/currentlywriting/

my diary desu

Same thing I always do; poetry about time, death, infinity, cosmos, etc

there litearlly is aliteration whtf is wrong with u faam

repeating the same word doesn't count m8

...

what are you talking about?
there's no alliteration there except between penis, penis, penis, penis and penis and squeamish and squeamish

I am trying to write an essay about alienation, because I feel it might finally unlock how I feel, but I can't condense all these authors thoughts, I simply have a brainstorming file.

all of them rhyme

you said there "litearlly is aliteration" and that's false

i didn't say that though.

then you came in where he left off

A short story about a man who is keen to marry his daughter to the son of a man he's been friends with since childhood, the subtext being that the two men had a since-unacknowleged drunken homosexual tryst during their adolescence.

actually, i've been in it the entire time,

What's the theme of the work? What sort of feeling or message do you want to tell with them?
Would love an example.
Try stream of consciousness. It help you unlock that freedom.
Interesting. How does the tryst affect their current day relationship?

>What's the theme of the work? What sort of feeling or message do you want to tell with them?
it's not supposed to be particularly high literature
it's supposed to be a narrative about how the mining facility is used as a pawn in a conflict between to rival star systems
the system that owns and operates the facility sends a new and improved AI to oversee it but its real purpose is to stage a series of catastrophes to be blamed on the other system to justify war
the story is told from the perspective of the miners who are both struggling to survive and trying to discover the meaning behind it all

eventually everyone dies but the protagonist who escapes the asteroid but I haven't worked out the details of the ending

I welcome any suggestions, the story is still very much in its formative phase as I've only written a few pages and I know I'll have to rewrite most of it anyway

>Try stream of consciousness. It help you unlock that freedom.
I might understand what you are getting at Joyce, oh oh oh but you see, I have this problem where my thoughts jump ahead, I had this trouble since school where sometimes I would make sentences that made "sense" in the order of ideas I had in that moment but at the same time were incomplete, as if what I wrote worked only if coupled with the particular state of mind I was.

Also this is not a fictional story, it's an essay, with some help from Hopper whose paintings depict this state of mind.
I am trying to connect various philosophers's idea of alienation.

Plus alienation because I am a misfit who feel like nobody knows him and knows nobody.

Writing a book.

It's a young adult novel that acts as a deconstruction of the superhero genre.

It's like if the the web serial Worm met the comic series The Boys, but is less edgy than either of those.

I've got 3 books on the go right now.

One is another sequel to a series I've got, there are already three and this one will make four. It's probably about a quarter written.

Another is a VERY strange comedy which I don't know if it's going to be hilarious for the reader or utterly cringy. I've created an omnipresent and very much God-like narrator of sorts who addresses himself as the writer of this book, takes full control of it, and actively fucks around with the book and its characters as it goes on. The 4th wall is utterly destroyed... constantly. Like I said, I don't know if it's going to be entertaining, or if it's going to utterly suck, but I think it will be a very interesting experiment.

Then, finally, and I KNOW Veeky Forums is going to love this... imma write a compilation of erotic short-stories/novelettes. Why? Because I find writing erotica to be enjoyable and I think I'm damn good at it, that's why.

I also self-publish, and while I'm not yet anywhere close to being a full-time writer from my books, I am most certainly making a notable amount. Who would say 'no' to $25-50 a month just for something you genuinely enjoy doing? That's how much I've been consistently making since March, and June is off to a great start. I'm already over $5 for this month.

how do you get people to buy your books?
self promoting?

When you self-publish, yes, you need to promote/market your books yourself. If you have some money to spend you can pay for some advertising, but I haven't tried it yet. Looking forward to further experimentation though; there is a MASSIVE learning curve to self-publishing, and I'm quite enjoying the process, especially considering I'm getting paid a bit for it. Just today I got an eBook sale for one of my books that are prices at $2.99 USD. Gives me $2.05 USD in royalty, which is substantial. 70% royalty is way more than you could ever hope to get in traditional publishing. I hear 15% is generally the maximum you can expect, and it's not easy to get that much.

What methods of promotion/marketing (bar advertising) would you recommend? I know most people show it to friends and family but i mean its not like they are going to bring in a constant stream of money.

My family doesn't know the titles of my books or my pseudonym. I've yet to tell my old friends, either. You can create promotions for your books using KDP Select. Using this, you can put your books for sale for up to 5 days (either individually or all together) within the 3-month period of your contract. Each individual books gets a 3-month contract and is automatically renewed until you decide not to use it anymore. Some writers shy away from giving their books away for free because they see it as wasted money or something like that. Ultimately, it costs nothing to use this free promotion with KDP, and it gets people reading your material. Could get you some ratings/reviews, can get word spreading by word of mouth, if you luck-out one of the people who get the book might have a popular blog, Youtube channel, Twitter account, or something like that through which they mention your book to give free advertising that you earned simply for having read a book that people liked.

The way to manually spread the word however, and I've learned this from other self-published authors like Derek Murphy, is to (in short) not be obnoxious about it. Don't get into people's faces and start screaming in all-caps to BUY MY BOOK! CLICK THE LINK! That's no good. I make comments on Youtube (well-written and generally multiple paragraphs, I often get thumbs-up for them), might bring it up in threads on Veeky Forums or /k/ (All my books thus far have had firearms in them to some extent or another) if it's relevant, and that's an important point; relevance. No point in going to a forum about, say, Game of Thrones, only to try and promote a book about a hypothetical war in the near-future with North Korea. So just write what comments you're going to write, whatever posts you typically would, and what not, and if one or some of your books are relevant, then casually and discreetly mention them somewhere around the end. Don't even have to provide a link. If they enjoyed your comment/post, then they might take it upon themselves to Google the book's title and/or your pen name. Those who aren't interested will barely notice, but those who might be could look into it themselves. If you're trying to grow crops then focus on good soil (the comment/post) to let the seeds (the mentioning of your book(s)/pen name) grow (get readers) naturally. Don't try to force it by drowning everything in miracle grow (BUY MY BOOK, IT'S GOOD, YOU'LL LIKE IT!)

So, like trolling, there's an art to marketing/promoting. Join relevant forums, and if you're daring then go to relevant threads on relevant boards. Leave good and honest comments on Youtube vids and if it applies then you can casually mention a book or two. Notice that I'm not marketing/promoting right now; just talking about what I'm currently writing though not talking about methods of marketing/promoting. I've not given my pseudonym nor the title of any of my books.

I noticed you can get paid per page read with KDP, does that still apply books you give away?

Slowly phasing back into an on and off project.
An assortment of story fragments about a guy "haunted" by a "ghost" Native American while going about his regular degenerate lifestyle of drug use, bar fights, and sexual deviancy. All the while he is also attempting to rebuild his dead grandfathers farm house he inherited and learning to adapt to a rural lifestyle. Been on and off working on it for about half a year now, don't see an end in sight, or what form the finished product will take.

i was writing a paper on Oedipal Complex thru the work of Aeon by Carl Jung. I admire it for my own reasons but I think it shows credence to the problem of addiction and mental health from a moral psychology or personality.

yea we use our cellphones a lot. Just write and look it over. Sometimes I'll have sentences that can be combined into one after editing. It's process and it takes grit! Steinbeck talks a lot about that "Tunnel of Terror (alienation)" in Cannery Row. Have you tried meditation? It allows you see what your minds is up to in a different way.

Incest. Always, always incest.

>Notice that I'm not marketing/promoting right now; just talking about what I'm currently writing though not talking about methods of marketing/promoting. I've not given my pseudonym nor the title of any of my books.
I know who you are though, I've seen your amazon page.

Getting paid by page reads is done through Kindle Unlimited, which to my understanding is like the book version of Netflix. Pay a certain amount per month, and then read as many books as you want. When you get your book contracted via KDP Select (3 months at a time, as I mentioned) then it automatically becomes available on KU. The rate of pay for KU page reads (typically called KENP; Kindle Edition Normalized Page-reads (or something like that)) is basically half a US penny per page. Averages around 47-50% of a penny, but basically you can call it half a cent. So if your book is 200 Kindle pages long and someone reads the whole thing, you get a US dollar converted to whatever currency you use. About $1.35 for Canada or Australia. To get a British Pound I guess you'd need around 250-300 KENP?

So yeah, you don't get paid for page reads from free books given away; you get NO many in any way through giving away free books, unless they then buy your other books or tell others about you who then buys your books or checks them out on KU. Giving away free books is simply a way to get people reading your stuff. It's an efficient way of finding readers, and I do find that often times after a successful promotional period with dozens or even over 100 free downloads, I then end up with a surge of paid downloads and maybe even a paperback sale or two. Paperback sales are very rare though; eBooks and KENP is where it's at. Just a couple days ago I got over 300 KENP which is over $1.50 US, which is over $2.00 CAD or AUD. Might not sound like much, but it certainly adds up if it can be maintained.

For Kindle book pricing, it's 35% royalties for under $2.99 USD, and 70% royalty for $2.99 or more. So at $0.99 USD, the lowest price (great for when you're just starting out and want to encourage people to just give your stuff a try) you get $0.35 USD in royalties. At $2.99 you get $2.05 which is VERY nice. I got a sale like that today, and it's always pleasant to see. Ultimately though, you can decide your pricing. If you're greedy and set it to $10.00, well, firstly it's highly doubtful anyone will buy it unless you have a well-established pen name that people are familiar with and love, but if you DO get some sales you'll get about $7.00 a pop which is no small chunk of change. Ten sales and that's $70.00. You can set your paperbacks to almost whatever price you want but you don't make as much in royalties because Amazon actually has to manufacture a physical book, which costs money, and they also take a cut on top of that so a 200-page book of a relatively small dimension (height/width) set to $10.00 will MAYBE get you... $3.00? They have a royalty calculator on CreateSpace to help you find out. Just check out CreateSpace if you want to self-publish. They do a pretty good job at holding your hand through the whole process.

Fair enough; I'm on Veeky Forums pretty often so I guess after a while people just become familiar with the way I type and the things I say.

>meditation
I have tried Tulpas, but it does not seem to work for me, either because maybe I can't meditate (attention problems, and how would I know I am doing it right?) or because my mind is missing something.

I wanted to write a short story based on an idea I've had a month ago, but when I started I got writer's block immediately.

start easy man. There's guided meditation apps. Just think of it of a crisis (Why am I unable to sit still?). Call me crazy but that voice in your head telling you don't have to try something and experience it, is the same one that's telling you "no I can't" when you qt 3.14 smiles at you (or whatever the fuck you want to do in life idk). I used Zen, which is just sitting down and focusing on your breath. The idea is you'll never stop thinking but you can acknowledge when thoughts come and let them go. All the dandies(they are all studs cuz they can lie to a girl on tinder) wanting to wear rompers can't say to themselves that they aren't their every thought. Come back to us user, we miss you.

Began editing one of my short stories earlier only to end up disliking it thoroughly
Work on my other projects has ceased completely

Have you read Oscar Wilde's "Preface" in Dorian Gray?

"We can forgive a man making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that admires it intensely."

I hate myself and have lost the will to write -- so, nothing.

Novella/short novel in the editing stages

It's about a dude in college at the center of a cosa nostra inspired outfit living in an America beseiged by a soft insurrection (mostly nonviolent, things like extreme graffiti). Basically they take advantage of an overworked police force and rely on the college environment to mask their operation that runs from Canada to New Gloucester (Boston).

It's framed as both a confession/memoir (the dude is dying and the investigation recently turned up new info that might send him to prison) AND a classified investigative profile after the MC vanishes despite seemingly dying of an unknown illness.

It's mostly just how much this kid spends too much time in his own head and the events progress like a more tragic Guy Ritchie story.

Conceptually it's hip hop in a comparatively long story form. Race, fame, expectation, privacy, secrecy, crime, family, etc. are examined.

you pitched this before i think but now it sounds worse.
It used to sound kinda high-brow now it just sounds like youre pandering

novella about journalism and the current political climate. It's set on a college campus and is about a campus protest against a largely innocuous subject that gets out of control and ends up being coopted by increasingly radical and ridiculous causes. I'm trying to create sort of a Rothian tone and style.

also too much like Infinite jest.
>canada/boston crime operation
>kid spends too much time in his own head while cold-playing serious-crime shit ocurrs thematically

Eh, whatever. I love it. My friends and family support me and it's the first thing that I've really comitted to. I'm young and this is just a fun idea that normies weebs will both enjoy.

generic as is. mix it with somehing else.

Is that what Infinite Jest is about? Huh. It doesn't occur in Canada or Boston but that's the spread of the operation.

it's a slow-moving school drama about a kid-trapped in his head dealing with his trouble-making classmates paralleled with gritty drug addict recovery life in boston as canadian insurgents plan a terror attack on the united states
Its just amore interesting creative version of what youre doing.
I recommend you either make your story very edgy or really play up the romatic angle of the thing.
Don't make it childish which i worry it will be considering what you said in your post about being young and family and friends suppor or whatever

formulating a cohesive story about anthropomorphized birds.

Okay. I'm gonna pretend to listen to you instead of arguing, even though my book has nothing to do with Canada, terrorism, addiction, Boston, TENNIS, corporate prositution or school. He goes to school and he spends too much time in his head because that's his job, not his tragedy.

I appreciate you pushing creative originallity. It's really just a socially conscious hip hop story with elements of transgressive fiction, surrealism, altermodern fiction and hysterical realism.

Bojack Horseman would like a word

>. Race, fame, expectation, privacy, secrecy, crime, family, etc. are examined.
these are all themes of IJ though
You fail to see how terrorism, addiction and tennis are just vehicles to the same themes youre discussing.
the difference is that the setting is original and creative.
yours is pandering with... hip hop?? what does that even mean? that it's disjointed and postmodern with reference to black people's social status in it? cuz iJ did that too...

no, a specific bird species. not fully anthropomorphized, but presented in such a way that people would be unable to percieve them through any other lens. I want people to inevitably cast Judgement against these birds, only to realize that they are nothing but little chirping faggots.

>BOSTON IS SO UNIQUE SATIRICAL CANADIANS GUYS OH AND BLACK PEOPLE

Surreal novel.

Will either be known as one of the greatest literary works of the 21st century or will be so pretentious and poorly received that it will fall into obscurity.

My mind fancies the latter.

Infinie Jest is an overindulgent ultrasuperpostmodern wanna-be-satire that ultimately says everything about absolutely nothing

as a setting for a hysterically-realistic post modern novel about young mid-education people that uses juxtapositions and sad realities of future-worries for effect i think its just a bit hack.

it says just about as much as anyone under age 35 could hope to say.
my only point is that school-story-guy needs to try to distance himself as much as possbile

School story guy here. I feel you. If you read it I think you'd see they're more seperate than related. Hopefully the final version will be distinct enough, but as a young writer (under 25), I'm okay with some thematic similarity to such a higjly esteemed novel. I honestly think you're interpolating what you think is there. However people choose to interpret my book is up to them. I've never had so much fun doing something. I'm just happy to not be one of those writers that doesn't even try because their idea isn't the new super original critically acclaimed satire of the year.

Just be original.
Dont try to make it funny either.
that would be the biggest mistake.

Oh god. Why do people try to make something funny? Almost an oxymoron. You can't try to be funny. Either you ARE funny because you're sad or you naturally ellicit a humorous take on things.

Even if you don't mean for it to be "high literature" every story has a theme or some message within it. In this case I think the asteroid imagery is very appropriate, showing how the miners are flying out of control in comparison to the empires. For the ending, would the AI kill everyone? I can't imagine it would if it were programmed not to. Would the protagonist do it to stop the war? Would his friend do it? Or maybe someone unknown?

With stream of consciousness writing your sentences don't necessarily have to make sense. Think of it like very quickly skimming over the pages of a book. If you go fast enough you'll only catch glimpses of words, but your choice of words and the way you feel them in your head will give you an overall view of what it's about. Then you can start seeing patterns and tying them together, building them up like a spider web.

Currently writing a high fantasy where the demons and devils worked to destroy humanity and successfully done so. But in doing so they made the gods that they worshipped feral back to their bestial forms which killed off half of their world's population.

This would be dealing with the aftermath of such and how the devils and demons go into conflict about how stupid it was to actually destroy humanity.

My main problem though is which characters I would include in the roster as recurring or main character in the story.

I better not use stream of consciousness because my problem is that I write in a way that is too "personal" or egocentric even, basically you would have at times to "decipher" what I write, this in the past has been a reason for many headaches, with marks that could wildly range simply because of how damn hard it was to make sense of it.

>tfw want to write erotica but have very limited sexual experience

Yeah, I wasn't having a go.

Sex is such a temporary thing, it's hard to remember any of it even when you get laid a lot. Don't worry, your imagination would be much more interesting. Just have someone with experience edits your work.

Thanks for the actual advice. Wasn't expecting that.

Erotica is all in the circumstance. The act of sex itself is fairly simple.

That's ok, what do you think of them?

An anarcho-capitalist society in the 2090s. Do people still read steampunk?

there's some details a virgin just won't know, but if you read enough of it I'm sure it could pass

Did they ever?
You might be able to sell steampunk to the YA crowd though.

Not really YA what i'm writing. Not strictly steampunk either though, just has some very strong elements.

It looks like you put some stuff together competently and knowledgeably, though my impression is that it's not particularly inspired stuff. There may be a market for it, but it's just not anything that appeals to me personally.

Steampunk in its premise is pretty silly.
Better to make a civilization that hasn't advanced beyond industrial tech (minus electricity), because of magic.
This way you can go crazy into "superstructures" and stuff like huge tanks nearing 40K territory.
Electric-tech has no use in a world where common folk can start tiny flames/sparks in a couple seconds of concentration.

If it doesn't play a big part of the story then why include it?
>Electric-tech has no use in a world where common folk can start tiny flames/sparks in a couple seconds of concentration.
That's where you're wrong. Electricity is dead simple to produce if you can make fire, and can be stored almost indefinitely in batteries. It requires no concentration to flip a light switch.

No worries, to each their own. My first book is actually one that I had wanted to write for many years but finally got around to it in 2016. I actually went straight from writing that to writing most of its sequel before finally calming down and going back to that first book to edit it. Went over it many times, in total around 3 or 4 drafts. I then wrote an erotica that also has, to a small degree, some experiences in my own sexual life, but also I just plain ol' like writing smut so I don't know if that could be considered inspired or uninspired. Either way, I quite enjoyed it. I then wrote an action that had a bunch of gun porn in it for my fellow gun nuts, then a drama piece about the stuggles men face when the issue of divorce is raised which also touches on the issue of male suicide, and only THEN several months later did I dust off that sequel and gave it a finish, making it my 5th book and 1st sequel. A month later came yet another sequel, which is actually the book that I got an eBook sale today along with a couple dozen page reads which is nice.

I do believe I'm tapping into a market of sorts, because I get relatively regular sales and KENP. May was a little bit of a slump but June is going quite well, meanwhile March and April was fantastic in my opinion, considering I haven't been a self-published author for so much as a year yet. Still got a case of writer's block on the go unfortunately but I think it's soon to come to an end. Looking forward to getting a 7th book finished once I decide which of the ones I've started that I want to dive into. I'm most definitely finding a real passion in writing, I've been going at it steadily for many months now, and I look forward to continuing.

Working on my book about humans sharing a world with demons when the latter caused an event humans dubbed the Realm Tear Crisis. Demons entered the world in an attempt to flee from an evil they won't discuss. They brought possessions, curses, hauntings and the I'll with them, as well as magic, which I call witching. There are benign and malignant demons, the former of which establish an order called Wycyrí. Humans call the order the Watchers. These demons feel they've unbalanced the human world, but in their reluctance to return to Maléfor, they instead defend the humans from the maleficent demons. The story follows a human antihero who endeavors to become a Wycyr, and once he discovers dark secrets within the order he makes it his personal mission to tear the order apart. From Death's personal soul collectors to the Makers and Dread God, there's a lot invested in this world. I hope to get it published.

It's currently 750 pages in length.

more

Post the first sentence

The frigid midnight air slithered into Cyril's nostrils, where it writhed and seethed like a wounded viper.

sounds sexy.

Thank you.

The backdrop to my fiction.

Mostly meandering among the sprawling universe I'm attempting to establish.

Porn. Drugs and magic.

Do you ever try writing about what you're going to write about? If I keep doing that and including "quotes" they eventually overtake the metacommentary completely.

A sci-fi novel, like DOOM mixed with Fantasy elements. I'm also writing it on a word-processor emulator. hate modern day word programs. Too much junk.

Hi Veeky Forums, I thought of making my own thread to ask but saw this one here... do you guys have a guide on writing or any suggested material? I'm an illustrator and I would really like to start making some graphic novels. I have ideas but not anything well organized or fleshed out.
Over on /ic/ (art board) we have a huge wiki guide with tons of books and tutorials on how to draw the right way and I was wondering if /lit had something similar?

If you're an illustrator, illustrate. Don't try to learn to write too.

In short: a novel in which three New York City high schoolers and a Japanese idol singer discover that the collective unconscious is a grand inferno-like cityscape. Furtive, innocent explorations lead to attempts at social engineering that end in disaster when they attract the attention of a globalist cabal dedicated to chasing the ultimate orgasm

But there are lots of illustrators who write... they're graphic novelists... I don't want to learn how to write, I want to learn how to make a good story that I can draw out. When I was 18 I really just wanted to make books so I taught myself how to draw better cause I thought it'd be better than learning to write with words.