#lost ground

[alchemiasart]

Do over

I think the most powerful thing I ever learned to do was to let go of pieces of story that didn't fit.

For so many years (drafts, volumes), I felt like I was betraying the spirit of my story - especially if they occurred to me spontaneously - by editing the crucial bits. I periodically produced brilliant snippets of prose and dialogue and exchange, and if they didn't fit the actual framework of the story, I would often abandon the story altogether for fear of having to "kill off my beloved."

(This phrase, "killing your beloved", has never been about characters exclusively, it's been about the pieces of the story or script or scene that you adore but just don't belong.)

As I work on my July book (my challenge now updated to trying to put out a book a month for a year), a story that I started several years ago as the first of a hard science fiction series, I am absolutely chuffed that I have not suffered any bouts of crippling anxiety or table-flipping rage at having to change fundamental pieces of the plot.

Not to give too much away, but "Lost Ground" is about a generational space ark with a human colony that ends up decelerating too soon and will ultimately miss its destination completely. This coupled with a rash of missing biomass creates a double-whammy of disaster. The story is about solving both mysteries and finding an alternative for the colony.

Now, here's the behind-the-scenes part: I use a lot of filler names and roles when I'm still in the process of flushing a story out, but sometimes my writer-anchor doesn't really want to let me update those bits when it's time to make them more interesting. I bullied it into submission this time (pun intended), and came up with these excellent modifications:

Changed the suite of directors from a total sausage-fest to a legally mandated distributed gender range, including intersexed and nonbinary people. (I'd like to think that future is cast in progressive thinking.)

Altered the descriptions of moving around the ship to reflect what would actually happen: a ship that uses rotary acceleration to create artificial gravity is not going to have windows that show the stars moving away behind them; the spin of the Drum will spin the stars so that the same constellations occur again and again, changing very slowly over time.

I decided that I also needed some cultural representation and decided that the Director of Reclamation who's job it is to handle expired bodies should absolutely be a total Goth. What other culture would maintain the appreciation of the macabre and the respect for the rites of death better than they?

Instead of relying on exposition at weird places, I invented a manual that provides excerpts of policy so that there's context for the decisions that seem obvious to the characters but might seem a little weird to the reader.

The fun part about this is that it's just the first story out of at least six that I've penned so far, following the colony aboard the Zarathustra through their trials and tribulations. The cast is massive, though, so I expect that there will be a number of short stories and spin-offs even before I get to the actual sequels.

But, I couldn't do it at all if it weren't for suddenly being okay with a little literary euthanasia.

[housecow]

soft, round, warm, jiggly

[mellific]

FASCINATE, a new minicomic that i will have at SF ZINE FEST this sunday (9/3)! come to table 38 and pick it up along with uhh slkfjsd books that will hopefully have arrived at my house before friday! i guess!!

[hinamie]

i don't normally participate in these redraw challenges but it's megumi so i'll make an exception

[lemonsharkgirlfriend]

so rhaenyra starts s3 with a god complex, believing herself to be the prince that was promised from aegon the conqueror's dream... but hugh and ulf will betray her, mysaria will misunderstand her, coryls will undermine her, bartimos will underestimate her, daemon will abandon her, her people will turn against her and burn her castle and kill her dragon. and when everyone who accepted rhaenyra as queen rejects her, the only person left to love rhaenyra will be alicent, who never loved rhaenyra as queen but rhaenyra as a person ("she was the vision that sustained him [...] it was his love for her that kept him resolute in his choice of heir."). alicent, who abandoned her gods and duty to go to rhaenyra on dragonstone and appeal to the person beneath the crown ("i cast myself on the mercy of a friend who once loved me."). alicent, who's made a god of rhaenyra, not as queen, but as the girl she read with beneath the godswood ("come with me.").

[hyunpic]

😕💔

[dansemacabre]

(tw unreality!)

ayo new theory just dropped and bad news! the implications are cosmically horrifying

in the bulletin from time baby in book of bill, he says bill is a “danger to narrativity”, and that he risks the fourth wall. this kept bothering me. why reference the fourth wall here? why have time baby reference it? yeah the heaven page and shit is a bit meta, but thats just how bill talks, right? Well i was a fool

when you put “seven eyes” into the lost files site, this warning pops up from the oracle question mark? from journal three:

the therapese at the bottom translates to “set coords for dimension: r34lity”.

and putting r34lity into the website gives us this image:

the text below it reads they found a new home. those are “real” fucking images. the henchmaniacs are in our “reality”. the cryptids page might not have been a goof goof bit- they were “real”. (“real” meaning our reality in the book of bill sense of it but still our reality. is that tracking.)

none of the rest of the cast actually references us as a specific audience, or the fandom, or acts like we know them at all. the cast addresses everything they write to a mystery “reader” who needs to be saved from the book’s influence.

meanwhile, in the book of bill:

because bill’s not talking to a mystery “reader” who’s reading this book.

bill fucking sees us.

bill sees reality. REALITY reality. like this earth the one with alex hirsch and gravity falls the show and tiktok and shit. book of bill is a book in our reality for us the reader. (ie. there’s a reference to “they both reached for the gun” if you put gun in the website, which would only make sense if bill was sentient in this “reality” right now.) and someone is trying to get here to hide from him. maybe they’re already here.

[sycamorality]

FULL RES HERE IN CASE TUMBLR FUCKS WITH IT

EVERY SLUGCAT. IN THE HISTORY OF RAIN WORLD. THAT WE KNOW OF. inspired by @hourglass-meadow's original post from ~9 months ago because haha. hah. theres SO MANY MORE. HERE'S ALL OF THEM BABY.

symbols next to the slugcats and what they mean:

slugcat sources under cut vvvv it gets a bit long!

first two are from runnMaze2.rar

next five are from kickstarter art:

first & second art, third art, fourth art

I DO NOT HAVE A SOURCE FOR THIS ONE IF SOMEONE HAS IT PLEASE LINK ME IT. i've heard its on the devlog but i never found it oops. these were original arena slugcat designs!

as for the slugcat pups...

from here

from here

the gang(tm) are from in-game. the green slugcat however was the original fourth arena slugcat!

image posted by james on the rain world discord!

the next five slugcats are from survivor's intro cutscene. interesting note that monk was not added at this time! monk and hunter were added ~4 months after rain world released, so assumedly these cutscenes weren't made in mind with monk.

the remaining slugcats in the second row are all from basegame projections that you can find in your own files, with the path

C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Rain World\RainWorld_Data\StreamingAssets\projections

and we all know where the downpour slugcats are from ;) these are all from ingame. the slugpups next to gourmand are colorpicked from gourmand's non-food quest ending art!

the next few slugcats are from gourmand's ending, excluding gourmand themself, of course!

the next three are judge and the two beta spearmasters!

i do not have a source from where judge is from - but the beta spearmasters were posted by faeling :]

the next slugcats are from gourmand's scrapped ending, which you can find on the wiki!

the yellow and blue slugcats were two slugcats added in a projection with remix enabled. i didn't add the white slugcat from this one because... look do you see how many white slugcats there are already. also i forgot

the rest are all from the coop thumbnail, wip coop thumbnail, devtools [surv, monk and hunter also feature and this is nightcat but i included it due to the color difference from in-game] and remix thumbnail [probably survivor, but again, color difference! even if its stylistic i still think its neat to include :]] and the coop manual!

you can find the wip coop thumbnail on the wiki!

you. Could argue the white and yellow ones from the manual are surv and monk, But ! color difference. also the yellow pup that looks like monk actually matches perfectly with the yellow slugcat pup from alpha

[probablyanalienindisguise]

Hellooo personal hc that thk was blinded as a result of the infection

[alchemiasart]

Murphy is an asshole.

I will (obviously) definitely not be making my July 1 release because somebody died.

I didn't know him personally, he was the uncle of one of my partners. He left a pretty significant mess behind, and we're pretty much the only local family that can help sort it out.

The writing is still coming, though, and it's very exciting. One of the freeing elements of self-publishing is that you can write the stories in ways that feel right instead of worrying whether or not "the market" is going to buy in.

And by "the market", I mean the agents and publishers and other gatekeepers who determine who gets the Big Support (it's not that big, mostly marketing) and who doesn't.

Plus, I don't want to wait a year or better for my polyam/queer/ace/non-normative science fiction mystery to see the light of day. I want you to be able to read it soon.

So, fingers crossed that Psychopharmacology doesn't kick my ass too hard (because I am still in grad school through all this), I am hoping that I'll have a really solid space story released on August 1 - again, in all three relevant formats, and that'll be on Amazon.

I can't remember if I posted it anywhere, but you can see my previous works of mischief and follow me on Amazon, too.

[r3ynah]

Family of Distinguished People.

So like what if, the Fenton family is just a family full of heroes, villains, and vigilantes. like.. just imagine a long line of people that had or has contributed to the world somehow. Like the Fenton parents as Supervillains, Jazz as a Vigilante, Danny as Hero. Dani just decides to travel not too interested, but does help with her family if needed, Dan does the same thing.

BUT WHAT IF joker is actually a close relative of the Fenton Family (ex. Uncle, Cousin,Family Friend) and like he's just there all happy with his (found)family during family reunions, birthdays and shit.

And the batfam are just like so confused and stressed to why the joker goes missing once a month.

While Joker is literally having a game of Monopoly with the elementary kids at amity park (the kids couldn't bother, they've saw scarier things they handled scarier things) cue Joker giving the kids a hundred dollars because he lost.

This is just one of my what if prompts, that i got locked up in a vault. Might delete this later who knows.

[commander-revan]

I just don't understand this ending... In both of Horikoshi's previous serialized series the villains lived and got to reform and atone at the end.

Why was this series, which focused way fucking more on making the villains sympathetic and pointed out the ways they could have been saved if society or their families were different (and how one literally never had a chance in the first place), the series where they die or are locked away forever.

What happened?

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

"See you tomorrow"

MDZS Disco Elysium AU part 4 [prev parts]

[otlwoozi]

MAMA 2024 ALBUM DAESANG - FML

[clambuoyance]

[DC] doodled these two a lot this week

[snarky-wallflower]

That poor RedCanary person: huh, this Magnus Institute looks like a great place for spelunking! I’ll go check it out!

the rest of us: welp, you’re dead as hell, goodbye.