#I will never read Homestuck (I couldn't even if I wanted to. too long)

[king-of-havoc]

Love having mutuals who are obsessed with things that I will never even touch

[pale-opal]

Hear Me Out:

I know that image and what I'm about to say has a chance of being incredibly niche, because I have no idea how much overlap there is between the Homestuck and Mega Man fandoms. But if there's anything I've learned from the internet, it's that no matter what fandom you're in, it's almost guaranteed that someone in said fandom has read Homestuck before. So I think someone out there will understand the rant I'm about to go on. But for everyone who hasn't read Homestuck before, here's a quick explanation: Homestuck is a webcomic that was written and published by a man named Andrew Hussie. It ran from 2009-2016. It follows the misadventures of four kids as they play a game called Sburb with the help of twelve other kids known as "trolls." Together, they go on a quest to complete the game, as the initiation of it has caused the world to end (so even if they wanted to quit, they couldn't. Whoops). It is currently available to read on mspaintadventures.com, however I do NOT recommend reading it if you are a minor, or if you have sensitivity to content that contains violence, strong language, etc. - There were also two (technically one?) epilogues produced afterward, as well as a sequel called "Homestuck^2". - The disclaimer above applies to those works as well.

Okay. Now that I've explained what Homestuck is, let's get into why I put these four Doctors in the squares that I did.

Dr. Cossack: Has read Homestuck, Knows What Homestuck Is - He just seems like the kind of man who casually knows a lot about a lot of things. - A "nerd," if you will. - I can see him reading this in college and subsequently getting totally invested. - He relates to John Egbert (one of the four kids I mentioned earlier) on a personal level. - He did not like the epilogues. - He likes Homestuck^2, though. Dr. Light: Has Read Homestuck, Doesn't Know What Homestuck Is - I imagine that Light was introduced to Homestuck through Cossack while they were in college. - Like, what if Light got sick at some point, and Cossack came over and showed him this random webcomic he found in an attempt to make him feel better, only for Light to wake up the next day, convinced the whole thing was a fever dream? - Cut to many years later, after the birth of Proto Man. - Light and Cossack are having a conversation on the phone: - Cossack: "Hey, Thomas. Do you remember Homestuck?" - Light: "...Homestuck?" - Cossack: "You know, that webcomic I showed you when you got the flu back in college?" - Light: "I'm not sure I-" - Cossack: "The one with the little gray people?" - Light: "Little gray- wait. Wait, that was real?!" - He has not read the epilogues or Homestuck^2. Dr. LaLinde: Has Not Read Homestuck, Knows What Homestuck Is - I think that Dr. Cossack would go on many coffee-fueled 2 a.m. rants to her during last-minute attempts to finish projects on time when the two of them were in college. - LaLinde would always listen respectfully, and as a result knows the entire lore behind Homestuck despite never reading it. - One day, she decided to give it a go. Here's how that went: - LaLinde: "Okay, let's see here- what? Eight thousand (8000) pages? Where am I going to find the time to read all of that?" - And so, she has to this day never read the darn thing. Dr. Wily: Has Not Read Homestuck, Does Not Know What Homestuck Is - The reasoning behind this is simple: he just couldn't get into it. - Dr. Cossack tried several times while they were in college to convince him to read it, but it sounded really convoluted to him. - Dr. Light tried to get him to read it before the whole "Dr. Wily becomes evil and takes over the world" thing after he remembered what it was. - That didn't work either. - Plus, the whole thing just seemed too long. - He eventually just forgot it existed once Light stopped trying to get him to read it. But here's something else about the Doctors: they all had kids. Kids who all grew up with different levels of parental involvement. Kids who would've probably heard their parents talk about this strange little webcomic at one time or another. Which brings me to my next point:

Blues: Has Read Homestuck, Knows What Homestuck Is - I imagine that he heard the aforementioned phone call between Light and Cossack, and asked Dr. Light about what they were talking about. - Light straight up tells him that he's not allowed to read it. - Blues accepts this. - Cut to Blues' life after he runs away from home. He's at the library. - He's also in the midst of his "I hate my dad" arc, and as a result is more than willing to go and read this comic Dr. Light told him was off-limits. - He spends a whole day reading the webcomic, its epilogues, and its sequel. - He is there from the time the library opens to the time it closes. - And once everything is said and done, he is a changed man. - His favorite character is Dave Strider. - He also used to like Dirk Strider and Jane Crocker, but then he read the epilogues. Bass: Has Read Homestuck, Doesn't Know What Homestuck is - Bass was just minding his business, until he finds Proto Man broke into his house... again. - I like to think Blues breaks into Wily Fortress sometimes, just because he can. As a treat. - And to visit any Wilybots he's friends with. - He goes to confront Blues, only to find him in the midst of his third reread of Homestuck. - He asks what he's doing. - Blues tells him to pull up a chair. - He starts the reread over so that Bass can understand what's going on. - Bass, too, ends up a changed man. Even if he has no idea what he just read. - His favorite character is Karkat Vantas. - He made a trollsona (basically a troll OC), but has never told a living soul about it. - Also, he will never admit it, but "[S] Game Over" messed him up on an emotional level (if you don't know what "[S] Game Over" is, don't worry about it. Don't look it up. It's okay. Just forget I said anything). Tempo: Has Not Read Homestuck, Knows What Homestuck Is - Quake Woman has not read Homestuck for the same reason her mother hasn't read it: She's simply too busy. - Blues tries to convince her to read it, though. - But here's the thing: Vesper Woman HAS read it... but she just thought it was just alright. This leads to conversation like this happening: - Vesper: "Don't listen to him, Tempo. It's okay at best." - Blues: "..." - Blues: "...would you like to elaborate on that?" - They get into arguments about different aspects of the plot a LOT. - Tempo just listens quietly while she works. - Out of curiosity, she ended up looking it up one day when she had free time, and ended up stumbling across Hiveswap instead. - Hiveswap is a spin-off game that takes place in Homestuck's universe. The first Act was released in 2017, and the second was released in 2020. - I will admit that I haven't played Hiveswap, so I'm not sure if the disclaimer I provided for Homestuck applies here. Kalinka Cossack: Has Never Read Homestuck, Does Not Know What Homestuck Is - My reasoning behind this is even more simple than Dr. Wily's: - Dr. Cossack does not let her know that Homestuck exists in an effort to keep her innocence in tact. - That's it. That's the reasoning. You can all go home n-. - ...wait. Is that ANOTHER image down there?

You see, there's one more set of characters that I want to discuss in this long, long post. Characters that wouldn't be influenced by their parents, meaning that whether or not they've read Homestuck would be more up to happenstance:

...I can explain.

Zero: Has Read Homestuck, Knows What Homestuck Is - Part of the reason I put him here is because he ended up being the opposite of what Wily wanted him to be. He wanted a ruthless killing machine, and instead he got someone who helps save the world on multiple occasions. So why not have him be the opposite of his creator in Homestuck knowledge as well? - (Although if you think about it, Zero is technically a ruthless killing machine, but that's not what we're here to talk about). - Another other part of the reasoning is that I thought it was funny. - Zero had trouble getting invested until Act 5. - After he reached that point, he was locked in. - He sees a little bit of himself in Rose Lalonde and Dirk Strider. - He has never read the epilogues, or the sequel. Once he saw the Snapchat bonus content, he thought that was it. - Zero successfully got Iris into the comic as well. - Her favorite character was also Rose. - I like to think he and Layer also became friends after realizing they were both Homestuck fans.

Axl: Has Read Homestuck, Doesn't Know What Homestuck Is - He found a dub of the series on YouTube on day while watching random videos. - He was invested almost immediately. - Axl would talk about it with the other Red Alert members a lot - especially to Red and Tornado. - But there was one problem: He didn't know the name of it. It just completely slipped his mind at one point, and he wasn't able to get it back. This led to stuff like this: - Axl: "And THEN John and his friends are losing to the Condescence, but-" - Red: "That's nice and all, but what's this webcomic you read called?" - Axl: "Uh... I dunno. I can't remember." - Red: "Are you sure you didn't just make it up?" - Axl: "Wha- Yes! Yes, I'm sure!" - Red: "...sure thing, little buddy." - After joining the Maverick Hunters, Axl casually brings up the plot of this comic he can't remember the name of. Zero soon says this: - Zero: "...are you talking about Homestuck?" - Axl: "That's what it's called?!" - He made a trollsona like Bass did, but is a lot less shy about sharing it. - His favorite character is Roxy Lalonde. - Axl got Palette into it as well. X: Has Not Read Homestuck, Knows What Homestuck Is - He heard Zero talk about it with Iris a lot, but it sounded a bit too violent for his tastes. - He did play the Pesterquest visual novel, though. - Yes, the disclaimer does apply for this visual novel. - I like to think that at some point in X7, X complains about Zero and Axl's interest in "overly violent media" and asks if Zero has started "corrupting the youth." - He is promptly told to shut up. - X is more open to the idea of reading Homestuck by the time X8 comes around though. But it isn't until Axl is recovering from the game's ending that he actually starts considering it, since he knows it'll make Axl happy. - Speaking of which: will Capcom ever give us X9? - I just want to know if Axl is really okay, or if Lumine messed him up somehow. - It's been almost 20 years since the game released. 20 years is a long time to leave part of a video game franchise on a cliffhanger (but then again, Mega Man Legends fans have been waiting for 24 years...) Sigma: Has Not Read Homestuck, Does Not Know What Homestuck Is - The reason Sigma is in this category is very easy to explain: - He deserves nothing that could give him any semblance of happiness. - Also, I hate him.

Alright, rant over.

The inspiration for this post, as well as the original template, can be found here.

...now you can all go home.

[genericpuff]

What makes a comic good in your eyes? And what makes it bad?

Oof, that's a BIG question that I can't exactly give one single answer to. There are a ton of factors. For me the biggest thing is writing, while the art might be a turnoff if it isn't polished in the beginning, it's still not a dealbreaker for me, I've read tons of comics that started off still figuring out their art (and that's the beauty of webcomics, really). It's when the writing isn't interesting or good that I tend to drop off. Maybe the plot doesn't make sense or takes too long to establish what it's trying to do, maybe the jokes feel forced or poorly written.

I think writing tends to sort of take an unintentional backseat in webcomics, and it just comes with the territory. Tons of online artists naturally come up with their own characters that they want to write stories for, so they gravitate towards webcomics. Whereas writers - even online ones - don't tend to see webcomics as the default, they'll usually end up in the fanfiction circles or on Wattpad or even just ditching the online format entirely and going straight into trad publishing. It's why there are so many writers looking for artists in the webcomic community, you won't find artists looking for writers quite so much because they usually wind up using webcomics as an entry point into writing. Writers can't use webcomics as an entry point into drawing quite as well, there's a LOT more upfront work into learning how to draw vs. learning how to write (but writing is ultimately harder to master, knowing how to write scenes on the page doesn't necessarily mean you're writing those scenes well).

So I find more often than not the writing ends up being a dealbreaker for me. Art gets me interested enough to take a peek, but the writing is what keeps me invested, so if the writing isn't sound, I'm probably not gonna stick with it. If a comic does feel like it isn't written (or even drawn) up to what I would define as "good", I try to identify what exactly what's wrong with it, not just so I can better understand why it isn't working, but so I can implement that understanding into my own work. It's not just learning what works in a comic, it's also learning what doesn't work.

Still, I try to distinguish between whether a comic is "good or bad" vs. whether or not it's even meant for me. I've definitely read comics in the past that didn't click with me but I could totally see why people liked it, it just didn't appeal to what I was looking for or my humor or whatever. Some comics are objectively great and they just don't connect with me, like Scoob & Shag, Homestuck, etc. where I can respect why people like them, I just like, couldn't get into them no matter how many times I tried LMAO And then some comics are objectively not great and I enjoy them anyways, like Deep Fried Pudge, which is literally just a daily single panel dad-humor-full-of-puns comic, it had no right being in my subscription list when I was still on Tapas but something about it was so charming to me. I feel bad even calling it "bad" because it's not trying to be anything, it's just this humble little passtime project that someone started and never stopped. And I mean it has not stopped updating since 2012, every time I check in on it I'm astounded to see it's STILL going at 4,036 episodes. I have no idea what power the person who makes this possesses but they will surely outlive us all, I can only rationalize its existence as the closest I've ever been to perceiving God.

[captorations]

tw: animal death (nonviolent, elderly.) long post which also features kittens named after TLT characters, to which the warning does not apply.

this is Twilight. he was named for the streaks of orange on his belly, which were even more pronounced as a kitten. not for the vampire series, thank you very much; that nonsense didn't take off until a few months after i named him. he was chosen to be a ten-year-old's first pet because his response to being picked up by a human, as a recently-captured feral kitten, was to purr. not stress-purr, either. his default response to any kind of attention was to purr, absurdly loudly, and this never changed at any point in his life.

he could be grouchy and unpredictable at times, and he never cared for other cats in his space, but he was quite content to live his life alongside mine. he was never a lapcat, preferring instead to curl up somewhere nearby and burst out into purring if i so much as looked at him. i learned his language, able to determine the difference between and meanings of his vocalizations, and he learned mine, responding to his name and offering attention when i was upset. one of the first times Twilight ever came up on my bed with me, when we were both very small, was after a nightmare. sure enough, he was often at my side as i struggled with constant nightmares throughout last year.

but, well. you read the warning. he passed in february, peacefully and painlessly. i miss him dearly. he was my companion for what will for a few years yet count as the majority of my life, and i will always be grateful to him for waiting to go until the evening my partner arrived back home, so she could be with me when he went.

he was, and i recognize that i am quite lucky to have avoided it for so long, the first lost loved one i've had to grieve. and i did grieve. i always will, a little bit. i may have cried while writing this. that's one of the reasons i didn't talk about it here until now.

the other reason is a happier one. i wanted to have good news along with the bad. and i do!

of course i'd thought about what i would do when Twilight passed. my plan was to find a bonded pair of adult cats in need of adoption. but then, as Twilight started to inch past the division between "old cat" and "elderly cat," my partner happened to befriend a feral breeding pair and work to socialize each year's kittens to, hopefully, make it more possible for them to be domesticated by someone else. no TNR programs out there in the sticks, and it wouldn't be ethical to try to domesticate the feral adults.

so. when Twilight passed, and once i had recovered from the worst of it, our attention turned to this year's kittens. it wasn't by any means a guarantee. we couldn't steal them at the ideal age, as the mother was clever and cautious, and taught them to be the same. all the more so because my partner had stolen one of a previous litter to be her mother's pet.

there were so many factors going into this. how many kittens would there be? how many would, and unfortunately this was something we could do nothing about, survive long enough to be socialized and captured? would they like us? would we be forced to make a heartbreaking choice, leaving one or even multiple kittens to remain wild, with all the danger and hardship that entails?

well, the answers to those questions are, in order: two, both, yes, and no. in other words, everything went perfectly. and i'm very glad it did, because i can't even pretend i didn't practically fall in love with them on sight.

i honestly thought my partner was messing with me when she reported a black cat with gold eyes and a grey cat with silver eyes. that couldn't be real. there was no fucking way the universe was handing me two kittens that perfectly match major characters from the locked tomb series, i.e. the most powerful influence on me since homestuck itself.

but no, that's what actually happened. and even though the grey kitten's eyes eventually turned gold too, it hardly mattered, when their personalities started lining up with the characters they resembled. i didn't plan to name my next cats after tlt characters. in fact, i'm a little wary of giving animals the names of characters at all, even derivatives thereof; i prefer to appreciate them as their own selves, not a reflection of another.

however, i make a policy of not ignoring serendipity. we captured them effortlessly, mostly thanks to my partner's work in socializing them. both my partner and i had name ideas, but we agreed not to discuss them until the kittens had been examined by a vet, both in case of health concerns and to confirm genders. sure, gender is fake, and even faker for pets, but whatever.

the vet visit was yesterday, and as we suspected, both are female. so, after comparing notes and compromising on names, i present to you: Nona and Millie, respectively.

i actually had planned to name the black kitten "Hark," but my partner convinced me otherwise, and honestly she's right. Nona suits her better, in personality, in her capacity for violence (against toys, neither has scratched or bitten us even once since capture) hidden by a meek and easily spooked front, and in her habit of following Millie's lead but sometimes wandering off and trying new things and/or getting into trouble. i'll get over the weirdness of the directly copied name soon enough. it's already led to fun sentences, like "Nona spent the entire ride home hiding under a towel." (Nona likes to hang out under things. Millie prefers to climb things. in my partner's terms, Nona is a bush cat and Millie is a tree cat.)

meanwhile, Millie is a double reference. she's mostly named for Camilla Hect, but also for the Millie from warrior cats, who is one of the MVPs of the series, fight me. as mentioned, Millie usually takes the lead between the two. she's a little more cautious about new things, but will accept them after Nona inevitably tries them first. she defaults to protecting Nona when they're both spooked, taking point in the defensive huddle.

please appreciate Nona hiding in the top right photo. she is a black cat who knows she's a black cat, and acts appropriately.

they've adjusted incredibly well. it took about a week for them to be indistinguishable from domestic-born cats, at least when they're around me. my partner handled socialization, getting them accustomed to humans enough that we could capture them with minimal stress. i'm handling domestication, the process of guiding them through their new environment and the expectations of exclusively indoor, household animals. (these expectations are: being cute, not causing too much chaos, keeping us company, and seeking attention at whatever frequency they choose.)

we're both very good with animals, but i have the advantage of being raised by two veterinarians. so even though they were almost four months old on capture, older than is recommended for domestication attempts, i was pretty damn sure i could pull it off. and i did, not least because they're both very smart and adaptable in their own right.

so! thank you for reading this absurdly long post about the personal life of an altogether fairly generic tumblr user. as a reward, you get a video of Millie being annoyed at Nona for going somewhere she can't follow. (note: when Millie goes somewhere Nona can't follow, Nona gets sad and upset and meows pitifully about it.)

[chronically-undertronic]

scuse my weirdass rambles, i swear i have just put this place under a microscope /j. so many observations to be made lmao

listen, i was just scrolling through the undertronic tags for nostalgia and some writing ideas (there was one (1) fic on ao3, yaboi wouldn't be takin that). i didnt actually know there was even anything on there, i had never checked before. and honestly, seeing everything that had been posted onto there was a trainwreck of emotion. it was like scrolling through messages of a group of friend's chat and reminiscing memories, except they're not mine and i was never there. it's such a vivid feeling of absolute belonging to a place i was never present in, yaknow?

and then i saw y'all and couldn't stop thinking about it for days. the carrd caught my eye first because a) bro that's just a straight up sickass carrd holy shit and b) undertronic content?? in the wild?? lets go babey!! and then i looked into it more and just. man, i dont know what emotion it was, probably like all of the above. 'cause holy shit, i didn't know there were more people like me out there!! i thought we were the only system who had undertronic headmates that existed for years!! it didn't even cross my mind that it was possible for more to be out there. so reading through old pluralkit discord screenshots and posted conversations was like looking at something i had always longed for.

you guys looked like you were happy in those chats.

you didnt have to hide in those moments. i wanted to reach out and reply and laugh alongside the ghosts of these four year old conversations and say "i get it, i understand this, we've lived it too," because i've never talked with someone who had a chance of returning the sentiment to its full extent. man, it was like lookin in a mirror of what i wanted to see. and i know i'm crazy 'cause again, i wasn't there. you could argue i'm still not 'here', hiding behind signatures and pseudonym accounts.

i got what i came for, though. i have my never-ending nostalgia and a pile of fics to write. i just think that the inspiration doesn't come from the ideas i saw being laid out, but the people who did so and the inherent beauty of learning it the way i did.

anyway. again, pardon my over-analytical rambles. wanna go grab a cup of tea and bitch about life some time?

-💜💚

I feel the groupchat / belonging thing bcs that's how I feel when I look at old homestuck content (I didn't get into it until 2016, when it yk, ended)

Also oh my god *points* listen

Listen

We genuinely have like the whole cast of UT in our head because it's one of our spinterests (the other being aphmau ofc) so the fact that you also have UT headmates is so???? /pos I feel seen I feel less alone we get each other we shake hands

Ik it would take away the safeness of being anon but now I'm thinking of how fun it'd be to make a UT themed syscord server hrmm

Anyways I'm in tears anon /pos I would love to grab tea and bitch (as long as it's iced tea sorry im southern I don't drink it hot /j)

[hms-no-fun]

Hello, fairly open-ended but I’m wondering what motivates you to write and create, because honestly I don’t think I’d be able to do what you do.

everyone thinks they couldn't do what the artists they admire do, until they do it. i didn't plan for godfeels to be what it is, i didn't even really understand homestuck all that well when i started it. they always say these things just sorta happen to you sometimes and it's really hard to believe it when everything you make feels like garbage from a dumpster, but it's true.

it's hard to pinpoint what motivates me to write. i've always liked telling stories. i think i decided i wanted to Be A Writer when i was like... 12 or 13? and i just wrote tons of stuff. fanfic, forum roleplays, my own original stuff. most of it's garbage and lost to the sands of time thank god. but when i think back on how i felt when i was writing at the time, it's really not much different from how i feel now. i would get ideas in my head of scenes or dialogue exchanges or get really obsessed with one song that i felt like would go great with a particular moment in a story, all of which are things i still do. i'd get those ideas and build a story around them.

this is gonna be a wild tangent but, i've always been the sicko who played grand theft auto games to do violence. to this day i will spend hours in sandbox games just wandering around blowing stuff up. make of that what you will lmao. anyway years ago i was playing red dead redemption 1 with cheat codes that made you invincible and have infinite ammo. and i was going around blackwater killing everyone. at first it was funny, because your one-hit-kill animations are SO over the top, and of course the cops never stop coming and the town never runs out of innocent bystanders. but after a while it stopped being funny and became really macabre and upsetting. like who is this dead god that is just wiping out a town of people for no reason? why do bullets pass through him, why is he so brutal and merciless? why doesn't he stop? i thought about what it must be like to watch someone do this, which of course called to mind a few choice sections of stephen king's dark tower series (king, fwiw, was a HUGE inspiration to me in my earliest days and up until about 8 years ago i had read almost all of his books).

i kept this rdr murder spree up for, no joke, two hours at least. most of that time i was quite profoundly Not enjoying myself. god i think i may have cried at one point??? not much but just like, somehow the horrifying absurdity of this spectacle was so entrancing and evocative that i couldn't stop. i wanted to see how far i could go before it got to be too much. i can't really say why i did this. besides depression and undiagnosed etc etc. i mean, this is kinda just how i play open world games. i spent months building a pyramid to the skybox in minecraft when i was in college. i 100%'d the ps4 spiderman game (with the exception of time trial shit because i hate time trial shit) despite the fact that i did not like the game very much.

no i haven't been diagnosed with autism, why do you ask? lmao

anyway, this rdr murder spree rattled around in my head for a long time, and eventually i decided to turn it into a story. i think i called it "what happened at arthur's mill" but it never got very far. there were some great images, i had a feeling of a MOOD and a tone, this tragic old god stuck in the wild west, but it wasn't enough to build a story on. so i set it aside like i do for most of my ideas.

then, years later, i started working on a book that i thought of as (i'm so, so sorry) an anime-inspired world war I fantasy novel. this is probably going to be the story i work on after godfeels, actually? anyway this story, "sunset war," involves a series of women trying to cross over an active warzone no-man's-land to go to this remote place to find out why some weird shit is going on with them. and at some point i remembered that arthur's mill story and was like, wait a second, this is PERFECT. so i took that idea and transplanted it into this setting. so this woman, reki, she's a sex worker who spends a night with this Wandering Gunman type who just wants someone to hold him while he cries, and in the morning like thirty lawmen show up to arrest him because he wiped out a wholeass town, and reki tries to defend him only to get shot to death. and the guy basically gives her his immortality and his magic Infinite Ammo Revolvers and tells her to go to [place] for [reasons]. so it’s not a hugely important backstory in a plot sense but it fits in this setting and defines it for me in a way that wasn’t happening before i connected all the right dots.

i share all this because this chain of events is an example of what motivates me to write, whether it's fiction or nonfiction. i love love love connecting dots like this. putting ideas into a soup and seeing what comes out. like you’re building a puzzle over the course of your life out of random pieces you find in the street.

there are so many moments, conversations, encounters in daily life that feel thinner than the rest. they stick out to you as Meaningful in some way. evocative. they're so thin you can practically see through their physical reality into a kind of symbolic superstructure. some people might call that an encounter with God. i like carl sagan's description of it as witnessing the numinous. becoming aware of one's place in the universe. call it whatever you want, rationalize it however, it doesn’t really matter. what matters is the feeling. you cross a street and you see powerlines zigzagging in a certain way against a cloudy sky, and it’s just the right time of day that a bunch of birds are out, and there’s a lull in traffic so you can hear the wind for the first time all day, you can hear everything in the world that isn’t human, and in your gut you know... this is important. this means something.

why is it important? what does it mean? to whom? those are your questions to answer.

i write towards these moments, or at least i try to. sometimes writing feels like that. feels like you’re seeing something real under the fabric of reality. what motivates me to write is the joy of losing myself to the act of writing. the joy of making people see what i see, and the vindication of having them respond the way i wanted them to. and the joy in being surprised by their reactions! i even enjoy being criticized, because it means i have room to improve.

once again this is a situation where i don’t know how to give actually actionable advice, because i’m an insufferable hippie who likes making wavey motions with my hands when i talk about art. but i think that if you can find a way to catch that thinness on the page, even if for an instant, you won’t be able to help yourself. sooner or later you’ll make something that resonates with people. i guess this is another way of saying “be true to yourself” or “write the story you wish existed in the world” or whatever, but even as i agree with those sentiments i find them too specific. all that matters to me is soul. forget three act structure, forget wordcounts, forget genres, forget what’s publishable, forget what you think anyone will read, forget everything. if you can write with soul, it won’t matter whether what you wrote is good. it’ll be yours, and you’ll feel it in your gut that it’s yours. release that thing even if you think it sucks, and then move on to the next thing. do that enough times and eventually you’ll realize that actually you’re pretty good at what you do, and even if it doesn’t pay enough you still really enjoy doing it. eventually you’ll be 32 and realize that all those years you thought you were languishing and wasting time, you were actually building up a skillset. and with that skillset, built as it is around this soul you are writing towards, you realize you can actually be pretty versatile as a writer. and the more you do it, the better it gets. no matter how good it is, somehow it always gets better.

as much as i talk about writing as if it’s a kind of magic, it isn’t magic. at least, no more than kissing your partner is magic. you don’t need motivation to kiss your partner, you just do it because you love them. there is tremendous satisfaction in finishing a puzzle out of pieces you found on the street over the course of years. does there need to be a why? it’s rarely easy, it can be torturous, but that’s true of doing taxes. that’s true of everything. but if you can cut through all of that and get to the soul, get to that thin boundary between reality and a real fiction, you can do anything. that is the well that will keep your crops watered and your family hydrated for years to come. that’s what i believe, anyway.