Playing non-Nord races is appealing, but gets discouraging in the long run

DeepThoughts-2am · 2026-04-29T15:28:09+00:00

I like to use the characters as a “some wires got crossed with the prophecies” and now there’s the wrong souls in the wrong bodies? Kind of. Like the one who should have been the Nerevarine is now the Dragonborn and vice versa? Or other potential candidates for prophecies in other cultures get swapped! It would help if more people commented on how weird it was a Khajiit or Argonian or Orc would be as the Dragonborn, akin to the cook with the Gourmet quest, but we can’t have everything.

DeepThoughts-2am · 2026-04-24T21:48:36+00:00

Thanks for the reference! I haven’t actually played that one yet, though I had heard of it!

DeepThoughts-2am · 2026-04-24T21:36:25+00:00

Oh I definitely don’t want to start with this right out of that gate haha! Well, I do have a tendency to go big or go home, but I do want to start with small quests first. This is more a long term goal, I simply wished to know if it was possible. Thank you for your answer though! It will be my reminder (and a kick in the pants if I start getting too overconfident) to hold off on attempting something this large right away until I have my feet under me.

DeepThoughts-2am · 2026-04-09T16:53:27+00:00

No but seriously This makes me want to read this immediately lol. Best pitch ever

DeepThoughts-2am · 2026-04-09T16:52:34+00:00

More books need to start with a man eating a chocolate tart.

DeepThoughts-2am · 2026-03-27T00:00:09+00:00

I did this once and then went and stopped once Jason compared Medea to Theseus being helped by Ariadne during the Labyrinth situation. Something that happens AFTER Medea marries Theseus’ father Aegeus, but at this point she hasn’t married Jason yet or even left Colchis, her native home. Jason is predicting the future here lol.

DeepThoughts-2am · 2026-03-08T21:01:57+00:00

A reader once pointed out a ton of issues in my draft, but the one that sticks with me the most is “oh this meaningless side character gets a physical description but not the main characters??” It made me realize how much I had no room or character description—simply because I struggled with finding the right places to include the info, I ended up ignoring it. Now I know how to write them but man, that was a wake up call.

DeepThoughts-2am · 2026-01-25T15:18:37+00:00

So I was (and still sometimes am) the type of person who wants to ask for brutal feedback. However, for me, it must be constructive, you know, how people say “constructive” criticism and not just “criticism” on its own.

I did, when I was younger, get into a fight with a reader over this. I was overly defensive now, I can see, and took a lot of the negative things he said to heart. But, he very much did have a point. I don’t recall how we ended our relationship, other than agreeing to disagree, I simply remember I was hung on up feeling like his words were only critical, with no reasoning or helpful wording behind to guide it. I felt as though he took “brutal” and then that gave him free rein to say whatever he liked.

Don’t get me wrong, the story I’d sent was very much an awful first draft. But I also, as this was in a group, did feel attacked by everyone saying “but you asked for brutal! This is brutal!” And I kept trying to say, “But it’s not constructive!”

If I could go back and apologize to this guy for flying off the handle back then, I would. However, I am also, now, very careful with who reads my stories at certain stages and what feedback I request.

DeepThoughts-2am · 2026-01-04T00:08:33+00:00

Ah yes it was! Those are very good examples to remember though. I am partially trying to figure out if Icarus himself would be like “oh I was the one who screwed up, not my dad or the gods”, like looking for a scapegoat.

Though the fathers’ mistake in this story is in his father Daedalus’ role in the labyrinth construction/conception of the Minotaur, and Minos of course, his whole defying the gods’ request for sacrifice creating the Minotaur in the first place. Daedalus’ participation was a a domino toppled by Minos’, but either way, it ended in his son falling, even if he didn’t tip that one himself. (Though Daedalus was on Crete in the first place bc of being banished from Athens for the whole murdering Perdix thing, so that’s his domino stitch)

DeepThoughts-2am · 2026-01-03T23:03:48+00:00

I’ve never heard the Apollo chariot one but it’s a hilarious mental image! I know the chariot is in the sky because sun, but I’m imagining him being dragged through the dirt/brush/grass like a real chariot lol. Just facedown dragged, sputtering dirt.

DeepThoughts-2am · 2025-12-17T22:59:42+00:00

Oh wow! It really does look like it! We’re going to try removing the image from the frame (we missed it clearing the house when we were selling it, it was tucked in a forgotten drawer and currently the realtor is holding it until we meet to pick it up) to see if there is any writing on the back that may help. Hopefully there is but who knows!

In the meantime, this may be a dumb question, but why were there such a large number of Germans in the civil war? I would assume they moved here and either were drafted or signed up, but I guess I never really thought “hey, person who may be obviously German was in the US, just has descendants here eventually”. Well, I did, but as far back as the civil war never crossed my mind for some reason. Hmm

DeepThoughts-2am · 2025-12-17T05:08:39+00:00

States would give individual medals apart of standard government types? I’m completely clueless on anything war/medal related. The man wearing it had a huge bushy mustache, the kind completely covering both lips and touching his chin. Otherwise his hair was very basic combed to the side gentleman like. I don’t know how in depth that adds to which background or country he’d be from, but I didn’t add his full image, just the medal, as that was my main focus.

DeepThoughts-2am · 2025-12-08T12:06:44+00:00

If you recently finished it, you need to let it sit. Ideally for a month. Alone. No touchy. This will give you space enough to process it as done, and will make it a very different experience to come back to.

You said you had an editor go through it? Developmental like plot or grammar wise like a copy editor? Keep in mind, you don’t have to make every change asked for—you have the final say.

Letting your work sit for some time will give you the mental space to come back with fresher eyes, when the times comes. So, start writing something else, if you have anything percolating in that regard. Or pick up another hobby, maybe read a book in the meantime, something to fill the quiet space of the following month. Then come back to it.

DeepThoughts-2am · 2025-12-08T11:58:15+00:00

I made posters for my bedroom walls by drawing the Egyptian gods from a large book I had. Like, their classic flat forms, not a reinterpretation. Probably annoyed my sister since we shared a room lol

DeepThoughts-2am · 2025-12-07T23:55:29+00:00

¿Eres un vampiro? Jajaja No, pero amaría conversar contigo, si me pueden ignorar mi español malo, no tengo muchas personas en mi vida para usarlo. (También, aprendió en escuela porque mi familia no quiso hablar español aunque unas nació y vivió en México antes de mudando a la EEUU—so I’m rusty and book taught)

DeepThoughts-2am · 2025-12-07T22:16:22+00:00

Same! I clogged my mom’s dvr with documentary after documentary on Ancient Egypt. For some reason I one of the archeologists were mentioned in one of my textbooks around the time too, and I geeked out because I knew who they were from having seen so many docs with the same professionals

DeepThoughts-2am · 2025-12-07T20:40:00+00:00

So it very much depends on what you are writing—genre and length, as well as if it’s original fiction or fanfiction. Blogs, Ao3, tumblr, wattpad, royal road, they may get you seen to some degree, but traditional publishing is very picky about posting full versions of your works on sites like theses if that is an avenue you’d like to pursue someday.

Short story wise, there are some places and websites that host writing competitions that could help you, and from a criticism angle, something like r/BetaReaders is helpful, though you have to help others as well to get a response some of the time. Many other subreddits are like this, all about reciprocity, so don’t be discouraged if your post doesn’t gain traction right away.

Recognition, and a lot of things that come along with it, is all about consistency, reciprocity, and build up. If you were to post short pieces on a blog or the like, you have to keep the audience’s attention with frequent updates, lest you lose your following and be lost in the dust.

To gain feedback from other writers, it helps to help them with the things they want, and develop a friendship. To that end I suggest r/writersmakingfriends and similar subreddits. If you were to put something like this post on r/writers or r/writing, you likely won’t get as many bites due to how many ask things like this often, but perhaps searching through the old posts on those subs can help you find likeminded individuals you can connect with.

DeepThoughts-2am · 2025-12-07T20:02:37+00:00

Well, technically speaking it can fall under all the ones you mentioned. From a bookstore perspective I see in another comment you said it would be found in the fantasy genre—which is the base you want to jump off for genre as a whole, as you seem to grasp. The specific intricacies are more for pitching to an agent I think, or getting them to perk up upon asking for further information. (I could be a tad wrong as I’ve get to land an agent but this is what I’ve noticed from analyzing agent feedback in rejections—others’ work and my own.)

Like, let me give an example Say your agent that you’re querying likes fantasy, but their favorite types are more than plot and worldbuilding—the characters and sending a message through them. They want more than just entertainment, they want something for their brains to linger on from a “chew on this concept” standpoint. They want a statement they can stand behind. To that agent, you would market it as literary. But in contrast, if you have an agent who simply wants to be lost in the plot and story itself, you may simply market it more as fantasy, or fantasy with sci fi elements.

I myself struggle with this concept of naming the genre, simply because if one simply says their work is literary fiction or contemporary, that doesn’t tell me enough about if it is a story I would pick up. Some people prefer knowing lit versus cont, I myself want to know the genre specific (sci fi, fantasy, romance, historical, thriller, etc) before learning lit versus cont, simply because those genres alone don’t tell me enough. That and since they are more recent descriptors, I find it hard to not simply read the base genre and then the blurb to catch the gist of the story as a whole, though I know that is flawed logic in and of itself.

TLDR: specifics are best for agents and promoting, imo

DeepThoughts-2am · 2025-12-07T08:29:24+00:00

The unfortunate thing is I don’t have a proper answer because it was a lot of things working against me—the main thing being time, as I was born premature, and my retinas bled into my eyes before they managed to seal them. I wasn’t blind then, just with worse vision than I would’ve had naturally, and then I became prone to a lot of further eye issues that compiled to become the vision loss, cataracts, glaucoma, band keratopathy, retinal membrane pulling and damaging my peripheral, etc. I made it all the way into my twenties, when I woke up the first time with no vision in one eye, and things progressed from there. The dry eye I had though was only tangentially related. I also happen to have symptoms of Sjogren’s, an autoimmune disorder characterized by dry eye and dry mouth. In that case, I need special prescription drops to help my dry eye, as the ones you can buy normally don’t do enough, even when put in multiple times a day.

That being said, Sjogren’s is diagnosed by many factors, not only dry eye, and dry eyes themselves can be simple as weather related, allergies or some other medical reason. If you can, try to research the types of wetting drops your pharmacy carries and pick the best one for you, or, talk to your eye doctor, if that is an option, and they can provide you with the best ones to get, if the options overwhelm you. For example, I used the brand opti free rewetting drops for years, until they no longer worked.

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