Apparently A Full-Time Euphoria Blog Now

Finding out that Bram Stoker was in a sexless marriage and that scholars believe that he very likely was closeted gay puts the entire book into perspective as to WHY it reads EXACTLY like a self insert wattpad Dracula kidnap fic:

one character knowing something offhandedly that they shouldn't, isn't addressed until later

the crow rhyme

colours!! esp if like, blue is evil in your world and the mc's best friend is always noted to wear blue...betrayal?

write with the ending in mind

use patterns from tragic past events to warn of the future

keep the characters distracted! run it in the background until the grand reveal

WEATHER.

do some research into Chekhov's gun

mention something that the mc dismisses over and over

KEEP TRACK OF WHAT YOU PUT. don't leave things hanging.

unreliable characters giving information that turn out to be true

flowers and names with meanings

anything with meanings actually

metaphors. if one character describes another as "a real demon" and the other turns out to be the bad guy, you're kind of like...ohhh yeahhh

one for sorrow,

two for mirth.

three for a wedding

four for a birth

five for silver

six for gold

seven for a secret never to be told

eight for a wish

nine for a kiss

ten a bird you should never miss

eleven for health

twelve for wealth

thirteen beware

When creating characters, it's all too easy to envision the most perfect people, especially when it comes to creating love interests. Even our loveable morally grey characters are mostly perfect, if only they would stop killing...

So, here are a list of some flaws (based on personality, not appearance) to help round out your characters. While it's nice to be good at everything, it's abnormal. No one is perfect, and your characters will be much more relatable if you knock them down a bit.

Please note, none of these are (specifically) mental disorders, as I don't consider those a character flaw.

The Good (aka little flaw):

Absent-minded, aimless, argumentative, audacious, awkward, blunt, bold, boring, capricious, childish, clumsy, competitive, complainer, cowardly, critical directionally-challenged, dubious, finicky, fixated, flake, flirty, foolish, gossipy, gruff, gullible, hedonistic, humourless, hypocritical, idealist, idiotic, ignorant, illiterate, immature, impatient, impetuous, impulsive, incompetent, inconsiderate, indecisive, indifferent, indomitable, irrational, lazy, lustful, materialistic, meddlesome, meek, mischievious, nagging, naive, nervous, nosey, obnoxious, overambitious, overconfident, overemotional, overprotective, overzealous, passive-aggressive, paranoid, peevish, perfectionist, pessimist, pest, predicatable, pretencious, prideful, rebellious, renege, rigorous, sarcastic, skeptic, seducer, selfish, self-righteous, shallow, slacker, solemn, spacey, spoild, squeamish, stubborn, supersticious, sycophant, tactless, tease, tempermental, tenacious, theatrical, thoughtless, timid, unpredictable, unsupportive, vain, workaholic

The Bad (aka big flaw):

Addiction, adulterous, aloof, anxious, apathetic, arrogant, belittling, belligerent, bigmouth, bitter, bully, callous, deceptive, dependant, deranged, dishonest, disloyal, disrespectful, egotistical, envious, erratic, exploitive, fanatical, fickle, fierce (at the extreme), gluttonous, greedy, harasser, hubris, impious, infamy, intolerant, judgemental, lewd, liar, meglomaniac, morally grey, narcissistic, negligent, obsequious, obsessive, offensive, prejudiced, quixotic, reckless, rigid, self-martyr, self-righteous, short-tempered, spiteful, squanderer, stingy, unethical, unforgiving, untrustworthy

The Ugly (aka cross the street when you see this person):

Abusive, bigot, controlling, cruel, explosive, immoral, inhumane, intolerant, machiavellian, manipulative, murderous, neglectful, oppressive, racist, remorseless, possessive, self-destructive, threatening, treacherous, vengeful, vindictive, violent

The seven chief features of ego: self-deprecation, self-destruction, martyrdom, stubbornness, greed, arrogance and impatience.

Some of these may not even be considered flaws, and some may jump from one category to the next. It's all about how you present these flaws in your characters.

Oh, thank you so much! All my writing stuff is tagged #writing advisements, but I can speak very briefly about outlines because… I don’t use them. I’m not necessarily advocating that (generally when I get close to the end I do start to detail things a bit more to make sure I close up plot holes and tie up loose ends) but I’m more of a ‘scribble random notes in my phone so I don’t forget the scene I just daydreamed’ sort of writer. 

There’s more detail on specific stages of writing in some of my other posts, but my basic process is that I spend a lot of time in a pre-writing state I call meditation. I take this very, very seriously—I’ll usually write ‘meditate next chapter’ into my daily to-do list (I determine the list for every day of the week on Monday mornings), and very often it will be my primary writing task for the day. It usually involves going for a walk or a run, and is mostly time to let my mind wander wherever it wants to. Well, that’s not quite accurate; I pick a starting place and then set my mind on a specific wandering path, like “what would happen next if this character did this thing?”. Sometimes I’ll listen to music that I think will aid the wandering, or put me in the correct mood. 

Part of the meditating phase is the research phase, when I usually pick names or setting details. This is pretty brief. A lot of times I’ll research a lot of names I might want to use at once and then make lists of them, in case I want to add a character but don’t want to interrupt my writing by thinking a lot about their name. In any given note for any of my original stories, there’s probably a list of names and surnames labeled ‘just in case.’ I also will scribble out a timeline if there are any necessary dates.

This is what my notes look like for a random chapter of How to Win after having daydreamed the scene:

Okay, here’s what happens when I write/edit:

1st draft: Word vomit, which is what I recommend for you. You’re worried you’ll get caught up in research? Don’t research. Fuck research. You can do it later. Just start writing. Even if what you write looks like this:

She walked in. Then she sat down. She looked up at him. He looked back at her. She was incredulous. He didn’t seem to care. Still, she asked, “Are you serious?”

You can fix it later, finesse it, but editing is always easier (though more time-consuming, don’t be fooled) than writing. Just sit down, write a scene, walk away. If you’re having trouble getting started, then my best piece of advice to you is very simple: just write.

2nd draft: First edit. This is where I usually add 1-2k words of, as I said, ‘finesse,’ though it can sometimes be unnecessary. This is when my half-formed thoughts become sentences, so the above scene might now look like this:

She took a seat beside him, waiting for a reaction. He wasn’t particularly shamed by her eye contact—managed to meet her eye with a spectacular lack of concern, in fact—and for a moment she considered turning her head, but if anyone should have been averting eye contact, it should have been him. “Are you serious?” she asked, once it seemed obvious she was going to have to do the asking.

If I want an alpha read, I send the second draft to someone else. This is because all the ideas are out somewhat cogently by then, and everything I want the characters to be doing is present, but if their purpose in the narrative is unclear, I want someone to tell me so before I spend more time on where I put the commas.

3rd draft: This is tightening up, polishing for perfection (or something close to that). I’ll usually cut words during this read, so that the above can sometimes become:

She took a seat beside him, waiting for a reaction. He wasn’t particularly shamed by her eye contact—managed to meet her eye with a spectacular lack of concern, in fact—and for a moment, she wondered if she might have been the one in the wrong.

No, she thought. I am wronged.

“Are you serious?”

I don’t typically use beta readers because I think I should be responsible for my own editing (it’s part of my craft, after all) but if I want someone to read for spelling/grammar/punctuation, I send them this draft.

4th draft: Before I publish anything, I read it in either a different font or in a different window. The FFN editor, for example, uses a different font from google docs, so it’s easier to spot errors. I highly recommend this. Personally, I’ve found that when I don’t do it (or I rush it), there are almost always errors I blatantly missed.

hey netizens! i'm not sure how many people are aware, but youtube's been slowly rolling out a new anti-adblock policy that can't be bypassed with the usual software like uBlock Origin and Pi-Hole out of the gate

BUT, if you're a uBlock Origin user (or use an adblocker with a similar cosmetics modifier), you can add these commands in the uBlock dashboard to get rid of it!

youtube.com##+js(set, yt.config_.openPopupConfig.supportedPopups.adBlockMessageViewModel, false) youtube.com##+js(set, Object.prototype.adBlocksFound, 0) youtube.com##+js(set, ytplayer.config.args.raw_player_response.adPlacements, []) youtube.com##+js(set, Object.prototype.hasAllowedInstreamAd, true)

It’s you friendly neighbor fanfic author here. In the light of this apparent new trend of people feeding unfinished fics to AI to get an “ending,” and some people even talking about “blanket permissions,” let me just say this:

I EXPLICITLY FORBID ANYONE TO FEED MY FICS TO AI. DUDE, THAT IS ABOUT THE LEAST RESPECTFUL THING YOU CAN DO. IF YOU DO IT, SHALL YOU BE EXCOMMUNICATED FROM YOUR FANDOM AND WALK ON LEGOS BAREFOOT TILL THE END OF DAYS.

That is my anti-permission.

AI CANNOT create on its own. It’s not that smart. Anyone who’s ever build any sort of language AI can tell you with 100% certainty it’s not that smart. It can “learn” and it can “create” sentences, but it needs to be fed a language to do so.

So it will only ever “create” based on what it’s fed. This is absolutely crucial.

There are ethical ways to do this. I did this in my undergrad with my class, taking .txt files of old classic books and feeding them to our programs for words. That way our programs were only ever “creating” from works that did not break copyright laws.

But feeding an AI someone else’s fanfic? Yeah, now you’ve given the language model SOMEONE ELSE’S WORK to learn off of WITHOUT THEIR PERMISSION.

It doesn’t matter that it’s a fanfic and technically, the author does not own the characters/setting. They created the story, they engaged in creative exercise, so that fanfic is theirs. YOU do not have the right, legally, to take THEIR work and do what you want with it, much less feed it to an AI who will take their work and now use it to further its language learning.

Especially since AIs like Chat GPT have a payment model. Now someone else is making money off of a fanfic author’s work, and YOU directly contributed to that.

It’s you friendly neighbor fanfic author here. In the light of this apparent new trend of people feeding unfinished fics to AI to get an “ending,” and some people even talking about “blanket permissions,” let me just say this:

I EXPLICITLY FORBID ANYONE TO FEED MY FICS TO AI. DUDE, THAT IS ABOUT THE LEAST RESPECTFUL THING YOU CAN DO. IF YOU DO IT, SHALL YOU BE EXCOMMUNICATED FROM YOUR FANDOM AND WALK ON LEGOS BAREFOOT TILL THE END OF DAYS.

That is my anti-permission.

(Info redacted because I prefer keeping these accounts separate but no one follows me on the side blog I have for that account.)

The story was posted almost a year ago and is relatively “popular” by my average statistics even though it has tropes and themes that are big turnoffs for a lot of people (hence separate accounts). This popularity is undoubtedly because it’s a Marvel Loki story and that fandom is massive.

So there is obviously an algorithm or a bot scrubbing ao3 statistics and leaving this comment on fics that meet a certain metric with the main character of the fic inserted into the comment.

I had a little time to kill this morning so I decided to investigate further. And y’all this is so predatory. Come on this journey with me. It made me mad. It may make you mad.

First, if you go to Webnovel’s website, you HAVE to choose between male lead or female lead stories before you can go any further. WTF?

And that’s weird, but this gets so much worse. This is basically a pay-to-read site that has different subscription models. Which… okay BUT! The authors don’t get paid! Look at that comment again. They’re promising a supportive and nurturing community, but zero monetary compensation. It’s basically, “post your stuff here so we can get paid and you can get… nice vibes?” I mean look at this Orwellian writing:

Using the phrase “pay-to-read model” in the same sentence as “qualitative changes in lifestyles for authors” deliberately makes you think that you can get paid and maybe even make a living on this website. But that’s not actually what it says and authors will not receive one red cent.

Oh but wait, the worst is still to come. In case this breaks containment (which I kind of hope it does) this is where I mention that I’m a lawyer in the US.

I don’t do intellectual property or copyright law but I do read and write contracts for a living. So I went to look at their terms of service. It was fun!

Highlights the first, in which Webnovel gets a license to do basically whatever they want with content you post on their site. This is how they get to be paid for people reading authors’ writing without paying them anything.

Highlights the second, in which Webnovel takes no responsibility for illegally profiting off of fan fic. This all says that the writer is 100% responsible for everything the writer posts (even though only Webnovel is making money from it).

Highlights the third which say that by posting, the author is representing that they have the legal right to use and to let Webnovel use the content according to these terms. So if a writer posts fan fiction and Webnovel makes money from people reading the fan fiction, and the House of the Mouse catches wise, these sections say that that’s ALL on the writer.

So that’s a little skeevy to start off with but the thing that is seriously shitty and made me make this post was that these assholes are coming to ao3. They are actively recruiting people in comments on their fan fiction. And they are saying they are big fans of the character you’re writing about and that they share your interests.

They are recruiting fan fiction writers and giving every impression that you can make money from posting fan fiction on their site and hiding the fact that you absolutely cannot but they can make money off of you while you try, deep in their terms of service which no one but a lawyer who writes fan fic and has some time to kill will read.

I see posts on here regularly from people who don’t understand how this stuff works, don’t understand that they (and others) can not legally make a financial profit from fan fiction. And there are tons of people who will not take the time to dig into the details.

I swear to god after like a week people will still be reading but nobody leaves comments anymore and I just want to make it absolutely clear that I would be excited and elated to get a comment on these fics one hundred years after I post them.

Gang, I can’t stop thinking about this guy. Not because he was hot (though he was), but because I have never in my life felt so wildly unmoored while speaking to another human being.

Like, he told me his name, I told him mine, and then I made a very in context joke about a lizard - too much to explain here, but I promise it made sense at the time. He responded, and I am not taking any liberties as I quote this:

“A lizard? Aren’t those the little guys that run around on two legs sometimes?”

It is hard to know what to say to that. I am good with conversational curveballs, but this was out of left field. I hesitated, then put on a very polite social smile and responded “yeah! I guess lizards do run around on two legs sometimes!”

“You are much like a lizard, then.” He said. “You’re also on two legs.”

Well.

I was briefly saved from having to come up with a response because the opening act started playing. Opening acts are hit and miss, but I was happy to discover that this particular one, Ruby Dear, has a frontwoman with an absolutely incredible voice. Like holy shit, after the first song my friend and I looked at each other and simultaneously said “PIPES.” I got pretty into their set, and would have been bummed out when they had to wrap up if the promise of a truly spectacular Talking Heads cover band wasn’t on the horizon.

I had by this point forgotten about my new friend The Lizardman, but he tapped me on the shoulder and said “Did you like the performance?” Okay, that’s a normal question, I could handle this conversation.

“Yeah, I thought they were great! Did you like them?!” I said.

“Yes! I’ve never been to a concert before!” He replied.

Well.

“…HOW?” I finally said.

He shrugged. “I just haven’t.” I had to study him to see if he was fucking with me. He did not appear to be.

This presented a new question. He looked like he was roughly in my age range (late 20s/early 30s), but was it possible that he was very young?? He had to be at least 21 though, he’d been carded at the door and was drinking a beer. Furthermore, the friends he was with were in their late forties at the absolute youngest.

“You must really like the Talking Heads, if this is the show that got you to come out!” I finally said.

“Oh, I’ve never even heard a song by them.” He replied politely. “That’s the band that’s playing next?”

Well.

“The band playing tonight is called Start Making Sense.” I finally explained, after I had wrapped my mind around this. “They play songs by the Talking Heads. The Talking Heads broke up in like 1990.”

“Oh! Cool!” He said. “Were they any good?”

“… Yes.” I said after another few moments of interal debate about whether this guy was fucking with me. He had to be fucking with me.

Per the awestruck expression on his face after the band opened with Psycho Killer, he was not fucking with me. And he had questions.

“EVERYONE IN THE AUDIENCE KNEW ALL THE WORDS?!??” He exclaimed.

“YEAH WE ALL LIKE TALKING HEADS ENOUGH TO GO TO A TALKING HEADS COVER SHOW!” I yelled back.

“THAT’S AMAZING!” He decided.

Did I think the bass player was concentrating very hard? (He thought she was concentrating very hard.)

(During This Must Be The Place) “What am I hearing now?” I told him the song name and he said “No, what instrument?” I told him it was a synth. “What’s a synth?” he asked. I meant a synthesizer, I explained. “Oh, what’s a synthesizer?” He asked.

Did I notice that the drummer was playing the drum with her HANDS?

Is Road To Nowhere the band’s most popular song? It isn’t???? Why not?! (he very much liked Road to Nowhere)

Things that I was certain he would be very curious about that he had absolutely no questions whatsoever about:

Why the lead singer had changed into an enormous suit for one song.

Like, imagine you’ve made it to at least your mid-20s without ever having eaten pineapple.

They’re around, but it’s not like they’re mandatory, and you’ve just always had other things to do/eat. Then one day, you’re like “know what, I wanna know what this whole pineapple deal is,”

so you hop on a plane, fly to Las Vegas, hunt down Amaury Guichon, and have him lovingly handcraft a hyper-realistic chocolate sculpture of a pineapple for you. Nothing about that is missing the mark, exactly? Like, because it’s Amaury Guichon, there ARE pieces of actual pineapple involved in the recipe, so when you take that first bite, nobody can say that you haven’t tasted a pineapple now. You’ve done it, you’ve joined team pineapple-eater, and, as it turned out, you thoroughly enjoyed the whole experience!

It’s cool that you never tried pineapple before, it’s cool that you decided that this would randomly be the day to change that, and it’s great that it was a successful experiment! But, setting all that aside… it’s hard to get around that what you experienced was a BUCKWILD WAY TO BE INTRODUCED TO PINEAPPLE?

I went to my first proper unsupervised rock concert when I was maybe 14-15. It was a basement ska show at the college near me that my friend’s brother attended. I know first concerts are supposed to be one of the things you always remember, but I couldn’t tell you the name of the band if you paid me, even though I’m pretty sure I already had their CD. I don’t remember the music, I don’t remember the vibe, I just remember feeling incredibly, WILDLY anxious that I would do or say something that would reveal to all the other attendees that this was my very first concert.

It took me like… a while to get to the point where I could go to a show without worrying that everyone there knew I wasn’t cool enough to be there. I was so convinced that I’d dance weird or say something silly or commit an unspoken faux pas like wearing the band’s t-shirt to the show, that I honestly didn’t really ever have a good time until I’d forced myself to enough shows up to finally feel like I knew what to expect. Like, I don’t think I actually unclenched until my own band had actually played a show for a reasonably sized audience my senior year of high school. Which is ridiculous, right? I was the lead guitarist and singer for a fucking punk band and I was still CONVINCED that they’d all figure out I was actually a poser.

i went to a farmer’s market

with my mom and dad

and we passed a bookstore

in the window of the shop, a sign:

“book signing today! by some old man!“

“i know him!” cried my mom

so in we went – like perseus, unaware that he was about to face

(probably medusa)

(i forget)

(i’m not looking it up and also don’t tell me)

fuck me, he was a poet.

the book guy, i mean.

worse, he read a few poems out loud

directly at me

while i tried to figure out where to look

(because eye contact would only make it worse)

a brief summary of these poems:

some old fuck’s memories of how

Mountain Towns Once Were

and how

Mountain Towns Are Not Like That Now.

guess whose fault it was

it was cellphones.

i thought: this guy has a book because he took his sentences

and he pressed enter

a lot in

the middle

and did some weird things with The Capitals

and now he calls himself a poet

and reads at people who just wanted to

buy some fucking produce

jesus

it’s not that fucking hard jeffrey