• Diaries,  writing

    The Style Spectrum, and Why I’ve Put “The Liar’s Throne” on Hiatus

    I tend to think of my books spanning a spectrum of stylism. There are narratively simplistic books running on linear timelines (like Witch Hunt), a middle point of style balanced with clarity (like Atop the Trees, Beneath the Mountains), and then the rare all-style bonanza where style is substance (like Insomniac Cafe).

    When I’m planning a project, I consciously place my book on this spectrum. I consider myself restrained if I can write linearly, clearly, without theme overtaking plot. These are surface-level books where what happens is what matters the most, in a very intuitive way. These are usually more commercially appealing.

    The further along the spectrum I move in the other direction, the narrower its potential audience becomes. High style requires high engagement to intuit meaning.

    Whenever I’ve stayed on the safer end of the style spectrum, they have sold fairly well. Preternatural Affairs, led by Witch Hunt, became one of my most popular series. Writing them was frustrating sometimes. They didn’t scratch a particular creative itch.

    On the other hand, I had a fantastic time making Insomniac Cafe–which nearly nobody has read.

    I’ve rationalized writing the low-style books because I need books to pay bills, but at this point, I find it so difficult to reach readers that income isn’t much of a consideration. I need to enjoy the process of creating a book because that’s most of the good I’ll get from it now.

    I don’t feel the whim to go as far off the deep end as I did with Insomniac Cafe, so I thought I would try to write The Liar’s Throne on the low-style end of the spectrums. Events are unfolding in order. Mysteries may be held between the characters, but not between plot and reader. The focus is the plot rather than the themes.

    I’ve gotten quite far through the book writing like this–probably around sixty thousand words, although I haven’t typed up everything in my journals. Unfortunately, it’s also made me quite unhappy. I’m finding it difficult drag my feet through the back half.

    The other night, while I was meditating, I got a few ideas for livening up the format and jacking up the stylism. I’m going to use a lot of what I’ve already written. But it’s going to get remixed.

    Since this will demand major edits, I won’t be continuing to serialize The Liar’s Throne on Royal Road and AO3. I’ll leave what I already published for now. I’ve got plans for a book I can definitely serialize in its entirety, so I’ll have a replacement soon.

  • publishing,  writing

    make bad art.

    you really don’t need genAI. just draw a lot and accept that you’re gonna kinda suck at it.

    It’s so satisfying. You learn stuff. And it’s okay to be kinda sucky.

    i genuinely think, from talking to people who are using genAI, that it appeals to depthless insecurity. they have never felt Good Enough to Do the Art. “we’re different. you have talent,” they say, and also, “you have THE EYE,” unaware that talent is developed rather than innate.

    AI appeals to hustle culture, to the need to monetize everything. your art doesn’t start out commercially viable. genAI needs only a few words to produce something that looks way better than you think you can do. “i can’t afford to work at art for a year or two until i’m better,” you say, as if the ART is the pain point preventing you from making a living in this hellscape called reality. the AI looks like an easy escape route, but it’s pretending to solve problems by making things worse for artists. a year or two will pass whether or not you work on improving yourself. take the time.

    self-esteem, self-worth, and a willingness to practice something you suck at is so important. it is very, very hard. many of us have had our emotions invalidated throughout life. sometimes the people closest to us have said horrible things about us, and those voices linger.

    art asks a lot of you. it asks for honesty and insecurity and an ability to accept your limitations. but it gives you so much in return: a portfolio of accomplishments, a true expression of your internal state, the visualization of your voice.

    i tend to think i have a nuanced view of AI. i am strongly opposed to using it in professional products – that means book covers, the text in books, supplemental art, advertisements, audiobook generation, etc. i think using it for fun, like modding games or silly “how I look in Bridgerton” filters, is relatively benign despite the environmental impacts (personal impact is overrated compared to systemic responsibility). i think it’s simply bad at what it does when given the burden of creation (book cover components) while smaller tools like Adobe’s Content Aware Fill are just sensible developments to improve workflow.

    but on a purely human, emotional level, i wish i could plead with everyone to do something extremely radical and Just Make Sucky Art. I truly believe the world gets worse whenever we use AI and even your worst art makes the world better. i wish i could ask everyone to let themselves be vulnerable in whatever medium they like, even though it’s a HUGE request. i wanna ask everyone to waste their time dicking around with things that aren’t profitable or productive because i think it will heal you, and playing like a kid is important at every age, and it’s cheaper than buying credits to make yet another soulless Bratz doll romantasy character card.

  • Diaries,  writing

    Update on writing Insomniac Cafe

    I’m tearing through my Friends rewatch now. I’m trying to make sure I finish it about the same time that I finish the rough draft of my book, Insomniac Cafe, which is a surreal horror Friends redux. Ergo my relentless Friendsposting on social media lately.

    I’m working on season five out of ten. Phoebe’s surrogacy for Frank+Alice is still weird (mostly because Frank+Alice are gross). Remember Frank+Alice? She was his high school teacher? They married when he was 18 and she was 44? I knew people this happened with IRL and I didn’t really grok how repulsive it is at the time. I’m currently 36, and the very idea of hooking up with an 18-year-old, much less someone I have power over like a student, makes me wanna peel my skin off.

    I forgot Chandler and Monica got together so early on the show. Although I always kinda think Chandler is a homo so deeply in denial he doesn’t even know it, I still love his relationship with Monica. They’re so freaking cute together. They manage to remain real friends while also being super enthusiastic about each other.

    It’s stark contrast to the relentless drama of Ross and Rachel, who I will never stop hating as a couple. Ross just doesn’t have redeeming qualities! (Note I must make on every single post: I adore David Schwimmer’s performance. Just wanna say, all the crap I talk about Ross doesn’t apply to the actor. The actor is hysterical. Ross is probably so loathsome because David’s so good at it.) And when the two of them are together, they are mi se ra ble. When they’re not together, they’re fighting and horrid. He’s so petty. Jealousy is one of my least favorite traits, and he’s *obsessively* jealous.

    I find it difficult to believe Ross and Rachel could ever be friends, much less long-term romance partners. She would just be constantly henpecked by the dude. I will not be doing nice things to Ross in my book.

    Speaking of names (were we speaking of names?), I decided not to play with the copyright protections of “parody” for Insomniac Cafe. So none of the characters are gonna be named Ross/Rachel/etc — they’re getting names based on the actors’ other comedy roles, mostly. Rachel will be named Joanna, after Aniston in Office Space. Monica is Gale, a la the horror-comedy Scream character. This is similar to Final Girls Support Group, which named actual horror movie characters after their actors (iirc).

    But I totally recast Ross because I love David Schwimmer and I’m gonna do bad, bad things to Ross. I call him Adam instead. As in…like…I mentally cast Adam Driver to play Evil Ross. lmao. Can you see it? I think this is the funniest thing in the world. The book is a little funny — black comedy, maybe — but calling Ross “Adam” because everyone is played by the Friends except Ross, who is Adam Driver, kills me every time I think about it.

    I’m still waffling about whether I actually kill off Ross and hook up Rachel with Joey, though. I love the pairing, but it’s pretty unpopular, and I don’t want people to be distracted from the ending by something like that? I’d prefer to keep the focus on the book’s themes. And all the really gross stuff in it.

  • writing

    It’s only slightly harrowing to revisit the past

    First of all, please just let me say the important thing: I have published a new book.

    Fated for Firelizards is a paranormal romance where a gal ends up with a dragon. It’s mostly fun. It’s consciously didactic and radically eco-punk. I fear I’m not putting my best foot forward coming back with something that is so goofy, but hey! I like goofy. I am a goofy person. It’s a fair representation of my interests, just like my doorstopper gothic fantasy literature and my avant garde horror.

    Links are here, assuming my websites haven’t exploded from an unfamiliar volume of traffic.

    Yay! New book!

    I rewarded myself by buying a foot bath massager thingy. I’ve been doing a lot of walks out in ye olde Nevada desert, and I do most work at a standing desk, so my dogs are barking. My feet are tired too.

     

    What was the last book I published?

    That’s not a rhetorical question. I’m honestly not sure.

    I think it was either one of the Mr. Poe novels, or it was Shatter Cage’s last book, Rise of Heroes. It definitely happened *after* the beginning of the pandemic. But that’s now four years ago. It’s been a while.

    I tried to finish the last Lincoln Marshall book, but I’m still only about 1/3 of the way through. That one is difficult. It’s not my favorite series I’ve written, and I was going through weird stuff when I worked on it. Going back brings up a lot of Feelings. A lot of them aren’t great. Plus, it’s a really complex series drawing on many aspects of the Descentverse, which kinda flushed from my brain circa 2020. So I didn’t publish that one.

    What did I publish last? Has it really been three years since I put out an entire novel?

     

    It’s not like I’ve been lazing around.

    I had a book fail on submission to traditional publishing houses in 2021. Nobody wanted “You’ve Got Nudes,” a small-town romance take on “You’ve Got Mail.” There were a few reasons. For one, having a disabled sex worker as the hero wasn’t a popular idea. For another, there were other You’ve Got Mail takes that were more mainstream, so the market was kinda saturated.

    I wrote a book over 300,000 words long, too. I haven’t finished editing it.

    And I wrote about 50,000 words of a horror novel.

    Plus several other small projects.

    Perhaps more time-consuming is the fact I spent the year 2022 in college. I thought it was time to get my degree. Then I remembered I’m really bad at school, and I took a step back in early 2023 to figure out why the hell I can’t grow up and just do it. A whole year of working time! Gone. I really enjoyed it. The cellular biology class was outstanding, and I especially have made use of my art class. But I didn’t finish a degree.

    (I’m surely not the only person who feels like it would have been easier and more rewarding to set fire to money rather than fail college.)

    The second half of 2023, I spent crocheting and writing movie reviews. Plus that’s when I started on my interactive novel, Fated for Firelizards.

    And this year, I got sober-sober. That’s an accomplishment I’m especially proud of.

     

    The industry has changed and so have I.

    I’ve kept tabs on the industry, more or less, while I’ve been not-publishing. It’s not been a good few years.

    When I left, a lot of unethical practices had well taken hold in the market; the influx of AI-generated everything has only meant more Stuff produced that I can’t compete with.

    Surely if I had continued steadily writing my urban fantasy, I would have been fine. But trying to catch back up after seeing such seismic shifts leaves me a little lost.

    Nowadays, tons of authors launch on Kickstarter instead. Plus, things like BookFunnel have become major players for distributing books to readers. These require wholly different workflows/skills compared to what I used to do.

    The websites involved in publishing have changed a bit, my skills are rusty, and I have to talk myself through a lot of panicky bad feelings that come up whenever I approach the thing. I have a lotta business-related trauma that feels too private to discuss…anywhere, really.

    Just publishing Fated for Firelizards has been riddled with technical issues, major and minor. I don’t even know how to reach most of my readers at this point. Stuff has changed so much. Emails have expired. Rules around mass emails have changed. Social media visibility is hard as ever.

    And I don’t even have another book queued up to go after this one. I used to just pop ’em out, one after another.

     

    Well, I’m here. I might as well do it anyway.

    I always thought I’d get back to publishing novels — not just movie reviews, shitposts, and fanfic — so here I am.

    I’ve got more in the pipeline, albeit slowly.

    It’s weird to be here. But I am here.

    So I guess I’m doing it again.

  • image credit: Screen Media Films
    essays,  movies,  writing

    Say Less: 4 Lessons for Writers from Willy’s Wonderland (2021)

    Have I ever told you about one of my favorite good-bad movies, Willy’s Wonderland?

    Willy’s Wonderland is essentially an unlicensed Five Nights at Freddy’s-like horror movie. If you don’t know FNAF, you probably know Chuck E Cheese. It’s a family restaurant and arcade with animatronic mascots for entertainment. In both FNAF and Willy’s Wonderland, the animatronics are evil murderers.

    Willy’s Wonderland is one of those movies that isn’t good, but it’s kinda great: you won’t be scared by the horror content, but you’ll laugh, and the central performance from Nicolas Cage is one of his good ones. You’re never sure which version of Nicolas Cage you’re going to get. Here, he’s flawless.

    What makes Nicolas Cage so excellent is the fact his character has no dialogue. I’m not talking minimal dialogue like Mandy (2018). I mean, none. Reportedly, Cage agreed to do the movie only if they cut his dialogue completely.

    You’d think it’s a weird choice for the big-name star playing a hero to keep his mouth shut through a film, but I’m convinced that’s the only reason Willy’s Wonderland is any good.

    There’s a great history of low-dialogue characters across media. Gordon Freeman from Half-Life and Chell from Portal are notorious for their silence. One of Jack Reacher’s most common lines of narrative (not dialogue) is “Reacher said nothing.” I’ve used this myself: In my Descent/Ascension Series, Elise Kavanagh is someone whose dialogue is heavily limited to increase mystique.

    You can learn a lot about writing from Willy’s Wonderland.

     

    Lesson One: You don’t actually need character back story.

    Since Nicolas Cage can’t tell us what’s on his mind, or where he came from, we can only make guesses. His hero reacts to the horrifying situations without hesitation. What kind of man doesn’t seem to care about murderous animatronics on a job site? Over the course of the movie, Cage’s commitment to doing the agreed-upon job despite peril gives you the impression of Willy’s Wonderland accidentally hiring John Wick.

    By showing what he hates (bad work/life balance) and what he loves (his soda and a pinball machine), you get a strong impression of a sentimental but practical man who is a bit of a jaded, overgrown child with a hard life. It’s mounds better than anything the dialogue would have been capable of delivering, as evidenced by the back story everyone else shares.

    Give your audience some credit: Write less dialogue, and write less explicit back story. Events can do the heavy lifting.

     

    Lesson Two: Quiet characters provide opportunities for contrast.

    You can contrast a quiet character to more talkative characters, sure. That’s the most obvious utility. If you’re writing for fiction, where it’s a massive wall of text, distinguishing characters can be different; contrasting how much dialogue they use is a simple-but-effective way of delineating them.

    You can also contrast the character’s different emotional states to create a more dynamic narrative landscape. It builds punchlines into the narrative. You can’t help but laugh and get excited when the janitor tears into his animatronic foes.

    It’s shocking when the Janitor goes from working with his head down into a violent, roaring rage, beating the crap out of his attackers. The energy level of the film is also naturally improved simply by going from longer silent periods with occasional action, to a lot of action with less quiet.

     

    Lesson Three: Bolster your writing weak spots by working around them.

    The dialogue other characters have in Willy’s Wonderland is…not a highlight. Every single line could have been cut back dramatically. Nothing can go unstated, the actors struggle with long sentences, and little room is given for emotional displays that aren’t shouted at one another. So much of it is simply unnecessary.

    That isn’t to say the writing is all bad, though! The good in Willy’s Wonderland is general plot structure, the concept, and the heroic character. It’s simply fun to watch. One little edit (silencing the hero) took this from labored to a delight.

    When you’re writing, you can choose to bolster the stuff you’re good at and mostly skip over the stuff you’re bad at, too.

    Where are your weaknesses? If your dialogue isn’t strong, you might find yourself focusing on plot…which is what I tend to do. On the other hand, if you’re great at dialogue, maybe you want to enhance that at the cost of narrative. Play to your strengths! It’s your story.

     

    Lesson Four: Don’t drag everything out.

    Willy’s Wonderland is a brisk 1.5 hours long. Much like the hero, it shows up, does its job, and leaves.

    The story begins when Cage’s hero arrives in town. His work-life balance in this flick is legendary; he walks away from active fights when it’s time to take a break. In the morning, he clears out of town promptly, and that’s where the movie ends.

    My favorite writing advice I’ve received is “Enter the scene late, leave the scene early.” Willy’s Wonderland and its Janitor both exemplify this rule perfectly. It keeps things punchy, focuses on the delightful strengths, and doesn’t blow out its back dragging things out for an extra twenty minutes on the reel.

     

    Even though this campy, low-budget ripoff of a kids’ horror game isn’t “good,” the choices the team made transformed it into an outstanding delight of infinite rewatchability. You can take these lessons into your writing, whatever your format. When you find yourself struggling with a scene, try asking yourself: “What would Willy’s Wonderland do?”

    (image credit: Screen Media Films)

  • facebook,  writing

    Character blocking – less can be more

    I’m enjoying the work of reading the first Malazan book, but the prose itself, I do not like. The amount of character blocking bothers me. I get why the author does it (you can find his analyses of a scene or two online) but…it doesn’t read well for me.

    Character blocking is something most writers I know do. Including myself!

    I say “blocking” in the manner of a stage play. It is describing many small gestures of a character that doesn’t meaningfully add to a scene, or just doing it to excess. Character blocking is a broader way of describing something that is *usually* Eye Choreography.

    X looked at Y. He looked away.
    Y’s gaze cut to the ground.
    X looked at the thing, and then he looked at his sword.
    He walked to the bar with his gaze averted.

    There are two issues here.

    1) A book is less like a stage play and more like an impressionist painting you create in a reader’s mind. Broadly describing behavior will allow readers to fill in gestures themselves.

    2) Gestures don’t mean the same things to everyone. It’s unclear. I just touched a hand to my chin. What am I doing?
    Is this a thoughtful hand?
    Surprised?
    Am I messing with a blemish?
    Am I hiding the cleft in my chin?
    Maybe I’m about to say something.

    Looking at things or moving your hands or whatever can definitely be relevant, necessary scene information…sometimes. *Writing* it can also be totally necessary for *you*, the author, to work out where things are in the scene and what is happening. YOU know why the character is Looking.

    A character’s mood and physicality can be conveyed throughout the scene in MANY ways. It should form a greater picture for readers. Save specific gestures for when you wanna “zoom in.”

    In editing, I get rid of all blocking except the stuff that makes a scene *less* confusing.
    If he absolutely needs to look at the window or nobody is going to realize he’s talking about someone outside instead of inside the room, then yes! Block that. It zooms us in on that “look.”

    But remember: Gestures mean different things to different people. A lot of people can’t read body language at all, even on the page. You are adding gestures that “zoom focus” without adding more information or experience for the reader. I am exhausted constantly zooming focus on characters’ faces when their whole bodies exist and inhabit a setting.

    There are alternative beats you can use, if you want to confer a pause in dialogue (though I think you can let readers infer a lot about dialogue cadence too). I will favor beats that embody characters in their setting in meaningful ways.

    I really like beats that add *new* description to a character or setting. That breaks up big blocks of description and adds color and vivacity.

    I also like character-specific beats. One character might mess with his ear a lot. Another has antsy feet. One can’t stay sitting.

    Using character-specific beats consistently across scenes, chapters, and books helps fix a character in the reader’s mind. And the reader will bring biases about the character to fill in smaller gestures (X looking at Y, then away) as appropriate to their personality.

    In Malazan, Character Blocking is frequent. I know from reading the author’s analyses of his scenes that he does intend these lines to confer information. “By looking at the sword, Tattersail is thinking xyz.” He doesn’t actually intend for anyone to know what that means though. The author generally doesn’t care if anyone knows what he’s talking about. While I respect the attitude, I find that his reliance on blocking to express information he doesn’t care about conveying isn’t NEARLY as well-thought-out as his worldbuilding details.

    I dislike the insulting connotations of “lazy” when I mean “convenient at the expense of quality,” but lazy is the word I think reading a lot of this dialogue. Perhaps less lazy, more cursory? Like “FINE I guess people have to inhabit this world I’m writing, and they talk.”

    Likewise, I can’t say the prose on Malazan is bad when what it actually is, is that the writer and I have way different priorities. That’s all.

    I see my prose on this level as the Welcoming Center of my book. It needs to get out of the reader’s way so that my story and world can thrive. I want my language efficient and my meaning clear. I am not deliberately puzzling anyone, unless the specific intent of a scene is to puzzle, and even then, I will communicate it wholly differently.
    Efficiency of language can be so beautiful.

    Malazan is legendary for its complexity, opacity, and demands upon the reader’s patience. The world and experience of conquering the books makes this worthwhile. For my writer friends, I suggest editing out Character Blocking in draft 2 because you aren’t writing Malazan, probably. Don’t worry about the rough draft. Write whatever you have to write in the rough draft. But consider taking a scalpel into your scenes to excise all but essential blocking.

    ~

    Blocking (and especially Eye Choreography lol) is super common in some areas of fiction. It’s an instinctive thing. We’re trying to think our way through a scene and conversation and we put in unnecessary information while we work it out, which is better removed later, imo.

    A story written so minimalistically need not be dry – action and dialogue alone can still be compelling if your story is compelling. I do like to add some physicality of gesture, commentary, inner thought, etc on those things, and that’s nice too.

    A novel writing class is probably bringing some of these thoughts out because I’ve had to read Hemingway. Hemingway does not do this in his dialogue at all, and his dialogue is still effective (imo).

    Example:

    “Santiago,” the boy said to him as they climbed the bank from where the skiff was hauled up. “I could go with you again. We’ve made some money.”
    The old man had taught the boy to fish and the boy loved him.
    “No,” the old man said. “You’re with a lucky boat. Stay with them.”
    “But remember how you went eighty-seven days without fish and then we caught big ones every day for three weeks.”
    “I remember,” the old man said. “I know you did not leave me because you doubted.”
    “It was papa made me leave. I am a boy and I must obey him.”
    “I know,” the old man said. “It is quite normal.”

    Then we can look over at Gardens of the Moon by Stephen Erikson for the other end of things.

    “Are you the last left in the cadre?” he asked.
    She looked away, feeling brittle. “The last left standing. It wasn’t skill, either. Just lucky.” […] She heard Hairlock laugh, the sound of a soft jolt that made her wince. “The tall one,” she said. “He’s a mage, isn’t he?”
    Whiskeyjack grunted, then said, “His name’s Quick Ben.”
    “Not the one he was born with.”
    “No.”
    She rolled her shoulders against the weight of her cloak, momentarily easing the dull pain in her lower back. “I should know him, Sergeant. That kind of power gets noticed. He’s no novice.”
    “No,” Whiskeyjack replied. “He isn’t.”
    She felt herself getting angry. “I want an explanation. What’s happening here?”
    Whiskeyjack grimaced. “Not much, by the looks of it.” He raised his voice. “Quick Ben!”
    The mage looked over. “Some last-minute negotiations, Sergeant,” he said, flashing a white grin.
    “Hood’s Breath.” Tattersail sighed, turning away.

    That is some dialogue from the beginning of Malazan, which I personally feel is too much blocking. The information conveyed is not important and it breaks up the conversation too much, distracting from the way the conversation is meant to propel the scene.

    But again, as I said above — This is an issue of different authorial priorities. The author here think it’s important we should know that the cloak this mage is wearing is heavy in the middle of an explanation about the situation and people in the situation, and I think it’s too much.

    (I originally posted this on Facebook on 2/12/23.)

  • Diaries,  writing

    Progressing on Dwarrow stuff for ATTBTM

    I spent a while yesterday working on nachīga, the language the Dwarrow use in my gothic fantasy novel. *Most* the work this new draft of the novel requires is actually on the Dwarrow, not the Àlvare, who are actually quite well developed.

    (I call dwarves Dwarrow for two reasons: Tolkien liked calling them Dwarrow, and also because “dwarf” means a lot of different things in English, including certain species of animals and a human skeletal disorder. Differentiating concepts linguistically should be done thoughtfully in fantasy, imo.)

    There’s so much work done on my Dwarrow that it’s easy for me to forget I’m missing some significant pieces. The Dwarrow were the first part of worldbuilding I did on this book, in fact. I wrote out this manifesto for the idea of how a society consciously aware of corruption and hierarchy might structure itself to prevent these things from growing.

    And that came about from thinking about Dwarf Fortress honestly – because in worldbuilding games, we take it for granted that we (the player/king/god) must provide every life form in our societies with food, housing, and medicine. But this is not the case in America and we find the idea revolting. We tell cultural stories about how unhoused people or those who are visibly ill are at fault for these qualities, villainizing the disfigured rather than the beautiful housed rulers who decided it’s okay some humans live this way.

    So I’ve got this weird manifesto about the society, I have maps, I have a lot of functional questions answered (levels of technology? applications of it? sanitation? fantasy mass transit?). But I actually didn’t do one of the most important parts of worldbuilding, which is the language itself for nachīga!

    It wasn’t essential to understand nachīga in the first draft. I wanted time spent with the elves to feel alienating, hostile, and foreign, so I integrated a lot of conlang words initially in order to distance readers from these hoity-toity fair folk. Meanwhile, Dwarrow were supposed to feel like a homecoming: wrapped in a big blanket of warm acceptance. I used common names for things to make it easier to follow and feel more familiar.

    A long time ago, years now, I created the Àlvare language-first. Every value I wanted for my elves, I put into the language. Being excessively elaborate. Deliberately obscure. Musical. Information-dense. Curated. So you can see why it would then feel weird coming “backwards” for my Dwarrow to finally arrive at the point where I need to design a language reflecting values/etc that have been elaborated on elsewhere. It’s a distillation rather than a foundation.

    Lots of fun getting into nachīga, though. Once I’ve determined rules for phonology and grammar and stuff, I use a software called Vulgarlang to produce my vocabulary. I go from “scratching my head over rules and IPA symbols” to “1500 vocabulary words in the dictionary” in a few minutes. It’s *really* satisfying.

    Since I spent so much time doing thoughtful worldbuilding stuff yesterday, I think today I should write cartoon dragon p0rn.