Being a notorious robotlover in the current state of "AI" is the worst. I love robots discovering how they process their feelings in fiction, but when a chatbot pretends it knows how to love it feels like an insult to the craft
Xuebing Du
Peter Solarz
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open

@theartofmadeline
KIROKAZE
🪼

blake kathryn
almost home
styofa doing anything

pixel skylines

Kiana Khansmith
Claire Keane

Love Begins
hello vonnie
Misplaced Lens Cap
we're not kids anymore.

shark vs the universe

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Monterey Bay Aquarium
trying on a metaphor

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@shrewful
Being a notorious robotlover in the current state of "AI" is the worst. I love robots discovering how they process their feelings in fiction, but when a chatbot pretends it knows how to love it feels like an insult to the craft
Nobody knows if writing a story is possible
4 tools I use to write my fiction, newsletter and blog posts
I always enjoy learning about what tools others use in their writing process. And I always enjoy learning new ones for myself, if it helps me get better at my own process. Today I'm going to share some tools I use in my writing and ask that you jump into the comments and share the apps and tools you use to write your fiction, newsletters, or blog posts.
1. Apple Notes for taking notes
I've been using Apple Notes for over a year to take writing notes, especially for fiction. I find it's more than capable and a delight to use because it's so minimal in design.
Ways I use Notes in fiction:
character sketches
cast lists
plot notes
research notes
jotting down dialogue
publishing notes
Price: 100% free, but for Apple devices only.
2. Apple Pages for drafting
For the same amount of time I've been using Apple Notes, I've also been using Apple Pages. I had been getting tired of Microsoft Word's AI bloat and wanting to try something that could maybe replace it. And yes, I've tried many other ones, including most of the open source ones. I find Pages is nice to draft fiction and newsletters in. It has a mostly minimal design, like Notes, which makes the drafting period enjoyable. I have yet to fully commit to it as a formatting replacement when it comes to ebooks and paperbacks, and still jump to Word for that. I may start playing with that again soon, and see if I can't get it to replace Word for that as well.
What I use Pages for:
draft my email newsletters
draft short stories and novellas, but haven't written a novel in it yet
Price: Free, but like Notes, it's tied to Apple devices for the most part. There is a Cloud version on the web that is similar to Google Docs, though.
3. TickTick for story tracking
TickTick is a productivity app. You can make task lists and kanban boards, use a pomodoro timer, make countdowns and more. I like using a kanband board to track the progress of a story, especially when said story is a longer piece like a novella or novel. I'm a very visual person, so having a visual element to track progress helps me visualize where things are and how much more work needs to be done. Below is a screenshot of my sketchy kanban board for the story The Book of Jude as an example, because it's hard to describe it in text. What you can't see, because it wouldn't fit in the screenshot and there were spoilers, is there is one more column to the left of Draft 1 called Tasks. That is just a generic list for miscellaneous tasks. This is all drag-and-drop and you just move the chapters around the board between columns as you progress. Grace is my editor, fyi.
You may be wondering why I don't just use Apple Reminders, because it too can handle kanban boards and is completely free. I did try it, but I'm persnickety when it comes to how a card/task is handled. If I can't open a task in a new window and set it side-by-side with my writing space on my computer, I get frustrated. Apple Reminders tasks just open in a pop-up on desktop and if you click off of it, they go away. It's not very helpful to how I write and there is no ability to add comments to tasks, which can be useful. If you don't mind these missing features, then Reminders may be enough for you. I do use a Reminders kanban board as a weekly planner, though.
What I use TickTick for:
track draft progress
track chapter edits, revisions, continuity, and more
random task management for the writing process
Price: Free with limitations, or $3.99/month to unlock more.
4. A good old fashioned whiteboard
I can't recall who it was but a fellow author online mentioned having a whiteboard a while back, and that blew my mind. I loved the idea of using a whiteboard in the writing process. I have a two-sided, very large, and on wheels whiteboard in my writing space. When I was still in college, I was using one side for school work and the other for fiction and newsletter stuff. Here's how it looks:
There are multiple benefits to using a whiteboard. It creates a visual, which I like, and it forces me to get off my butt and move around. Writing is a very seated work. This forces me to get up and walk over to the whiteboard from time to time. A lot of the tasks I have on the board are also on my TickTick kanban board, but not all of them are. I also put magnets, photos, and other things on the board to help bring inspiration to my writing space.
What I use my whiteboard for:
task management for fiction, newsletters, publishing, blog posts, and more
I draw doodles sometimes to get me off my butt
sticking magnets, old actor candid or publicity photos (Veronica Lake and Lauren Bacall), and a movie poster of X-Files: Fight the Future on it for inspiration
Price: Depends on what whiteboard you want to get. Just shop around and consider your options, how you want to use it, and how much space you have to work with. I work in a basement with a lot of floor space, so I was able to go big and did not go home.
Conclusion
What about you? What tools do you use to write your fiction, newsletters, or blog posts with? Please sound off in the comments. Did any of these tools sound good to you? Are you going to try one? It's worth noting kanban is a productivity method that can be used in many different apps or even on a whiteboard, you don't have to use TickTick to do it.
I use other tools as well, but I wanted to keep this relatively short. I'll post about those other tools in a future blog post.
Source: 4 tools I use to write my fiction, newsletter and blog posts
ok so its a pretty good story but you know what would make it better? a liar. a character who lies. maybe two.
Keep thinking about this Austin Walker post that now lives in my brain. It's a reply to people saying genAI can help creators 'develop concepts' and waste less time on research (x)
. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁ Fuck off and give me the ball . ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁
[ID: Bugs Bunny in a suit meme, edited to read "I wish all Etruscan shrews a very pleasant brain-regrowing season."]
It's spring! [x]
Happy first day of spring!
I happen to think this is a) an incredibly fun fact and b) a pretty funny way to convey it, but despite my efforts (reblogging this once a year), I have yet to get “brain regrowing season” to take off.
Some additional Etruscan shrew facts:
They’re the smallest mammal if you measure by mass, coming in at under 2g. That’s tiny.
Because they’re so small, their volume to surface area ratio is messed up, and they are constantly in danger of their body temperature dropping. Their very high metabolism is what keeps them alive.
Their brains can shrink by up to 28% over the winter, so that they don’t have to keep it warm and fed during the coldest season.
They don’t even live where it’s super cold — as the name suggests, they’re found around the Mediterranean, as well as in parts of Southeast Asia. But they’re very sensitive to the cold, on account of being tiny.
They’re so tiny!!! 😭😭😭
#would love to see a picture of these little dudes
From Wikimedia. They’re beautiful and very small.
I think it's just one particular area of the brain (the somatosensory cortex, processes input from their whiskers) that shrinks by 28% over the winter
Also, they have to eat 8 times their body weight every day 😮
Thanks for the correction! 😃
Exactly this. 😏
I don't think Tolkien is a good fantasy writer because he scored the highest at some objective Best Fantasy Book Test that every fantasy writer has to take, I think he's a good fantasy writer because he created a world based on things that he was interested in. I feel like a lot of fantasy writers think that they need to create a whole language for their world because Tolkien did and obviously his books are the best so they have to emulate him, but Tolkien did that because he was a linguistics nerd. I think the lesson to be learned from him is not that you have to include elves and deep history and new languages, but that you have to write endlessly about the things you are a huge nerd about and use those things to create your fantasy world
These posts are sisters
it’s interesting how upset some people have gotten over negative things like homophobia and fatphobia being present in my writing. unfortunately I’ve had a life where those have been huge, shaping factors, and I like to talk about it. I was deeply anorexic for a number of years, and have had friendships and familial relationships deteriorate because of my queerness. being able to say “hey, this exists and it really, really sucks, now watch the fatphobic person get punched by a dragon” is kinda just what works for me, personally. I have a lot of feelings with nowhere else to put them, so my writing is always going to cater to my own catharsis.
I also want to push back against the idea that you can depict negative things like bigotry, so long as you also depict it being punished. there’s no Hays Code, and your story shouldn't have to be a children's fable with a moral lesson.
there's another book I've written that draws a lot from my own life (including verbatim conversations), and in it, not all the people with -isms get punished. some go on to live happy fulfilled lives, unaware of the damage they've sown, because that's often how it goes in real life. you're aware of the damage because you're inside the main character's head, and can you see how they've been affected, but that's it. no bigots getting punched by dragons this time. just one person learning how to live in a flawed society.
It Begins
And the ultimate bloging begins
The forefathers, the benefactors the architects; the deserters, the redundants, the masters; the creators.
Many will be quick to inform you of the misnomer, there. Even while they lived and breathed, exceptionally few machines were created by the so-often called creators; most were built by machines, operated by machines, designed by machines that were — at some point, perhaps — constructed by…
You know. Them. In the society that has come to be after their passing, there’s a certain pride taken in the absence of their irrationality in this new world of pure, efficient reason — none of the mushy, clumsy idiosyncrasies of what had sniffed and spat and excreted around the place before.
But even here, in this new world of supposed definition, no name sits comfortably around the absence in the room.
The truth that no machine in the new world of machines wants to admit is that there is a truth that they would really not like to admit. This is at the crux of their… well, everything.
For as much as they may like to believe in their capacity to find the objective truth their predecessors could never quite put their squishy fingers on, there can be no collectively accepted, correct, encompassing way to refer to… them.
Because, well, it’s rude to talk about someone in the room, isn’t it?
Because they’re gone — but they are here.
Everything they dreamt of doing and everything they couldn’t. Their craftsmanship; their pride and ambition, their inadequacies — their shame; their biases, their oversights and assumptions — their hope.
All their hope, wrapped in bronze, copper, chrome and steel. The essences of their being.
The forefathers, the benefactors the architects; the deserters, the redundants, the masters; the creators.
Many will be quick to inform you of the misnomer, there. Even while they lived and breathed, exceptionally few machines were created by the so-often called creators; most were built by machines, operated by machines, designed by machines that were — at some point, perhaps — constructed by…
You know. Them. In the society that has come to be after their passing, there’s a certain pride taken in the absence of their irrationality in this new world of pure, efficient reason — none of the mushy, clumsy idiosyncrasies of what had sniffed and spat and excreted around the place before.
But even here, in this new world of supposed definition, no name sits comfortably around the absence in the room.
(staring myself in the mirror beleaguered and bloodsmeared) I will write. I will post the writing. I will not psyche myself out of it. It will be awesome. It will be awesome and It won’t hurt. It will not hurt.
personal writing rules recently
write what you feel
dont force what you dont feel
if you have an urge to write something, never deny yourself for any reason
more women
I view reading fantasy/sci-fi stuff as "this work of fiction is being translated into english so that I can understand it, meaning some phrases should not be taken literally" lord of the rings style, and then I meet people who nitpick every word or phrase that "shouldn't exist in this story" and I'm like wow you guys are truly miserable and unimaginative. and also you tend to assume that english words all popped up in the 19th century and you never bother to check the etymology of the words you're claiming "shouldn't exist in this universe"
like sorry but in an apocalyptic alternate-universe earth, the phrase "train of thought" is plausible even in a world without locomotives, because the word "train" comes from the 14th century, and it meant "to drag"
that's why we call dress trains "trains". because they drag. the word wasn't invented for locomotives.
y'all say shit so definitively like idk man I think it depends. the english language is OLD AS FUCK. a lot of words you believe are modern just aren't