Writers' Workshop General Chat Thread

[zoroarctic]

Some good news from me this time that I wanted to share earlier, but got derailed the Jaguar escape: I'm doing some moving myself. I got a new TV job in Alabama, starting in exactly one week. Im going to be living out of state on my own for the first time ever. (I lived in Houston for a few months after Hurricane Katrina, but that was with the rest of my family) I'm also moving into a much bigger market, from the 80's into the 50's (out of 210). Needless to say, I'm super excited.

 

[unrepentantAuthor]

Different Eyes is the first fic on here I've read all the way through and the one that convinced me to go through with making an account

Blimey, Cryptic, that's quite something for me to hear! Thank you so much for the implicit praise. I'd be delighted if you could leave a comment in the thread, or direct message me if you're shy, about why my story had such an effect on you. I hope you continue to enjoy the fic as it continues!

@swiftfox, that's fantastic news! I wish you the very best of luck in this new chapter of your life.

uA news: still not heard back from rental referencing people but to be fair there's a billion people trying to rent this time of year. Failed my driving exam, super gutted about it and the knock-on effects, but eager to retake as soon as possible. Unfortunately, unless I get someone's cancellation slot, I have to wait until mid October. Ugh! I'm insanely busy with my IT course but making steady progress. With luck I might be able to keep to my writing goals on top of everything else, phew.

 

[unrepentantAuthor]

@Cryptic, I've read through your big project explanation and I'm certainly interested. I can't promise that I can contribute much directly, but I'd be delighted to discuss your ideas further in a public thread on this forum, or on Discord.

The desire to make an internally-consisted and plausible pokémon world is a desire I share. DE is meant to partly be an example of this, as a byproduct of being a serious story about genetic experimentation. I also enjoy Arvalis' work, although there are other 'pokémon realism' artists I prefer. You may be interested in this post (& associated thread) and this fanfic project.

Also, still super flattered by your inspiration from DE. May I ask why you use the pronoun 'her' for me? Most people assume I'm male, and I would love to know why you didn't, since I have an abiding curiosity in gender presentation and the interpretation of online identities etc.

 

[Cryptic]

@unrepentantAuthor You're welcome, the story is really awesome and unique! The pokesign idea is genius(I had thought of having dexterous pokemon in my story learning existing human sign languages, but a language exclusively for pokes, despite the in-world problems it has according to your worldbuilding thread, is just cool and practical). In answer to your request, I'll try to learn the rules for the reviewing stuff and reread it to leave a review at some point.

I also think I'll go ahead and create a thread to discuss this once I can throw together a good format for presenting my ideas, thanks for those threads btw they are very helpful. I'm noticing that specific pieces of my idea have already been done but not my perspective as a whole, so hopefully if I start posting my story it would be unique enough. Still, I'll probably take the cautious route and do a little more reading before acting upon anything.

Also, I apologize for assuming your gender. To answer you why it happened subconsciously, I can't know for sure, but my guess is because of projection of myself onto you. What I mean is, because your use of language, similarity to my ideas, species of pokes that get emphasis in your fic, and even fascinations(I too love Esperanto along with other conlangs and find the whole gender thing personally interesting to study and philosophize about), I put a greater emphasis of relation between our personalities than I do with most strangers. By the flawed but useful Meyers Briggs definition, I am an INTP so finding people who share thought patterns or interests even remotely similar to mine is rare. I personally identify as female so that probably lead to the assumption. It's also worth noting that I don't see gender and sexuality in the old guard 'conservative' way, but I also don't see it in the modern era's progressive LGBTQ+ centric sort of way either. If I were to directly express my opinions I'd offend a lot of people that I love and respect, so I keep it on the backburner, but it still affects how I see the world. That probably contributed to why your avatar, who looks male purely out of the virtue of its clothing and not having over-the-top eyelashes, didn't immediately lead to an assumption that you were male. I've used ambiguous or implied male identities online in the past and been confused for them, so probably another case of projection. Oh, and I forgot to mention that you have a bunch of female characters in your fic and that's generally more common among female authors, but that's still an assumption. Again I apologize if it led to any offense.

 

[diamondpearl876]

Thanks for the welcome! I'm tickled because Unrepentant's Different Eyes is the first fic on here I've read all the way through and the one that convinced me to go through with making an account. I'd like to open a thread, but only if I know my idea hasn't been explored by someone else already. I guess I'll explain the gist of it and ask if any of you have seen something similar?

To answer your question specifically, a "realistic" Pokémon world has been done many, many times. But it doesn't mean your story won't make that worldbuilding unique to you. It's hard to say without knowing the plot, specific characters, etc. I'm also not a fan of insinuating authors shouldn't write something they want to just because someone else has, so if this is what you want to write, I'd encourage you do so anyway.

 

[Beth Pavell]

"Realistic" means many things to many people as well. My take on realism in Pokémon isn't usually what you'd see, so there's plenty of room for innovation

 

[Cryptic]

That makes sense

 

[diamondpearl876]

Anyway, looking forward to hearing more about it if/when you're willing to share!

 

[unrepentantAuthor]

The pokesign idea is genius

Hey, thank you! I am particularly proud of that one. Actually, I was kinda planning on writing a more conventional journey story in the same universe eventually (years in the future, mind) in order to better explore the kind of stuff you're picking up on and excited about. If you pursue a similar sort of project, I would be nothing short of delighted to read and review it. Also, thanks for your intention to review! Reader feedback is my lifeblood at this point.

I'll go ahead and create a thread

Looking forward to it! Also, you needn't worry about being so careful not to step on any toes. 'Unique' ideas in fiction generally have some kind of narrative heritage — the phrase "there is nothing new under the sun" is over two thousand years old for a reason. I would perceive this issue differently, in that readers will usually be thrilled to have more of the content they like and very few fanfiction authors would take offence at a perceived similar theme or intent between their work and yours.

I apologize for assuming your gender.

Hey, I don't mind at all. I'm actually quite pleased in a peculiar way, because it serves as an indication that my presentation doesn't veer strongly masculine (whatever that would imply). I'm not sure how best to express it in this context, but I suppose I shall say that I don't identify with any gender. I don't mind he/him pronouns much, but they/them are my preference if it's no trouble. That's not to say that I have a problem with being called she/her either, honestly — it's just very unfamiliar, since I present as masculine offline!

I find your explanation very interesting indeed! I suppose I'm flattered by your projection, and excited to meet someone with similar interests to befriend. I agree that M-B is a deeply flawed metric, but I've used it and had both INTP and INTJ results, for what that's worth. I'd be fascinated to see what this test gives you, if you have a few spare minutes to take it. As for female characters, I've thought a lot about why I tend to write more women than men and I'm really not sure there's an obvious and simple explanation. I've played as male, female and nonbinary characters in RPGs, so I don't think there's a strong personal identification or anything.

Oh, and— saluton, mia novamikino! Estas mia grandega plezuro renkonti vin, do bonvenon al nia komunumo, kaj faru vin cxehejme.
(English: hello, my new friend! It is my great pleasure to meet you, so welcome to our community, and make yourself at home.)
Probably best to continue any Esperanto correspondence through DM, btw, so as not to exclude everyone else/malkrokolidi !

 

[canisaries]

the more i use this pfp the more it starts lookin like a girl. that's what you get for havin emo hair red

 

[Jersey Jimmy]

Hey, y'all. I'm kicking around the idea of writing a new fic again. Not exactly sure what it'd be like, but it would be nice to get back into it. Maybe I could start with a one-shot.

 

[UselessBytes]

Woah, just hit the 15 GB storage limit for Google Drive. That's a lot of writing, my guys. (Granted about 4 GB is movies that I downloaded... questionably, but that's still a lot of writing.)

 

[Misfit Angel]

I'm... slightly skeptical of those numbers. ',:|

If I combine the entirety of my Land of the Roses, Storm Island, Union City Angels and Eternal Bloodline folders, plus all of the writing I've done for my novel project and about three other projects ranging anywhere from partially written to just planned, I come up at just under 90mb. This is including things like inspirational graphics and reference charts, which are probably the largest contributor of size. Something else has to be eating up that amount of space, as simple words alone won't do it unless you're one of the most prolific writers of our era.

 

[unrepentantAuthor]

UselessBytes is claiming to have written about 350 million words, by my quick calculation.

Text just doesn't take up very much space on a computer drive.

 

[Iggy]

UselessBytes is claiming to have written about 350 million words, by my quick calculation.

Text just doesn't take up very much space on a computer drive.

Unless you use MS Word. I generated 14.788 words of lorem ipsum, which take up 52Kb in the .odt format and 99Kb in the .docx format (.txt is just as large!). That's about 284 words for 1Kb for the .odt format, which means 11Gb of words is roughly 63 million words.

 

[unrepentantAuthor]

We're overlooking something else besides — Google Docs files don't count towards your storage use limit. They claim to be "0 bytes" when you view their details.

 

[UselessBytes]

Idk man, that's just what it says. (I don't know crap about computers) idk what else it could be because there's nothing else on that Google account aside from what I mentioned.

 

[Iggy]

Idk man, that's just what it says. (I don't know crap about computers) idk what else it could be because there's nothing else on that Google account aside from what I mentioned.

Maybe you're haunted by a ghost writer?

 

[UselessBytes]

Maybe you're haunted by a ghost writer?

Spooooky!

But in all serious it's probably something on google's end. Who knows.

 

[unrepentantAuthor]

I wouldn't want to take a real guess without actually taking a look for myself. The key piece of info which would be simple for you to answer is whether your writing files are being given massive filesizes in the details display, or not. This information would establish whether the data bloat is related to your content or not.