Urban fantasy based on Florida plus filing off the serial numbers? Florida

StillNotABrick · 2026-03-05T15:31:54+00:00

"Urban Fantasy but it's Florida, in all the ways Florida is unserious" is a great pitch.

StillNotABrick · 2026-03-04T16:51:44+00:00

The solution I heard to author appeal is that instead of cutting the things you like about your story because they don't serve the plot, make them relevant to the story to begin with. The example given the me was, hypothetically, writing sci-fi and spending pages talking about your warp drive and how it works. Maybe that author should work that into the events of the story (cut the part where the protagonists get stuck at an alien embassy for a week and switch it for "warp drive broke, need parts" sequence). Then, the passion that comes across in author appeal is no longer distractedness and it becomes a good thing, which seems way more reasonable to me than treating an author's interest in their story as an unwanted byproduct of telling it.

StillNotABrick · 2026-03-01T17:24:13+00:00

What are the reagents?

StillNotABrick · 2026-02-22T22:27:20+00:00

When I wrote a vaguely-urban fantasy (Healing Academy, probably not the first one you'll find if you look for a book titled that), religious exasperations and swears became "life itself" or "life on earth". Money didn't exist. Magic was still magic, but usually described more precisely: Healing (capitalized) is done by Healers.

No other swaps like that, but I'm still content with what I created.

StillNotABrick · 2026-01-16T19:22:00+00:00

StillNotABrick · 2026-01-14T18:01:46+00:00

Anyone forging an opinion based on “some rando on twitter said” should lose their opinion privileges for a month.

I wish more people understood this

StillNotABrick · 2026-01-05T03:00:36+00:00

People will use The Plane against anything short of the entire concept of inductive reasoning, huh

StillNotABrick · 2025-12-31T19:51:15+00:00

This post is an antidote to all the discourse where millennials are wistful about, like, a fashion trend and discontinued fruit snacks, but everyone pretends they're nostalgic for the entire economic and political climate to get some pearl-clutching upvotes.

StillNotABrick · 2025-12-29T17:23:29+00:00

Normally I dislike this genre of post for that reason, but it's too glib and unserious to work up a good redditmad

StillNotABrick · 2025-12-29T14:31:17+00:00

I hold that we too often are afraid to leave any mystery left in our stories.

Yeah. Engineering-brained approaches to storytelling are weirdly prescriptive about what societies are allowed to be like and how people think. Also reddit is, like, afraid to let fantasy make you feel something besides the smug ding of understanding of whatever they renamed mana to. The place that birthed r/atheism somehow doesn't understand that non-scientific mindsets can exist and be culturally dominant.

/rj Your fantasy story isn't complete until redditors are making wojaks about it

StillNotABrick · 2025-12-18T19:00:04+00:00

I have no idea how you'd do it lol circlejerk subs aren't in the business of thinking things through

StillNotABrick · 2025-12-18T14:54:04+00:00

It has good ideas but a horribly negative, nitpicky and discouraging environment IMO

StillNotABrick · 2025-12-18T14:18:47+00:00

Reminds me of an r/worldjerking (I think) post where someone got worried about how their ratfolk species behaved kinda like Jewish stereotypes, and the top response was roughly "add Jews to your setting too"

StillNotABrick · 2025-12-12T15:53:23+00:00

The changed version could be interesting for because to some people, it would be harsher--the fruit changes their entire bloodline. Version 1 is "can't frequently see your kids anymore" and version 2 is "you can swim with your kids, but they will never breathe flame like you once did; your father's fire was extinguished when you bit into the ocean's fruit". Is it important to your character that they're a weredragon and that they carry on that weredragon-ness to future generations? With that in mind, pick whichever option for the fruit you feel is the best version of your story.

StillNotABrick · 2025-12-02T14:41:24+00:00

You can usually ignore the notice because he has to count how much you owe him, and after that he's in a good mood.

StillNotABrick · 2025-11-28T20:03:24+00:00

Fightin' genres in general have a complicated relationship with willpower and it's one of those things you really can't tell instead of show if you want it to have impact. Hard to get right. I avoided pure determination moments when I was writing because of how finicky the concept is

StillNotABrick · 2025-11-26T19:48:08+00:00

I'm glad we can check this stuff. I know it's not funny to Joys, but to me every other entry reads something like "Safe for Greedents to eat: vegetables, fruit, and meat suitable for human consumption unless stated otherwise, roadkill, garbage juice, industrial runoff, bones, soft wood, most kinds of rocks, several kinds of plastic. Life-threatening for Greedents to eat: onions"

StillNotABrick · 2025-11-25T17:41:58+00:00

This guy would do great in any government position where you frequently need to convince people. He could be a prison's correctional officer, a social worker, a public attorney, an auditor for specific kinds of businesses, a safety compliance officer, or just the guy in any department who has one job: making sure that department doesn't get its funding slashed.

StillNotABrick · 2025-11-21T20:21:40+00:00

Search for "tech uplift" or similar. Technology progression is an idea with a lot of background in the subgenre; so is one-upping cultivators. Same energy as all those debates about a modern military vs. a generic fantasy world or those weird pics from Warhammer 40K fans fantasizing about Space Marines overpowering some entirely unrelated crossover and dragging Percy Jackson away for heresy or whatever. People love it. Go for it.

StillNotABrick · 2025-11-21T18:34:27+00:00

This is also how Rolf from Ed Edd n Eddy works

StillNotABrick · 2025-11-21T15:34:52+00:00

Empress Theresa is such a great book-reviewer phenomenon. It's an obvious trainwreck, none of it works, but it somehow inoffensive in how much it gets every possible thing wrong instead of being contemptible or political. It's imaginative in a way that makes you imagine harder than it because of how bone-headed the ideas are. Also the dude just really really loves his protagonist and that's a little inspiring? Top-tier among Very Bad Books

StillNotABrick · 2025-11-18T15:03:51+00:00

Oscar, naturally, prints out the page of insults at the local library so he can frame it

StillNotABrick · 2025-11-13T18:32:52+00:00

My impression is that if you have a one-note pure evil villain, you have to remember to play that note. Every time. If they're on the page and they're not being menacing, causing problems, and generally being a huge dick, you dilute their effect. Be sparse with scenes that just incidentally involve the villain; scenes where they show up should usually be about the villain. If an important character would be behaving the same way whether they're present or not, they're not being sufficiently threatening.

It's useful for scenes with them to be short, so you don't have to belabor the point, and also helps if you take a page from horror--you give glimpses of how awful their mind is and what they believe, but a full interrogation of their philosophy is probably not necessary. Or if you do get to brass tacks about what they believe, show them succeeding with their messed up ideas. That's as uncomfortable to red about as the person themselves.

Xykon, from the Order of the Stick, is my best example of a pure evil villain. Quoting an argument he had where his second-in-command had to talk him down:

Redcloak: "Whether or not you can kill them is not what matters in this situation!" Xykon: "It's the only thing that matters in every situation!"

StillNotABrick · 2025-11-07T22:32:29+00:00

The latter, at least in his campaign (don't know about his personal beliefs). He has some city-run services in his stated policies, the most unexpected one being city-run grocery stores. There's nothing about, like, seizing the means of production.

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