Do I Need A Permit Of Some Kind To Fly A Parachute To Hear If The Giant Night Cat Purrs?

Map for Damocles’ Gambit

The whole green land belongs to Alyria (Askanian is only shown as independant cause they still have their king as a respentive figure & some different laws than the rest of the empire)

Note: I made this map before I established that Iudin is north of Alyria - so on this map north is to the right and south to the left.

Art by Charlotte Cousquer

Repeat after me:

The first draft just needs to exist

The second draft needs to be functional

The third draft needs to be effective

The first draft just needs to exist

The second draft needs to be functional

The third draft needs to be effective

The first draft just needs to exist

The second draft needs to be functional

The third draft needs to be effective

Remember, the second and third can't happen if you don't have something to work with. Your first draft will always be shit compared to your third, but at least it exists. The worst first draft is an unfinished one. The best first draft is a just completed one.

You read books/stories not in their first draft form-- only in their finished form (third, fourth, sometimes fifteenth draft). So stop comparing your first draft with a final one.

So, just write--you can make it better later. Perfectionism is the greatest weight a creator can carry.

Fanfic writers are like crows. If you give them treats (comments) they will bring you shiny things (fanfic)

no no no you dont GET it. It's not about romance it's not about sex it's about DEVOTION. it's about LOVE. It's about chasing your other half to the ends of the earth to protect them from themselves. It's about wanting them to be happy. It's about stopping their self-destructive ways. It's about saving them from darkness, because you know they're capable of love. Because you've FELT that love and so you know it's there. It's about having faith until your dying breath. again it's about utter and true devotion and selfless love. Hello?? are you listening?? True, selfless love is about restoring their faith in humanity by being the example

Saw someone refer to their hyperfixation as their muse and it’s the best thing ever. No this is not due to a chemical imbalance in my brain I have been touched by the gods with divine inspiration

Hey y'all why are writers always cold?

Years and years ago, I read a book on cryptography that I picked up because it looked interesting--and it was!

But there was a side anecdote in there that stayed with me for more general purposes.

The author was describing a cryptography class that they had taken back in college where the professor was demonstrating the process of "reversibility", which is a principle that most codes depend on. Specifically, it should be easy to encode, and very hard to decode without the key--it is hard to reverse the process.

So he had an example code that he used for his class to demonstrate this, a variation on the Book Code, where the encoded text would be a series of phone numbers.

The key to the code was that phone books are sorted alphabetically, so you could encode the text easily--picking phone numbers from the appropriate alphabetical sections to use ahead of time would be easy. But since phone books were sorted alphabetically, not numerically, it would be nearly impossible to reverse the code without exhaustively searching the phone book for each string of numbers and seeing what name it was tied to.

Nowadays, defeating this would be child's play, given computerized databases, but back in the 80s and 90s, this would have been a good code... at least, until one of the students raised their hand and asked, "Why not just call the phone numbers and ask who lives there?"

The professor apparently was dumbfounded.

He had never considered that question. As a result, his cipher, which seemed to be nearly unbreakable to him, had such an obvious flaw, because he was the sort of person who could never coldcall someone to ask that sort of thing!

In the crypto book, the author went on to use this story as an example of why security systems should not be tested by the designer (because of course the security system is ready for everything they thought of, by definition), but for me, as a writer, it stuck with me for a different reason.

It's worth talking out your story plot with other people just to see if there's a "Why not just call the phone numbers?" obvious plot hole that you've missed, because of your singular perspective as a person. Especially if you're writing the sort of plot where you have people trying to outsmart each other.

↖This User Wishes They Had a Pet Dragon

The inherent homoeroticism of killing your enemy and immediately regretting it