some things

1. Never tell anyone what you're planning to do until you do it (you will get a premature dopamine hit and sense of accomplishment from telling them and lose motivation to actually do it)

I assume that as part of your job, you've read Jewish texts such as the Talmud, Sefer Yetzira, Zohar, and etc. Are there reliable translations of these texts available, or would I have to read them in the original Hebrew?

Talmud: multiple excellent translations with high quality English commentary available online for free at places like sefira.org.

Sefer Yetzirah: same as above. But the text is also only like 3000 words it has some excellent critical scholarship in english

Sefer Zohar --the book of radiance-- is the crowning achievement of medieval Jewish esotericism, and remains one of the most complex and influential mystical texts in history.

To oversimplify, it is a grand synthesis of Jewish mysticism, an attempt to bring the panoply of peripheral Jewish mystical traditions more in line with the Orthodox mainstream. It's author, Moshe De Leon, was horrified by the medieval neo-aristotelian rationalism of rabbis like Maimonides, who he saw as stripping Judaism of its emotional and spiritual core.

As such, Sefer Zohar is a systematic literary tour of Jewish esoteric history. An esoteric history which involves a robust literature on the mystical significance of the Hebrew language itself. Because of this, much of the text is recursive analysis of its own language; full of things like theologically significant puns, numerology, and other such esoteric language games.

It is also not written in normal medieval Hebrew. For several complex reasons, the author was attempting to pass the text off as a copy of a rediscovered manuscript from 2nd century Palestine. So it's actually a 13th century Andalusian rabbi trying to write like a 2nd century Syrian rabbi who wrote in Aramaic. It is written in its own dialect, generally referred to as Zoharic Aramaic. Also much of the text is a gloss on the Hebrew Bible itself. All of this makes it effectively impossible to translate.

Several of my friends play CCGs professionally. They are helping me design a simple playable card game. Once the game itself is balanced and enjoyable, I will hand the beta art over to my occultist friends, at which we will do several rounds of exegesis on the game as a divinatory tool.

Like this is part of what Crowley meant by "every man and every woman is a star". It's genuinely interesting to see the charismatic elements of modern evangelical protestantism evolve a similar structure.

While you very well may be able to draw such a thread, I think any Thelemite who actually has a grasp of Thelemic theology and philosophy would agree that if you are not engaging in self-deification as a deliberate act of Will, you are in fact doing something wrong. When Paula White replaces the names of the prophets with her own, does she do it with the knowing, tongue-in-cheek deliberation of Crowley identifying himself as the Beast 666? I for one doubt it.

She makes herself an implement of her God by positioning herself as prophet—but would she go to the lengths that God asked if his prophets? Does she understand what this self identification means? If not, I would not see it as a deliberate act of Will, but as the type of careless, foolish blasphemy that marks megachurch style Christianity.

I love blasphemy. I love self-deification. (My blog probably makes that abundantly clear.) But if all acts are to be done "under Will", then I do not think that Paula White acts with Will in this way.

To be clear, I suspect you're correct about that line. (I would postulate that it goes through Wicca as well before it reaches the evangelicals.) But I just want to put it out there that just as Christian theology is warped by these preachers, so is Thelemic theology (if that's what they are, one way or another, influenced by).

I will quote ZUN

I have been thinking a lot about Chuunibyo as a state that is; anti-normative, aspirational, and generative.

1) Chuuni is anti-normative. A comfortable and copacetic individual cannot be chuuni. Chuuni is founded in a dissatisfaction with the world, the type commonly found in adolescents. This lends the chuuni to both delusion and generation. The two are ideally not mutually exclusive.

2) Chuuni is aspirational. Chuuni is not a static state. It is something that must actively be pursed. The chuuni seeks something, be it a desire for identity, a more just world, or an escape from an unacceptable reality. A chuuni mindset is maintained for a reason.

3) Chuuni is generative. Chuuni in its best artistic expression is generative. After all, desire must inevitably articulate itself. This might manifest as "a desire for special powers" or "a cool bisexual vampire bf" but because Chuuni is ideally both anti-normative and aspirational, it will not stop with these ideas. It indulges the adolescent, but continues building based on that trajectory.

There's a bit in Don Quixote where feels anxious about repairing his clothing (practically a costume for a non-existent role of knight-errant) with thread of a different color as this was a sign of embarrassing failed nobility poverty, and not a romanticize-able chivalric poverty.

Ive told this anecdote before but I will tell it again:

One of my best friends wanted to write a screenplay. He wrote the first 25%, and then re-wrote that eight times. He wrote two whole screenplays worth of words, and had a fragment of a draft to show for it. If I had a first commandment for my writing career, it is this:

No Backspace until the first draft is done.

Most of writing as a craft --the actual process of producing a written work-- is editing. To practice writing, you need a finished draft to edit. That first draft will inevitably be incoherent, embarrassing, bloated, personally revealing of your own unexamined biases and quirks, and generally not very good. You have to embrace this. This is what editors are for. @/mortalityplays has a post that articulates this better than I can.

In this vein, I would recommend that your theoretical practice webnovel be as indulgent as possible. Write your potato chips. Something that sparks a bit of chuuni glee. Whatever gets you to that daily word count every single day. Take Amber Skies, my own experimental webnovel; it is a far-future found-family bildungsroman full of pornographic gore and biomechanical dragons. It is my chuuni. The prose is adolescent, melodramatic, and riddled with grammatical errors. I love it.

Writing Amber Skies taught me what it feels like to actually sit down and write 125,000 words. How much effort that takes, the effect it has on my body, what is physically possible for me to produce in a single day without burning out. It is also a marathon, not a sprint. Consistency and routine are your strongest soldiers.

In terms of concrete structure, I have fewer thoughts. My first webnovel was written as a serial, which worked for my strengths as a writer, and the nature of the text. A thousand words a day, every sunday, for 125 sundays, published to the audience SOON as I was done writing. Don't do this. Let things cook a bit. Maybe 5-10k chunks?

Enjoying bad art is neither virtuous nor unvirtuous because enjoyment is passive. It is barely a choice. I do, however, think that incuriosity is shameful. Taste, as in the ability to understand, diagnose, and articulate, the artistic choices that make up a work, is the vehicle for understanding and producing art. Taste can only be cultivated by reflecting upon a broad field of art, peak to dogshit. Because of this, the cultivation of Taste is one of my favorite parts of being alive.

If you've only ever watched marvel movies, of course they are your favorite movies. Your love of marvel movies means little. However, if you have sampled everything the world of cinema has to offer, have watched every single movie dogshit to peak, and marvel movies are still your favorite, that is meaningful. You probably have some very interesting things to say about movies. Even though I will probably disagree with them.