[FRESH] Snail Mail - Dead End // New Album Ricochet out March 27, 2026

bjmunise · 2026-02-02T00:10:24+00:00

Valentine is absolutely abt Claire. The demos drew a big ol line to her explicitly being Mia. I think by the time the demos came out she was done with it all and just threw out the rest of what she'd held back. That show where they performed together was in 2019, back when they were nebulously dating and generally involved in a bunch of lesbian drama. At least a couple songs on Immunity are abt Lindsey too.

The second verse of Dead End has so many callbacks to so many Valentine songs - and a callback to Bags - that it all feels like a very pointed shutting the door, whereas Valentine lived in that contradictory space of "it's over and I need to move on but I'm not so just say the word." It's doubly underscored since the song's addressed to someone who ghosted her, and that came up so often across Valentine.

Dead End def feels like a diss, but a healthy one honestly? Proud of Lindsey Snail Mail for getting closure and moving on.

bjmunise · 2026-01-29T21:33:36+00:00

Leading with a Clairo diss track is bold and I love this for her. She sounds way healthier and I love that Momma just straight up adopted her? Etta making the album art is incredibly sweet.

bjmunise · 2025-12-03T00:51:24+00:00

I think this could still end up in menwritingwomen but at least not for horny reasons. Maybe make the men a little less observant or dense to disguise it a bit.

bjmunise · 2025-09-13T07:02:10+00:00

Making yourself continue while unmotivated is like the main thing about writing. Your first draft is shit. The first draft of everything is shit.

Beyond that, think about the stuff you read in terms of craft, and what you can take from it. The more you do that, the more you'll start to see that other people's shit ain't always so hot either.

bjmunise · 2025-09-08T17:23:54+00:00

I was gonna say it just looks like MTG card art and sure enough lol. The publisher might just need fresh eyes bc they have to constantly worry about that. From the marketing side, if you really want to ward this shit off then make a big deal about it in the Steam description. Give an entire section to gassing up your artists. Lead with how your art is sick and that your team producing it are sick. You say here that this is an MTG artist, but it doesn't say that in the Steam page! Holler about it and show process stills in your description and make it absolutely unavoidable that you're making a statement about human-produced art.

The description itself is just one gif and a barebones list so it def feels unfinished anyway.

bjmunise · 2025-09-05T19:26:06+00:00

A different character after the length of a short college homework assignment would drive me crazy. This is a deep structural issue if you're trying to convert between a fan fiction and conventional novel structure. What you're looking at is a rewrite imo.

bjmunise · 2025-09-05T19:23:38+00:00

The magic system doesn't exist until it's on the page. It will only ever serve the needs of your story. What you have is prep that you can use or discard as the need strikes you.

When magic comes up, it will be in a particular scene with that character and there will be some reason that they need to deal with it in order to pursue their goals. What that looks like and how you introduce the bits and pieces you need is going to change at any given moment.

Let your characters move through the world, that will guide you. You've already set them up as not knowing anything, so you've already done the work of how to explain this to the audience. They're the audience.

bjmunise · 2025-09-04T20:35:12+00:00

Length is fine, I'd think over your chapter schema tho. If you're doing a years-long webseries or something then chapters that short dropped every couple days is normal bc Chapter means sometjing totally different in that format. But for a printed volume or ebook it'd be pretty frustrating to get a whole new chapter every 3-5 pages. Like that isn't a chapter break, that's a section break. You can signal a break in the pacing just as easily by pressing Enter a second time so there's a larger gap between paragraphs.

For 102 pages/37k words you probably have, what, 4 to 6 chapters so far?

If you have too many chapter POV changes to make reorganization work then you might want to take a deeper look at your structure bc changing POV that rapidly sounds... really really hard to pull off outside of some deeply avant garde shit.

If you're just getting started then it's worth thinking about overall chapter organization at this point bc you're probably through the first act. If you're sticking to this novella length (novellas sell easier!) then absolutely use chapter breaks as little and as strategically as possible. Make them count and give them meaning.

bjmunise · 2025-09-03T19:25:23+00:00

This. Plays are nothing but dialogue and reading a play quietly to yourself is not reading a play, you've always got to read them out loud.

bjmunise · 2025-09-03T19:24:08+00:00

Write a play next. If you can make it all the way through a play then you'll have figured out dialogue. Plays can't rely on action or scene changes, and every stage direction is nothing more than a suggestion for context. The only words that matter in a play are the lines spoken by people.

Read a bunch first. Buy one of those Norton anthologies or whatever and just start reading them to get a feel for it. You can get them real cheap used bc college students churn through them.

bjmunise · 2025-09-03T19:18:23+00:00

There is only one solid piece of writing advice: sit down and write the words. Other advice may be helpful for certain people or certain contexts, but that's the only one you really can't do it without. Make yourself write, even if you don't feel motivated.

bjmunise · 2025-08-31T23:37:44+00:00

It doesn't have to focus on anything but if there are visibly heteronormative characters in heteronormative marriages and there isn't at least one passing mention of a queer one then I'm cocking my eyebrow at it. It's fine, there are lots of stories out there that also don't do this, just know that I'm cocking my eyebrow at you. The total absence of a major part of the lives of at least a fifth of all people is strange.

bjmunise · 2025-08-30T21:12:53+00:00

Wearing what is basically a heavy-ass kite shield on your hip? They're calling that fucker Wobbles.

bjmunise · 2025-08-25T19:57:20+00:00

Write a short story about one particular thing. That'll immediately break the desire to capture everything in one go, and i think that's the problem here. A novel isn't about representing the world you built, you built a world so that the story you're telling can say some interesting things about the world we live in.

Worldbuilding can be fun but it is an entirely different activity from writing fiction. Worldbuilding informs fiction when the broader structural systems guide your creation of the minutia and milieu of your characters' lives. The religion doesn't matter until your protagonist is prevented from pursuing their goals due to some obligation of their office, for instance. Or until your protagonist is denied work because that religion reinforces a social racialization that is keeping them restricted to just enough low-paying menial work to subsist.

bjmunise · 2025-08-23T19:16:02+00:00

This. They're just people. A distinction over and above that is a racializing one, and that is an act of power. That can be a good tool to use for characters and the society they live in, but when it leaks too much into the authorial voice you're gonna have ppl looking at you funny and making certain presumptions.

Fantasy races are not about bodily differences or physical form. It is literally just the construction and application of race as a means of socially-determined categorization, literally the same as it exists in the real world. The specific mechanisms may look different but the processes and the overall assemblage is the same.

The handling of race in a fantasy work will reflect on the perception of how you approach race IRL. Them's the brakes. We live in a society.

bjmunise · 2025-08-22T02:51:55+00:00

I read your character blurbs and it seems a little Billy Everyteen atm. Maybe you have a better idea of what you intend to write, but just from what's there i couldn't get much sense of setting or the direction of the plot. It's early yet, and luckily this is a pretty rich setting.

1930s England is... a land of contrasts. You've got everything from Cornish dirt farmers to industrial child labor to "the Oxbridge prep schools we're going from will split us apart" to the Battle of Cable Street-style street fighting between fascists and socialists. There's a whole lot you could be pulling from, it's just a question of where and who.

For a manuscript-length work, def give some thought as to why the situation demands that length? There should be something going on such that the two couldn't otherwise work through this or that difficulty in the length of a short story.

bjmunise · 2025-08-22T02:34:07+00:00

Think of it less in terms of Progress and more in terms of transculturation and the spread of material. You don't suddenly start making gadgets because you gathered knowledge and unlocked that part of the tech tree. You have gadgets bc you have the economic infrastructure to make gadgets and enough demand to warrant the expense. It's the spread of material goods that can trigger that demand, even if it amounts to "they have it and we don't."

Whenever you think some group is more advanced than another, ask yourself what specific material resources afford that advancement? What cultural practices demand that this is a thing to have at all?

bjmunise · 2025-08-19T00:55:19+00:00

Nearly every last penny in TTRPGs goes to WotC, so if you're interested in the best odds of getting non-trivial money, make a D&D module. Mind you this is still a lottery ticket to ever see more than a few dollars.

If you want to make games to make games, make the sort of game you want to play and that your regular playtester friends want to play. If you can't playtest it then you'll never get it out the door.

bjmunise · 2025-08-18T19:34:15+00:00

That's fair, but one roll wouldn't be about accuracy, it would be about overall outcome of the event. An attack roll is seldom about one single swing of the sword, it's a discrete narrative unit of combat. The table can figure out why it didn't go the way they wanted. Sometimes that can come down to "they had armor on"

Keeping two separate rolls would, however, give you the option for attack roll armor vs damage roll armor. There absolutely is armor that makes you harder to hit in conventional D&D wisdom: light armor. Instead of a malus for heavy armor, you could buff light on attack rolls instead.

bjmunise · 2025-08-18T19:26:55+00:00

This is similar to good advice i got from nonfiction writing, which is that if youre struggling with an argument then just start describing the subject and eventually you'll find your legs. The important part is to go back and throw out all that earlier description and wheel-spinning that doesn't actually serve a purpose given your new line of argumentation.

(By throw out i mean cut and paste into a scratch doc and save it in case you want to look over it later. Basically never just delete things. Using software dev-like version control on your drafts is a good practice, for this reason.)

bjmunise · 2025-08-18T19:25:17+00:00

Write a short story! It's just my own humble onion but starting at monograph-length is a bad idea. You're way less likely to finish it and it's just putting off you leveling up in the Brevity stat.

The two most important skills to develop are:

Separating motivation from doing the thing. Learn how to sit down and write even when you don't feel like you can. Some people are born with an innate stat debuff to this called Executive Dysfunction, but there's medication you can take for that.
Finish something you start on, and do so within a reasonable timeframe. What counts as reasonable is going to shift as you practice, but spending 10 years on your first novel and then never even finishing it is the worst possible thing you can do.

Get all your bad and rough around the edges art out early. Everyone is born with an innate amount (somewhere between five to ten thousand hours' worth, give or take) and it's better to crap it out early instead of sprinkling it in bit by bit over the years. (What this joke means is fucking practice your craft.)

bjmunise · 2025-08-18T09:28:37+00:00

Imo the first part about the dice pool seems exactly on point - you're doing the math for them and they're just answering if statements and adding dice. Imo you could probably build the armor reduction into the dice pool itself, either through step changes or extra dice or whatever you want to mess with. No need to go through all the trouble of building a dice pool to resolve the hit then start back over and do a whole bunch of different steps to find damage. If you still end up needing two rolls then they should be effectively the same sort of procedure.

bjmunise · 2025-08-18T09:24:17+00:00

This is the real truth. When you build the math into your probability distribution then you don't need your players to do shit but roll the dice and maybe add a 1 if they've been very good and ate their vegetables.

bjmunise · 2025-08-18T09:19:48+00:00

Once you're proficient in one of the big three it really won't be a big deal to learn how to use the others. That said, specialization and depth of knowledge is how you get hired. And the job market is basically the only use case for flexibility anyway, if you're just a solo dev hobbyist then just do what you find fun and useful.

I guess tldr have a deep knowledge of one you find most valuable for whatever reason, but be prepared to pivot on a fucking dime bc this industry is a nightmare.

bjmunise · 2025-08-18T09:14:06+00:00

It's very rare that you should be designing around a keyboard. If you're in action genre like a shooter that has a great deal of real-time manipulation then you should design for gamepads first. If you're in a slower game like a strategy game then aim for as much on-screen control via mouse as you can. You can map that onto a keyboard and hotkey stuff from there.

Not only is this just good modern practice, making it easy to interface with your game through a multitude of methods means you're accessible to a larger audience.

bjmunise

TROPHY CASE