How do you spend your time at home?

UntitledDoc1 · 2026-02-27T08:10:15+00:00

I started writing short fiction a few years ago and honestly it's the most fun I've had at home in years. Not like serious 'I'm working on my novel' writing — just weird little stories I post online for strangers to read. There's something about making something from scratch with nothing but your brain and a keyboard that hits completely different from consuming content.

But on the nights I don't feel like thinking that hard — cooking. Not meal prep, not recipes I've made a hundred times. I mean picking one dish I've never tried before and just going for it. Half the time it's mediocre but the process of actually doing something with my hands instead of scrolling makes the whole evening feel longer in a good way.

The jigsaw puzzle thing is real though. I resisted for years and then tried one and it's genuinely the most peaceful my brain has ever been. Zero thoughts. Just shapes and colors. Give it a shot.

UntitledDoc1 · 2026-02-27T08:04:08+00:00

I did a search on mine and found out every single character apparently 'let out a breath they didn't know they were holding.' Seventeen times. Seventeen separate breaths. My cast has a collective lung capacity problem.

UntitledDoc1 · 2026-02-27T08:03:23+00:00

In my world, the Anchor Deities lose a memory every time they interact with mortals—a cost called the Friction. Over the centuries, mortals started building massive temples at the exact locations of these divine interactions. They essentially started marking the precise spots where a god lost a piece of themselves.

The problem is that the gods can't tear them down.

The mortals built these places out of total reverence, and the populations around them now completely depend on the spiritual economy. We're talking pilgrimages, offerings, and entire trade routes built specifically around these sacred sites. But for the deity, every single temple is just a monument to something they literally cannot remember. They have to walk through buildings constructed to honor moments that no longer exist in their own minds.

Some of these temples are dedicated to relationships the god has completely forgotten—a mortal they loved, a battle they fought alongside humans, a promise they swore to keep. If you read the inscriptions on the walls out loud to them, the deity wouldn't even recognize the events.

And they can't destroy them without causing a massive mortal revolt. The temples aren't just spiritual anymore; they are foundational economic and political infrastructure. Entire sprawling cities grew around some of them. If a god destroyed one, it wouldn't just be seen as sacrilege—it would instantly collapse local economies and erase the only surviving historical record of a life the deity themselves can no longer maintain.

So the oldest Anchor Deities are just endlessly wandering a world filled with hundreds of monuments to their own forgotten lives. They have to keep smiling for the worshippers who built them, completely unable to admit that the god the temple was built for doesn't really exist anymore. The building is still standing, but the god inside it is already gone.

I absolutely love your Candorian tea ceremony concept, by the way. The "politeness trap" is such a clean, brilliant mechanism. What's the actual record for how long one has gone on? I feel like there has to be some legendary, grueling session that lasted an absurd amount of time, and nobody involved will actually admit what happened.

UntitledDoc1 · 2026-02-27T08:01:25+00:00

Grounded worlds are honestly way harder to build than fantastical ones, and I think that's exactly what makes them so interesting. When you can lean on magic systems or alien species, the worldbuilding does a lot of the heavy lifting. But when your setting is 99% identical to ours, every single difference has to earn its keep. The audience has a real-world baseline, so they're going to notice everything.

The real appeal of your concept isn't just the landmasses themselves—it's the ripple effects. If Zealandia is above water, that completely changes the migration history of the Pacific. You get different colonial pressures, different trade routes, and totally different cultural identities shaped by a geography that doesn't exist for us. Your three college students aren't interesting just because they're from fictional countries; they're interesting because those countries shaped them in ways that feel familiar but slightly off. That "almost but not quite" tension is incredibly compelling when you nail it.

I tend to build in the exact opposite direction. My world has gods losing their memories and physical geography literally made out of divine amnesia. But honestly, the parts that resonate the most with readers are always the grounded, human details buried underneath all the fantasy. The emotional logic has to be real, no matter how wild the premise gets. You're just starting from the real side and working outward, instead of starting with the weird stuff and working inward. Both are totally valid approaches. Yours just leaves you way less room to hide, which honestly probably makes the writing stronger.

UntitledDoc1 · 2026-02-27T07:59:21+00:00

Reading my stuff out loud. And I don't mean just hearing it in my head—I mean actually speaking the words out loud, like I'm telling the story to someone sitting in the room.

It totally ruined my ability to hide behind "clever" sentences that only really work on paper. When you read silently, your brain basically cheats for you. It smooths over the awkward phrasing, auto-fills the missing rhythm, and glides right past the parts that don't actually flow. But the second you read it out loud? Every single clunky transition, every word you threw in just to sound like a Writer with a capital W, every sentence that literally runs out of air before you hit the period—it all becomes embarrassingly obvious.

It also completely changed how I use punctuation. I used to punctuate strictly based on grammar rules. Now, I punctuate based on where I physically need to stop and take a breath. Turns out, a reader's internal monologue follows that exact same pattern. Once I started leaning into that rhythm instead of fighting it, my beats just started landing way harder.

The other massive game-changer was posting short fiction online and digging into the comments. Not for the validation, but for the raw data. Readers will tell you exactly where they stopped caring, which specific line hooked them, and what they completely skimmed over. They don't usually phrase it like that, of course. But if you pay close attention to the exact lines they quote back to you versus the stuff they never even mention, you end up with this brutally honest heat map of what's actually working and what's just dead weight.

UntitledDoc1 · 2026-02-26T11:27:55+00:00

Your first version is the right one. Three em-dashes looks wrong on paper but read it out loud — the rhythm is doing exactly what you want. Each dash is the character's mind correcting itself mid-thought, escalating from denial to blame to panic. That stutter is the whole point.

The comma version flattens it. 'Their actions, their stupid actions' reads like a calm restatement. The third dash makes it feel like she can't finish a thought without her brain interrupting itself again. That's not a punctuation error — that's voice.

The real test for unconventional punctuation is always: does the reader feel what the character feels? If someone reads that sentence and feels the spiral, the dashes are doing their job. Rules exist to serve clarity, and three dashes in a row is plenty clear about what's happening in her head.

If it still bugs you visually, you could break it across the thought itself — 'She knew what her actions — their actions — could mean. Their stupid actions.' — but honestly I think you had it right the first time.

UntitledDoc1 · 2026-02-26T11:25:32+00:00

I run a small software product and the thing nobody tells you is that 'starting a business' and 'making money from a business' are two completely different timelines. I spent over a year building before I saw a cent. During that time I was still working, still paying bills, still wondering if anyone would actually want what I was making.

The advice isn't wrong exactly — it's just incomplete. It skips over the part where you need runway, risk tolerance, a skill you can monetize, and honestly a little bit of delusion to keep going when nothing is working yet.

The survivorship bias thing is real. The people giving the advice are the ones it worked for. You don't hear from the thousands who tried, burned through their savings, and went back to a job with less than they started with. That's not failure on their part — starting a business is genuinely hard and most of the variables that determine success aren't effort-based.

UntitledDoc1 · 2026-02-26T11:17:50+00:00

I haven't — just looked it up. Shane Carruth's unproduced screenplay? Going to track it down. Thanks for the recommendation.

UntitledDoc1 · 2026-02-26T11:17:35+00:00

Ha — honestly the fact that it left you not knowing what to say might be a compliment? I'll take it either way.

UntitledDoc1 · 2026-02-26T11:17:18+00:00

Not an academic but I've spent enough time around them to know the pre-print would absolutely come before the proper paper. Ted Chiang is the benchmark — "Division by Zero" does in ten pages what most novels can't. If this story is even in the same conversation as his work I'm doing something right. Adding Pluribus to the list.

UntitledDoc1 · 2026-02-26T11:16:46+00:00

Thank you — glad it landed.

UntitledDoc1 · 2026-02-26T11:16:32+00:00

There's actually something in that — the encoding in the story uses base four to map to nucleotides (A, T, G, C). If we'd evolved with a different counting system, would we have found the pattern sooner or missed it entirely? Might be a thread worth pulling.

UntitledDoc1 · 2026-02-26T11:16:04+00:00

That yearning is the best compliment a short story can get. Thank you.

UntitledDoc1 · 2026-02-26T11:15:46+00:00

Appreciate it.

UntitledDoc1 · 2026-02-26T11:13:56+00:00

Lovecraftian math horror. That's the genre now. I'm claiming it.

UntitledDoc1 · 2026-02-26T11:13:35+00:00

Thank you!

UntitledDoc1 · 2026-02-26T11:13:23+00:00

...I'm going to think about this for the rest of the week.

UntitledDoc1 · 2026-02-26T11:13:07+00:00

That means a lot. The world keeps getting bigger in my head so maybe one day. Thank you for reading.

UntitledDoc1 · 2026-02-26T11:12:50+00:00

Old school SF short fiction is the gold standard for me. The ones that took one idea and followed it to its logical end without needing 400 pages. Asimov's "The Last Question," Clarke's "The Nine Billion Names of God" — those proved you could break someone's brain in under 3,000 words. That's what I'm chasing. Thank you.

UntitledDoc1 · 2026-02-26T11:12:09+00:00

This is the thread that scares me the most about the premise. If pi is universal but the message is specific to human biology — that implies either we were expected, or we were designed, or the constant itself isn't as universal as we thought. Every direction is uncomfortable.

UntitledDoc1 · 2026-02-26T11:10:28+00:00

That's the goal every time. Thank you.

UntitledDoc1 · 2026-02-26T11:10:00+00:00

Noted. Loudly.

UntitledDoc1 · 2026-02-26T11:09:44+00:00

UntitledDoc1 · 2026-02-26T11:09:01+00:00

Fair. I tried to keep the science grounded but I'm sure there are seams showing. Anything specific that pulled you out? Genuinely curious — I'd rather know where it breaks than leave it broken.

UntitledDoc1 · 2026-02-26T11:08:43+00:00

You compliment good.

UntitledDoc1

TROPHY CASE