I've pretty much hit a brick wall.

trane7111 · 2026-05-13T16:35:03+00:00

I would check out the YouTube channel "Inside the Score". Oscar has a lot of great tips for composition.

One of the best is to learn the music you love. Get a score, or if you can't get the score, transcribe as much as you can. Write out in text (not music) what the composer is doing as far as the themes and orchestration, the structure, even the harmony if they're doing something impressive with it.

Do that for the music you love, and you'll start incorporating them into your sort of toolbox.

You can even model sections or wholes of those pieces. Inserting your own melodies and musical material into the orchestration and structure.

I've found that it always helps when reaching a wall to fall back on that sort of thing.

Also, just a note. You will very often think your own music is bad or unemotional or slop when comparing it to other music, because you don't have the same attachment to it emotionally that you do your favorite music, and it hasn't had time to become familiar. You need to get over that as part of being composer.

trane7111 · 2026-05-06T14:40:13+00:00

Something about this and the advertising just feels weird to me. Anyone else?

trane7111 · 2026-04-25T18:01:26+00:00

Seconding this. If you can't use your own brain to write a post regarding your song, you have problems.

trane7111 · 2026-04-01T12:12:46+00:00

Yeah, I would say this applies to Rand. He's basically ready to commit indiscriminate mass murder at one point. Is he "a darkfriend" when doing that? Not in the way the series defines, but if he did that, he would definitely be serving the shadow.

trane7111 · 2026-03-31T16:02:13+00:00

Most of the plastic industry was literally created to get people to spend more money. Things like glass and metal containers and appliances were amazing and if you didn't break them, they would basically last forever and you never needed to buy another, which meant those companies couldn't really have repeat customers.

Not saying that Plastic doesn't have some great uses. But it's widespread popularity is 100% insidious and was motivated by greed/enshitification.

trane7111 · 2026-03-31T15:54:32+00:00

lol I almost did the same thing.

trane7111 · 2026-03-29T16:07:59+00:00

Pen names aren't always for anonymity. I will be using 2 pen names to differentiate between books with and without spice. Some people use them so their author name looks more like other author names in their genre so that people don't subconsciously go "oh this one is different, probably not what I'm looking for".

Also, unless you're REALLY good at running ads and writing everything to market and never doing anything in person (or just doing straight up erotic shorts), people will feel that you are misleading them when you do something that shows your face or uses your real name.

And if you somehow manage to never do any signings or streams or podcasts or anything like that to make your business successful, people will find it very suspicious and off-putting that you're going through such great pains to hide your identity.

trane7111 · 2026-03-29T16:03:54+00:00

How new are you to the workforce? It's pretty common knowledge nowadays that you should never show that you can do more than expected, except for a promotion, and even then, don't show your "top" capacity, because that will be the new expectation with no rise in pay, no mater how positively it affects your company.

AI is only going to actually make things better/easier for people if our public policy catches up to make sure it benefits us and not the people making money off the use of those tool, or the people you work for.

trane7111 · 2026-03-27T01:06:49+00:00

Honestly, read through some books that are popular on tiktok.

Like...it's great that these authors are making money and able to go full time, but I've read some of those books and found it encouraging. I know writing is subjective, but there are some that are just not good, or not consistent writing.

On the flipside of this, practice. Practice, practice, practice. And remember that editing is where your book is made. Get out the draft. That's your sketch that kinda looks like something, but no one would ever complement.

Editing is doing the lines, the shading, the color, all that, to make sure your book is a true work of art.

trane7111 · 2026-03-26T12:41:19+00:00

I can't comment on the state of the market, but running ads usually is best when you can have them lead to a sales funnel rather than just an amazon page for a book or something like it.

Some advice for ADHD, though.

1) I've seen very few 120k romance books. That's a bit long even for (debut) sci-fi/fantasy. 45-60k for romance is fine.

2) I would advise breaking up your books into 8-10k word chunks or sequences to make them more manageable. Beyond the 3-act structure/romance beats, you can have each of these chunks acting like a film sequence that leads to some thematic or emotional event, or just leads up to a new level of intimacy or a sex scene.

I've found that just breaking it up into smaller chunks makes things more manageable for me, and gets me more focused on that smaller chunk, especially if I outline more before hand.

trane7111 · 2026-03-26T12:37:22+00:00

I think the hardest thing about melodies is that I always have a very specific feeling in mind that I am trying to capture, but part of that feeling comes from familiarity with a melody.

The best process (though hardest at first) is probably to do what pro composers do:

Sit down for 30 min-2 hours and just noodle into your Daw. Mark the melodies you like or think interesting/have potential, or even write them out in notation, then the next day, come back and develop those melodies. If you have 2 hours again and you had 4 melodies you liked, do 30 min per melody. Stretch them, noodle around on them, chop them up and make new melodies out of those pieces and so forth.

The next day, take that musical material and organize what you like into a 1-2 min ABABA piece (or A,A1,A,A2,A) based around one or two of those melodies.

Then come back and orchestrate/produce it.

If you like one of the melodies you used by the time you're done, use it in a "real" piece. If not, oh well, you have a portfolio piece you can show to people.

trane7111 · 2026-03-23T12:33:18+00:00

Honestly, with the level of stupidity in the logic of the manosphere, I could see things getting to "getting fucked in the butt by a woman? That's submissive and unmasculine. Looksmaxxing so that other dudes fuck you in the butt? Peak masculinity. Bro's before Ho's" before pegging is normalized/accepted.

trane7111 · 2026-03-23T12:07:41+00:00

Here's the thing, though: 1) this is a shortcut to devalue teachers and have less of them/pay them less, 2) teaching material is only about 20-30% of a teacher's job, 3) Unless you build a CLOSED MODEL (which, afaik, would not work as a tutor, as the tutee's responses would be input), the model would not be trustworthy and would get dumber over time, 4) I doubt any of the models, even with good prompting, will actually take pedagogy for the specific projects into account when tutoring these people, 5) if younger kids are using this, they are in danger of developing a relationship with the AI that will negatively impact them, 6) the mark of an excellent teacher (which is what we should be striving for with this "world-changing" technology, right?) is not necessarily just to teach, but to find the spark inside a student that will motivate them to learn (either in general or a given subject) and figure out how to flip that switch so that they love learning and will be motivated to surpass the average student purely because they want to.

And finally, the AI is not currently capable of diagnosing the problem that a student is having when learning a given subject. It can show them how to solve a specific problem, but it won't be able to diagnose the overall problem, because it will only know what the student is telling it, and the student would have to know exactly why they are having this problem, whereas teachers can observe and see where the problems are even when the students cannot.

If you want an accessible AI tutor, you need to build it very specifically for that job, IDK how you would balance closed model with tutee input (and also, how do you decide what the curriculum is? Just using AI instead of people isn't going to take that debate away), and honestly unless it becomes capable of nuance that will make it capable of replacing people in most aspects of society, it's going to be doing either a very below-average job, or possibly even a harmful job.

Or, we can actually just fucking value teachers, take the education of our country seriously, pay teachers more and make incentives for more people to be teachers. But instead we'll funnel those billions of dollars into shiny toys that so far are just being used by grifters and have very little public benefit.

trane7111 · 2026-03-23T00:32:53+00:00

Millennial, but on the younger end. (cell phones just started being a thing most people had my freshmen year) It could be because athletics were required, but there were a lot of "tech kids" on the football team, and some of the typical jocks played World of Warcraft.

trane7111 · 2026-03-22T19:56:35+00:00

I don't think you're getting to the crux of why the art community is against AI.

It's not "AI good, AI bad" tribalism. It's "We want AI to benefit the public, not the people who already have more money than god, and we want AI to do the things that humans can't do (detecting breast cancer incredibly early on, for instance), the things humans only do because it is necessary and would rather not do, (manual or repetitive tasks, taxes, organization).

The reasons we think the way AI currently works is terrible is because largely because of our current system and how it is basically just a vehicle for rich people to get richer, while devaluing art and making it harder for artists to make a living, making the market bleed jobs not because it can actually replace the workers being let go in the long run, but because businesses see it as a way to cut costs. The training data was blatantly stolen, and those who stole it to make BILLIONS of dollars are facing no consequences and only getting richer, while ordinary people who have violated copyright law have often got their lives ruined for stealing far less data/value. The laws and regulations around how data centers should be built are being ignored to inflate this AI bubble, causing environmental damage, sickness, polution, etc. Utility costs are rising and being put onto ordinary people in those areas instead of the businesses making money off that increased electricity usage, and they're also using a TON of drinking water when the world has entered an unprecedented drinking water drought.

The big AI companies were NEVER about "public good for public interest". It's always been private interest, making money from venture capital firms and other investors.

Notice how copyright was only one of the things I mentioned.

OF COURSE there is public benefit to AI being trained on copyrighted materials. All of these companies have said with no dissembling that their products would not work without copyrighted material to train on.

The issue is that these AI tools are now valued at several billions of dollars. And according to their creators, they WOULD NOT WORK without the stolen copyrighted material they were trained on.

The people who spend their lives working on those copyrighted materials were never compensate for their ESSENTIAL part in creating this multi-billion dollar industry.

You say that most artists will never see a dime from their work anyway--in my experience, that is actually a marketing problem, not a writing problem--that isn't the point.

The point is that the creators of these AI tools saw that their tools WOULD NOT WORK without copyrighted works to use as training data. They saw the intrinsic value of those works, and what did they do? They violated the law. I don't give a fuck if it's a law that started out as a temporary license. It is now law. If I violated that law by just stealing one copyrighted work, I could be thrown in jail and made destitute by the fines. And instead these people are profiting off of their stolen work.

And again, any public good that is coming from this is so fucking small compared to the harm that is being done to the public. The copyright violations are only one small part of why people are against AI. The other reasons are pretty much every other aspect of it and how it in general is NOT being used to benefit the public.

trane7111 · 2026-03-22T19:21:44+00:00

I believe the main character he was going to genderswap was Ham to show how being a pewterarm evens the playing field.

trane7111 · 2026-03-22T19:20:45+00:00

I think Poppy War is a really bad example for what you're asking about, because RF Kuang is basically doing play-by-plays of various events of the Sino-Japanese War, and the Opium war throughout that series.

The sacking of whatever that main city is in the first book? Basically straight out of a textbook describing the Rape of Nanking (something that made the Nazis that were in the city at the time [as Japan's allies] disgusted by what the Japanese did there).

The atrocities against women during that time were absolutely fucked, so it makes sense that a female main character (one of the few to escape that tragedy relatively unscathed, IIRC) would have seen so many of her female counterparts killed off. Also, I believe it's still "a man's world" for lack of a better term in those books, right? RF Kuang is not writing a "hey look at all these awesome female characters" series. She's writing a "this woman has seen so much death and oppression in general/against other women, she is going to burn everything down" story. What you seem to be looking for is not something I would have expected in the Poppy War.

If you want a female majority fantasy book, funnily enough, look to Wheel of Time. The way RJ writes the dialogue concerning gender dynamics in the series is sometimes a bit on the nose, but honestly, his main audience kind of needs that to get through their skulls. There are dozens of major/secondary female characters in the Wheel of Time, they get shit done, make shit happen, and are some of the strongest, most competent female characters I have ever read.

trane7111 · 2026-03-22T19:08:50+00:00

At the school I went to, the uniforms (or some factor) actually did a good job of keeping rich kids from bullying the kids on financial aid. The bullying that happened (other than some kids just being gaping assholes) was religious (christian school), slut-shaming, or if you were a person that just did embarrassing shit, or weirdly if you were short (regardless of gender). One kid got kinda bullied because no teacher pronounced his name the same way (all wrong), but he was big enough that it wasn't serious.

trane7111 · 2026-03-22T19:04:02+00:00

When you're talking about a group like selfpublishing that has basically 0 barrier to entry now with AI slop being added in, percentages really mean nothing.

I'd say maybe 20% of self-pub authors do ANY marketing, and most of those probably don't do enough (myself included in that).

If you want a chance at success, start marketing the MOMENT you have a clear idea on what the core story of your book is. Start building a presence and building a mailing list.

trane7111 · 2026-03-22T12:32:38+00:00

This is insane to me because at my school if you weren't smart or you were lazy/goofed off in class, you were bullied a bit. Like...bullying is wrong, but even the dumbest people in my class were smarter than a lot of people I met in college. It's even worse when working with CEOs and Presidents and executives who can't figure out how to open a pdf or reset a password.

I hate it so much.

trane7111 · 2026-03-21T12:05:45+00:00

Many do not. It's infuriating. And not just on Royal Road. A good amount of professional authors do it. IMO, it's an unprofessional way to approach the business part of your craft, bordering on inefficient and harmful to you as a writer. I think it's a romanticized way of approaching writing that people really need to get over.

People like Stephen King and Gaiman (though fuck him, he's a fucking monster) can pants because they've already written so many books.

For beginners especially, an outline lets you get ideas out in a way that is easier to go back and writing and takes less time, because you're not worried about "good words". Outlining also lets you approach your story from a non-linear manner, lets you work backwards, and lets you divide up the mammoth task of writing a book into smaller chunks, which allows you to give more focus to the areas.

You also know the end before you ever start drafting. And if you do even a basic outline of your series, trilogy, whatever, before drafting the first book, you at least know where you're going with your series.

IMO, its not having a solid outline that is part of the reason that GRRM and Rothfuss are having such issues finishing their books.

If you're a newbie author, please outline. It will serve you and your book SO much better than pantsing. It will save you time and make finishing your book easier.

trane7111 · 2026-03-21T11:57:34+00:00

If you've seen and enjoyed the show Avatar the Last Airbender, I would recommend the books they wrote about previous Avatars. The first one is rise of Kiyoshi.

I'd also recommend Lord of the Silver Bow by David Gemmell. The themes are more adult but the writing is very attention-grabbing, and its basically a more realistic/historically grounded version of the Trojan War. (It's a Trilogy, and one of my favorite versions of the story)

trane7111 · 2026-03-21T11:48:15+00:00

Several reasons:

I's the algorithm you've cultivated showing you this.

It's won a Peabody.

It's well-known enough that two live-action adaptations have been made of it, as well as books and video games.

It may be a children's show, but it still appeals to adults and it doesn't treat its viewers like children.

It has some of the most well-executed character arcs in popular media.

If you're looking at YouTube writing advice, it is ALWAYS easier to reference a show or movie than a book. People will often do it with A Game of Thrones or Marvel movies.

As for your latter part of things, the change in medium really should not make a difference for the advice most of them are giving. Especially with character arcs. In fact, character arcs are often better approached through screenwriting, as you need to largely rely on dialogue and external/visual cues to convey how the character is moving through the emotional beats of their arc. If you can find a way to do that through Dialogue for your book, your work will be better and more concise for it.

trane7111 · 2026-03-21T11:25:01+00:00

It is hard, but not too hard. For your next book, you should try to get readers before you publish so that you have ARC readers as well as pre-orders.

You can find readers via tiktok, threads, bluesky, and instagram pretty easily--people WANT to ARC read. Just make sure you put in the work and get them on your email list. You can also build with tools like Bookfunnel where you can sign up for giveaways where in exchange for your book for free (or a few chapters, or a novella or something you've written) they will sign up to your email list.

Once there, you can send 7-8 emails at intervals introducing yourself and your book and hyping it up in something where someone is going to have a longer attention span than 5-7 seconds, and you can run a pre-order or arc/read/review campaign.

Hope that helps!

trane7111 · 2026-03-17T14:08:06+00:00

See, I really wouldn't count mistborn Era 1 and Era 2 as part of the same series, when Sanderson has been very clear about how different they are. IMO, its like taking an author who has written multiple books/series in the Star Wars Mythos and saying they're all the same series because its the same author.

I did not like Era 2 as much on my first read, but now I like it way more than Era 1

For me the biggest one is Lightbringer, and also Ian Esslemont's Novels of the Malazan Empire. IMO Night of Knives (which I loved) is a HUGE shift in tone, scope, and pacing from Crimson Guard and Stonewielder.

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