☕️ hoopy frood 🍵 @tynanpants@writing.exchange

#introduction
Hello Fediverse (and writing.exchange)! I'm Tynan, and I'm a speculative fiction writer and software engineer. I'm here to write about writing, chat with other writers, and toot other random stuff that comes up. (Bird site account is too professional and I want a place to more freely speak my mind.)

Currently reading The Stand, and The End Of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking).

If you want to check out my blog or some stories, they're all linked at http://www.tynanburke.com/writing/

Kicking the tires on a new opinion:

World-class YA/PG stories shine a little brighter than other genres because you don’t have access to many of the bells and whistles that a mediocre writer can distract adults with. You have to be really good at the fundamentals because they have to carry more weight. Sort of like how chefs judge each other based on fried eggs.

As a corollary, bad PG is even worse.

I’m not a particularly big fan, fwiw

This spring, I helped out a y combinator company that was trying to build a writing community. They decided to go with an expensive subscription plan so I told them it wouldn’t work and stopped.

Got curious this morning and looked them up. The website just directs you to a discord server for some scammy “web 3.0” NFT nonsense.

The best minds of my generation…

One easy way to add drama to a story is to just make the characters shittier people

@tynanpants aside: Young Man, Become Legend! would be kind of a fun band name

@tynanpants it’s this one, this is the winner https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gfbL3gG0MU

today i will try to find the best cover of A Cruel Angel's Thesis

and write, in case my editor sees this

“Alright! I’ve sent the manuscript to my editor” is something I will never get tired of saying

@tynanpants the title is from the Kybalion but I just realized it sounds like Whitman. Probably drawing from shared source material. Occultism was popular back then

Beta draft of short story LIKE AND UNLIKE ARE THE SAME is complete! Well, I still need to read it through one more time. But!

It’s the tale of a young mage at his first 12-step meeting for magic dependence.

One of the problems with working with an editor is that I don’t let my ideas stew and iterate enough before I seek feedback. There’s been a certain weirdness missing from my work lately.

Which is all to say I hope he doesn’t mind getting this one later than he’d like 😅

Frank Reich would be a good character name

Time to rip this short story’s second draft to shreds

Finally been firing up Scrivener again to do the second draft of my novel. It really came together in my head while I was letting it lie fallow and working on other projects. Wrote up the new take on the main characters, and a bullet-pointed outline, in two days! Happy with myself. Breaking this down into chapters is going well too, for now at least. I always forget how much easier a second draft is :D

Since finishing the rough draft of my novel 2.5 weeks ago, I’ve fully brainstormed and outlined a novella and a short story, so naturally I’m beating myself up for “not writing”

Of course I run out of ideas the second I'm approached to write a short story for a special issue of a magazine. On the bright side: free publishing opportunity! Yes, I'm complain-bragging.

I did figure it out, there are some things about addiction treatment I've been meaning to get off my chest, so this story will be about a wizard's first mandated meeting for magic dependency.

I think I just attempted to spell 'paraphernalia' for the first time. WHY IS THERE AN ‘R’ I’m so angry

Ready Player One came out 10 years ago, and was considered to be a solid B entry in the Harmless Fun category. 7 years later, with the movie, the book was back in the news. The new critical consensus was "this book is toxic incel garbage." I think about this more than I should

Anybody got tips for #writing a whodunit procedural? Never done one before. I know “plot backwards” but that’s it.

Woohoo! Finished the rough draft of my hopepunk novel THE WORLD BEYOND EELS, weighing in at 125,570 words. 2/13/2020 - 3/13/2021. Now comes the fun part!