I have written various things, collected here, including what I think is the second most popular (or at least usually second-mentioned) rationalist fanfiction. I serve dinner to the Illuminati. AMA.
Some time ago you made the public offer to talk to depressed or otherwise seriously lonely people, even though you apparently really dislike phonecalls. Did anybody take you up on it? How did it go?
I don’t think anyone sought me out on the basis of that offer, or if they did, they chose not to tell me or I forgot the details of how we met. Unrelatedly, I have friends with various loneliness and mental health statuses who I talk to (mostly online).
I could be described as having writer’s block right now; I was devoting pretty much all my creative output to Effulgence, which ground to a screeching halt due to coauthor brain problems, and now I am metaphorically upside-down like a particularly unfortunate turtle. I have been trying various things but nothing has produced good results yet (I have written, like, one short story, but no chapters). However, I have every expectation of being able to return to Effulgence full speed ahead when my coauthor can even if I don’t manage to budge my novels between now and then.
I do almost no revising after I’ve gotten an entire chapter down (though I will sometimes iterate a sentence a bit while it’s in progress, and I will rearrange paragraphs if my beta readers suggest it while I’m writing for my test audience.). I don’t like revision after that; it slows me down and makes me second-guess myself and hate my output faster than I normally start to and leaves me with questionable mental maps of what has and has not happened. I will correct typos and grammatical errors and the like when I am made aware of them. Elcenia as it currently stands is a complete reboot which I generate without directly consulting the original—I extracted a loose plot outline, massaged it into making somewhat better sense, and haven’t opened the old documents since except to remind myself of how to spell things and various assignments of numerical value, I write from the plot outline and memory. Effulgence I can’t even fix typos because of the limitations of the Dreamwidth platform, so that’s closer to literally no revision.
That’s pretty interesting, thanks. More questions!
Suppose for the sake of the argument that copyright problems do not exist, and you’re offered to publish Luminosity as a book. Would you then want to work with editors/copyeditors and change the text substantially according to their suggestions, or are you more like “this is done, feel free to fix typos but otherwise take it or leave it”?
Do you have a day job? A profession? What are they? Do you like them? (obviously feel free to ignore etc.)
I am Omega, and I intend to change humanity in such a way that some authors never really existed, their books are gone from collective memory and never influenced anyone. Because I liked Luminosity, I allow you to name up to 5 authors whom I won’t even consider expunging. Who do you name? (don’t waste a slot on yourself, you’re safe)
I didn’t do more than get a copyeditor to look over the text of the Elcenia books before self-publishing them. I would probably go the extra mile if we’re talking published published, but my tolerance for Executive Meddling is negligible, so it’d have to be more like pointing things out that I might want to fix so I can fix them than changing things without my participation. And it would have to be more about wording, pruning or adding exposition, etc. than about macroscopic plot or character issues, because I don’t know how to touch those in a complete work without doing a whole lot more work than I’m willing to or having things fall apart like wet tissue paper.
My most recent conventional employment was being the administrative manager at MetaMed, but I quit a few months ago, and now I am basically a house spouse, the “spouse” part pending till September. I’d take conventional employment if it dressed up pretty and knocked on my door with a bouquet of flowers (I have informed e.g. Louie that I exist, am unemployed, and like money) but it’s not urgent. Irregularly, people will pay me to do things like write commissions (I am pretty bad about delivering in a timely manner though, I have one like half finished...) or make menus. Sometimes I get donations through my websites or somebody buys an Elcenia book.
I think I’d need to know more about how this hypothetical works. Are my personal friends and family safe too even though you’ve likely never heard of their writing, or do I need to expend slots on all my favorite people who happen to have written fiction (or whatever the “author” threshold is)? Is Stephenie Meyer safe (because you liked Luminosity) or is she in the line of fire and something weird happens to Luminosity if she gets got? Are huge linchpins of influence like Tolkien safe just because they’d have knock-on effects beyond their own works, or are those knock-on effects part of the point?
The idea is that Omega makes the world stay roughly as it is, but the individual beauty and other virtues of the books are lost. The books are replaced by something generic and drab that is still able to generate roughly the same large-scale effect due to Omega’s tweaks. And everyone you know personally is exempt. So for example Tolkien may be expunged, and instead someone else wrote some epic fantasy that helped launch a genre and it had something like orcs in it, but it wasn’t nearly as powerful and beautiful and everything as Tolkien was. Same for Stephenie Meyer: whatever you liked about Twilight is gone, replaced with some generic vampire love story that inexplicably became incredibly popular, and you’re able to base Luminosity on it, and maybe add more of your personal imagination to offset the drabness, so large-scale effects added up to the same in your world.
Basically I’m trying, instead of asking the familiar “your top 5” or “the 5 books you’ll take to an uninhabited island”, to ask “which 5 books you find it most painful to contemplate being lost to the world as if they never existed, but everything else mostly stayed the same”. It’s an inherently self-contradictory question, I know, but maybe still worth asking.
Hmm. Taking this question at face value where I am only prioritizing by the individual flavor and character of the books and not their cultural significance, I’m going to say let’s keep J.K. Rowling… Tamora Pierce… Sharon Shinn, Laini Taylor, John Scalzi. I was also tempted by Philip Pullman (but I think about 75% of what I’d miss is people putting daemons in arbitrary fanfiction, which it sounds like would get suitably replaced?) and Zenna Henderson (but I think losing her stories would probably be a smaller loss to me than the ones I picked).
I did this by looking at my bookshelf which has actual books on it, so if I was supposed to interpret it to include screenwriters or anything the answer is invalid.
My impression of Luminosity, after reading it and before reading Radiance, was that it was essentially depicting the usefulness of luminosity more of less entirely by showing vampire-Bella completely losing her luminosity techniques/attitudes. To what degree did you intend this? Do you see it as accurate?
Also what do you think of Syzygy, seven years down the line? (Me(highschool) quite liked it. Me(2014) was very surprised to discover that it was written by someone I encountered again elsewhere.)
I did not intend that interpetation, and have been repeatedly surprised to find people espousing it. There is a reduction in Luminosity’s didacticism over the course of the book as I got caught up in the plot, and it’s possible it happens to undergo a particularly noticeable drop around when Bella turns which people are reading this way. However, I didn’t intend to show Bella’s various errors as being consequences of any abandonment of her interior luminosity, however much less narration I spent on it. She has plenty of other personality flaws and resource shortages to drive her mistakes.
Oh man, Syzygy. That started closer to a decade ago, though I guess it did end around seven years ago. I don’t hate it enough to break my rule that what goes up, stays up, so when I recovered the files from the unexpected cataclysm that caused the comic’s end, up they went. But it’s embarrassing, very noticeably amateur, both in the art and the writing. I’m still pleased with a couple of particularly nasty turns of plot, like Kulary’s backstory, but they weren’t presented to their best effect.
What’s the status of Effulgence? I gave up on it soon after it branched out wildly around the Milliways part, and when I checked to see what’s going on, there appeared to be no updates in 6 months or so.
Anything else you’ve written recently that you may recommend?
My coauthor for Effulgence is suffering from an inability to can. It is slowly recovering (today we were able to do a not-in-Effulgence-continuity sandbox thread for a little more than thirty comments, and she’s been writing an unrelated short story!) and we are continuing to make plans for what we will write when the ability to can is restored. The last new post was made in November 2013, though, so I’m not sure where you’re getting “6 months or so”.
I periodically update curious parties about Effulgence behind-the-scenes goings-on in this TV Tropes forum thread which was originally about Elcenia but is now about my stuff in more generality.
I have released two shortstories relatively recently, though the latter (AU-fanfiction-of-sorts of Three Worlds Collide) was written back in 2012 and I just sat on it for a while. I have also been writing a series of social justice blog posts for alternate universes which have inspired some entertaining audience participation. I recommend subscribing to my general RSS feed if you are curious about my creative output.
I have less than zero idea how far you got into Effulgence when you describe yourself as dropping it “after it branched out wildly around the Milliways part”. But if wild branching and Milliways were turnoffs for you I don’t think you’re gonna like anything after that mysterious part.
If I recall, I really liked the story as a standalone one, up until the Luminosity Bella showed up. Of course, given the name and the nature of the RP, I should have expected it.
Yeah, there are, um, lots of them. You can read some of their stories before they hit the “peal” as self-contained AUs, if you want—just go to the first instance of a new “symbella” in the index (except for the lower-case omega, that’s a special case), and read only posts that have no other symbellas. (Some posts have no symbella and these are usually part of the same story as whatever’s closest to them, it just means the relevant Bell isn’t present in that particular thread.) These will sometimes cut off kind of awkwardly, of course...
I have written various things, collected here, including what I think is the second most popular (or at least usually second-mentioned) rationalist fanfiction. I serve dinner to the Illuminati. AMA.
Some time ago you made the public offer to talk to depressed or otherwise seriously lonely people, even though you apparently really dislike phonecalls. Did anybody take you up on it? How did it go?
I don’t think anyone sought me out on the basis of that offer, or if they did, they chose not to tell me or I forgot the details of how we met. Unrelatedly, I have friends with various loneliness and mental health statuses who I talk to (mostly online).
Do you have a routine as a writer?
Do you get writer’s block, and if yes, any favorite methods of breaking it?
How much do you rewrite your drafts?
I don’t have a routine.
I could be described as having writer’s block right now; I was devoting pretty much all my creative output to Effulgence, which ground to a screeching halt due to coauthor brain problems, and now I am metaphorically upside-down like a particularly unfortunate turtle. I have been trying various things but nothing has produced good results yet (I have written, like, one short story, but no chapters). However, I have every expectation of being able to return to Effulgence full speed ahead when my coauthor can even if I don’t manage to budge my novels between now and then.
I do almost no revising after I’ve gotten an entire chapter down (though I will sometimes iterate a sentence a bit while it’s in progress, and I will rearrange paragraphs if my beta readers suggest it while I’m writing for my test audience.). I don’t like revision after that; it slows me down and makes me second-guess myself and hate my output faster than I normally start to and leaves me with questionable mental maps of what has and has not happened. I will correct typos and grammatical errors and the like when I am made aware of them. Elcenia as it currently stands is a complete reboot which I generate without directly consulting the original—I extracted a loose plot outline, massaged it into making somewhat better sense, and haven’t opened the old documents since except to remind myself of how to spell things and various assignments of numerical value, I write from the plot outline and memory. Effulgence I can’t even fix typos because of the limitations of the Dreamwidth platform, so that’s closer to literally no revision.
That’s pretty interesting, thanks. More questions!
Suppose for the sake of the argument that copyright problems do not exist, and you’re offered to publish Luminosity as a book. Would you then want to work with editors/copyeditors and change the text substantially according to their suggestions, or are you more like “this is done, feel free to fix typos but otherwise take it or leave it”?
Do you have a day job? A profession? What are they? Do you like them? (obviously feel free to ignore etc.)
I am Omega, and I intend to change humanity in such a way that some authors never really existed, their books are gone from collective memory and never influenced anyone. Because I liked Luminosity, I allow you to name up to 5 authors whom I won’t even consider expunging. Who do you name? (don’t waste a slot on yourself, you’re safe)
I didn’t do more than get a copyeditor to look over the text of the Elcenia books before self-publishing them. I would probably go the extra mile if we’re talking published published, but my tolerance for Executive Meddling is negligible, so it’d have to be more like pointing things out that I might want to fix so I can fix them than changing things without my participation. And it would have to be more about wording, pruning or adding exposition, etc. than about macroscopic plot or character issues, because I don’t know how to touch those in a complete work without doing a whole lot more work than I’m willing to or having things fall apart like wet tissue paper.
My most recent conventional employment was being the administrative manager at MetaMed, but I quit a few months ago, and now I am basically a house spouse, the “spouse” part pending till September. I’d take conventional employment if it dressed up pretty and knocked on my door with a bouquet of flowers (I have informed e.g. Louie that I exist, am unemployed, and like money) but it’s not urgent. Irregularly, people will pay me to do things like write commissions (I am pretty bad about delivering in a timely manner though, I have one like half finished...) or make menus. Sometimes I get donations through my websites or somebody buys an Elcenia book.
I think I’d need to know more about how this hypothetical works. Are my personal friends and family safe too even though you’ve likely never heard of their writing, or do I need to expend slots on all my favorite people who happen to have written fiction (or whatever the “author” threshold is)? Is Stephenie Meyer safe (because you liked Luminosity) or is she in the line of fire and something weird happens to Luminosity if she gets got? Are huge linchpins of influence like Tolkien safe just because they’d have knock-on effects beyond their own works, or are those knock-on effects part of the point?
The idea is that Omega makes the world stay roughly as it is, but the individual beauty and other virtues of the books are lost. The books are replaced by something generic and drab that is still able to generate roughly the same large-scale effect due to Omega’s tweaks. And everyone you know personally is exempt. So for example Tolkien may be expunged, and instead someone else wrote some epic fantasy that helped launch a genre and it had something like orcs in it, but it wasn’t nearly as powerful and beautiful and everything as Tolkien was. Same for Stephenie Meyer: whatever you liked about Twilight is gone, replaced with some generic vampire love story that inexplicably became incredibly popular, and you’re able to base Luminosity on it, and maybe add more of your personal imagination to offset the drabness, so large-scale effects added up to the same in your world.
Basically I’m trying, instead of asking the familiar “your top 5” or “the 5 books you’ll take to an uninhabited island”, to ask “which 5 books you find it most painful to contemplate being lost to the world as if they never existed, but everything else mostly stayed the same”. It’s an inherently self-contradictory question, I know, but maybe still worth asking.
Hmm. Taking this question at face value where I am only prioritizing by the individual flavor and character of the books and not their cultural significance, I’m going to say let’s keep J.K. Rowling… Tamora Pierce… Sharon Shinn, Laini Taylor, John Scalzi. I was also tempted by Philip Pullman (but I think about 75% of what I’d miss is people putting daemons in arbitrary fanfiction, which it sounds like would get suitably replaced?) and Zenna Henderson (but I think losing her stories would probably be a smaller loss to me than the ones I picked).
I did this by looking at my bookshelf which has actual books on it, so if I was supposed to interpret it to include screenwriters or anything the answer is invalid.
My impression of Luminosity, after reading it and before reading Radiance, was that it was essentially depicting the usefulness of luminosity more of less entirely by showing vampire-Bella completely losing her luminosity techniques/attitudes. To what degree did you intend this? Do you see it as accurate?
Also what do you think of Syzygy, seven years down the line? (Me(highschool) quite liked it. Me(2014) was very surprised to discover that it was written by someone I encountered again elsewhere.)
I did not intend that interpetation, and have been repeatedly surprised to find people espousing it. There is a reduction in Luminosity’s didacticism over the course of the book as I got caught up in the plot, and it’s possible it happens to undergo a particularly noticeable drop around when Bella turns which people are reading this way. However, I didn’t intend to show Bella’s various errors as being consequences of any abandonment of her interior luminosity, however much less narration I spent on it. She has plenty of other personality flaws and resource shortages to drive her mistakes.
Oh man, Syzygy. That started closer to a decade ago, though I guess it did end around seven years ago. I don’t hate it enough to break my rule that what goes up, stays up, so when I recovered the files from the unexpected cataclysm that caused the comic’s end, up they went. But it’s embarrassing, very noticeably amateur, both in the art and the writing. I’m still pleased with a couple of particularly nasty turns of plot, like Kulary’s backstory, but they weren’t presented to their best effect.
What’s the status of Effulgence? I gave up on it soon after it branched out wildly around the Milliways part, and when I checked to see what’s going on, there appeared to be no updates in 6 months or so.
Anything else you’ve written recently that you may recommend?
My coauthor for Effulgence is suffering from an inability to can. It is slowly recovering (today we were able to do a not-in-Effulgence-continuity sandbox thread for a little more than thirty comments, and she’s been writing an unrelated short story!) and we are continuing to make plans for what we will write when the ability to can is restored. The last new post was made in November 2013, though, so I’m not sure where you’re getting “6 months or so”.
I periodically update curious parties about Effulgence behind-the-scenes goings-on in this TV Tropes forum thread which was originally about Elcenia but is now about my stuff in more generality.
I have released two short stories relatively recently, though the latter (AU-fanfiction-of-sorts of Three Worlds Collide) was written back in 2012 and I just sat on it for a while. I have also been writing a series of social justice blog posts for alternate universes which have inspired some entertaining audience participation. I recommend subscribing to my general RSS feed if you are curious about my creative output.
I have less than zero idea how far you got into Effulgence when you describe yourself as dropping it “after it branched out wildly around the Milliways part”. But if wild branching and Milliways were turnoffs for you I don’t think you’re gonna like anything after that mysterious part.
What does it mean “to can”?
Two uses spring to my mind: to discard material (as in “trashcan”); to declare work done (somehow from “film canister”).
It’s an internet-dialect neologism. Related to “I can’t” without any subsequent verb, evolved into “I have lost the ability to can” etc.
Thanks!
If I recall, I really liked the story as a standalone one, up until the Luminosity Bella showed up. Of course, given the name and the nature of the RP, I should have expected it.
Yeah, there are, um, lots of them. You can read some of their stories before they hit the “peal” as self-contained AUs, if you want—just go to the first instance of a new “symbella” in the index (except for the lower-case omega, that’s a special case), and read only posts that have no other symbellas. (Some posts have no symbella and these are usually part of the same story as whatever’s closest to them, it just means the relevant Bell isn’t present in that particular thread.) These will sometimes cut off kind of awkwardly, of course...
Ah, thanks, I’ll give it a try. I was confused about where the stories start.
If you don’t mind me asking what do you do other than writing? Do you have any plans to make it a career or is it strictly recreational?
I don’t currently have a day job, though I have in the past. I suppose you could call me a housefiancée, spousehood pending.
I’m not interested in traditional publishing, but I certainly wouldn’t object if my mini-fandom exploded and started showering me with money.