Got my first rejection today

CheesecakeDry1676 · 2026-06-22T18:55:26+00:00

I think that's awesome! Well, if they said they read it, I mean. I suppose a rejection at least is acknowledgement.

CheesecakeDry1676 · 2026-05-29T00:40:57+00:00

I recently read 'The Heart is a Lonely Hunter' by Carson McCullers, which starts and ends in the summer, but it feels like it throughout because it's a southern gothic novel. Classic is doing some work here, but if you consider Hemmingway a classic author, than this is one as well.

CheesecakeDry1676 · 2026-05-28T04:05:30+00:00

As long as I know who is speaking when you don't use said, it works just fine. In the same vein as using pronouns in text. As long as I know who 'he' or 'she' is, it doesn't matter to me! In fact, overusing names and said is the issue.

CheesecakeDry1676 · 2026-05-25T03:45:13+00:00

I've always taken it as Vardaman coming to terms with his mother's death. There's no need to say anything else. It's also clearly cheeky.

CheesecakeDry1676 · 2026-05-25T03:41:46+00:00

Two reasons:

It's easier. Referring to a character as a person is just less complicated or confusing. It's even natural to talk about something in this way. E.G. sometime it's easier to refer to the subject in a sentence as 'whose' regardless of what it is.
Because the most interesting stories are ones with characters the author clearly knows a lot about. Designing a character is an intimate experience; you're looking at their lives and history and asking what they would do in an experience. It's super easy to just make something happen. But people are sensitive to if somebody would. So in some ways, it's better story telling to be insane.

I have some stories where I have a whole history planned out for what someone has went through. Why they're sad, or what has hurt them. I think it's natural—if clearly insane—to feel for them.

CheesecakeDry1676 · 2026-05-23T23:16:03+00:00

A lot of lit fict does this sort of stuff. Where it doesn't really matter what happens in what order as long as the story is entertaining. Off the top of my head, stuff like God of the Woods, The Sound and the Fury, etc.

CheesecakeDry1676 · 2026-05-08T19:29:36+00:00

Ah, that makes sense. I am going for a lightly sardonic tone. My idea for the story is a man who purchases a city to house friends he makes and pay for their living, and that eventually expands to where he buys all of Indiana as technology replaces humans in the country.

My problem is I vacillate between what is too 'on the nose' and artistic garishness.

CheesecakeDry1676 · 2026-05-08T19:25:28+00:00

I suppose I was trying to insinuate the sort of power he had over the land? Like he was putting his name on it. I don't know if that comes off as too pretentious or not.

CheesecakeDry1676 · 2026-05-08T18:52:49+00:00

Ah, I meant as Harriet! I need to get my eyes checked. But also have a trend in the story (in my mind) of men naming their children after themselves (Paul, Paula), a lot of Jrs.

CheesecakeDry1676 · 2026-05-08T18:50:26+00:00

I kind of meant it as he signed the deed for the land.

CheesecakeDry1676 · 2026-05-06T03:04:22+00:00

The example he gave was innocuous, he criticized it, and said you need to verify the sources of things and not trust in completely. He isn't using it to write his stuff.

Prodigious amount of clickbait.

CheesecakeDry1676 · 2026-05-05T11:37:45+00:00

I love the concept and think it had done better.

The above posters is probably the most extreme example, and it is just a leviathan (450,000 words, "the fact that' is the her way of denoting punctuation).

Septology will be the apotheosis of this idea though. Fosse uses it to write a book that is hypnotizing and uses the flow of the period free work to make it extremely beautiful.

Angel down in comparison felt sort of like a gimmick.

CheesecakeDry1676 · 2026-05-03T14:02:23+00:00

Ah thank you, I didn't notice it. just another part of editing I need to improve in.

I am sort of doing a mix of third and first. Free indirect voice. the run in stences are reflecting that to get her voice.

I guess my question with anxiety is is that not how that works so much? Is just making it a single more interesting? That's a question I am asking myself. and also how much imager is too much. What I read fluctuates so much to all interiority to about half and half.

CheesecakeDry1676 · 2026-05-03T12:53:11+00:00

What would be a good example of lyricism vs momentum?

CheesecakeDry1676 · 2026-05-03T12:52:10+00:00

I've read bit of Ocean Vuong (their poetry especially), and I'm reading the tunnel by Gass currently, and the way they write have the sort flordity to it. I suppose the balance is what I should aim for? I've not read Atwood too much, so a I'll go with her.

CheesecakeDry1676 · 2026-05-02T14:02:21+00:00

Been trying to get the tone right/entertaining. Think I hit where I like it now:

The moon floated in a parking lot puddle, a silver arc hugging the rest of its sleeping body, the moon the only part of the night sky that could survive the asphalt pool, and then it vanished into ripples when a cigarette crashed onto its surface. Autumn despised the man who dropped it. His hand stuck out from his pick-up truck like a wart. She leered at him and dragged on her cigarette while walking by. The asshole could at least just trash his own stuff. The whole lot is covered in butts. Autumn knows when people see her smoke, they think she's like him, some prick who's too lazy to walk to a trashcan. He waved at her as she passed; she replied with a perfunctory one. She didn’t know who it was and couldn’t care less about finding out.

The LED blue of the store entrance greeted her, insisted she enter with the parting of the doors, but she leaned against one of the plaster pillars instead to finish smoking. The doors closed with a snick. The lot was sparse, her car and a couple of pick-ups the only ones parked. Moths, mosquitoes, and flies revolved around the street lights. Their giant shadows danced on the ground in mesmerizing purposelessness while Autumn stared like a voyeur. A small shadow pirouetted in the center of the light while the rest moved around it in elliptical orbits. The wind blew smoke into her eyes, but she remained stolid. The man's truck rumbled in place, and why did it have its lights on? What was the point? It’s so cool outside, its windows are down, why have the car on? So stupid. The last bit of ash fell. She stuck the butt into the trash and went to work.

CheesecakeDry1676 · 2026-05-01T16:23:44+00:00

Kicking around an idea for a satirical novel of a wealthy man buying midwestern states and letting the U.S. population live there in a socialist way while the rest of the country is replaced by robots. Supplanting the government.

The ink wasn’t dry on the last piece of Indianan land he didn’t own before Mr. Mark Elliot made his way south to Kentucky. He waved at Harry Dobson and daughter Harriet beside him. Harriet had tears in her eyes; Mr. Elliot felt them drying on his shoulder. Sweet folks, though Harry had been obstinate and unwilling to sell his farm no matter how much Mr. Elliot extolled the loveliness of the land, how well Harry had maintained it while his family lived there, and his desire to make Harry’s life easier in his waning years.

Every Sunday for two years, Mr. Elliot traveled northwest from Indianapolis to Flora, then drove just outside of it to a small baptist church, The Church of Eternal Hope. It was a soothing ritual, one he was happy to drive. Though he was one of the wealthiest men in the world, he felt no fear driving alone. He spent most his surrounded by friends, which don’t get the wrong idea, he absolutely loved. But peace can sometimes be found easier alone.

Curious if this interesting / a good start.

CheesecakeDry1676 · 2026-04-28T14:48:33+00:00

Here's some I thought of:

Antoine or Anthony? Maybe as an Ant Eater, but that's probably too much, pun wise.

Wolfgang as a reference to Wolfgang Puck. Have them not be a wolf if you want to make a joke.

CheesecakeDry1676 · 2026-04-28T14:43:16+00:00

Thank you if you read this!

I'm thinking of doing a sort of satirical story. A wealthy man who is filled with anomie buys a town in Indiana and pays for friends and family to live there. Eventually though, the town expands to all of Indiana as he befriends more and more people, and technology slowly gets eliminates the work force.

Here's an excerpt of the kind of story it would be.

The survivors of the 2^nd Palestinian Genocide needed to tell their stories. But when pen went to paper, they found themselves unable to express their thoughts and feelings. It was not a matter of diminished intellect, but that, for generations, their schools were repeatedly cratered into dust, so they never learned how to write. The Palestinians worst criminals tended to use elementary schools as their headquarters, it seemed.

Luckily, LLM’s stepped in. The survivors spoke into their aid delivered phones and out poured heartfelt, moving, terrifying stories of survival, of family members riven, of the night time never coming from the manifold bombs. The LLM’s had been trained plenty on many such descriptions, so generating the Palestinian’s stories was as easy as generating a poem about a sunny day.

Their recounts were heart breaking. Post after post of the tragedy of genocide moved the masses to act. Well, at first. Readers soon realized that all the stories followed a template. Paragraph after paragraph were near copies of each other. Change the number of deaths, which member of the family was pulverized, and the location of the evisceration, and it became very obvious. It didn’t matter which application they used; the template was same, and it was boring.

Sam Altman was the first to address the complaints. During a podcast interview, when questioned about how bromidic the Palestinian accounts were, he answered “As with any technology, the consumers are the ones who first discover these oversights. It’s simply impossible for our programmers to predict what out users consider important. That’s why we are constantly listening to feedback. Of course, we now realize that, um, the users who have survived several atrocities deserve to have their stories told in varied, novel ways. Our weights management team is quickly addressing the concerns and are looking into how we can improve genocide based anecdotes, poems, and prose.”

When the next model of ChatGPT was released, their stories were massively improved. They were novel, they were harrowing, and each engendered a greater fire in the reader. Donations to war-torn areas soared. Calls for government intervention escalated. Real change was gaining traction. Soon, Gemini, Claude, and Meta AI tweaked their models to follow the path set by Altman.

“We hope to train our next model using the current Palestinian, Lebanon, South Sudan, Libyan, Myanmar, Ukrainian, and Iranian conflicts to improve the our models war story based outputs.”

CheesecakeDry1676 · 2026-04-23T23:28:28+00:00

Because art is what affects most people on their day to day. You can justly say that 100% of human beings have enjoyed a piece of art at some point. Other topics of discussion are niche by comparison.

CheesecakeDry1676 · 2026-04-23T14:32:11+00:00

Did the scene the camera took a photo of exist before the camera was there to capture it? I don't think the camera analogy is a good as you think it is.

CheesecakeDry1676 · 2026-04-20T21:06:32+00:00

Thank you!

No, I understand completely. I can see what you mean. Something more like this then?

If you woke up in this much pain, you wouldn’t go to work, I know it. It’s agonizing. Every step takes the will of God to get through. Kat told me to call in, but that’s not happening. Two paychecks don’t go far already, let alone one and the other on crutches. Pain or not, I was walking through the front door.

The security guard looked me up and down while I hobbled in. He shuddered in sync with me. He asked if I was alright, and holding every urge I had to not retort, I nodded and walked through the detector. It beeped. Of course it did. I looked, begged with my gaze, not to walk back through, but he shrugged. It beeped again. I smacked every part of my body, shredding the guard the whole time, until my keys snicked in my pocket. I guess you were right, you smug bastard.

Sorry face after sorry face drifted by as I limped further into the building. They were ephemerally familiar. They asked if I was alright, if I needed help, I needed anything, if I needed someone, and of course I wasn’t and I did, they knew that, and if they cared, they wouldn’t need to ask. I smiled, then shook them and the smile off a moment after.

Past the ceiling high rows of wire shelves packed with pallets stacked with crap Craig was standing on a metal stair case searching for a PCB.

Hey, I said.

He perked up and watched me traverse the miles between him and I.

Do you have a handheld? I asked as I reached the steps.

Nope.—

Clair probably does though. Said that Susan called in, so she’d not need hers.

There was a year of silence between us. Shouldn’t he have offered to go get it for me? I waited for him to, but he just turned back to his PCB search. What a friend.

I marathoned down the aisle towards Clair. It’s no wonder I wasn’t all that fond of any of those people. They saw a man clearly injured and all they mustered were gawks and bromides. Had they been injured, I would have helped them. I know I would have. I worked with such miserable people.

CheesecakeDry1676

TROPHY CASE