#im making it up as i go. and i LOVE silly little unrelated tasks

[fortjester]

playing disco elysium is great bc Kim will tell me we need to find a fridge big enough to stash a body in STAT and then we will spend three hours running around collecting bottles and he won't say shit abt the three hours the body has still been unrefrigerated for

[really-sleep-deprived-nerd]

40.5-Non-threatening employee

Warnings: Definetely-not-completely-human-Cecil and not sure if it should count as a warning but I started listening to WTNV recently and I am on episode 43 so Im not catched up to current events

Summary:

The city council reminds everyone that demons are, in fact, not real, Carlos gets an interviewed by StrexCorp and Cecil would never under any circumstances go on a bloody rampage to exterminate every single employee of StrexCorp if they so much as touched a single perfect and soft hair of Carlos's head, no sir.

This episode was co-written with my sleep deprivation. Weather: The villain I appear to be (Annapantsu's cover) Written by Roma

In the face of our meaningless existence, being certain that death will sooner or later will come for us, what can a human do except to dream and to hope and to create?

Welcome to Night Vale

Listeners, you would not believe what a little birdie just told me, and by little birdie I obviously refer to intern Dave who turned into a talking sparrow after last friday's events that we are not allowed to talk about or remember.

He told me that our wonderful and generous owners, Strexcorp, decided that they will be interviewing dear beautiful Carlos today, to see if he would be a nice addition to their company or if he should...stop existing...

Oh, but not to worry, dear listeners, I know Strexcorp will realize soon enough that while perfectly imperfect Carlos cannot be bought, that is to say, wouldn't be a good fit for their company, obliterating him into nothingness would be a very, very stupid idea.

And as we all know Strexcorp, in their all-encompassing glory, does not have nor follows through very, very stupid ideas, and as I am saying this, I am looking straight at Daniel from management's eyes, who seems to be looking the tiniest bit nervous and afraid for reasons I cannot fathom but nevertheless I have a vague feeling are justified.

Just a hunch,  though. Nothing else.

Ah, Daniel seems to now be shaking as he desperately calls for Lauren to come to him. She has now arrived,  looking angry at being called away from whatever important task she was doing. Wordlessly he points at me and she looks into the booth. I smile at her and, if my teeth seem sharper than normal, I am certain it just a trick of the light, nevertheless she pales slightly but reassures Daniel that everything is fine and under control. Daniel clings to her arm and refuses  to let her leave.

Anyway, listeners, leaving this whole confusing interaction aside, the City Council wanted to remind you that: Demons arent real, especially demons that were created after some members of the City Council may or may not have realized inhumane experiments on one of old woman Josie's angels, who, they would like to emphasize, are NOT real either. Diana, the all-powerful shapeshifting demon that appeared yesterday disoriented in the parking lot behind the city council, is not, in fact, a demon, she is merely a foreigner shapeshifter that they encourage us to welcome into our town not because of an incomprehensible amount of guilt after what they did to her, but because she seems like a nice gal who, they think, will be a lovely addition to our town.

I, for one, will be happy to receive Diana with open arms, even if I will not be as enthusiastic as our local immortal sorceress,  Selena, who, upon seeing Diana, started waxing poetic about how her black skin made out of the void contained and reflected unknowable galaxies and was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen, and about how her three eyes shined brighter than the moon and seemed to contain the universe’s most wonderful secrets and that she wouldn’t mind getting lost in them for the rest on eternity.

Ah, young love, isn't it wonderful?

In other news-Oh? What an... interesting development, listeners. Carlos has just texted me saying he loves me and that if he can't come to our date tonight that I should try to forget he ever existed with the minimal amount of mourning possible, as he doesn’t want to make me feel bad.

Mmh.

Going back to what I was saying before for a second, I say while looking at Lauren and Daniel who seem to now both be trembling in fear for no reason at all, Diana has been found to say, after Selena's never ending compliments and soft hands that hold her like she was something precious, that she might had Selena for only a day and a half, but if anything irreversibly bad happened to her, she would burn the whole of Night Vale to the ground in a search for bloody revenge, wanting to exterminate every single being responsible for harming her beloved. 

And that is a sentiment all of us that are lucky enough to be with someone can relate to, isn't it? While it is true that I had my beloved Carlos for far longer than a day and a half, that is still a sentiment that I can relate to very strongly.

Very strongly, indeed.

And now, The Weather.

Welcome back, dear listeners, Carlos just texted me telling me to disregard his last message and informed me that everything is fine now, the StrexCorp executives that were interviewing him received a call and suddenly decided that, even if he wasn't useful to them, he apparently wasn't worth the trouble of a vaporizing weapon and left him alone and unharmed.

In unrelated news, briefly before Carlos texted me, Lauren came by looking sickly pale and dropped a paper on my desk before getting out of the recording booth quickly, probably worried she would be interrupting the broadcast, how sweet and thoughtful of her!

The paper -in case any of you is curious- is a warning telling me that I am by contract not allowed to physically intimidate or otherwise put the fear of God on any of my superiors, which is a silly warning, really, I would never do that! 

Gosh, could you imagine me trying to intimidate someone? Me, with my glasses and a purple vest that has a pattern of kitty paws all over it? That's hilarious!

And on this lighthearted note, I must leave you, dear listeners, so I can go home and watch that nifty documentary Carlos and I have been meaning to watch for weeks now.

Good night, Night vale.

Good night.

[babbushka]

im starting a novel, book, series (whatever you wanna call it!) about a woman who buys a house with her husband and their marriage is failing and in turn with it so does the house and she documents it through diary entries. thats just the rough idea but i wanted your opinion as a writer: is this unoriginal? should i post chapters online or just write one solid chunk? how do you motivate yourself to be creative? tysm in advance!

Hello! Firstly I’d like to say if you have plans on publishing this novel I wouldn’t post it online at all. Too many websites these days have increasingly tricky copyright laws and assume ownership of the things you post when you post them, so better to be safe than sorry and keep it off the web entirely. I don’t want you to write a masterpiece and then not be allowed to publish it because some website claims it’s plagiarism! 

Secondly, I don’t believe in ‘unoriginal’ ideas at all. I really don’t, and here’s why. In the history of humanity, every single story ever told can be boiled down to 9 archetypes. Yes that’s right, over the tens of thousands of years we’ve been on this planet, only 9 archetypes (rescuing of a lost love, red string, the underdog, result of impersonation/disguises, hero’s journey, mentorship, fatal attraction, two sides of a coin, & careful what you wish for). 

So a cynic might say, how can any story be ‘original’ when they’re all just some deviation from these 9? Well a cynic would answer that they’re not. However, we are not cynics, and this news is good for us because it means well, if no stories are original, then there is freedom to do whatever you want, because it’s all already been done before. 

But the thing is, the thing that makes me say there’s no such thing as an unoriginal story, is that no one will do it the way you will do it, because you haven’t written it before. And even if you HAVE written it before, you’ve only written it in a very specific state of being, with the context about the world that you had. Current you might write this story one way, but future you might have a completely different outlook on life, will have gone through different and new experiences to inform new writing. So even if you’ve written something before, you’ll never write the same thing twice. 

To answer your last question about motivation, for me really all it comes down to is having too many stories to tell and not enough time to tell them lol. For me usually the only reason I skip writing for the day is because physically my body isn’t up to the task of sitting at the computer for hours on end. Writer’s block happens to all of us, and when it strikes, I force myself to write something completely nonsensical, something totally unrelated to what I was working on before. 

Start out with 500 words of pure nonsense, just type out whatever little silly story your fingers produce. Don’t worry about making it good, or making it make sense, just be silly and have fun. You can stop at the 500, but chances are you’ll want to continue a little longer, maybe another 500. Maybe another. But maybe not! Maybe after 500 words your brain gives you an idea for the original project and you abandon this writing exercise entirely to go work on it, that’s all part of the process. 

I’m sending you my love, my dear anon, and please remember this: write the stories that you want to tell, the things that will fulfill you in some way. Nothing else matters :)