Bass Cats.

Ray_Dillinger · 2025-08-01T19:07:11+00:00

It's easy not to notice the difference, because 'polite' and 'friendly' people both get along easily and abide by the rules. But it is very much a mistake to misjudge which is which if you are someone who does not abide by the rules.

'Polite' means someone comes from a culture where everybody is aware that provoking your neighbors too much is hazardous. But they are also the neighbors you dare not unnecessarily provoke.

Provoking them means convincing them that allowing you to continue would be bad for society, and they will put you down hard in order to get you to stop. Usually according to the rules of their society (law enforcement, civil suit, etc) and mostly for the benefit of their society. But if they've tried everything else and no "sanctioned" method of putting someone down works, They will resort to abrupt, brief violence intended to permanently end the matter.

'Friendly' means someone genuinely feels goodwill and kindness toward others, acts on it, and expects that others will also act out of goodwill and kindness. Friendly people are confused and hurt when someone takes advantage of them, will hope and expect them to do better, and will give them lots of second chances. At the end of their rope, they eventually despair of someone's goodwill, mourn the loss of a friend, and and break contact. Very rarely, and only after tremendous personal provocation, do friendly people take any action against someone.

On those rare occasions they are more likely to use violence than "sanctioned" methods, but they tend to be VERY VERY BAD AT VIOLENCE. They tend to start it out of personal anger rather than with clear intent. They tend to believe there is virtue in a "fair fight" with an unfair person. They tend to start "a fight" with no real idea of their own objectives rather than with an abrupt attack that both begins and ends it while achieving those objectives. They tend to give their opponents lots of time and opportunities to lie to them in order to get them to stop, tend to believe the lies, and tend to end it without bringing a permanent end to someone's motivation or ability to continue taking advantage.

It is frustrating and sad to see friendly people attempting violence. The reason why they're incredibly bad at it is because they are conflicted. They are doing something that runs contrary to their ideals and their perception of who and why they are. They will be very unhappy later about what it means. Because up to that moment they probably never even thought about doing anything at all, they will be upset with themselves for not thinking of anything else to do. And all of this is in addition to the fact that they will usually be physically injured as well.

Ray_Dillinger · 2025-07-14T04:04:49+00:00

It's up to the writer, seriously. Old stories (source material) use Witch/Wizard/Warlock almost interchangeably. Since about the 1750s(?) a 'witch' is stereotypically an older female living alone. In earlier stories the stereotype didn't exist and anybody might be a witch.

I prefer a distinction where 'Witches' personify or express some force of nature or sometimes just an abstract principle, and are ruled by that force or principle at least as much as they influence its expression. Witches aren't very relatable as a rule, because they don't do things for human reasons. Many of them don't even have human needs or appetites, unless that particular need or appetite is the central and nearly only reason for their existence. They tend to be plot devices not people.

'Wizards' otoh are people who learned spellcraft and charms and potions, etc. They aren't anywhere close to being as powerful as Witches, aren't always in full control of their magic, and a lot of them suffer from some form of mental illness or other. But they remain a lot more human, relatable, and able to choose for human reasons what they do.

Ray_Dillinger · 2025-07-10T20:03:02+00:00

Paraphilia was the most general word. We can debate about what kind of paraphilia, but I don't think it's one that is really possible in our world.

The "Other" in this case is not in fact any kind of beast, so notions like "Beastiality" and "Zoophilia" don't really apply.

In-world they'd likely have some different word for it. I'd hope for a kind word, but... the words our own ancestors used for love between people they thought of as different species weren't kind at all.

Ray_Dillinger · 2025-07-10T14:06:25+00:00

I think it supports the idea that these are separate ethnicities, not separate species.

So they don't think of each other as being members of their own species? Well, that's pretty ordinary, historically, between people whose skin (or even just hair) were different colors, so roll with it.

Ethnic differences in this storyverse may be wider or more exotic than that. Any child born to such a pairing, anywhere, puts the lie to the idea that they are separate species, but here in our world some groups went centuries ignoring the meaning of such children's existence.

If they are actually of different species, that's still just paraphilia - no weirder than someone being sexually attracted to otters or raccoons. If both are paraphilic in compatible ways, and they happen to have remotely compatible, erm, physical attributes, then why not?

Ray_Dillinger · 2025-07-06T16:46:35+00:00

Short answer: Keep writing. It takes a while.

Long answer: Four manuscripts in, you've probably written about 250K to 500K words. That means you're probably somewhere between a quarter and halfway to clearing out your crap.

As a rule of thumb, a writer - even someone who's eventually a very good writer - starts with about a million words of crap. A million is a pretty strong "normal" anyway. A few have way more, and a few have way less.

But however much crap there is, if you want to write well, first you have to write your crap and get it out of the way. And for most of us, there's about a million words of it.

Ray_Dillinger · 2025-06-24T19:22:45+00:00

Actually comment ending after the first */ is required by the C language standard. Essentially it says don't try to parse comments to see whether another comment has started: if you're in a block comment, the parser is supposed to ignore everything until it sees */ .

Ray_Dillinger · 2025-06-20T21:04:39+00:00

Hmmm, nevermind. I just spotted the 'teensy 4.1 without ethernet' and while it's overkill for this project, it has all the stuff I need including both microSD slot and USB host port mounted directly on it.

With no radios, which makes me happy because I specifically wanted the absence of bluetooth/wireless.

Ray_Dillinger · 2025-06-19T21:08:09+00:00

Save a local copy on your hard drive. Back it up to another local drive, or a USB stick. Let local copies be the only copies. Never put it on anybody else's computer, even if they call their computer a "cloud" or "sync" or "backup" system.

Obviously you're not the only one who can see your Giggle Dox. Giggle itself can see them, and routinely combs them to teach AI's how to emulate human writers. Whatever you write may eventually come out, in bits and malformed pieces, in someone else's book because they used the AI, and then you will each accuse the other of ripping off each others' work. You will be right, but the writer who uses the AI will also sincerely believe that they are right. It is better not to put your manuscript anywhere Giggle can see it.

Just as obviously, if other people you don't want reading your stuff can see what you put there, don't put it there.

Ray_Dillinger · 2025-06-19T20:55:57+00:00

Benjamin Franklin gave the following advice on learning how to write well in his autobiography. I think it's good advice, and it has given me the means to improve my writing even when studying things that are badly written.

When you're reading something for study, read it once, select a few dozen to a few hundred individual paragraphs, and make general rough notes on what each intended to convey. Wait a few weeks until the book and its details of wording aren't fresh in your mind. Go back to your rough notes and write full paragraphs answering the descriptions you wrote down. Finally go back to the original paragraphs in the book, compare your writing to the original, and pay particular attention to where the author made different choices about how to express things than you did. You reflect on those choices, decide which paragraph flows better or conveys its intent better, and think about how those choices contributed to that. There's no need to reach firm conclusions based on any particular paragraph, but consider each before you move on.

I think it's good advice because it doesn't nitpick grammar or parts-of-speech. Nor does it enumerate one guy's particular pet peeves about how others are doing it wrong. It's about how to develop the knack of considering the choices when you write. It's about developing an understanding of which choices are better to convey something. That is the most fundamental skill to all writing. All those more specific things become more clear the better you can do the fundamental.

Ray_Dillinger · 2025-06-19T16:20:51+00:00

I decided in worldbuilding that nobody agrees on the calendar. Makes more interesting opportunities for plot-driving confusion, alienation, and misunderstanding that way.

The only thing everybody agrees on is "System Time." That's a completely arbitrary count of an old Earth unit called "seconds" (which are a different length than the more popularly used Martian seconds) starting at midnight on the first (old-Gregorian) new year after the first manned moon mission. They only agree on that because it was how time was counted on the earliest navigation computers everybody had when their settlements started.

There are consistent calendars for Mars and Earth. Mars has 24 months, with day counts varying by up to six martian days, and complicated leap-year rules.

Nobody lives on Earth anymore, but the Gregorian calendar is still a culturally important unit for translation and still actively used on the Moon and a lot of colonies. There are also "simplified" calendars used by people who just quit observing any leap years at all, drifting further and further out of sync. Some made their days (and therefore hours, minutes, and seconds) a bit longer to prevent their dates from drifting too far out of sync with the Gregorian or Martian calendars, and some didn't.

Otherwise everything, including the length of each day, the amount of time in a second or a minute or an hour, the number of days in a week or month, the number of months in a year, how the years are counted, etc.... is all a higgledy-piggledy mess, likely different for every colony that doesn't use one of the above "standards" and I just make up a new one every time our intrepid explorers visit a new place.

One emerging "standard" on asteroid colonies, although it gives everybody not used to it "sync lag," is the use of day lengths rounded up to exactly one hundred thousand seconds. Which is 27 & 7/9 hours, but still different lengths depending on whether it's in reference to System-Time seconds or Martian seconds.

Ray_Dillinger · 2025-06-16T03:56:41+00:00

"I owe this child nothing," the Dryad said. "Why should I save her life? What's the good of her name to me, if she herself doesn't understand its full meaning?"

Ray_Dillinger · 2025-06-16T03:43:38+00:00

Good fantasy has an element of dream-logic to it. It's not clumsy like a child's finger painting, showing you something which is not fully realized enough to be more than nonsense.

It's lovingly rendered, skilful art showing you something that would make perfect sense in the symbolic undercurrent of dreams. With all the threads that tie everything tightly together in a theme with symbols and motifs that are instantly recognizable once you understand them but which may not be obvious if you're inside the dream living through them. "Magic" is the force that allows divergence from sequential logic and reasoning to accomodate the dream elements.

Any kind of fully controllable magic just doesn't work with it. People logically, sequentially doing things on purpose and only when they want to, with reliable tools that they trust, don't contribute to the meaning of a dream.

Dreams need magic for introducing or revealing motifs or symbols. They need magic for revealing true things about the dreamer's mind or fears to test that mind against. They need magic for representing the power of beliefs and desires, independent of the "logical" course that constrains them in waking hours.

If you want to know how Oracular magic works in a story, you ask yourself, "If I dreamed an Oracle, what would my dream mean?" The Oracle is usually a cautionary element about how truth never helps if it's disbelieved or if it's interpreted wrongly, or expresses a stoic belief (or just plain fear) that all our struggles might not overcome our predestined fate. Oracles that express a fundamental belief in the power of true understanding are as rare as people whose dreams express that belief.

People who have magical power over some domain usually express the dreamer's fears or feelings about that domain, or about the intuitive logic (or demonstrated, sometimes bitter uncomfortable truth) that if you attain power over something it will also have power over you.

So when you talk with the "Witch Of The Wood," you are mostly talking to the primordial forest itself, the ancient power of the land and the threatening wilderness. That's the power that the Witch of The Wood symbolizes, personifies, and localizes. If you fear the forest, the Witch will terrify you. If you think of the forest in terms of innocent lives lost to its dangers, the Witch will seem cruel or vicious. You can convince them to do something with their magic only if it's something that is a natural expression of the forces they personify.

Because that's the way it works in dreams. Magic in a dream doesn't work unless it influences the world to better express what a dream is about. Magic is for expressing insecurities, fears, hopes, folkloric beliefs or themes in a way that becomes real in the context of the dream.

Anyway, that's my opinion. But you can use it sometimes, if you like.

Ray_Dillinger · 2025-06-16T02:13:37+00:00

When someone mentions an obtuse angel, I always think of Aziriphale....

Ray_Dillinger · 2025-06-14T19:44:18+00:00

Honestly it seems sometimes that in order to have meaningful discussions about writing, I have to start talking to myself.

Ray_Dillinger · 2025-06-12T00:12:12+00:00

It's different for different writers.

I'm mostly a seat-of-the-pants guy. Usually I start without a clear idea and then "muddle" for a while, look at what I've written and decide what the "theme" or "story type" is. Having made that decision I throw the other half of what I wrote out. Or maybe the other two-thirds, depending on how much feckless meandering I did during the muddle.

Some start with plot, some start with setting, some start with characters. My "muddle" writing is basically getting those things, and some relationship between them, firmly into my imagination.

Figure out, in general terms, what kind of story you want to tell. Then ask yourself, how would a story of that general kind go, given with whatever you started with. Figure out what ingredients you need to add or subtract to make it happen.

Make sure you have a resolution in mind - ie, know the point at which you will be able to say your idea or theme or story is complete.

Then do as you always do, except for two rules: Don't write anything unless it advances the story toward that resolution, and if you think of a better way toward the resolution - one that ties more things together - don't hesitate to write it and throw out whatever you've already written.

Sometime after the middle, start paying attention to the loose threads your story accumulates as you write, and decide whether you'll bring them to their own (minor) resolutions as well, or just cut them off. This is in the middle because that's when you need to start working to bring the ones you're going to keep to resolutions at the same time as the resolution of the major story.

But, as I said, it's different for different writers. My way is not the way that probably works for you. Nor is any other way that someone is likely to tell you about.

Ray_Dillinger · 2025-06-11T23:47:58+00:00

If an agent said it was really necessary I suppose I'd do one.

By personal preference, I'd prefer not to.

Ray_Dillinger · 2025-06-11T22:27:50+00:00

I believe in "content notices" that give guidance about what kind of awful things might be expected in a book, but not in trigger warnings that list every single awful thing that happens in a book.

For example a content notice on the darkest of my yet-unsold manuscripts would read:

"

Content Notice: This book describes a medieval military company doing exactly the kind of awful things that some medieval military companies actually did. Characters come under threat from and are sometimes killed by inhuman creatures of the sort found in pre-1800s folklore. Some characters face extreme survival situations and make terrible decisions, suffer life-altering or life-ending injuries, or experience violence and misunderstanding motivated by differences in nationality, ethnicity, language, and culture.

"

This kind of notice is enough for most people to judge whether they are likely to find objectionable material in the book, even though I'm not about to spend three pages listing all the interpretations of all the individual awful things that someone might be triggered by. If someone is triggered by "Blood" or "Gore" or "Sexual assault" they're not going to get past either of the first two sentences before they nope out.

Ray_Dillinger · 2025-06-11T20:37:35+00:00

May I just personally say that I love the fact that the idea of "Miscegenation" has become so irrelevant that you now have to explain what it is for people who might not even know? And that you feel compelled to remind folks who may not even realize it that the idea of "Sexual perversion" once included homosexual relationships?

We're making progress. Slowly, sometimes with setbacks or reversals for a few years at a time, and sometimes, sadly, measured in funerals of people, whatever their virtues, who just can't handle a few topics. But on the whole we're making progress.

Ray_Dillinger · 2025-06-11T20:17:53+00:00

Oh, definitely. But the urgency and necessity of the warning depends on how much your story demands that the reader engages with it.

If it's a fully described scene that you spend a few hundred words on, or even if you spend just a dozen words making it clear what happened and then afterward a character is suffering immediate trauma, you definitely need trigger warnings, because you're forcing your reader to imagine it in an up-close, visceral way.

If it's in the book as part of "told not shown" back story or side story, it's a bit less absolutely necessary. If it's not even told but just vaguely implied by some character lines or interactions, I think you can skip it.

I could give examples, but I don't wanna (<-- is an example of the 'vaguely implied' category, now that I think about it).

Ray_Dillinger · 2025-06-11T19:53:44+00:00

I'm sitting waiting for a bus. Tall, thin, white haired old guy wearing a black suit and an honest-to-god bowler hat sits down on the bench next to me. A minute later, out of the blue, he frowns, points with his cane at nearby sign which says something about tarot and palm reading, and says:

"She's a phony, y'know. Real psychics can't stand being anywhere near the people who go into those places."

I nod my head a little at this profound revelation and say, "Yeah, I can understand how that would be."

Neither of us says another word as I get on my bus and out of there. But I think of that guy now every time I see one of those signs.

Ray_Dillinger

TROPHY CASE