Mastodawn

Trixter of the Moon Council Feb 18

RE: https://retro.pizza/@trixter/116084514290429066

Okay so back to this novel-I-wrote thing...

So if I've become disillusioned enough to give up on traditional publishing, do I want to just make whatever little changes I'd like to make coming at it several years later and then self-publish? Just to let it be out in the world and maybe get a tiny trickle of validation? (I will be honest, I desperately need some validation at this point.) Traditional publishing money would have been nice, but that's not a real thing so much anymore, and the truest reason anyone has for writing is to share all the nonsense in their head with other people. I still love these characters and I want other people to love them with me.

What I've written so far is, *of course*, only the first part of a trilogy, because that is how things go, but maybe I could find it in myself to keep going if it felt like a single fuck was given by the world.

#AmWriting #AmWritingFantasy

Trixter of the Moon Council Feb 18

My favorite thing about bringing up self-publishing is the people/bots watching the keyword searches waiting to tell you that what you really need is their $2,000 Professional Self-Publishing Services Package.

Trixter of the Moon Council Feb 19

Thinking about the whole novel thing some more and wondering if I want to rewrite the romance subplot as sapphic or just be satisfied that the male love interest is absolutely the kind of male love interest a lesbian would write, just big Hozier energy here.

Trixter of the Moon Council Feb 20

*opening up my old novel project folders and immediately going to the text files of smutty non-canon drabbles*

Trixter of the Moon Council Feb 20

Look, this isn’t monsterfucker romance, it’s adventure fantasy with a monsterfucker subplot

Trixter of the Moon Council Feb 20

There are two important reasons why this is not a “romance” or “romantasy” novel and one of them is that the main plot isn’t about the romance, it’s about the main character rescuing her twink brother from his evil boyfriend, and the other is that everyone is absolutely miserable at the end.

Trixter of the Moon Council Feb 20

Yes, it’s planned out as a trilogy. Does that mean that it takes until the end of the third book to get to the Happily Ever After? No, of course not, you absolute fool.

Trixter of the Moon Council Feb 20

(The romance is just the raven-man psychopomp she tragically falls for on the way.)

Trixter of the Moon Council Feb 22

Doing my best to fight the urge to just make a new playlist for this novel instead of working on it. That Transformers fic I was getting back into is currently all of 3 chapters and about 3 hours of playlist.

Trixter of the Moon Council Feb 22

(The new playlist would be entirely Hozier.)

Trixter of the Moon Council Feb 22

(Actually it would just be this song, which came out over a decade after I started working on it, on repeat:)

https://youtu.be/-32-6FqGW2E

Hozier and Bear McCreary - Blood Upon the Snow (from God of War Ragnarök) - Lyric Video

YouTube

Trixter of the Moon Council Feb 22

When I try editing or even rereading my own fiction writing, I run into a problem where I'm not so much reading the words as I am letting the words trigger the memory of the story as it existed in my head. Also because of this I tend to speed-read because I know what's going on, I know what happens, I'm just trying to savor the meaty bits, but that makes it very hard for me to tell if something is paced well or not.

I'm going to work on that as I go back over this novel one more time. I'm tempted to compile it into an epub or PDF to see if that helps, but if I don't at least let myself do line-edits I'll go mad.

Maybe sometime soon I'll toss the first chapter out here in case anybody wants to see what I'm on about.

#AmWriting #AmWritingFantasy

Trixter of the Moon Council Feb 23

I am *struggling* against the urge to use this novel project as an excuse to buy that wee e-reader Aftermath just had a post about.

I want it so much but I am so broke.

Trixter of the Moon Council Feb 23

Gonna start describing my novel as “Hawkwind meets Wardruna”.

Trixter of the Moon Council Feb 23

(Look at it tho, it’s so neat)

https://aftermath.site/xteink-x4-cheap-hackable-ereader-crosspoint-review/

The Xteink X4 Is The Cheap, Hackable eReader That's Just Enough

It has no touchscreen, no light, and it's under-powered. But the Xteink X4 has a devoted community that wants to make it sing.

Aftermath

Trixter of the Moon Council Feb 23

Making sure I have enough good queer representation in this story to allow for one (1) Evil Gay

Trixter of the Moon Council Feb 24

Giving theme songs to my supporting cast but I'm stuck on one because his song would be, like, something from Darius Rucker's country phase or some shit.

Trixter of the Moon Council Feb 25

All right, any of my buddy-pals here interested in reading my first chapter? I’m open to feedback but mostly I need encouragement and accountability at this point. Also I will warn that this is dark fantasy and not exactly cozy.

I have the whole thing written, btw, but I’m doing one last round of revisions.

Trixter of the Moon Council Feb 25

I have reached the stage where I am annoyed at anything I need to do that’s not writing which is unfortunate because I have a job.

Trixter of the Moon Council Feb 26

My actual goal with finally putting this novel out into the world is so I can secretly post my non-canon sexy parts as fanfic.

Trixter of the Moon Council Feb 27

Writers will literally be like “look at my favorite blorbo, he is so perfect and I love him,” and it’s a damp wizard with depression

(I’m writers)

Trixter of the Moon Council Mar 1

The struggle of writing a scene with a character who you know would be inappropriately horny

Trixter of the Moon Council Mar 1

The difference in vibes between how I talk about my writing and the story itself is pretty significant ngl

Trixter of the Moon Council Mar 1

There's a lot in this novel that's really good at this stage, but I need to put some more work into the villain arc, which is basically "men will literally join a necromancy cult instead of going to therapy".

Trixter of the Moon Council Mar 1

This book isn't fanfic-with-the-numbers-filed-off but you can *definitely* tell which WoW expansion was my favorite.

Trixter of the Moon Council Mar 4

Back in '00 or so I read an ebay listing for a Gundam Wing hentai doujinshi about Wufei getting sexually assaulted while in prison that referred to him as "grumpy little Wu-chan" and that's the energy I bring to talking about the emotional harm that comes to my characters in my writing.

Trixter of the Moon Council Mar 4

I'm not writing romantasy, I'm writing fantasy in which people fall in love and it makes things so much worse for everyone involved.

Trixter of the Moon Council Mar 4

There was a point very early on when I was thinking of telling the story that ended up as my novel as a 16-bit Final Fantasy-style game in RPGMaker, and that's not *consciously* why it ends up with a balanced 4-member main party for a chunk of the book, but I can't account for my subconscious.

Trixter of the Moon Council Mar 4

I think I’ve accidentally recreated Bucky Barnes from first principles.

Trixter of the Moon Council Mar 5

I'm gonna have to ask my characters to stop being horny for like five minutes.

Trixter of the Moon Council Mar 5

Current Writing Status: *playlisting intensifies*

Trixter of the Moon Council Mar 6

I guess I’m at the “Oh shit how it is so late” stage of Writer Brain.

Trixter of the Moon Council Mar 8

No LLM could come up with the depravity of the chapter I'm working on.

(It's mostly not even that bad but the bit that gets real bad gets *real bad*.)

Trixter of the Moon Council Mar 9

I feel like I’ve oversold the quantity of sex in my novel but I hope to make up for it with quality.

Trixter of the Moon Council Mar 16

Honestly it’s kind of amazing how little my novel owes to any Transformers fiction considering that’s My Thing, but there is a slight hint of mnemosurgery, and also a reference to a completely unhinged alt.toys.transformers post circa Beast Wars.

Trixter of the Moon Council

This novel I’m working on is aesthetically influenced by all the Scourge stuff in Warcraft/The North stuff in GoT/Skyrim, narratively and characterly influenced a lot by Michael Moorcock, and okay, I’ll admit the main character is prone to melodramatic inner monologues that are very Simon Furman.

Trixter of the Moon Council 3d ago

I just like ice zombies, I don’t care if they shouldn’t work, they’re magic

Trixter of the Moon Council 3d ago

This novel is really just a cautionary tale about goth boyfriends.

Trixter of the Moon Council 3d ago

I have vague memories of a post from maybe Tumblr where some fanfic writer was like, "I had a really rough night but the good news is I can now properly write about what it feels like to get shot" and that's basically how my magic system works.

Trixter of the Moon Council 2d ago

I have reached the first scene in this novel that needs to be completely scrapped and rewritten from the ground up and I am pleased to report that I am still capable of producing new words on the page.

Trixter of the Moon Council 2d ago

The old version has to be tossed due to being too horny.

Trixter of the Moon Council 1d ago

I can confirm that my stove is still hot and I am indeed still cooking.

Trixter of the Moon Council 1d ago

This is just a Extremely Inappropriate Flirting: The Novel

Trixter of the Moon Council 6h ago

I actually just don’t know how much sex is appropriate to have in a non-sex-focused novel these days

@trixter There's no inbetween. Either a chaste kiss and hand holding between a boy and a girl, or full on pansexual fukkin'. Don't quote me on that, but I think it's a major publishing rule probably.

@trixter impossible

Trixter of the Moon Council 2d ago

@Weebism It was kind of *problematically* horny.

@trixter good..?

@trixter What, precisely, makes them less plausible than the normal kind of zombies?

Trixter of the Moon Council 3d ago

@triphazard Well, *technically*, frozen zombies should not be able to move, on account of being frozen.

@trixter Maybe they're like... slushies?

Trixter of the Moon Council 3d ago

@triphazard But Slushies just freeze solid when given half a chance!

@trixter They just gotta keep moving, that's all!