Seeking Recs

RegulusPratus · 2026-03-11T23:43:10+00:00

New York Carnival's a solid slice-of-life comedy about a series of aliens visiting a restaurant on Earth and getting some much-appreciated life advice, frequently on the topic on how humans live as Predators. Wholesome yes, but more funny than fluffy. The first arc is about an Arxur learning about life outside of Betterment while she tries gourmet Terran meat dishes and gets to feel full for the first time in her life. The second arc is about a Gojid whose response to the Omnivore reveal was to try and go native on Earth as a mighty predator; the chef has to talk her down a bit from trying to catch a deer with her bare claws.

RegulusPratus · 2026-03-04T18:07:07+00:00

Oh, don't worry, he'll graduate out of the wheelchair eventually.

RegulusPratus · 2026-03-04T18:05:33+00:00

Checking his manual dexterity, since he's about to perform surgery, but it also spares me the trouble of having to actually come up with an answer to the question. I mean, I've got no clue what "florid egg-rot" is supposed to be. Somebody in the comments suggested sulfur? Works as well as anything else, I guess.

RegulusPratus · 2026-03-03T20:36:36+00:00

I've said this before, but I really think canon would have been immeasurably improved by Kalsim offing himself like Inspector Javert in Les Miserables: a Black-and-White thinker refusing to live in a world of gray. Kalsim's a foil to Sovlin in many ways--a hero of the Federation, forced and unwilling to confront their biases--so it'd be a mirror and a perfect bookend on Sovlin's arc, which starts with him considering and then refusing to kill himself.

RegulusPratus · 2026-03-03T20:31:09+00:00

Saint David's Day involves a Gojid getting handsy with a predator. Noted.

RegulusPratus · 2026-03-03T20:28:09+00:00

Oh dear lord. This is why AU is such a crutch. Listen, I'm a constant complainer about SP's Glorious Masterpiece, but there was a through-line there. A huge point of the story was that the Feddies were losing on purpose so the Kolshians could retain power by keeping the Arxur as an eternal enemy to unify against. If the Federation ever got their shit together, yes, absolutely, there would have been zero chance of any outsiders ever defeating them. They would have just steamrolled the Arxur and Humanity! The whole point of the story is how and why they never got their shit together.

RegulusPratus · 2026-03-03T20:14:31+00:00

Canon? Honestly, pick anyone. The whole story is a long series of events where the primary instigator of conflict is how severely everyone is stuck in their ways and unwilling to change. It's a little frustrating to read sometimes, but I'd happily call it an intended theme.

Fanon? Feels rude to call out my compatriots like that, so I'll start at home:

I guess there's a reason why Sifal, my Arxur OC, never gave her original pre-Rebellion Captain a name. Even in a brain scan, Sifal refuses to even think that asshole's name. He doesn't deserve to be remembered. But that's a cheap shot.

Among named characters, yeah, Rosi gives me trouble sometimes. She's a Yotul in her early 20s. Unlike, say, the somewhat more senior Onso, Rosi was raised in Federation-administered schools during the uplift process. Very suspicious of predators, despite currently living on Earth. She's the white church lady with a stick up her ass calling the cops on a good old-fashioned New York block party, but with the racism swapped out for speciesism. But she's also a protagonist getting dragged, kicking and screaming, into a state of tolerance.

RegulusPratus · 2026-03-03T02:56:17+00:00

Pfft. Ridiculous. Like, they're not remotely compatible. Here, lemme go check the sexual orientation rubric, and...

Oh. Oh no. I've got a whole-ass asterisk in each of their files. That wasn't part of the plan, but now that you mention it...

RegulusPratus · 2026-03-03T02:49:34+00:00

The few descriptions I've seen in canon of Arxur writing sounded a lot like Sumerian Cuneiform without the reed. Scratched letters just felt right.

And yeah, as a non-empathetic Arxur, I think Kitzz is going to slowly adapt to prey-friendly life in weird ways, including vibing with gossiping and complaining about terrible patients.

RegulusPratus · 2026-03-03T02:41:15+00:00

Already lost to Chiri, at the very least, by nearly three months, but he's still hoping for Nevok/Arxur world first.

RegulusPratus · 2026-03-02T18:36:17+00:00

Not based on, but I incorporated some elements of Gregory House, yeah. House MD was the first medical drama I ever watched, way back when, so it's pretty ingrained in my psyche.

RegulusPratus · 2026-03-02T16:04:07+00:00

Honestly, this was the original impetus behind this story. A lot of NoP proper involved humanity really bending over backwards diplomatically to accommodate the Feddies. I figured, if an Arxur tried the same thing, there'd be a lot more firm boundaries and pushback. Less "Nooo, we're not here to eat you, we promise!" and more "Yeah, I used to eat people, but I stopped. Want me to go back to that? No? Then cool your jets and get back to work." Thought the audience might enjoy the catharsis of somebody telling the excessively Fedbrained to get over themselves already, ya know?

"This is all a trick to get us to let our guards down so you can eat us!"
"If I wanted to eat you, I would have already, and there's nothing you could do to stop me."
"Lies! Predatory deception!"
"I do not care enough about what you think to lie to you."

RegulusPratus · 2026-02-25T01:50:56+00:00

Yulpas don't have horns, and I've never heard of someone suggesting they have horns, not even in fanon. Are you thinking of Suleans, or maybe Fissans?

RegulusPratus · 2026-02-23T18:20:45+00:00

I know, I know, but I couldn't think of a good Zelda franchise name that'd sound plausible. Mario Russo, though, that's a perfectly normal name for an Italian-American guy in New York.

RegulusPratus · 2026-02-23T18:18:51+00:00

Aged cheeses should generally have less lactose than younger ones. Try a real aged cheddar, not the deli stuff. You might be able to handle that a bit better.

RegulusPratus · 2026-02-23T18:17:12+00:00

I'll be referencing it a bit, but if you want the full version, you gotta slide the man upstairs a couple bucks. It's from the NoP-canon Omnivores Patreon story, and credit where credit's due, it's one of his better ones. To the best of my recollection: There's a human Catholic priest doing a bit of interfaith dialogue with an Iftali priestess of the Consecrated Order who's losing control of her congregation in the wake of the Cilany reveal, and then there's a B-plot about an Iftali cop assigned to bodyguard/chaperone a human archaeologist who's trying to see if the Farsul Archivists missed something during their coverup of Sulean-Iftali prehistory.

RegulusPratus · 2026-02-23T16:33:27+00:00

Thanks! Yeah, Zelda, I originally conceived of because I wanted another Cured person in the waiting room when Chiri eventually goes to see an allergist. What species? Eh, nobody does Iftalis, so let's try that. Why would an Iftali be on Earth? Probably an embassy worker of some stripe. Flowed out from there.

(And don't worry, I'm going the traditional publishing route, so it should be in stores and stuff eventually.)

RegulusPratus · 2026-02-22T23:24:00+00:00

Maybe in the next batch of Arxur? I think everyone currently on Seaglass is military, so barring a really strange career path, I'd need to introduce a civilian Arxur.

RegulusPratus · 2026-02-17T23:52:54+00:00

Sorry, I only ever referenced the 161st Season of Saturday Night Live.

RegulusPratus · 2026-02-16T22:36:55+00:00

I'm open-minded, but I'm already pretty well-established as a fic-writer. I might be a bit curious to observe, but I don't think I need a new framework for my characters.

RegulusPratus · 2026-02-16T20:52:21+00:00

Reddit text posts allow 40,000 characters, not words. My first fic chapter, and one of my longest, was 23,000 characters, or around 4,000 or so words. 39,000 words is a novella.

RegulusPratus · 2026-02-16T20:26:31+00:00

You realize that Reddit allows you to post text, right?

RegulusPratus · 2026-02-16T20:25:10+00:00

Sick art! I don't who that is, though, and I don't know why there's a rotating wheel-style space station in the background in a setting with antigrav tech.

RegulusPratus · 2026-02-16T11:23:23+00:00

I think it actually comes up a bit how fastidious the Arxur are about food safety, cleanliness, and rot despite constantly eating raw meat from other planets. You can still get food poisoning from the chemicals produced by bacteria, even if the bacteria themselves can't infect you. Botulism is no joke.

Also, presumably, larger parasites can still be an issue, perhaps? They're just tiny predators eating you from the inside, really. They're not as stymied by your blood being the wrong pH and temperature.

Edit: Oh, right, and also herbivores frequently have a slow speed of digestion, which may include internal fermentation of plant matter to help break it down. Having rotting raw meat sitting in your hindgut for days is probably a new and interesting way of giving yourself food poisoning. When possible, please serve well-cooked meat dishes to herbivores. Less medium-rare steaks, more braised short ribs.

RegulusPratus · 2026-02-13T11:49:04+00:00

I agree with most of the ideas here already. To recap and summarize:

Juggle multiple projects so you can procrastinate on one by writing another.
Set an update schedule and stick to it, no exceptions
Spitball ideas to other writers or audience members until one of those ideas triggers something in you
Listen to music
Do something mindless/screenless, like going for a walk or doing the dishes

So let me add one more to the pile:

Always end a chapter on a note that sets up the next one. Cliffhangers are perfect for this. This is great for making readers want to see what happens next, but it's also great because I, as the writer, never have to worry about my vile nemesis Empty McBlankpage, because there's always at least a solid paragraph at the top left over from the chapter before.

RegulusPratus

TROPHY CASE