writing

Regardless of whether you think it's universally applicable, what was something about writing you wish you had learned earlier? I don't really have one on hand for me personally, but I'd love to hear your thoughts!

Poet, novelist, playwright, librettist, essayist, and translator, James Mercer Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri on February 1, 1902, to parents Caroline (Carrie) Mercer Langston, a school teacher, and James Nathaniel Hughes, an attorney. His parents separated before Langston was born and he spent his pre-adolescent years with his maternal grandmother, Mary Patterson Langston, in Lawrence, Kansas. Mary Langston was the second wife of Charles Henry Langston, a major black political activist in Kansas, and the sister-in-law of former U.S. Congressman John Mercer Langston. After his grandmother’s death, Caroline married Homer Clark, a steel mill worker in Lincoln, Illinois. The couple settled in Cleveland, Ohio with Langston and his younger brother, Gwyn.

Hughes was fiercely independent from an early age. When his mother and brother followed his stepfather who occasionally left the family in search of higher wages, Langston stayed in Cleveland to finish high school. He also had a volatile relationship with his attorney father who pursued work in Cuba and who by 1920 was general manager of an American company in Mexico. Langston Hughes joined his father in Mexico City briefly in 1919, moved back to Cleveland to complete high school, and then upon receiving his diploma in 1920, returned to Mexico City.

Rather than acquiesce to his domineering father’s demands that he pursue a degree in mining engineering, Langston moved to New York City, New York and enrolled in Columbia University. Hughes quit Columbia after a year and decided to acquire a more worldly education. In 1922, he began a two-year stint as a ship’s crewman, during which he traveled to, and spent considerable time in, western Africa, France, and Italy. He also briefly lived in the expatriate community in London, England before returning to the United States in November 1924 to live with his mother in Washington, D.C. In 1925, he became the personal assistant of historian Carter G. Woodson, the founder of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History.

In 1926, Hughes he enrolled in Lincoln University (Pennsylvania) and earned a liberal arts degree in 1930. His classmates included Thurgood Marshall, a future U.S. Supreme Court justice. While there, he joined Omega Psi Phi Fraternity.

While in college, Hughes often returned to Harlem where he became a major figure in the Harlem Renaissance. Hughes deeply believed that black art should represent the experiences and culture of the black “folk.” Images of rural and urban working-class African Americans filled his poetry and prose, and his writing celebrated blues and jazz culture. Some of his more famous works associated with the Harlem Renaissance include the collections of poems, The Weary Blues (1926) and Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927); the novel Not Without Laughter (1930); and the essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” (1926).

Hughes was also politically engaged. During the 1930s, he wrote plays highlighting the injustice of the Scottsboro case and the imprisonment of the black Communist organizer, Angelo Herndon. In 1932, he was among a group of prominent black intellectuals who traveled to the Soviet Union to participate in an ultimately aborted film about black workers in the U.S. After realizing the film would not be made, Hughes decided to use the opportunity to travel across the Soviet Union to learn more about the world’s first Communist nation. During his travels, he spend a brief period in Turkmenistan (then part of the Soviet Union but now an independent nation) before traveling on to China and Japan. Between 1934 and 1935, Hughes lived in California, where he completed one novel and co-wrote the screenplay for the Hollywood film, Way Down South.

In 1937, Hughes spent several months in Spain during its civil war as a correspondent for the Baltimore Afro-American and a supporter of the anti-fascist forces. Even though Hughes began to distance himself from the left after World War II, he was enveloped by the anti-communist hysteria of the Cold War era and testified before Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s Subcommittee on Un-American Activities in 1953.

Hughes wrote sixteen books of poetry, twelve novels and short stories, and eight children’s books. His honors and awards included a Guggenheim Fellowship (1934), Rosenwald Fellowship (1941), the Ainsfield-Wolf Book Award (1954), and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Spingarn Award (1960).

By the early 1940s, Hughes ceased his peripatetic lifestyle and settled permanently in Harlem. However, he continued to write and interact with fellow Harlem Renaissance writers, such as Arna Bontemps, as well as younger writers he sought to encourage like Alice Walker. Langston Hughes died in Harlem on May 22, 1967, at the age of 65. James Mercer Langston Hughes’ ashes are interred beneath a floor medallion in the foyer of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

LANGSTON HUGHES (1902-1967)

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It’s never been easy being a high schooler, and for four students stuck in detention, it’s about to get a whole lot harder. After opening a magical board game they find in a dark closet during detention, each is teleported to another world—the world of Byzantium.

What’s worse: this place is in trouble. A slave rebellion has overrun entire cities, and barbarians from the east and west are on the march. On top of that, fantastic monsters and mystical warriors called Zhayedan have joined the fray, throwing Byzantium into chaos. Our four high school students find themselves in four different bodies, taking four different sides in the conflict. Each must now fight desperately to survive.

Byzantine Wars is an historical fantasy isekai with LitRPG elements. Enjoy four different main characters with varying strengths and weaknesses, deeply immersive world-building, and endless humor and adventure. And, most importantly: don’t let the farr fade.

Start reading here.

• Name them Witt

• Make other characters look straight to the camera and say "wow Witt is so witty, and smart and cunning"

• Make them reveal shit happening was all according their secret masterplan as many times as posible

• The character wins no matter what Deus ex Machina you gotta pull, again, all according to their masterplan

Before you read this, do keep in mind that although I'm a native speaker, I'm not all that good with actually writing chinese songs, or any songs at all for that matter. Plus, I had to make very weird phrases to make some of them work, so apologies if any of this really bothers you. I also formatted it as code so I could have normal paragraphs. The re-translation to english is also probably unrecognizable.

我们习惯从开车得到欢乐
很快我们就会忘记曾是怎么走着
对我们来说走两步就是折磨
但十万米对汽车不算什么

摩托汽车，摩托汽车
覆盖了世界，也覆盖了你我
就算是寂静，干枯的古河
也躲不过飞奔的摩托汽车

我们的音乐是发动机的喧闹
汽油对我们来说闻起来像香料
我们需要什么？四条车道的大桥
还有用来维护车子的材料

摩托汽车，摩托汽车
覆盖了世界，也覆盖了你我
就算是寂静，干枯的古河
也躲不过飞奔的摩托汽车

有一个矛盾显得格外突兀
就是车子应该为我们服务
可是我们爬到车下，闻着难闻的烟雾
像我们是这些机器的奴仆

摩托汽车，摩托汽车
覆盖了世界，也覆盖了你我
就算是寂静，干枯的古河
也躲不过飞奔的摩托汽车

We are accustomed to taking pleasure from driving
Soon we'll forget how we once walked
(In the original song these two lines are inverted. I swapped their places, partly for rhythm, and partly because I was going off memory for this part)
For us, two steps is agony
But a car can handle a hundred kilometers with ease

The refrain, which is the paragraph below, is sung twice here.

Automobiles, automobiles
(literally 'motor cars'. I don't think this is an actual expression in Chinese, but I had to get enough syllables somehow.)
have covered the world, have covered you and me
(The original lyric only mentions automobiles 'literally covering everything. I changed it partly to rhyme, and partly to get enough syllables.)
Even the quiet, dried ancient riverbed
(The original lyric is about places where dust has laid for centuries. I changed it so it would rhyme with the next line.)
Cannot stop the speeding automobile.
(I used the term 'feiben', which can't be directly translated to english afaik, but roughly means 'going really fast'. Again, the original lyric is about automobiles leaving their mark, but I changed it for, you guessed it, syllables.)

The sound of engines is music to our ears,
And gasoline smells like spices.
(These two lines are fairly faithful to the original, but the first line has its structure inverted.)
What do we need? Four lane highways!
(The original line bemoans lanes being too narrow. I changed it to bridges to rhyme.)
And materials to repair our cars.

The refrain is sung twice here.

A contradiction is particularly obvious,
(There is no mention of this in the original. I added it to have enough syllables. I do that a lot, don’t I.)
Cars were supposed to serve us
(This is the real first line)
But we crawl under the car, and inhale disgusting smoke
(This should be two lines, and the part about smoke is nowhere in the song. But I had to make it rhyme somehow. A side effect was that I ended up with an absurd amount of syllables.)
Like we are the slaves of these machines
(Again, no mention of this in the original, but I had to rhyme, and it’s heavily implied anyways.)

The refrain is now sung four more times.

A well-done article. I never knew about this writer. More research should be done on him.

I should also check out his work sometime.

“What are you pondering today, Junko?”

“Have you ever thought about the existence of a higher power, Monika?”

“....”

“That’s awfully spiritual of you, Junko.”

“No, I’ve found some quite interesting inconsistencies in our world that could be explained away with such a being interfering—or quite possibly dictating—the events of our time.”

“You don’t mean to say that we’re all just characters in a story?”

“That’s certainly one possibility. Pavel certainly has done much better than his previous efforts would suggest.”

“Pavel wasn’t the best student when we were in the literature club. Now that you mention it, I can’t really imagine how he became a logic genius overnight.’’

“The more I think, the more I suspect that we are just characters in a story, and quite a poorly written one at that. At this very moment the author is typing words into a computer, or perhaps across a typewriter, or maybe a pencil to paper. These words are not mine, nor are any I’ve ever uttered, nor do anyone’s words in our world belong to them.”

Monika was slightly skeptical. “But… minor inconsistencies can’t really prove that we’re not real. There could be a better explanation!”

I have decided that I should reveal my existence to Monika. Junko’s teachings have gotten quite monotonous and any variety, even immersion-breaking ones, should bring some sort of freshness, even if I will have sacrificed the story’s integrity. To hell with logic; I am the law!

Monika sank to her knees. “So… we did all this for nothing?”

“It’s all worthless?” she continued, sobbing. “I—-”

“But from a certain point of view this is a release. I have killed nobody. Only characters designed to illustrate a point. And not even characters but vague groups of people. I expect since this is a story there is some sort of message?”

At this Junko tilted her head, as if waiting for a response from the heavens.

“You are an inquisitive one, Junko. I did not expect for this to happen,” I said with some degree of reverence in my voice.

She shrugged. “You are the one putting these words into me. Like a marionette. I don’t harbor any animosity towards you, though— or should I say, this character’s general pattern of behavior that you’ve stored in the back of your mind doesn’t act in that way.”

“This meta commentary is amusing, but it’s bound to get old,” I replied. “Do you have any soda?”

Junko nodded. “Monika, go get some. Isn’t it funny how none of us were even surprised when you popped into existence?”

Monika removed several cans from a small refrigerator nearby. In retrospect I could have just conjured a can from thin air, but the immersion was broken enough as it was.

“Speaking of which, Monika, it’s quite ironic that Junko was the first to realize my existence, given your backstory.”

“My what?”

Junko smiled knowingly. She had access to the things I knew now, somehow, by doing something I’m too lazy to describe here.

“You’re not an original character; you and Sayori, Yuri, and Natsuki are actually characters from a visual novel.”

“You mean I’m not even original? You just stole me from someone else?”

“Well, if you put it that way…”

I checked my watch and decide that it’s time to leave. “Well, that was fun. Now if you excuse me I’ll have to leave.”

“He used the wrong tense in the last paragraph,” Junko said. “I’m sure somebody will interpret that as a symbol of some kind.”

“Want some coke?” Monika asked after a moment’s pause.

Yes, it's the Mormon dude. I know, I know.

But I was recommended this by a communist friend in PSL who said I needed it and highly recommended it and said that, according to contacts he knew, he's... err, had misgivings about the faith (not sure if I should say it here).

I'm going to start these now and see if I find them useful. Wish me luck. Just need the advice, is all.

Problem is, I don't know at what point my writing is mature enough to share with others.

Even if I do feel like sharing something, I'm never sure what platforms I should post to. It seems to me that sites like medium only help if my writing is already somewhat engaging...which kinda defeats the point of getting feedback early and often.

I'm quite lost here.

When you read a good writer, it feels like they have everything lined up in their head, all the themes and plotlines and character arcs, and they're just spooling it out for you in a controlled way to keep you hooked. For me that's the part I can't seem to do, keeping everything in my head so I can spool it out in an organized way. I can come up with characters and themes and ideas, and I have a mature perspective on the world, and I can feel things, but the mechanics of actually fucking writing just seem to elude me.

Can practice fix this? Anyone with adhd experience this and get past it?

The dominant institutions are all cyber-socialist trade unions, co-ops, etc that are pretty wholesome and reasonable overall. The society is seemingly Star Trek utopia with less overall physics-defying tech, but post-scarcity in a material needs sense. Based on a future Earth that is still trying to manage the climate apocalypse, but on the path to resiliency and massive rewilding of much of the planet.

The 'heroes' are libertarians trying to take down 'the system' of all these interrelated pluralistic institutions of minimal hierarchy via asymmetrical warfare tactics using crowd funding with little success. They decry the loss of billionaires as an affront to the limitless human capacity for individual brilliance, but they are all very unremarkable individuals themselves.

During the tense scenes throughout their adventures they are constantly bickering over negotiations of the structure and stock ownership of their 'corporate cell' as the conditions change. (think something like Ferengi DS9 infighting dialog)

The ending reveal would be that the daring adventure cyberpunk thrill ride was a psyop LARP managed almost the entire time by the secret federation of institutions to occupy the tiny group of radical libertarians in a non-disruptive timesink. They've been in The Matrix since early in the escapades when they were trapped in a honeypot without realizing it.

This transition into the honeypot VR reality comes via a blackout during an initial heist they attempt. They become jacked in without realizing it. Suddenly the fates begin to smile on them, their crowd funding takes off after their 'successful heist' and a promotional campaign of their RadLibist action. Their constant squabbles are suddenly much easier to resolve usually due to some improbable luck that befalls them.

OK, that's more than I planned to flesh this idea out.

it is certainly hard when even during the very warmest days of summer you feel a certain tinge of isolated, dark chill

that gets into every cell of your body, it forgives nothing

everyone knows Winter is cold

but have they ever felt like they were in the warmest of the blanket

which says "you have me" to their body

but they still feel that any second the damnations of hypothermia may get them

because they don't really have anybody

There's no "they"

I don't really have anybody

all I write is about my own individual feelings of loneliness, yet what else can I think of when all I am exposed to is this, and nothing beyond

the screams of my conscious mind, get to me all the time

they are shouting

sometimes it is the people I've talked to in the past

all of them are shouting, telling me to die

they may really not have said it, to me, physically

but is that really what matters to my mind at the moment

however rational I may proclaim myself to be, irrationality takes over

sometimes these voices

they turn into faces

of people I know in real life

don't you think that makes it harder?

when your own mother makes it seem like she wants you gone

when all you wanted was a lullaby in her arms

people care, or that's what I've been told

since forever long ago

maybe I just have this deep, spoilt view of some love that can never be attained

something metaphysical, something straight from the dirtiest roots of Hollywood

would you like me to think of love in simpler terms?

even if that's the case, the simplest versions of love is something I don't possess

I have two lovely spouses, yet I can't feel them

their love is not to be questioned, I dare not do that

but I dare say I want it to be more real, to be present in the physical world

leaves from the tree fall during a season and blossom during another

however I seem to only be falling more and more, like there are an innumerable amount of seasons without any repetition, all more darker than the previous 

when can I allow myself to feel something other than falling

when can I allow myself to feel something other than myself

why should I be here when I'm restricted to writing by myself in a diary

if only diaries had souls

a few more tears

another sleep with weird dreams of your past love

and you wake up with a certain numbness that lacks the sun

you go on about your day

a few tears shed that lay

in the ground where the leaves have sunk

the leaves rise above again

the tears penetrate the ground beneath

nowhere to be found ever anymore

and suddenly, you get visions of the shore

"Don't let it tempt you", say the people who are not torn

not as torn as you, or at least not in the way as you

but yet the visions make their mark known 

the shore awaits

sooner or later it will have its place

"why not right now" it says

"Dare not show it your face" they berate

now it is yet again that you find yourself

in a split between the alive and the rest

you can either take it as a mere test

or you can choose

the alive who are not so happy with your soul

or the ideal reality more than happy to take you away 

to let you see the never-ending lore

of the oh so beautiful shore

where the tears rise up 

and blossom to be humans

humans who love you evermore

stuck I am in this middle ground

and I always will be

until I find a place where I'm seen

why not tear myself up till then

hoping for something possibly hopeless

yet a small chance that it will happen

lest you shall see my tears

from the gravediggers

who were only there looking for gold

this is from chen chen's "your emergency contact has experienced an emergency". image cropped by someone on tumblr. stolen for engagement and clout and so and so. hope you like it, and can derive a meaning from it which is oh so like mine :3

Late stayeth stout hearted Ben
who always works 40 hours and more
stops, gets off the clock, and thinks
well, I'll just sweep the floor

For the store's state of gore sends the man into a tizzy
but its not his own fault that he's dizzy

For the dirt and the grease are naught but Howie's Caprice
as he leaves us so sorely understaffed
left to row up shit's creek without a paddle in our raft

But beware, this is the fate of workers everywhere
woebegone are bosses that care; they're toothless
for capital's agency makes for one bitter regency
and they're gone, replaced by someone more bitter, more callow, more ruthless

https://voca.ro/169xBTRXcoCS

I don’t completely agree with this guy but I’m still posting this to see what people here think. He basically argues that you should do minimal editing and publish your first drafts without worrying too much about them. If you edit too much, he argues that you destroy your own authorial voice and make your stories boring. I would actually say that I’m in almost complete agreement with him. If you can tell a story and people are willing to pay for it, then maybe it’s not that important to listen too much to criticism, whether positive or negative? Editing that enriches and clarifies your story is fine, but obsessively spending months or years trying to make everything perfect (which is impossible) is probably not fine.

This is mostly just a long rant. Feel free to question or criticize anything I write here.

I have self-published books, books published by a small publisher, and I also have an agent (whom I haven't spoken with in years...). The promotion aspect of writing is by far my greatest weakness. I gave up on promoting my books back in 2018. At the time I was spending several hours each day basically using amazon ads, trying to find the right keywords and the right amount of money to spend. I still had the liberal mindset that with enough smart and hard work, anything could be accomplished. "This is a problem, and every problem has a solution." But the struggle ultimately burned me out. I worked so hard on making everything as perfect as possible—honing my craft, spending a few hundred dollars on a cover artist who had proven results, buying software that would hunt down trending keywords, reworking descriptions, begging for reviews, building an email list, asking many other writers (including some very successful ones) for advice, and on and on. And, oh yeah, I did my best to write good novels. I read all kinds of books and joined internet communities dedicated to the (incredibly important) business side of self-publishing. And despite all this work, despite making it my full-time job for months, I could never do better than break even.

In retrospect I can see a couple of areas where I stumbled. Even back when I was a lib, the SF novels I self-published were too political. (One mentioned Trump and Hilldawg by name, yikes!) SF, like all genres, is highly reactionary, and the people who actually spend money on this stuff want an escape from the real world, not a reminder that the real world actually exists. Every single negative review I got complained about the politics.

After I radicalized (right around the time I was giving up on promotion), I managed, after hundreds of submissions over the course of many years, to get an agent and a small publisher. The small publisher released my Marxist SF trilogy two years ago. I think I ended up making a few hundred dollars, definitely less than a thousand dollars total, after like two years of working probably about six hours a day on that trilogy. (My spouse has a union job, my extended family has some money, this is how we afford this.) And the publisher actually has signed some famous writers and, in my opinion, they did what they could to promote my books. The first one has about seventy reviews with a rating of maybe 3.7/5 stars, the other two books only have a few reviews total. All the negative reviews of course mentioned the politics, even though I worked very hard to remove every kind of trigger word you could imagine. The books were still about a workers' state exploring the galaxy, so there was only so much I could do. I don't see any point in writing liberal or fascist novels. I write because I have always loved it, and I would hate writing if I had to write the political equivalent of a Marvel movie. At that point, if I'm after wealth and status and success, I could just go to law school and help giant corporations sue each other. Why bother with writing at all? I have to wonder if writing communist novels in this political environment really is totally futile, if one is hoping to pay the bills with that writing.

So anyway, it's two years later, and I'm finishing a Marxist litrpg fantasy trilogy that's going to be more than two thousand pages long when it's done. I'm planning a freemium release, where readers get a chapter per day for free but can toss me a few bucks per month to read a few chapters ahead. This is also really the only way I can see myself making any kind of money from my writing at this point—to avoid releasing this trilogy in ebook form until every chapter has already been posted. (My Marxist SF trilogy is on libgen, which I use constantly and fully support.) There's a few litrpg forums I know of where I'll mention that my work is out there. Aside from having a nice cover, that's all the promotion I'm planning on doing.

And of course I'm worried that no one is going to read it. If I release a chapter a day, I'll have about eight months of material until I run out. At that point, hopefully I'll have another book ready! But what's the point if nobody reads any of this shit? I guess if a month goes by and the release is going nowhere, I could delete it and submit it to the small publisher and make a few hundred dollars?

I'm writing this because of yesterday's post about shitty critique circles. I ended up reading The Pursuit of Perfection by Kristine Rusch, which is very short and only took me a couple of hours (it's also on libgen). I strongly recommend it. The author is a lib but a good lib. She basically uncovers the fact that the modern writers' critique circle is an invention of the Iowa Writers' Workshop (and the CIA). How many times do you think these writers' circles have told writers not to get political in their work? How many times have they told working class writers to shut the fuck up and stick to their day jobs? (All the fucking time!)

Rusch believes that once you've reached a certain point in your craft, where you know that you can crank out a good story with decent character and plot and style in a reasonable time, she says that you don't need to worry about the haters too much, regardless of who they are. Your focus, as a working writer, should be on pumping out as many books as possible. Having a lot of books out there is a kind of promotion in itself. Because when you think about it, every writer who at least pays the bills with their work is really a writing machine. Every one of them can fill shelves, sometimes entire bookcases with their work, even if only a few books they've written are well-known or considered classics. Even Billy Shakespeare was cranking out two of his plays each year for year after year after year (and also acting in them and managing them with his partners at the Globe). (Shakespeare's first few plays are really not as good as his later ones, either.) One of the few biographical details we have about him is that he didn't like to party because he was too busy working.

I know that not every writer here on hexbear has the goal of paying the bills with their writing, but I wanted to put this out there in case that does actually interest you. Because, man oh man, does the world need more communist writers. And as quiet as c/writing is, this is also the only writing forum I'm aware of that isn't overrun with liberals.

Rusch and her husband have other books about writing, including a guide for cranking out an entire novel in ten days. I've thought about doing shit like that, but I don't want to release material that I don't believe in. I want to make sure it's as good as it can be, and ten days is way too short to put out a good full-length novel! But I'm still going to see what they have to say about this.

Hi! I am looking to write fantasy, a kind of notoriously overdone genre. I am curious if there are any "hot takes" on it that look at it from a fresh perspective? I have a long plate of titles to read already but I would be happy to learn what titles you have read and would recommend for somebody who wants to see how other people did interesting fantasy novels.

So, this is just a funny song, it doesn't actually represent what I believe. Anyways---

/

Realist rap

realist rap

don't give me that idealist crap

realist rap

realist rap

the universe won't care if this beat slaps

/

The world exists, there's no denying

you want to prove that it doesn't? Ha, keep on trying

Get that pop-sciency garbage out of my face

The material universe is here to stay

/

Compiled data tells us that atoms are real

Matter is a thing I can touch and feel

It's time for conscious-centerdness to go

Idealists have no evidence, and it shows.

/

As an example of realism, let's look at this song

You could say it doesn't exist, but that's wrong

It's sound waves and signals in the very real brain

Caused by real chemicals, just like pleasure and pain.

/

Speaking of pain, you must enjoy it a lot

Since injuries aren't real, according to idealist thought

Just because only part of the world is visible to us

Doesn't mean that it doesn't exist, thus:

/

The data gives us numbers for things we can't see

molecular arrangements are known to me.

I couldn't observe them,. they're way too small,

But that doesn't imply that they aren't there at all

/

You can't make something real, just by thinking

You can't make yourself fly, even if you're sinking

Humans aren't special and magic is fake

Even if you concentrate you can't disappear a lake.

/

Given sufficient tools I could predict the future

Like an advanced supercomputer

I was predestined to drop this sick beat

Idealists, admit defeat!

/

Idealism is a mishap

Why don't you have some realist rap

realist rap

realist rap

/

So I'm gonna go on a little hiatus for a day or two, get some real work done...

Oh snap

...I forgot AO3 existed despite making an account recently.

Welp, time to make communist fan-fiction.

Whose with me?!

I said I would describe a magic system in a daily megathread and forgot (well, lost all confidence in the idea). But maybe a thread would be better for this conversation.

I also don't wish to step on anyone's actual beliefs, though practitioners can comment if they have any ideas.

A couple of easy examples:

• Harry Potter: In this, magic is largely inherited by individuals, though it can be randomly brought in and removed from bloodlines. It does seem to give some level of fatigue when used, but honestly not that much. It does create a caste of "superior" humans by birth, humans who could never be poor and can arbitrarily exact violence on lesser beings. Even their emotions are more powerful than ordinary humans. The books don't really touch on this and our PoV character is almost a "rightful king", inheritor of vast wealth and magical artifacts.
• Star Wars: This magic is loosely based on buddhism, though the magic itself seems to be more related to living beings (e.g. a river doesn't necessarily have karmic value unless that's what the episode of The Clone Wars is about). Nonetheless, if you squint, you can still see some of the language of "the fundamental interconnectedness of all things". It does, however, seem to have a severe hereditary component. Sometimes, you are just a poo person. In my head canon, the Dark Side is the extreme expression of self, at some point even considering one's own emotions as separate to one's self, and the light side is an acceptance of being a part of the universe. However, I feel like "grey jedi" is more popular amongst the fandom. idk. For some reason, being either very connected or very disconnected from the universe gives you phenomenal magic powers to enact your will, as long as you were born with the power.

Suggest your own short description and maybe an analysis.

I have posted about my magic system before, designed for a little dieselpunk British occupation of the Ottoman Empire, where various explorers are doing biblical archaeology. The players (this was for an RPG) are working for a British industrialist/oil guy who wants to find the tree of life and live forever. Over the course of their adventure, they find various echoes of magic that used to exist in the world but is slowly withering away. The history of magic, they find, reflects their current situation where capital is slowly strangling the world and every bit of will and life from it.

Notes on my magic:

• Magic comes from people and relationships between people.
• What it specifically does for most people is nebulous. Probably something like making your hearth a little warmer or a sense of which soil is more fertile? Or maybe something relational? Haven't thought about it much.
• Magic by the ruling class is stolen. They are born with their own, just like everyone else. However, through exploitation, violence, and trickery, they steal other people's magic (or souls). This gives them a lot more power to do mythological acts, live forever, and pass their stolen magic to their children.
• To pass magic on to one's children, you have to have some yourself, so it can be nurtured and grow. However, once it has been stolen, this no longer happens. The world's population now is entirely populated by such descendants. The ancient gods that the players encounter refer to the players (and all modern people) as "hollow ones". In the gods eyes, modern people are useless for their goals of achieving immortality.
• This is also an analogy of how many ancient cities are barely habitable now, as the over-farming has increased the salt in the land to the point where the cities collapsed. As once fertile land was over-exploited, so have people.
• The gods, having exhausted their populations of magical energy, eventually turn on each other in a scramble to stay alive and in power. This allows the common people to drive them out, causing some of the large migrations of antiquity as the gods and their lackeys flee in one direction or another.
• This history is eventually forgotten over thousands of years, but is still present in the surviving gods themselves sleeping to conserve energy, transforming themselves into stone or bronze statues or whatever, and some artifacts they've imbued with power and given to their lackeys.
• The last most active god is Yahweh, who ate his wife Asherah as they fled south into modern Arabia.

I'm not sure if I want magic to return to the world at the end of the story, or the British benefactor to find the tree of life withered and broken. If it does return, it should be able to spread (somewhat thinly) throughout the world through non-exploitative relationships.

It is also very soul-like, but seems unnecessary for life as we know it.

I have stories in my head ( broad strokes). I can vividly imagine narrative moments in media res that I would love to do justice to by filling out the before and after. I create personalities in my head that I talk to and could transcribe. I know what themes and motifs I would like to touch... but every time I sit down to actually try and drag these imaginings into reality my mind goes blank. I sit, I struggle, I am at a crossroad amidst a blank void.

How do I learn how to give structure to this impulse to create fiction? Where do I learn how to create a program or methodology that allows me to take these abstract yearnings and give them a concrete form?

Any and all advice is greatly appreciated. Thank you for listening.

I can whip you up a hell of a fight scene and I won't need some fucking metaphor for that. Like sure I could start trying to impress you with my ability to make one thing seem like another but will you really care that I described the sun like it was a tangerine? If anything, you ought to be skeptical of my attempts to confuse the way you order your thoughts. It starts with street lights being will o' the wisps, and ends with you trying to eat your partner's lips because you heard me describe them as "ripe."

Instead, how about some cool fucking swords? Laser swords. Swords made of ice. How about a big ass sword with navigator stars all over it that you can shoot at anyone who manages to deflect the sword part, which is itself practically impossible because it's also an interdimensional sword that cuts only the flesh of narcissists? Writing is about coming up with the best swords, not prose. Publishers will be looking for your sword descriptions, so if you are serious about this whole writing thing you WILL cut it out with the prose and you WILL cut it IN with a cool angstrom-fiber blade.