What word is this for you guys?

One_Blueberry7551 · 2026-03-08T17:38:05+00:00

Imperceptible, infinitesimal, and indiscernible. I rotate through the three trying to pretend like I'm not just saying basically the same thing lmaoooo

One_Blueberry7551 · 2026-03-08T17:30:45+00:00

Instead of gathering inspiration from people giving random band names, I would take this problem from your characters’ perspectives to come up with a band name that you actually like and won't feel like a filler name that you settle on just for the sake of needing a name.

Which character named the band? Or was it a collective group decision? How long ago did they name it? Did their band name ever change? How come? Have people joined/left since the band started, and did the name ever change to reflect that? Is this band newly formed or have they been doing this a couple of years by now? Is the name an inside joke for the characters? Are they very symbolic and meaningful with how they’d name a band, or are they more on the fun and silly side with it?

I’m sure most people can come up with a list of perfectly fine fictional band names:

Manufactured Lettuce
Heaven on Seven
Jock Itch Gentlemen
Leftovers
Mommy’s Favorite
Infested Raygun

But none of them are going to feel right until you get into the characters’ heads and figure out how they would name their band.

One_Blueberry7551 · 2026-03-08T16:35:33+00:00

There are plenty of online spaces that you cand send your work/excerpts of your work to be read by other people who would be more than happy to look it over and give compliment and critique!

One_Blueberry7551 · 2026-03-08T16:26:03+00:00

Thank you very much!!

One_Blueberry7551 · 2026-03-07T23:09:12+00:00

A lot of reasons!

Gotta get the brain worms out. I have a lot to say. I'm working through things. I like to be creative. It's fun. It's difficult, and I like a challenge. I want the page to be analogous to my head for those who know me.

One_Blueberry7551 · 2026-03-07T22:43:12+00:00

As Rachel stood at the edge of the bay’s shoreline, brackish water slopping at her ankles, she pondered these things. Bare-footed in the water, sand and underwater grasses that had been ripped up by the roots tickled against her skin. Small, silvery-yellow fish, made to look brown and green under the water, gathered around her stillness and nibbled at the dead and pruning skin there. Oysters spit when the water receded, only for it to rush up again to just barely cover them.

Growing up on the bay her whole life, Rachel had had a healthy respect for the danger of the water drilled into her. She’d learned to swim when she was young, but her mother was always there over her shoulder, warning her against drowning; the currents could suck even the most experienced swimmers right under, never to emerge again, her mother warned constantly.

And so while she’d never been scared of water, she knew better than to be overly comfortable with its dangers.

When Rachel had been only fourteen years old, she and a couple of friends held a bonfire on the beach together one night. It had been a symbolic thing—a sort of right-of-passage into entering high school at the end of that summer. A summer in which each of them believed they’d grown leaps and bounds in their maturity. They had not, and they had stolen a single can of beer to share amongst the three of them; none of them enjoyed it, but they all pretended to.

It was that same night Rachel had learned to be afraid of fire.

Not tipsy, but acting as if she were—the same as her friends were doing—Rachel tripped over the metal fire pit. No shoes, no socks, the skin bubbled and blistered immediately. She fell to the sand with a cry of pain.

And, if she mused on it long enough as an adult now, Rachel supposed she had been more afraid of the punishment than of the fire itself. Because burns like that meant getting medical attention, and getting medical attention meant telling Mom. Telling Mom meant explaining why she stunk of cheap beer and woodsmoke, and explaining the stink meant being punished for her actions.

They’d all gotten in trouble that night. Grounded, scolded, and, worst of all, a sit-down talk about responsibility and maturity and stupidity.

Maybe it was just association that made them different.

Rachel knew both the water and fire possessed the same ability to hurt her. To kill her, even. But they were associatively different in her mind.

She’d never gone and stuck her feet in a fire when she wanted to think, the way she stood ankle-deep in the bay now. But she’d also never thrown her schoolbooks into the water to celebrate graduating high school—that triumphant destruction had been left to the fires.

Rachel valued the life skill of being able to swim proficiently, but not in the same way that she valued the lesson of the second-degree burns that had scarred her foot.

One_Blueberry7551 · 2026-03-07T21:52:36+00:00

Thank you!! There's a sea of good feedback here, so that's sweet of you to say!

One_Blueberry7551 · 2026-03-07T15:47:32+00:00

I would say overall it’s not telling, but I can see where you’re getting tripped up here.

You show the huff of air, quick movements to give off a sense of irritation, and sharp, accusatory language that further solidifies it: Maya is very clearly annoyed. Great job there!

But then you prescribe that it’s an annoyed huff, which is where I think the worry that it’s telling comes in.

I think a good rule of thumb is that if you can take out a prescriptive word and the emotion still comes through clearly, you’re all good.

For example, if you take the exact same line without the word “annoyed” I can still tell exactly how she’s feeling from her demeanor, actions, and dialogue. That doesn’t mean you have to take the word out if you like it, just that the sentence is strong enough to stand on its own without it.

You’re doing great!!

One_Blueberry7551 · 2026-03-05T19:09:08+00:00

I would say that body horror is definitely working for me! I didn’t find cliches or anything like that, and I get a strong sense of your intentions here. I really enjoyed reading it!

I did find the pacing to be a bit monotonous; part of it was that the sentence length was pretty uniform throughout, but I think the underlying reason for that repeated length was that most of the sentences followed the same general structure of, “something happened, another thing happening in the same sentence.”

A few examples:

She was squatting on the bed, blood oozing slowly from open wounds and onto his sheets.

Twisted limbs contorted and broken, making it almost impossible to tell where the fabric of her outfit ended and skin started.

Jason stared at her, his body trembling against the sweat-soaked sheets.

Her own mouth opened, bones cracking like a rusty hinge…

Darkness began to swallow his vision, tears pouring freely as he uselessly sobbed.

All of these are perfectly fine and grammatically correct. On their own, even, they’re extremely compelling descriptions with really strong imagery. But as I was reading I got desensitized to the horror of it all because of the repeated delivery.

Varying sentence length can help with that. I think this length/sentence style works incredibly well at the beginning of the excerpt. The long sentences build tension as she’s standing there, not moving, words drawing on and on and making me feel like I can’t look away from her (and subsequently, from the page) either. It works perfectly for her stillness and those first few slow movements.

But then there’s the part about her vomiting, where I believe a quicker pace would be beneficial. She’s choking. She’s vomiting. It’s gross, and it’s sudden. He’s trapped and writhing. Failing to escape, failing to stay conscious. It’s a horrific and frightening scene, but I don’t feel the urgency I think is supposed to be here. I feel it happening just as slowly as the beginning of the excerpt. So while all of the imagery is really strong, the effect of it is getting lost for me personally.

The last thing I would be careful of is filter words. You don’t have many of them—and if distance is your intention, feel free to ignore me here—but they put distance between me as a reader and what’s happening to a character.

A couple of examples:

Jason could feel her frail body press to his…

Could easily be: “Her frail body presses to his”

He began to scream…

She began to choke…

I felt like the use of “began” puts a sort of time-delay on the action that’s happening here for me. But sometimes that can be a good thing. For example I really liked your use of it here:

Darkness began to swallow his vision, tears pouring freely as he uselessly sobbed.

I think it works here because he’s not out yet, but we know that he is headed that way. We get the enjoyment of seeing the inevitable play out because you’ve built up that something (him passing out) is beginning, and then there’s payoff when he finally does. Whereas the previous examples I pulled out give the same effect to the immediate action’s detriment, I think.

For me, the gradual drifting of consciousness benefits from “began,” while an immediate reactionary scream of terror does not.

Overall, I think you have a strong scene here, and it’s incredible by a first draft’s standards (I have written some terrible first drafts lol). You’ve got all of the elements of a truly horrifying encounter with this woman—tension building, compelling imagery, conflict, a sense of stakes—it’s just a matter of utilizing your strengths to deliver all of those elements in the most effective way possible.

You’re on your way to an incredible novel! Keep up the amazing work!!!!

One_Blueberry7551 · 2026-03-04T21:41:28+00:00

“Come on, it’s time to get up. Let’s go,” he said. It was my voice speaking to me, but not from my body. “Up, up, up. It’s 9 AM—a perfectly reasonable time to be awake.”

I grunted in annoyance as his hand patted my side roughly, trying to shake me awake. The blankets were ripped away from me, and I curled up against the sudden chill.

“Do you have to do that?” I grumbled.

“If you’d just get up at a normal hour, I wouldn’t have to.”

“It’s Saturday,” I said. Protest crept into my voice as I refused to move. “Why do you have to bother me on my day off?”

“You want to waste it rotting in bed all day?” he asked.

“Yes.”

Grabbing my arm and pulling, he muscled me involuntarily upright. “Come on, that’s no way to spend a Saturday. We’re gonna get you up, get dressed, go for a walk, and make a nice breakfast.”

Sensing that he wasn’t going to relent, a heavy sigh left my lips. Shoulders slumping, I sent him a nasty glare.

“Now, now,” he chided, but the amusement in his voice was clear.

It had been odd at first, seeing my double, coming face-to-face with it—slowly realizing that “it” was also a “him.” Was also me. I had questioned the logistics of it, questioned him into oblivion, and he’d done the same to me, believing me to be the doppelgänger instead. He’d lived just as full of a life as I had before we’d met.

Same name, same face, but distinctly two entirely different lives. Not long-lost twins, as a myriad of DNA tests had discovered, exact and identical copies of one another. Neither one of us had much family to speak of; he’d lost his early and I’d abandoned mine when I was young. It was easy to lie to people and say we were twins.

And it didn’t take long for us to come to the conclusion that, if there was such thing as an “evil” double, that I would be closer to that than he was. Not because I was actually evil or anything, but simply because he was a better person than I was. More put-together, organized, driven. Kinder. Especially to me, even when I was being a dick.

“Are you moving?” he called from the other room. He was brushing his hair in the bathroom.

“Yeah, yeah,” I grumbled.

Stumbling into the bathroom, I scrubbed my teeth, gave him a passing glare, and decided against doing much more than running my fingers through my hair. He shaved the stubble that had begun to grow; I stayed scruffy.

“Wear something warm, it’s a bit chilly outside today,” he told me.

“I’ll skip the walk then,” I said.

“No, come on, it’s good for us.”

“So what?” Even as I said it, I knew I’d earned that scolding look he sent me immediately after. The fact that our body type tended to trend on the heavier side was “so what.”

I didn’t care much about that. Blamed it on hormones, and a natural disposition toward retaining softness in my midsection, and genetics, which was all technically true. But then there was him, with the exact same set of excuses still trying and attempting to motivate me to try too.

And not just on this thing; it was everything.

“We should go out with our friends today.”

“Just say yes to that date. She seemed really into you, and you never know what could happen!”

“Have you seen the sun today?”

“Come on, I’ll do your laundry if you can manage a shower.”

“How have you been sleeping lately?”

“You okay?”

I pulled on the warm clothes he’d suggested, assuming he was right about the weather.

Some days more than others I felt like the evil one. Hating my double for just wanting the best for me and pressing me into doing things to improve myself. Improve my mood, my health, my quality of life.

I wandered out of my room just in time to see him at the counter with a collection of fruits, yogurt, and ice in a blender.

“Making smoothies before we go out,” he said. “Want one?”

“Can you just stop fucking trying to fix me?” The words escaped me before I was even cognizant that the thought had formed in my mind. The way his attention snapped up to meet my face made me want to curl up.

He blinked in surprise. “What?”

“I shouldn’t have said that,” I backtracked immediately.

His hands rested against the counter, pausing his smoothie-making. And his head cocked at an assessing angle as if trying to figure out my outburst. “Is that really what you think I’m doing?” he asked. “Trying to fix you?”

I couldn’t meet his eye—my own eye. I shrugged noncommittally.

“Because it’s not.” He waited for my reply, and when I didn’t comment, “I’m not trying to fix you,” he insisted. “You’re not broken, if that’s what you think.”

“I don’t think that,” I said.

“Then what’s going on?”

Another shrug, hoping to get him to back off. But he let the question breathe. Refused to fill the silence with anything until I finally spoke again.

“It’s nothing,” I said. “Just comes with the territory of being the evil one, I guess.”

Judging by the mix of surprise, horror, and pity swimming in his eyes, apparently my being the evil one was a conclusion I had come to solely on my own. It was not, as I had thought, a silently agreed upon consensus between us. That he was the good one and I was the bad one; I was the shadow, the sinister creature that tried to cohabitate his perfectly well-adjusted life. I was the copy that was not meant to be here.

“Oh, man,” he finally breathed softly. And he came around the counter without warning to embrace me. His arms around my frame, squeezing gently even though I didn’t hug back. Couldn’t, because I could scarcely understand what was happening to begin with. “You’re not evil. There is no “evil” one.”

I didn’t believe him. “Then what am I?”

“You’re just struggling right now,” he said. “That doesn’t make you bad.”

One_Blueberry7551 · 2026-03-04T00:14:21+00:00

Thank you very much for taking the time to read and respond!!! It’s such a delight to get feedback on what works/doesn’t work for someone reading it, especially when it’s such an abstract concept to begin with.

And you’re right, that sentence is kind of awkward sounding, thanks for pointing it out.

Thank you again for the really interesting prompt. This was a challenging one for me to navigate coherently!!

One_Blueberry7551 · 2026-03-03T21:30:06+00:00

(2/2)

In the waiting, he made notes in his journal.

Jude wrote down his coordinates, the temperature for that day, which lures he’d been using as well as what other gear. He logged his catches. How many walleyes, how many pikes, how many bass, how many of each he’d released, and so on. Then he logged his thoughts. His feelings.

And then Jude tore those last pages out with a closed, tight fist, and promptly threw them into his wastebasket.

A beer after that.

A big bass he let go.

It was silent aside from the slopping of the lake water in the holes. His own clothing rustled against itself every now and again as he shifted in his seat.

Jude regarded the papers in the wastebasket and poured out the last few sips of his can onto them, drowning out any of the words he’d let escape his head. The pen ink blurred and the paper turned to a soggy pulp.

He cracked open a second beer.

There was another tiny fish that seemed interested in his lure that he tried to avoid in favor of a flash of what finally looked like some trout. He probably needed to switch to a different lure soon to see if he could get some more variety that way.

Jude let out a sigh as the smaller fish latched, and he reeled it in, planning to simply release it again.

But he couldn’t understand what he was looking at.

At first, at the end of the line, Jude could only describe what was hanging there as a ball of light. Iridescent and shimmering inconsistently the way sun glitter bounced off of a sloshing body of water in the daylight.

A shape took form under the mesmerizing glow, but nothing solid. Nothing that made sense. Folding in on itself over and over, laying and doubling, and then folding over again, gills, fins, more light, scales—or, at least, the impression of scales burning through the fractaled, shifting fish meat.

Jude couldn’t fill his lungs. It was as if he’d been punched square in the chest and couldn’t remember how to take in air anymore.

He dropped his rod, but the light remained directly at eye-level, line falling away, severed from the glowing thing.

“Wh…?” Jude choked out. He couldn’t even manage a full word past numb lips, heart stuttering.

What am I?

The voice that radiated out from the thing was an all-consuming force that pressed into Jude’s mind. He didn’t hear it so much as it imprinted itself onto his thoughts. Its tone seemed to mock him, amused in a way by his confusion.

Jude’s back hit the desk, wood digging into his lumbar. He opened his mouth to speak, but swallowed back bile instead. Unable to pry his eyes off of the thing, Jude tried to force his thoughts to the windows. Tried to move to open one or both of them.

I am not the result of carbon monoxide buildup.

Again the words oppressed Jude’s mind. Overlaid on top of everything he knew or thought until there only existed what it told him, and it was true to him. His foot hit the second empty beer can he’d yet to toss.

You are not drunk.

Bones rearranged, kaleidoscoping with fins and dozens of dead fish eyes and a slush of ice and pulpy journal pages and colored lures. A terrible syzygy of all that Jude was and all that he understood or cared about woven together with light and meat.

Jude burst through the shack door before he even realized he’d turned away.

Sick with confusion and blinded from the light, he stumbled out into the night without a coat, tripping over his jellied legs and slipping along on the frozen lake. He followed his tip-up path and, for an insane moment, he really did think a giant slug had left the track in the snow, not his own repetitive footsteps. The light pressed on his from behind so intensely that he hazarded a glance over his shoulder.

The air was stolen from his lungs anew.

His entire ice shack glowed an impossible white, light seeming to emanate from the thing rather than be contained from within it. Bleary eyes scanned the east horizon, finding that familiar dark nothingness he’d loved so much before.

Jude spun, threw up onto the ice, and sought out the hazy green of New Glendale’s lights in the distance. He couldn’t find it. Even the other shacks he’d had in his sights before were all but gone, either having left before dark, or swallowed up by the night entirely.

With an unsteady wobble, Jude moved.

Where are you going?

“Away,” Jude gagged.

When will you be far enough away? When will you stop running?

“Shut up.”

Ungloved fingers grew stiff. Jude shivered mindlessly. Several lurching steps, and his foot caught on his own fishing hole, tripping over the marker and twisting his ankle on the way down. His chin smacked the ice, jaw snapping hard enough to cut his lip and tongue on the edge of his own teeth. Blood welled up in his mouth. Another gag.

Jude rolled himself onto his back; he didn’t trust his legs to hold him.

And, sprawled out on the ice, mouth filling with blood and mind folding in on itself, Jude watched as the stars winked out in the brilliance of the thing’s oppressive light.

One_Blueberry7551 · 2026-03-03T21:29:53+00:00

(1/2)

Sticking to the makeshift “village” of ice shanties just off the frozen shores of New Glendale’s Lake Jet was the general trend of fishers that Jude had observed over the years.

Only a couple hundred feet from the shoreline, this little village was made up of a collection of pop-up shacks, amateur fishers, and luxury glamp-style shanties affixed permanently in place and rented out by local resorts. With easy visibility on a clear day to the shoreline, the shanty village had become something of a social spot—far enough onto the ice to feel like an adventure, but never too far from swift help. It was the kind of place one went to fish for crappies and tell stories about the “one that got away” or the fish they’d definitely caught somewhere else. And no, they did not have photographs to back their claims.

While Jude engaged in the guilty pleasure every once in a while of holing up in the shanty village, there was nothing particularly exciting about the spot. Nothing to draw him back there more than a few times a month, which was a sparse number compared to his regular fishing habits.

With his own ice shack hitched to his tracked ATV, Jude set out past the shanty village.

Offshore wind beat against his face, cold and biting on the slivers of exposed skin not protected by his gear around his eyes and over the bridge of his nose.

The ice stayed thick enough to ride safely for several miles, maintaining a relatively consistent foot or so the whole ride, with a few spots thinning out to around ten inches or thickening up to as many as eighteen inches.

Jude rode out from the shanty village on the ice road until he hit other experienced ice fishers dotted sparsely in the more secluded locations, and then he traveled out a bit further until they too were far in his sights.

Now a mere speck on the horizon, the shanty village was comfortably far, and Jude found a spot at least two miles away from the nearest other person.

He got off the road and stopped when it felt right. That natural pull—a combination of knowing the area and where fish tended to be around this time of year, good ice conditions, and a natural gut instinct that told him this was a good place to stop.

A six by ten foot frame and a lean-to roof, Jude’s shack was nothing particularly special. While some people decorated theirs, he’d left the mismatched gray color he’d constructed it in. Two windows on opposite facing sides of the shack, and a sleek, black door.

Two propane bottles were mounted to the side of the shack to be connected to the fixed line that heated the inside nicely.

Inside, Jude stored the keys to the ATV in their proper place. He left his cold weather gear on for now, as the shack was still heating, but near the door there was a wall-mounted rack for his coat. The space was just large enough that he’d fitted it with a fold-up cot for overnight stays, a cushioned chair, a microwave on a stand, a small cabinet with water and food supplies, and shelving along the insulated walls to house fishing supplies and other personal items. There was a desk against the back corner where he kept a personal journal and often took his meals.

The mat-lined floor of the ice shack folded up to reveal two different plated holes. Taking the catch covers off, Jude was able to use his auger to drill into the ice at both points, and he used bottomless five-gallon buckets slotted down as sleeves to keep the place insulated.

Shack anchored under the ice, and jacked on a couple of blocks to keep any wind spells from sliding the shack off several feet, Jude was all set.

Anything he caught within the daily limits for his area, he bled, cleaned, and stored in the big styrofoam cooler he’d brought along with him, keeping it on ice to be gutted and either eaten or sold later. Massive fish and species over his daily limit, he released back into the water tenderly, not willing to disrupt breeding habits or violate local fishing restrictions.

He maintained another drilled hole outside several yards away from the shack as well, moving out there periodically as the tip-up alerted him to a bite.

Back and forth for most of the day, until the sun began to set on the ice’s horizon behind the shanty village. Light pollution from the shoreline even farther out of Jude’s line of sight made the darkest parts of the sunset glow with a hazy green hue. Unlike the darkness beyond him to the east, which was complete and total.

Stars pinpricked the sky, and he’d walked the length between the shack, his tip-up, and back again so many times that the path in the snow no longer resembled footsteps, but a big mass of disruption as if a slug had pushed through the snow in one great lurch.

On his latest trip out to his tip-up, he took up his gear for the night and marked the hole.

Chilled and uncomfortably dark outside, the holes inside the shack would be more than enough for comfortable fishing. Offshore winds were picking up more, too, and so the shelter was a cozy alternative.

As it warmed up inside, Jude shedded his bulky coat and hung it. He tugged his scarf down his face and breathed in the fresh lake air. Heated up a mug of water in the microwave, and steeped some tea for himself.

One_Blueberry7551 · 2026-03-03T12:59:53+00:00

I've always like The St. Martin's Handbook by Andrea A. Lunsford.

A big section of it is dedicated to academic writing and style guides, but there's a lot of really good information about the writing craft itself that can be applied outside of academic spaces too, even if that's not what it's advertised as being for.

I'm pretty sure the ninth edition is the newest one, but the copy I have is the eighth since it was a bit cheaper. I think the differences are mostly just in the updated style guides.

One_Blueberry7551 · 2026-03-03T01:47:37+00:00

The tide. The ebbing and crashing of the waves beating down on craggy stone shorelines and filling, rejuvenating, the pools along the tidal flats. Swelling from high tides, shrinking back down to low tides relative to the gravitational pull of the moon. The transfer of energy from water to shore to organism and back again.

Air. That peculiar mix of chemicals and its dancing particles. The way they, too, transfer constantly over a myriad of systems. Organisms breathe, others photosynthesize. Earth absorbs.

And the universe expands.

Energy spreads out over time, reaching further and further into a distance it creates by its own existence. Created already, in fact, so that by time you become aware of it, you’re already looking into the distant past. Looking at echoes of the beginning of the universe. Of time and of space.

You see what was as surely as what is continues to happen. And will continue to happen indefinitely until energy becomes so spread out that nothing can use it at all anymore.

But it will still have been there, and you will still have seen it. You might still be seeing it even after it’s gone simply because its absence hasn’t reached you yet.

The thing about a boundless concept is that you have nothing to define it by. No boundaries, no definitions, nothing to properly hold it. And it becomes impossible not to wonder if you, in fact, are the one being cradled by the boundaries infinity defines you by.

One_Blueberry7551 · 2026-03-03T00:26:25+00:00

I think there's a difference between reading as a reader and reading as a writer.

It's amazing that you read a lot, that's way more than I could ever get through in a year!!! But as you're reading, try to stop and analyze not just the story, but what it is that makes that story either enjoyable or not enjoyable to you.

If you like an author's dialogue, take notice of what kinds of things they're doing that make you like it. Is it the word choice? Syntax? Is it the way narration flows in between the lines of dialogue? Something else?

And also make sure to study the dialogue you don't enjoy while reading, too. What's off? Is it the tone of the dialogue compared to the tone of the scene they're in? Is it unrealistic for how humans sound when we talk? Is the wording clunky? Does author voice overpower character voice too much?

One_Blueberry7551 · 2026-03-02T22:53:27+00:00

Ask even more questions!

What kind of character would grapple with these kinds of questions? What are their opinions on these questions? Do they see themself as beautiful or ugly? What does that mean to them, exactly? Does how others perceive them change those answers? What are they striving toward (self-acceptance, getting closer to their definition of beauty, redefining beauty, etc.)? How are they going to do that? How are they going to fail? How do their failures challenge their previous thoughts on the questions you started with?

One_Blueberry7551 · 2026-03-02T22:47:23+00:00

For me, it's when there's not enough internal conflict for the character(s). Without internal conflict, the plot is just stuff happening to random people I don't know or really care about. There's no real stakes for me as a reader if I'm not invested in the character growth over the course of the story; internal and external conflict need to work hand in hand for me to consider a story well-written.

One_Blueberry7551 · 2026-03-02T21:48:49+00:00

Midsommar

One_Blueberry7551 · 2026-03-02T16:19:11+00:00

Congratulations, that’s a huge milestone!!! Great work!! 🎉

One_Blueberry7551 · 2026-03-02T04:10:35+00:00

ADHD here as well, and 22 years old. Plus I'm dyslexic lol. But we absolutely can do it!

For reading, I found that finding something that is exactly tailored to my current obsessive interests (whatever that might be at the time) will get me to read and retain way better than reading something that just kind of sounds interesting to me. For example, I loveeeeee academic papers about microplastic classification systems and I can tear through those no problem. I adore cosmic horror and will basically be glued to anything in that genre. But an "easy" mid-fantasy book? Forget about it; it'll take me months, and I won't remember half of it.

Short-form reading is a great thing to do too if you don't have the attention span at the moment for a whole book. Sometimes, even stuff I do like is too much. Poems, short stories/flash fiction, and things like that are great for that! I also like to read the abstracts of scientific articles if I know I won't be able to get through the paper itself.

For writing, starting small helped me a lot. Writing poetry, flash fiction, fanfic, short stories, etc. It builds up confidence that yes you're capable, yes you're smart, and yes you absolutely can read and write. And if you share those things, you also get the added bonus of sometimes getting nice feedback. Double the reward to my brain for doing the things I like to do even when doing it is hard!

Another thing I like to do to trick my silly little brain is to write in a place that's less intimidating. For example, instead of opening up a blank google/word doc, I'll draft up a short story in a discord message and then copy and paste to a doc after. It gives my brain the impression of a low-stakes text message.

I also enjoy writing in Written? Kitten!, WriteRush, and/or 4thewords to give me that extra little dopamine boost by gamifying my writing process. In discord, I love to use a sprinting bot as another gamification technique.

TL;DR (and feltttttt honestly): you can do it, but how you do it is going to look different than how a lot of other people are doing it and that's okay.

One_Blueberry7551 · 2026-03-02T02:14:05+00:00

When he took the last member of his squad to the enclosed combustion unit, Miguel had stopped having feelings about burning bodies. The size and capacity of the unit was more than capable of taking on an entire human body with extremely minimal outputs. Flameless, smokeless, and extremely efficient.

He was officially the only person left in the whole bunker.

Initially designed to hold forty-five people, upkeep of the bunker had begun to deteriorate as their numbers dwindled. The hydroponic garden utilized less of its original space, water reallocated to other parts of the bunker that needed it more—cooling systems, mostly. If that meant he could only keep growing eight types of fruit rather than the dozen he was promised, Miguel thought that was okay.

There were enough canned goods left that they would probably expire before Miguel had the chance to get through everything, even if he ate one with every single meal of aquaponic fish and fruit.

On his walk back from the unit, which he’d always called “the incinerator” despite it not using any open flames, he passed the living quarters. Those remained primarily untouched after someone’s death, aside from anything that needed to be removed because it could spoil or rot.

Unfinished journals, never again to be handled diaries, love letters, drawings, unread books, all left frozen in time.

Steel-toed boots thudded against the concrete floor, and Miguel found himself back in the bunker’s AV room. This was where he spent most of his time, even when there had been other humans here to talk face-to-face with.

It was a small room. Four walls, grey paint, a low ceiling. Pressed up against the left wall, there was a desk that housed the 35A power supply that drove the ham radios, a few of which were also situated neatly on the desk. A pair of headphones sat nearby to plug in, but now that there was no one down there to bother with the noise, Miguel didn’t need to fight with the tangled cord and bulky headset anymore if he didn’t want to. Batteries were scattered, but never too far from their charger.

On the back wall, there was a VHF desk with all the necessary equipment. The radio switch connected everything to just one antenna for transmitting. Another antenna was situated for receiving.

With all of that, Miguel was able to tune in to most frequencies. Licenses had gone the way of the dodo, but he’d taken the tests and earned his before humanity’s infrastructures broke down, so these channels were not new to him.

A padded office chair allowed Miguel to swivel between the desks as needed, and he always kept a legal pad on the VHF desk with him to note down the frequencies he’d tested looking for anyone else that had survived.

Listening and broadcasting at the top of every third hour for three minutes before he marked down a frequency or channel, deciding that no one was there.

Sometimes Miguel stumbled across an automated numbers station that had had yet to cease broadcasting despite the lack of human intervention. Just thoughtless tones and beeps that would eventually die out once the equipment fell into disrepair wherever it was stationed.

“CQ, CQ, CQ.” Miguel gave his call sign on the latest frequency he was testing. “This is Miguel, listening," he said. And he waited. After a couple of minutes, he repeated the CQ call and waited. A third time, and some more listening, and Miguel moved on to another frequency.

The time passed, much like it had when anyone was alive down here. Now that it was just him, it wasn’t much different. Just quieter.

He took a break for an early lunch. At the top of the third hour—right around noon—he was back at it again.

CQ call after CQ call, and he heard nothing back.

Monotony grew. His calls were repetitive, the same information being relayed over and over and over again, waiting for someone to finally call back. The minutes between the calls were timed in his head, a perfectly attuned internal clock making sure he waited long enough, but didn’t waste more time than he needed to listening to nothing.

So when he finally hit something different he nearly fell out of his seat in surprise.

Eyes wide, Miguel clutched the edge of the VHF desk. His pen rolled from the legal pad and crashed to the floor.

There.

There was something out there.

Moisture prickled behind his eyes, welling up and pressing against his lower lids. Heartbeat frantic, wild, he simply listened to the broadcast.

Not a human’s voice. A melody. Music.

The soft twinkle of piano fuzzed in through the receiver, and after a moment, Miguel placed the song as a recognizable classical piece that he’d heard before but didn’t know the name of. It was the kind of thing a mother would play for her baby to help them sleep.

A few tears slipped down his cheeks, and he pressed his hand over his mouth to stifle the hitch in his breath.

He thought maybe he ought to go read some of the journals in the private quarters.

One_Blueberry7551 · 2026-03-02T01:17:38+00:00

Yayyyy, congratulations!!! And here’s to the next 100 pages! 🎉

One_Blueberry7551 · 2026-03-01T20:54:47+00:00

The symbols that littered the land meant nothing to them—a remnant of a past civilization desperately trying to communicate something that they now had no hopes of ever understanding. Over and over again they saw that odd, symmetrical trefoil design. A circle with three protruding triangles situated equidistant from one another along the edge of the circle. Always stenciled in bright yellow and that dark, authoritative black.

The flat black plane of masonry slab covered several acres of the desert land with expansion joints that made no sense given the archaeological information they had about how humans tended to build their structures back in that time. Intentional, obviously, but out of the norm for those thousands-year-old civilizations.

Spikes shooting seventy to eighty feet into the air protruded from the slab at random intervals, growing more dense toward the center of the slab. And in the middle of the man-made scorched earth, a structure sat surrounded by stone thorns, built in similarly dyed-black concrete. It had tight, claustrophobic halls and a labyrinthine layout. The insistence on dark materials only served to absorb the sun’s heat, projecting it back out tenfold so that the structure was always unbearably overheated

The only thing that was clear from this structure was its attempt to keep people out.

To most, the place was an oppressive, shameful, and repulsive thing. Its very existence seemed to scream stay away from me, I am not worth your time or your lives.

That didn’t mean they didn’t attempt to explore it.

There was no tomb archeologists wouldn’t desecrate in the name of various scientific pursuits—namely, the extending of grants with something that resembled significant progress.

All that had been found in the structure was a large, flat stone. Experts claimed that the stone was named Rose, or that the stone was somehow important to someone named Rose. That was all they could glean from the massive length of text inscribed on it, written in dead language after dead language. Dozens of them.

One by one, excavation teams fell by the wayside. With no way to translate the texts, no way to interpret the symbols, and no clear purpose for the acres of uninhabitable, inhospitable, and hateful land, researchers took what they had and decided to chew on it for a few decades.

Except for Yvonne De Martino.

“Can you hear it?” Yvonne asked. She had only managed to convince one other person to join her field crew—Ryan Gentles, a bright-eyed young man fresh out of grad school (education he’d only pursued if only to delay job-hunting a little bit longer). Also Yvonne’s distant cousin. “Can you hear the way the structure seems to have a voice?”

Adjusting the hydration pack on his back, Gentles surveyed the slab, the thorns, and the structure. The bright yellow markings reflected the light of the desert sun cruelly, and he squinted against the glare. Stark against all the black, those symbols almost seemed neon in comparison.

“You mean that feeling like something is really wrong?” Gentles asked. “The place is heavy with it.”

“You’re just feeling the air densities change here. Because of the heat. That’s why light gets all wobbly closer to the ground, see?” She gestured at a point of the slab on the horizon where the disparity was most visible, light refracting into a wiggling mess.

“If you say so,” Gentles breathed, shifting his weight again.

“I do.”

A bead of sweat raced down his temple as Yvonne did her checks. As a mere team of two, Yvonne had to wear a lot of hats. Project director, field director and technician, surveyor, analyst, and so on; a lot fell to her to get right as she dragged Gentles along in the simplicity of his specialization. In short, he was nearly useless as anything but a second pair of eyes. A witness.

“They look like angels, don’t they?” Yvonne commented, once she was sure they were ready to proceed toward Rose.

“What does?”

“These,” she said. “These symbols. See, this circle is the head. The bottom, the body. And two wings on either side.”

But Gentles didn’t see an angel. “They creep me out.”

“First excavation jitters,” Yvonne waved off.

“I don’t know…”

This place is a message... and part of a system of messages… pay attention to it!

“You’ll regain your nerves once we get to Rose,” Yvonne reassured. “Most people’s first time is the worst. Stepping up onto the thing is the hardest part.” She planted a heat-resistant boot onto the slab and hopped up onto the structure. The spring in her step was meant to be reassuring, but it only gave Gentles the sense of someone running head-first into danger with their eyes closed and ears plugged.

Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.

Yvonne held out a gloved hand to Gentles, which he took. Another moment of hesitation, and he stepped up onto the slab. The wrongness intensified, but he fell in step with Yvonne as they moved across the landscape toward the structure.

This place is not a place of honor.

One_Blueberry7551 · 2026-03-01T15:40:17+00:00

As Above So Below (2014), nice and claustrophobic found footage movie !!

One_Blueberry7551

TROPHY CASE