☕️ hoopy frood 🍵 @tynanpants@writing.exchange
i code, write sf/fantasy, and blog about books, the Internet, and my enormous cat Samwise. i use too many comma splices.
"i've never seen somebody earn this many exclamation points before" -- story feedback, long ago
www.tynanburke.com/writing for more including some stories you can read now!
Joined Jan 2021
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#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/
“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!
+9014 since last update
Fight scenes were fun. I decided that the protags would be mostly passive, based on John Rogers's advice to never give civilian main characters a gun. Resolved a major character conflict while the two in question were hiding. The fight sequence has an explosive finale, and I'm wrapping up the exposition afterwards. Climax is mostly done--all that remains is the denouement where we learn what's actually been going on this whole time.
+5778 since last update
My prose has turned very tell-don't-show-y in this home stretch. I don't really care about this guideline--I'd like to think I have a good sense of what it means--but it's worth noting. Boring-to-me happenings are required to get all the characters in place so I just brutally summarize them. If anything I should be doing this elsewhere too.
Into the very final stretch, now. Half the characters have completed their inner arcs. Two big fight scenes coming up--woohoo!
Realized I can get rid of my entire prologue if I just tweak the opening sentence to this novel.
As I near the end of this novel’s rough draft, I find that I’m only now grokking the character trajectories. I knew who they were as people, but I didn’t know everything that was going to happen to them when I first sketched their arcs. Now that I do, I can see what stories I actually have room to tell. I’m excited to refocus things during revisions so there’s a more coherent story and theme.
I’m used to short stories where this isn’t as much of an issue...
#writing
+729/542
I didn't end up making something go disastrously wrong. It's enough that getting what she wanted didn't solve her problems. Her success paves the way for Hideki's failure, which I wrote out yesterday, and now he's locked in the brig. Which sucks for him but is great to write and, hopefully, read. He'll have a major revelation this chapter, which will help him grow as a person, so woot for Hideki.
The thrilling conclusion starts now, basically. A lot of action from here on out. Yay!
+602/981
Bit of a slog getting through this chapter. I'd been dreading writing it because I didn't know how to make it especially interesting. Oh this main character is finally getting to do the thing she wants to do, great, but where's the drama? Obvious in retrospect--make it not everything she hoped it would be, is this really what she wanted?--and then make something go disastrously wrong.
Yay!
i code, write sf/fantasy, and blog about books, the Internet, and my enormous cat Samwise. i use too many comma splices.
"i've never seen somebody earn this many exclamation points before" -- story feedback, long ago
www.tynanburke.com/writing for more including some stories you can read now!
Joined Jan 2021
