a play-by-forum game. people have put together entire custom rpg systems for polling audience response & rolling skill checks as part of writing the story. it ends up being, well, like a writeup of somebody's d&d campaign: kind of interesting but also wildly flouting every guideline for how to construct a narrative b/c the author has no clue where anything is going. definitely an interesting creative artifact though.)
also while i'm talking about this i might as well repeat, again, how wild it was to stumble across the progression fantasy genre? because it made me go, "oh, this is the genre of story that HPMOR was". at the time, reading HPMOR, i kept being like, "what are these narrative decisions that yudkowsky is making; this is a weird glimpse into a bizarre mindset of how fiction is written and engaged with". like his whole thing of how all the characters need to be cool and super powerful because it's impossible to empathize with anyone who is weak and has problems. or how it presented this idea that fiction is entirely about setting up a series of problems for your protagonist to solve so you can vicariously enjoy solving problems. yudkowsky explicitly said "oh yeah i wanted to have a bit where harry didn't win immediately but i thought that would be too alienating and boring for people to read". it was just this collection of downright grotesque ideas about the purpose of fiction, and it was singularly bizarre.
and then i found out it was an entire genre of fiction!! which made HPMOR less a singular bizarre artifact and more deeply pathetic (it's still the most prominent product MIRI has ever released, etc). like imagine putting your full effort into trying to save the world and all you can produce is some miserably formulaic power fantasy harry potter fanfiction.
anyway i don't exactly know how long i'm going to keep writing this thing, & i'm gonna try to actually finish it up soon, since the longer it goes on the less likely i am to actually finish it, and also if there's one thing i've learned from reading an enormous amount of royalroad fiction it's that once things hit the like, 300 chapter mark they have usually bled themselves dry of all their fun premises and after that point it's just grim power grinding for the next five million chapters.
(also on a somewhat-related note i've been reading through the start of berserk and that's also a fun look into the nature of serialized media. kentaro miura said like, "oh yeah when i started writing all i knew was that guts was really angry; i didn't know what he was angry about". griffith as a character was invented three or four chapters in; chapter 1 of berserk is just guts being super cool with an auto-crossbow. all the actual plot and characterization slowly evolved out of a need to keep producing more chapters on a fixed schedule.)
so aiming to place my serial writing on a scale between berserk and "the legend of randitly ghosthound", currently on chapter 1918 of miserable litrpg grinding, i would say i hope to rank somewhere in the middle.
anyway my dumb dungeon core story is over here and you can read it if you want to, but i wouldn't necessarily recommend it.
