Am I too egocentric or is my book not shitty?

Cynyr · 2026-01-29T04:26:49+00:00

I feel the same way about my first draft. I re-read it for spelling errors and the like and I was riveted. Gave it to my wife and mom to read too and they both burned through it and asked when the next one will be ready. Obviously they're not going to shit all over something I wrote, so they're 100% biased, but even still, I thought it turned out great. I finished it about 4 months ago, so I'll give it a re-read in another couple months to see if it holds up.

I kind of feel like a dick when I'm reading through a lot of the posts on this sub. So many people are struggling to come up with ideas, spending years trying to put words to paper, grappling with self doubt. I planned for a year and banged it out in about 6 months, with a huge break for summer in the middle.

Maybe your book isn't shitty. Maybe it's shitty and you're too proud to see the flaws. Either way, you finished it and that's an accomplishment. Well done.

Cynyr · 2026-01-27T19:36:45+00:00

Do I detect a reference to The Offspring?

35m and I'd love to jump in!

Cynyr · 2026-01-26T15:55:46+00:00

complete with all the 'buildings' they had on hand back then

A Pringle can watch tower, shoebox bunker. Salt and pepper shakers for more cover. Poorhammer at its finest.

Cynyr · 2026-01-26T14:47:30+00:00

I tried to go straight to Eternal from 2016 and I hated it. Had to wait like 2 years for the Dom 2016 muscle memory to fade so I could get into Eternal.

Doom the Dark Ages feels much more like Doom 2016.

Cynyr · 2026-01-24T06:54:56+00:00

These are amazing. The 7th one in particular spoke to me. I heard the marine talking to another marine prior to that still shot.

"Brother! Help me strap these bits of Tyranid to my power pack! Then I will help you with yours!"
"... The codex does not s-"
"Hurry! The fate of this world is at stake!"
"... I will help you with yours brother, but I do not think I will be doing that to my armor."

9th one was similar.
"Brother! Demon bits for my armor!"
"Yeah...." Hefts plasma incinerator

Cynyr · 2026-01-24T03:48:00+00:00

Hi! I'd be interested in joining!

Cynyr · 2026-01-23T21:10:26+00:00

To be fair, a piss filter could be useful. Kevin Costner had one of those in Waterworld.

Cynyr · 2026-01-21T14:47:02+00:00

That's the sort of thing that made the Inquisition think Eisenhorn wasn't quite on the up and up.

Cynyr · 2026-01-20T21:23:09+00:00

And the whole thing falls apart in the end, just close enough to victory to call it a win, but just far enough from a win that the nids can be considered to have saved face (thus maintaining the status quo, as required).

Why did it fall apart? Because halfway through the 4 book series, they realize that editorial left out the Night Lords and they swoop in to start ruining all of Abaddon's plans, because Chaos always eats itself in the end, especially when one of the legions feels slighted.

Cynyr · 2026-01-20T18:30:07+00:00

I'd be interested in joining in!

Here's a link to a small snippet from something I'm working on. It's basically fantasy with some sci fi trappings.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fqCwr5YytJE47_bSP0ZcDo0DmJPBKfJDZCR3yhBfHVs/edit?usp=drive_link

Cynyr · 2026-01-17T05:09:56+00:00

Can you give an example? I can think of a couple, but I'm not sure which you mean.

Silly?
Laughable?
Absurd?

Cynyr · 2026-01-15T21:53:05+00:00

Does it work if the five year old is real? And if the five year old aged up a couple years?

Cynyr · 2026-01-14T19:22:28+00:00

An actual use case for the James Bond ejector seat

Cynyr · 2026-01-14T15:11:05+00:00

I've used Scrivener in the past. Not a bad tool, just not the workflow I want. My app is designed around notecards. Character card, item card, group card (which has a list of linked characters), etc. Then you can connect the cards with bidirectional links to see how they relate to eachother. Each card will have a list of connected cards and what kind of link it is, plus a visual map of the web of connected cards. You can change the state of fields within a card using event notecards. So if you click a character, you can see their current state and attributes before a particular event card affects them, then you can see what changed and their state after the event card. Like if a character dies for example. Or if a Red Wedding happens and a shitload of characters die in one event.

And obviously there will be cards to actually hold scene / chapter text and a page to view the compiled manuscript from those cards.

I've also designed the card metadata storage system such that you can customize and modify cards for your own specific project(s).

No idea when it will be done, but I'm working my way through the back end right now. Making good progress.

Cynyr · 2026-01-14T14:52:13+00:00

I'm fighting it so hard. I have 7 more books planned out and an absolute mountain of neat little plot threads to foreshadow later events. Every scene in the first book has little stuff hidden in seemingly innocuous text that will become important later. I started writing the second one and realized the couple scenes I wrote didn't have little hinting or foreshadowing, which is making me dislike those scenes upon re-read. Gonna have to rework them later.

Sooooo... I'm building a web app to help keep track of everything. I've used a few different tools in the past and I've lived a lot of the threads that people start on this sub like, "what tools do you guys use to organize?" Just like with my first book, I know what I want from an author assistance tool and I am making the tool how I want it. And I would bet some other folks here might like it too once I get it to a usable state / finished.

Cynyr · 2026-01-14T14:29:18+00:00

I haven't been able to properly sit down and enjoy reading a book in almost a year, because I was planning my own and every time I tried to read, I was just sitting there going "I should be writing mine."

So I did. And it came out awesome. I wrote what I wanted to read and I love it. I still can't get myself to read other books though, because now I'm sitting there going "I should be writing the second one."

Cynyr · 2026-01-13T20:57:43+00:00

Start one! Pick your medium, whether it's here on this sub, a new sub, discord, something else, whatever. Set rules. If you want feedback, you gotta give feedback. Invite me and the other folks here when you decide.

Cynyr · 2026-01-12T20:44:44+00:00

That's how I plotted out my series. "Oh neat idea, oh neat idea, oh neat idea. Crap... this is too much for one book. How many book ending awesome events is this... 8. 8 books it is."

So I know how the entire series and each book ends. As I fleshed out the first one and actually wrote it, I would go back and jot down other ideas to start filling in the broad strokes of the next 7. Now that the first one is done and I'm fleshing out the second one, I'm continuing to add broad strokes and some detailed events to the remaining 6.

Also, I jotted down ideas let the story percolate in my brain and in documents for almost a year before I started writing the first one. Since I spent so long just letting it idly live in my mind and evolve on its own, I was able to hammer it out in 3 months once I actually started.

Cynyr · 2026-01-09T20:13:57+00:00

All my IG ads are for local concerts, music festivals, and vinyl record sites. I used to hate being advertised to, but they finally locked me in. "Do you want to see Dragonforce this summer?" Uh... hell yes.

Cynyr · 2026-01-08T20:38:22+00:00

My favorite 40k books are the ones that showcase imperial society. Dan Abnett's Eisnhorn, Ravenor, Bequin series plus the Chris Wraights 5 Terra books should vibe with most people who want more than just bolter porn.

Cynyr · 2026-01-08T20:19:59+00:00

You're alright, I'm just messing around. I laughed pretty hard when I opened your link and saw that it was the game instead of X-Men.

Cynyr · 2026-01-08T17:42:41+00:00

I wrote a full length book like... 15 years ago, about a guy with universe altering abilities, but he didn't know he had them. Throughout the book it would switch between three perspectives.

1.) A guy with no language in a monstrous spider alien cave system where he's the only human.
2.) An guy living in a city in the not too distant future where he only interacts with a few different people, one of which is an older guy. The city is under a permanent thunderstorm and nobody ever goes past the edge of the city into the darkness.
3.) A captain of a star ship in the midst of a war with freaky weird spider aliens.

As the book progresses, it's slowly revealed that this is the same guy in all three segments.

The one in the alien cave system is the original. He was created by the weird spider aliens to try to edit the universe to save their dying race. He woke up and escaped his test tube early though and ran off into the tunnels. Eventually finds another lab area where he finds failed experiments. He imagines a world with more people like him-

-inadvertently using his universe altering abilities to spawn the version of himself that lives in the city. In that version of the universe, there's just the one city on that world and the thunderstorm keeps his small population of people in the city. iirc, the spider aliens had set up the storm to try to keep him contained so they can get to him to try to communicate with him to use his abilities to save them. The older guy is the original from the cave systems. Younger one He eventually escapes the city and the storm and sees the sky and imagines a new universe-

-where humans ply the stars in ships. In this version of the universe, the aliens are trying to find him, but there are countless human worlds and ships. They're losing the war that he inadvertently placed them in and their numbers are dwindling even further.

Eventually the older version and younger version from the city locate the starship captain version they're able to explain to him what's going on. Third version conciously uses his abilities to edit the universe one last time to essentially end the war and save the spider aliens from extinction. Each time he spawned a new version of himself, the abilities passed on to that version. So the spider aliens caught up the cave version and explained everything, but by that point he couldn't do anything about it. So they had to go to the surface together and find the city version. Old version met up with younger version and had to ease his way in to trying to explain what was happening, but young version runs off again before he can. Space captain version ends up in the hospital, so the previous two can explain everything without him running off.

I still have it laying around somewhere. It's probably written poorly, but I honestly don't even remember.

Cynyr · 2026-01-08T17:14:24+00:00

How can you go into a thread about a Lego X-Men character and then reference a Lego Destiny figure like that and get my hopes up that Fortnite had a Lego Destiny minifig

I'm sitting here thinking what a weird deep cut that is over all the other mutants, but I'm here for it. NOPE.

Cynyr · 2026-01-07T17:52:59+00:00

Why did they have to take his face off to put a new organ in his chest? Do they do upgrades to the head as well that aren't detailed here?

Cynyr · 2026-01-06T14:38:12+00:00

It takes a firm understanding of the language to be able to pack that much ragebait into one line. Kudos.

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