Cosmic Funnies
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pixel skylines
Love Begins
TVSTRANGERTHINGS
Noah Kahan
#extradirty
ojovivo
izzy's playlists!
JVL
Sweet Seals For You, Always
Discoholic 🪩
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Misplaced Lens Cap
almost home
Sade Olutola
wallacepolsom
Stranger Things
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
seen from T1
seen from Egypt
seen from Russia
seen from Belgium
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seen from United States
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seen from Brazil
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seen from Armenia
seen from Israel
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@nickedinger
small town diner waitress voice: Omelas? Oh, oh no, easy mistake, you're in oh - MAY - las right now, with an A. Plenty' people get the name mixed up. Nope, no utopia here, just our small little town. *face gets really grim* We do still.. Okay well we do still have a kid that we... I mean it isn't working but- well- You know. It- It's fine. I'm sure it'll start working soon.
when the subject of "why do people believe things that are seriously wrong and harmful" comes up it feels like you kinda hear one of two perspectives:
"oh, that's easy! it's because they're fundamentally Bad people who want to hurt others and choose their beliefs to justify that! :) hope this helps"
or
"they just don't have access to the same information we do. look at this person who was raised in a cult! don't you feel sorry for her?"
and like, yes, fine, some people were in fact raised in cults, but what i wish people would understand is that the bulk of it is just normal human flaws, like:
they want to believe stuff that makes them feel smart and cool and like they've figured everything out (you also do this)
they want to believe stuff that makes them feel like their emotions are justified and grounded in reality, and that the people they want to hurt deserve to be hurt (you also do this)
they form conclusions before they've processed all the relevant information, and cling to that first impression even when new info comes to light (you also do this)
they pick up beliefs from the people around them because they want to be liked and fit in, not because the beliefs are good or true (you also do this)
they come up with reasons that the stuff that benefits them (and the people they like and identify with) is actually overwhelmingly best for everyone and obviously the right thing to do (you also do this)
they pay more attention to stuff that supports what they already believe and avoid looking in places that might show them otherwise (you also do this)
they listen to people who talk like 'one of them' and ignore others (you also do this)
they come up with reasons to dismiss people with conflicting viewpoints as obviously in bad faith or ignorant or a shill or evil (you also do this)
they fail to take their own beliefs seriously sometimes, and take their beliefs way too seriously other times, in a selective way that lets them do the things they already wanted to do (you also do this)
the very ways they construct the ideas of 'knowledge' and 'wisdom' and 'belief' and 'understanding' are biased so that what they don't want to believe comes under lots of scrutiny and what they do want to believe receives less (you also do this)
you, dear reader, are presumably right about everything and were correct to die on every hill you've ever died on, but the difference between you and someone who's wrong about important stuff doesn't look like "well they're inherently evil and i'm not", it probably looks like a combination of:
natural environment (they would have been exposed to different information than you regardless of their choices)
being in the right place at the right time (your particular profile of flaws and virtues happened to be what was needed to lead you to the right conclusions, they had the opposite experience)
random luck (you doubled down on what felt right to believe but wasn't, but it turned out to be inconsequential, or even right for different reasons, while they doubled down on what turned out to be a horrible mistake distorting their entire worldview)
you do less of the things in the previous list, and over time the difference between you and them adds up
and, look, i also do these things. the nicest and most thoughtful people i've ever met do these things. if you meet someone who never does any of these things, i dunno, give them a fucking medal or something.
i know you're doing your best. we're all doing our best.
People in the notes being like "these are weaknesses of neurotypical people; my autism means I don't have these flaws": yes you do, and this post is about you specifically. People who believe that they're somehow magically immune to cognitive biases are the ones who tend to fall victim to them the hardest.
i saw someone comparing Obsession with Frankenstein, and at first i thought that comparison was a bit random since the two stories had nothing in common.
but the more i thought about it, the more i realized that Obsession succeeded in making a Victor Frankenstein-esque villain more than the 2025 movie did.
don't get me wrong, the movie was beautiful. i loved Jacob Elordi as the creature, the acting was great and the visuals were stunning. but one major change in the movie was that Victor was rewritten to be more obviously a villain.
right off the bat, Victor was shown to be abusing and berating the creature and then trying to burn down the house with the creature in it. he also generally had a very arrogant and self-righteous demeanor. there's even a very on-the-nose line of "you are the monster, Victor" which i was NOT a fan of.
this was not what book Victor was like at all. book Victor was more like Bear, in that he was a more subtle villain. much like Bear, Victor's villany came from his inaction and refusal to take responsibility for his actions.
Bear was never violent or abusive towards Nikki. Victor was never violent or abusive towards the creature. to someone who doesn't know the full story, these men come off as poor undeserving victims of these monsters.
Victor doesn't abuse or try to kill the creature, but what he does is he lets it run rampant and hurt people. when a child gets killed and an innocent woman is convicted for it, Victor does absolutely nothing about it despite knowing that it was his creation that did this. he lets the woman be executed simply because he was too much of a coward to take responsibility for his actions.
and in the same vein, the rest of the story plays out and more people get murdered by the creature because of Victor's inaction and cowardice. Victor is also selfish and loves to paint himself as the victim in any circumstance. even when the creature clearly threatens the safety of his wife, Victor assumes that he's the intended victim and thus lets his wife be murdered.
and up until recently, just like with Obsession, there was a lot of debate on who the real villain of Frankenstein was. and that's how you know the writer succeeded in writing a subtle villain.
with both Victor and Bear, it's not that they're moustache twirling villains orchestrating everything from the beginning. it's the fact that they are realistic villains, subtle villains; the kind that could be your neighbour, your coworker, even your friend.
Victor is reminiscent of many parents who neglect their children and refuse to take responsibility for the life that they chose to bring into this world. Bear is reminiscent of many men who are not outwardly violent but are selfish, cowardly and don't mind taking advantage of a situation as long as it benefits them.
both of them genuinely believe that they're the victim in this situation. Victor laments about how he did nothing to deserve all this and how this monster was ruining his life, and Bear complains about how obsessed and overbearing Nikki is.
i think writing a subtle villain is truly an art. there are many realistic villains in media but not all of them are subtle. it's a fine balance between making your character sympathetic and making them refuse to take accountability. Bear was sympathetic in many ways, people could even relate to him. and yet, it doesn't take away from the fact that he had the choice to try and reverse the wish but never thinks of doing it until HE is in trouble.
Obsession could have easily had "you are the monster"-esque dialogues but the director respected the audience enough to let us draw the conclusion. of course, a lot of people are drawing the wrong conclusion and that's their fault. but it's still great to see a villain who is so good at pretending to be the victim that even the audience thinks he is.
How people get nicknames:
Recipient of a third-degree burn in front of witnesses. IE, "I won't take that shit from a man dressed like a ghostbuster"= "Gostbuster" or "Buster"
A distinctive personal feature or quirk. IE, "Have you noticed how that new guy is always eating bell peppers?" = "Peppers", or "That chick has a massive forehead" = "Forehead".
An embarrassing thing you said or did. IE, "Did you seriously call Dale "Dad"?" = "Junior", "Baby boy", "Sport"
A game of name-mutation telephone. IE, "Donny Clyde" = "Bonnie 'n' Clyde" = "Bonnie" = "Bon-bon".
Irony. IE, calling a tall person "short stack" or a particularly dour person "sunshine".
A 'wrong place wrong time' one-off incident. IE, "He spilled oil on his pants and had to borrow a pair that were way too big and Jim saw him with the waistband pulled up to his nipples and called him 'Parachute'"
A batman-style origin story but not in a cool way: "One time she hit a deer with the company car and when she called the boss to tell her she was crying so hard we thought she was dying" = "Bambi"
The incredibly rare 'admiration' nickname, bourne only once a millennia under the light of the blood moon: "We saw him lift a truck once so now we call him 'iron man'"
+ How Nicknames Stick:
Your fate is determined by The Counsel
You hate it
It's accurate
“For example, if you’re trying to convince people to boycott a segregated store, your object is to convince them that boycotting the store will have a strategic effect, not that desegregation is morally important. For whatever reason, on a cognitive level human beings have a really hard time with this. Smucker cites an example of a Lefty roleplaying session where people were tasked with selling an action to people who agreed with them on principle but didn’t see the strategic merit of the action. Surprisingly, the sellers couldn’t make the conceptual switch to sell strategic merit: instead, they doubled down on THIS ISSUE IS IMPORTANT — even though it had been stressed to them that the people they were selling to bought into the importance of the issue. People react poorly to “this is important, so do WHATEVER I SAY”; they want to be convinced that what you’re proposing will work.”
Source.
Also from above:
“Bob Wing, a grassroots organizer, explains this nicely: “If winning feels impossible, then righteousness can seem like the next best thing.” But righteousness is not conducive to getting normies to join your team if your team cannot demonstrate ability to, at least sometimes, win. Nor does righteousness help you make real inroads with regular people.”
Somewhat related, my favorite comic strip of all time:
made a thing.
you can kinda tell when a writer has spent a lot of time around kids bc they avoid most of the pitfalls that come with writing children. namely, not giving them a too cutesy or twee voice but making them sound more like extremely weird little adults. kids playing pretend will almost never cutely slot into some romantic scenario for the adults' benefit bc the adults are usually too busy cleaning up or wondering what the fuck is wrong with their child. kids also have surprisingly stringent hangups ranging from very petty grievances to downright chauvinist gender roles, more often than not the result of a tragic education but sometimes far surpassing what they were taught in intensity. what im saying is there's nothing inherently wrong with treating fictional kids as stock characters but it's always quite nice to see when they aren't
It's extremely common for very young children to suddenly say something extremely cogent and articulate, that's jarringly inconsistent with their normal speech. This is usually something that they heard an adult say recently. A kid will spend ten minutes telling you a story about how they fought a wolf yesterday using simple sentences of fifty cent words, then nibble a snack, wrinkle their nose and say something like "I feel like Mum was overenthusiastic with the salt today, and not for the first time either" before going back to their clumsy story. (They do understand what they're saying when they do this. Kids' communication is usually held back by their vocabulary and pronunciation, not their understanding.)
Young kids are also a lot more socially aware than people give them credit for. Young children are perfectly aware that adults don't take them seriously. They know when their parents don't actually like them. They listen and remember when adults talk about them while they're in the room. Kids will develop basic abilities to charm etc. from babyhood and will begin experimenting with social norms and concepts of deception, appropriate information, and acceptable language and attitudes in toddlerhood. By the time a kid is five or six, they have solid social strategies for relating to adults and separate ones fr relating to their peers, that they'll continue to refine for the rest of their lives. They will also say completely off the wall shit because they don't have the context to know what is and isn't considered super fucked up yet.
By the time a kid is eight or nine, their main difference from adults is in experience, interests, and ability for long-term focus. An eight year old can think as intelligently and coherently as a thirty year old, they just have less experience and information to draw from, and are likely interested in very different things. They're also likely still slightly hamstrung by vocabulary and literacy, though much less so than a younger kid.
Teens will behave like adults who have little power (a teen is often at the mercy of their parents and the state and rarely taken seriously, which is extremely frustrating) and who are high stress and mid-crisis, because they're going through a transitory period where their bodies and moods are changing and are having to constantly learn and adjust; a fourteen year old in a stable situation will act pretty much like a thirty year old with an oppressive boss who's just left a tumultuous relationship.
I've already said that my number one piece of writing advice is to read.
But my number two piece of advice is this: be deliberate.
Honestly this would fix so many pieces of bad writing advice. Don't forbid people from doing something, tell them to be conscious and deliberate about it. This could help stop people from falling into common mistakes without limiting their creativity. Black and white imperatives may stop a few annoying beginner habits, but ultimately they will restrict artistic expression.
Instead of "don't use epithets": "Know the effect epithets have and be deliberate about using them." Because yes, beginners often misuse them, but they can be useful when a character's name isn't known or when you want to reduce them to a particular trait they have.
Instead of "don't use 'said'" or "just use 'said'": "Be deliberate about your use of dialogue tags." Because sometimes you'll want "said" which fades into the background nicely, but sometimes you will need a more descriptive alternative to convey what a character is doing.
Instead of "don't use passive voice": "Be deliberate about when you use passive voice." Because using it when it's not needed can detract from your writing, but sometimes it can be useful to change the emphasis of a sentence or to portray a particular state of mind.
Instead of blindly following or ignorantly neglecting the rules of writing, familiarize yourself with them and their consequences so you can choose when and if breaking them would serve what you're trying to get across.
Your writing is yours. Take control of it.
It probably sounds like I'm preaching to the choir here because most of my mutuals are already great writers. But I'm hoping this will make it to the right people.
Every family drama play: It's funny. I never thought I'd come back to my childhood home. Because of the Secrets. But now that both my parents are dead, my (two or three) siblings and I have to go through all their things.
Oh, these Things. So meaningful. We were both extravagantly rich and extravagantly poor, and solidly middle class, to make us both grandiose and relatable...
My husband is here, too. To support me. His family is neither extravagantly rich nor extravagantly poor. "Normal." In other words. I could never relate.
He has never met my family. Because of the Secrets.
When we were kids, my (two or three) siblings and I would play a game called Ghosts and Shadows...But being here, in this old house, I realize that the Ghosts and Shadows are real. In a figurative sense.
Who is that? Someone's already in the house. Oh! My brother...I thought...I thought you were dead! I haven't spoken to you in between eight and twenty years. Because of the Secrets. What are you doing? What is that grimy old book you're reading? Is that--Father's diary? No, I don't want to look at it. It might contain answers to the Secrets, but open up even more questions about where we came from...who we were...and most daunting of all, what we are destined for.
favourite things about first drafts:
square brackets with notes to self mid-line like [does this make sense with worldbuilding?]
ah yes, Main Character and their closest friends, Unnamed Character A and Unnamed Character B.
bullshitting your way through something that you probably definitely need to research later
also square brackets to link up scenes. [scene transition idk] my beloved
the total freedom of word vomits
"I'll fix that later"
the moment when the world and characters start to gain a life of their own
pieces falling into place as you write that you were uncertain about before you started
the accomplishment of Made A Thing
Not only is this allowed but it's something i encourage all writers of any kind to play with! :D
The idea that all writers know what to say all the time and just splash fully-formed drafts out one word after the other is false. There are some who can do it, but i think most of us... can't. Which is why we need tricks like square bracket notes! They're not cheats or lazy writing or some other flavour of Not Allowed, but instead really really important tools that we should use as much as we need to.
Some of the most helpful tricks I've collected over the years are:
make some notes in square brackets – e.g., I had to write a scene on a sailboat, but I know nothing about sailing so i literally just had notes like [boat part] and [how to do X thing?]. If you use square brackets as punctuation anyway, use something else like [[double square brackets]] or a unique letter combination like XY at the start of the note; the point is to pick something you can search for easily later on.
(You can also style inline comments in a different font/colour. Scrivener has an inline annotation feature; if you use Word, you can make a specific Style to make notes stand out at a glance, etc.)
bullet-point your way through any tricky parts – this can be pure stream-of-consciousness vague ideas. it only needs to make sense to me later. much more helpful than just leaving big blank gaps that Future Me has to work out how to fill, but also better than dwelling on a piece of writing forever.
use comment tools – mostly do this if I have ideas for alternate events and/or phrasing, or if I want to check something for continuity purposes.
write out of order – Best advice i ever got for academic writing is to know or even write your conclusion first and your introduction last, which your main argument in between. Similar principles apply in fiction, or any kind of creative writing. If there's a part of the essay that I can visualise clearly or a part of the story that is particularly exciting or important, I might write that first, then figure out how it fits/how everything fits around it.
keep a loose scenes and/or "outtakes" folder – anything that i write out of order goes here, along with any notes for how I think I want to incorporate it into the full text. In the same vein, if I delete something but don't know for sure it will never be relevent ever again, it gets cut and pasted into an outtakes folder.
Basic rule though is that you do not have to get your writing perfect on the first try. This is where drafts come in. The way I see it is to treat each draft as a fresh start – I create/open a new document (well, new Scrivener file) and start over as if from scratch. Each draft gets a narrower focus than the last. This is my process, as an example:
first draft is the word vomit. You do whatever you need to do to get it onto the page, and it can be terrible. In fact, it probably should be terrible. You can fix everything later. it's fine.
The second draft is a half-hearted cleanup attempt. I'll re-type everything because everything is subject to change, from the characters' personalities to the pacing to the order of events. It's all primordial goop, basically. i'm just poking and prodding and making a few adjustments, but mostly trying to create a more stable version of the first draft. All shortcut tricks continue to be my best friend.
By draft three I'll let myself copy-paste between documents if I'm particularly happy with a passage, but try not to get hung up on anything specific. I'll still make liberal use of square brackets etc. as I need to, but try to address as many from the previous draft as I can. This is where I get more brutal with making decisions and trying to fix parts of the story in place.
Draft four is usually my final draft, but there's literally no rules about how many drafts you're allowed to write. It's at this point that I try to keep square brackets etc. to a minimum (unless i've diverged significantly from the plot of a previous draft and having to rewrite large chunks), and make sure to address all the notes and problems encountered in previous drafts.
This is when I move on to revisions. Revisions are the "final do-overs", for me. I start them when I'm satisfied with all the large-scale aspects: plot and chronology; characters' personalities, motivations and arcs; large-scale pacing (so the over-arcing pace, rather than the pacing in individual scenes); backstories; and worldbuilding. I'll copy the last draft's document instead of starting with a blank one. First I run through those large scale things one more time and tweak until I'm happy, not just satisfied. Then I shrink my focus to in-scene pacing, dialogue, and the quality of the writing itself.
I'll also rewrite my plot outline between each draft, too. The act of actually re-writing stuff is very helpful for making your brain think about it.
Drafting like this isn't for everyone, but realising that you can just bullshit your way through chunks of text was a massive game-changer for me. Some people will do a draft, then work on something else, then come back and do another draft, work on something else, etc. Some people's drafting process will look more like what I consider to be revisions. Do whatever works for you. Just remember that from the moment you first decide you Want to Write a Thing to the moment you hit "post" or "publish" or give your manuscript over to a publisher, you can keep making as many changes as you like in any way you like. (And if you go the querying to traditional publishing route, you'll probably get suggestions for, and have space/time to make, changes to the manuscript quite far into the process).
Yes!!
I don't believe I've ever met two writers who have exactly the same process. Every writer I've spoken to about the craft of writing has their own process, usually developed over years and years of practice and trying things out.
For example, I don't rewrite at all, that sounds horrendous, I just save-as to create a new draft. I also get the big structure stuff done in outlining, but I'm a weirdo who writes 20k word outlines. As mentioned above, I am one of those people who needs space between drafts--or at least, between rough draft and first revision. And I do my first revision on paper, always. The human brain processes screens and hardcopy differently! I write all over my printed rough draft, and then go back to the doc and apply those edits and anything else that occurs to me at the time, so my draft 2 is more sort of draft 2.5??
There's a lot more, obviously, and it's different between novels and short stories (I don't print short stories unless I'm really struggling). But I'm always experimenting with different ways to write, and sometimes they work and sometimes I get stranded and have to go back to the drawing board. Some people have a lot more hand writing in the prep stages, in notebooks or on index cards--I visited someone once whose dining room walls were covered in butcher paper and index cards with pushpins!
So if you're a newbie writer, experiment! Read about a bunch of different ways to get those words down! Try new things! Put notes and placeholders and such in your drafts, write by the seat of your pants, try out the whole in-depth outline thing, revise every paragraph before moving on to the next one, whatever works!!
Also please feel free to come talk to me about it! I love hearing about how people write.
I pay my mortgage with support from patreon and ko-fi supporters, not book sales; my actual books sell very poorly. But every month I get automated emails telling me about the book sales. So I'll just open my inbox to be enthusiastically told that Tolino is paying me $3 or something. And I don't know why but this is so funny to me every time. To just get an email like. You made $3 this month! Cracks me up.
Why don't you make your whole catalogue a high tier Patreon reward? Then you'd basically move on from charging per copyright to charging per writing time. Depending on how long it is you could even multi-tier it; it would be a good way to experiment with making profit from art without relying on the Hollywood-enforced monopoly model. Think of it as Engels feeding Marx. And I'm sure there's a lot of people who would rather pay their writer for constant output than having to wait until a project is deemed profitable enough to publish.
The back catalogue is already available for free on my website. The entire business model kind of depends on it. You CANNOT ice out the free readers and expect to get anywhere with web serials; they're the bulk of your audience, the bulk of your fan community, the bulk of your publicity. They draw fanart and write wikis and contribute to discord discussions and talk to their friends and construct theories, and paid readers do all of these things too, but free readers outnumber paid readers by a good couple of orders of magnitude. Their value is simply far too high to throw away a thousand readers in the hopes that ten of them will cave and start giving you two dollars a month. (And, of course, every supporter and most book buyers start out as free readers, frequently for several years -- icing out the free readers permanently shackles supporter growth, and supporter numbers are ALWAYS dropping; if you don't replace them at the same rate, you don't pay mortgage.)
I'm not going to make ebooks a tier reward, if that what you mean, because one-time purchases just don't make sense as tier rewards. Either you end up selling them for much lower than you want (if you want them to be cheaper, why not just make them cheaper in the shop?) as people join for 1 month to get the ebooks, or you end up setting the tier at the ebook price and people are nonsensically paying you over and over the full price of books they already purchased. I've used a one-time purchase as a very high level tier reward in the past (namely, the right to name a character in TTOU), but they don't make good tier rewards in general. If I know how much I want the books to be worth, it simply makes more sense to charge it directly in a normal financial transaction than to go through monthly support.
Stop doing it scared and start doing it scary. Invoke sheer eye-clawing terror into all those who have ever wronged you
Susanna Clarke
(x)
I'm so fascinated by people who seem to believe that analyzing media is somehow taking the joy out of it. Like. Do you not enjoy thinking? Does taking stuff apart and figuring out how it works not give you a hit of dopamine? And you get mad when you see people having fun in this way? What a sad, miserable way to engage with the world.
Always be skeptical of advice that feels targeted to genuine laziness. This is different from beginner advice, or advice that is meant to be accessible. Someone saying "This might seem complicated to an outsider, but with a bit of time it'll all make sense, and you'll realize it's nowhere near as impenetrable as it seemed!" is totally fine! But if someone says their method requires "no work," or it gets "real results in no time," alarms should go off in your brain.
Whether it's a machine you can supposedly feed a single sentence into and receive the next Avengers: Endgame, or a $2,000 course that'll make you a wealthy entrepreneur living solely off passive income in 12 months, appealing to instant gratification and minimal effort is the craft of a conman.
This is going to sound like advice from your grandparents, but it's true: Nothing worth a damn comes for free. Whether it costs money, time, passion or heartbreak, things that have value are not created from thin air. If they were, they wouldn't have value, because anyone could have their own.
If someone could really generate 100 Avengers movies with a button, would they be selling you the button, or would they be making billions in the box office? If someone could really create such a reliable investment/business strategy that it could make even the least-savvy Joe out there a millionaire, would they be selling courses online, or would they be running a successful business?
Always ask if you're being sold gold, or if you're sold a shovel.
something I'm learning to balance:
if it's for my own use and fun than half-assed done is better than none
if it's for another entity then, by god, make it with integrity
My not-so-hot writing take for this fine middle of the night: prologues are virtually never necessary, and Origin Of The World prologues are even more virtually never necessary.
And if you are going to write one, it should be very short and damn good.
My less snarky follow up to this is:
The problem with a lot of prologues is that they are about characters who won't matter again for a long time, they present information we can get in a different and more interesting way, and/or they are infodumps.
This last part is particularly an issue for Origin Of The World prologues like the one that I just read, because instead of starting the story with tension, emotion, or characters I should be invested in, it starts with like five pages of just explanation, as well as the introduction of like 5 different species and about eight names.
Does any of it matter? Who knows. Because it's already lost my attention. I'll go read something that actually starts with a hook instead.
This was apparently a hotter take than I anticipated, so here are some questions that I think of to guide whether you should have a prologue:
What is the purpose of the prologue? Is it to show the past? Give a glimpse of the future? Explain something? Show side characters?
Why is this the first thing that the reader should read/know? If it is an explanation or something from the past, why do they need to know this before the story starts?
Can this information be conveyed in the main story itself, through dialogue or narration? What is lost or gained by moving it to the main story?
If information is being conveyed in the prologue or characters are introduced, does it/do they become relevant soon enough that the reader is likely to remember them from the prologue? If yes, why do they need to be introduced here? If no, why do they need to be introduced here?
Is the information likely to be overwhelming, confusing, or distracting to the reader? Are many new terms, concepts, or characters introduced all at once?
If the prologue is in full narrative/storytelling format (e.g., Origin Of The World), is it sufficiently compelling through either story or narrative voice to get the reader to stick with it?
If the prologue is a glimpse of the future to hook the reader (a la Twilight), does it spoil the book or give a false impression of it?
If the prologue is about the past or about side characters, what emotional attachment (if any) are you trying to get the readers to have in them? if none, why is this the best way to present the information? If any, do those characters appear again in some way to maintain that emotional connection?
Could this be the first chapter?
