/lit/ - Literature

>two friends start to have the same dreams, can see and speak to each other while dreaming
>they decide to write a book based on themselves and their dreaming
>they write in a third guy for story
>third guy starts showing up in their normal dreams
>starts showing up irl

>>10371513

Not a novel, but please

>>10354377 →
>>10354391 →
>>10354398 →
>>10354410 →
>>10354416 →

A bunch of people make a bunch of bad decisions yet turn out okay while the only sympathetic characters in the book get punished for ultimately being good people yet also being equally self destructive. The plot is about a father, a white collar criminal, although I intend to obscure all sense of actual truth in the novel to be literally impossible to find and/or track. Im hoping that the language and humor will save me.

>MC is trained in dark magic at a young age
>Tribe is conquered and he is forced to fight
>Eventually works his way up to general status
>Fucks the king's wife (one of them) and then fucks off
>Feeds people to a vampire to learn more magic from the vampire
>Comes back and kills the king and escapes with his 3 children
>Teaches his children about magic and travels around the world and eventually learning the value of family and ethics

I might have the youngest kill the father when they get older but im not even 5% finished with my story

>>10371513

I'm writing a series of video games that will probably never get made. I'll post those ideas if anyone cares, but since they're not novels I won't if nobody cares.

>A man strips nude and lays down on his kitchen floor
>He spends the novel looking back over the course of his life until he eventually dies from dehydration

>>10371674
Video games already exist. Your idea isn't novel.

>>10371703

But they're very novel video game ideas.

>>10371513
I always thought about doing a story about a generational spaceship that loses contact with Earth and thousands of years later the people develop a new culture and their Earthian origins become a myth and they don't even know they're on a spaceship except for a select few Illuminati-like elite. But actually interesting.

>>10371722
But a video game isn't a novel. They're two different mediums.

>>10371751
Ever heard of visual novels?

>>10371755
They are neither video games, nor novels.

A group of rap battling robots on post-apocalypse earth triangulate the location of a pirate radio station because they're tired of it playing bad music.

It turns out that the personalities and interests of the robots' AI are driven by the context of their environment (To better fit in with their now long dead human creators), and the hip-hop music playing from previously mentioned pirate radio station is the only thing giving them character and autonomy.

Travelling further from the source of the music during their triangulation process makes them dull and apathetic to their goal. This causes the main strife of the story along with the usual robot shit in the vein of philip k dick. There is no happy ending.

>>10371823
Thats pretty cool, would read. You made the drawing as well?.

>>10371823
I remember the last time you posted this, still a great idea

>A tyrannical king dies leaving his young, attractive, socially progressive son in charge. The people are hopeful.
>Early in the young leader's reign the court is scandalized when the king prematurely adjourns an important diplomatic meeting so he can poo.
>Advisers tell the young monarch that the king must exude an air of infallibility, he must never make it known that he poos.
>Time passes. The king is now gassy, bloated, ugly and irritable.
>The king empties the treasury to purchase fine robes and expensive perfumes in a vain effort to look attractive and imposing again.
>Executions are common, the people are starving, eventually they successfully rebel.
>When the king is brought to the chopping block he's practically spherical, clearly he wants to die.
>The headsman brings his ax down, a thunderous brap deafens the crowd, everyone is enveloped in a thick brown cloud.
>In a distant land a shepard finds a beautiful headless corpse in an impact crater.

Originally intended as an entry in a collection of children's stories with a revolutionary theme, I can't think of any other stories. Anyone who wants it is welcome to it.

>>10371513
An alcoholic, masturbation-addicted, BBS-surfing, In-Training Brain Eraser™, John Footloose, goes on a cyberpunk-biopunk adventure in the last city on earth, Big Money City; a place in tenuous civil strife between a cantankerous rebel group (Slipheed), the gay mafia (the Money City Maniacs), a Hollywood establishment attempting to seize a monopoly on all media (Epstein Entertainment Enterprises), and the local government attempting to keep their footing.
Outside its boundaries, the countryside is slowly being engulfed by Zdzislaw-esque chitinous humanoids, bizarre black obelisks that suck the very life from the soil and destroy technology, and all sorts of nightmarish megafauna, slowly expanding their realty from their stronghold in the Adirondacks, to Big Money City (Boston), with the only thing holding them back are the crazed bounty hunters, and a gameshow host who enslaves criminals to fend them off the creatures on a reality TV show, Ivan the Bearable's Kin Hunters.

John Footloose's has the works:
Treasure hunting for a fabled hard drive of golden age pornography.
A close encounters with mind-bending monster.
Playing cards with a superhuman mobster, 100% Heterosexual Huey, before being pursued after being accused of reading minds.
Getting a double-lubed hand job from an amputee with a bionic implant.
Ghosting his ex.
Being pursued by a Lovecraft-crazed seemingly magical serial killer named Strigoi Man who invades people through the power of dreams.

>>10371823
Great idea, i hope you go through with it.

>>10371823
Is this a meme from penny arcade or homestuck or something?

>two separate planets exist in an orbit around each other
>both have advanced life, with one around the tech level of rome and the other in a tribal warfare state
>tribal war planet is where the protagonist is born
>because of the planet orbit, day and night are correlated with level of gravity, so on one planet there is low gravity at night and high gravity during the day
>on the tribal planet, this means that warfare at night is all about raiding and high flying action, while during the day it is based on defense and raw strength
>meanwhile on the rome planet, the second protag is a girl scholar learning that a high ranking politician has found a way to communicate with the tribal planet and has established himself as a god. he's planning to bring the warriors from that planet to his to stage a coup

and thats about it. mostly just trying to build a story around the two planet world, which is really the only good idea in the mix

>>10372047
this reads like the premise to a terrible fapfic

>>10371870
'fraid not, it's fanart of homestuck

>>10371905
>>10372141
thanks, I've omitted some details that are still in flux, really the only things that've stayed constant are the hip-hop inspired robots and radio station, the actual drive and world context for the story have changed a lot in the process, probably still will.

>>10372153
I've actually read mspa shit pre-homestuck, andrew's previous work on the comic And it Don't Stop probably planted the seed along with a few other works that I'll refrain from mentioning before my plagiarism unravels. that being said, the robots in homestuck are only incidental fuel for the fire.

Slice of life on a mining colony

>>10371581
horror, or metaphysical analysis on the reality of existence?

>>10372163
Could it be marketed to children though? Would it have to be toned down?

>>10372402
not at all. I see the general idea you're going for, but it's nested in so much gross and unnecessary shit that it's practically unsalvagable

>>10372134
Sounds interesting if it's a satire and it doesn't take itself too seriously.

>>10372414
Agree to disagree. Grimm's became increasingly bawdy with each new edition because kids enjoy violence and scatological humor.

>>10371513
Random siren monsters that appear and kill people with their screams.

only a few people are immune to this, and people call them saviors and governments get them to fight.

eventually they realize that the source of the sirens was the saviors, and that they wanted humanity to have false hope.

secret agency is formed to hunt down the "saviors" who have magic superpowers, but the problem is that they've infiltrated everything.

Sirenhunters have to low-key kill them and have no one defending them

>>10372519
>increasingly bawdy
pffft. Grimm was dark as shit senpai. there's a reason people stray off the path of his direct explaination

>>10372508
It's just a bunch of shit, from satire, to cyberpunk, dystopian, to an eldritch thriller, etc. It's going off the rails, but that's part of the fun.

>>10371513
What if I've already written a couple but I know they still won't be going anywhere?

>>10371581
that one goes into the stolen ideas bag

>>10372134
This sounds like you have a lot of legwork and planning in this. Could be good if it's rediculous enough.

>>10373349

> Could be good if it's rediculous enough.
> rediculous

Please leave this thread, turn off your computer, throw it away, set yourself on fire and jump off a bridge

>>10373484
You know what you are, anon? You're a fucking grammarian. Real linguists, especially those who study English, despise grammarians. Why? Because English is a vibrant, EVER EVOLVING language. Fuck you, anon. Until English is truly dead, until the only ones who speak it are pompous little beige boys at the University of Mohammad (Boston branch) I AM LITERALLY INFALLIBLE!

Main charecters gender is never defined.
Watch people with agendas panic because they cant tell if its a story about a chad thundercock fucking several women and see it as a male power fantasy, or a progressive story about a lesbians sexual liberation through polygamy.

>>10373484
>Spacing between greentext arrows.
I think we found the person that really needs to commit sudoku. Jesus, pull yourself together.

>>10371639
I'm not trying to be rude but you have to summarize it first to get people interested, as much as I love reading random shit from people online there is no pull for me to read these huge as blocks of text. I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels this way.

>>10372348
Bit of both. I really enjoyed It, will probably have this third dude something similar. Maybe aliens. I've had a few things happen in my life that have made reality seem a bit unstable so hopefully I won't start seeing these characters in my own dreams/life.

The Emperor commissions the best painter of homoerotic nudes to paint a nude portrait of his 16 year old son, the heir apparent.

While the young prince poses for him, the painter learns that he has never been to bed with a man and becomes determined to seduce him despite the Emperor’s clear interest in his son’s body.
Meanwhile the Emperor sends boys from his own personal harem to the painter to keep the painter company in his bed.

Cute little tsundere sister has always loved you. But you aren't really close to each other and she becomes sour due to your uninterest on her. Things happen, you become together, but incest is a taboo. How could you date your little sister and make love to her? So there's drama involved, your parents find out and you two end up running away to the countryside.

>>10373808
Please post some of this

>>10373808
Wow, that's fucking gay!

Have an idea for a short story about the end of a Gladiators life, and his reflections regarding his life before he is killed in the arena.

I also have a story idea about a village getting wiped out by a disease, and the only survivor becomes a carrier. As he wanders around lost he unknowingly spreads the disease to other villages destroying their lives as his was taken. After this he commits suicide via the guards searching for the source of the destruction.

>>10373781
cool. i was going to compare the idea favorably to the dark half (one of my favorite king books), but didn't want to trigger /lit/ and get in a flame war over it, hence the vagueness of "horror".

> A handful of politically engaged college students in Paris go down the XVth arrondissement catacombs to have a good time and do drugs
> They meet two skins that went there to indulge in their homoerotic taboo, and proceed to beat them up
> The group discover how deshumanizing they can be sixty feet under the civilisation
> The police, who does sweeps in the catas, find them at random. The MC escapes

This may be partly autobiographic.

>>10373851
I'll have to give it a read. I've been wanting to get more into King, the only books of his that I've read are It and Cujo. I had nightmares for weeks after reading It.

>>10373853
>This may be partly autobiographic
lol. fag. you deserved to have the shit kicked out of you.

>>10373853
>autobiographic
You mean how you got beaten up while blowing a homeless?

>>10373894
i like just about everything from 1991 and earlier. he has a pretty big stylistic shift between 91 and 92. i think that might have been when he got off the coke. post-91 exceptions are nightmares & dreamscapes and desperation. i also liked full dark, no stars, but that was a pretty non-kingy collection, if that makes sense.

A surreal cyberpunk story, in which a schizophrenic is connected to cyberspace. It is told in first person. There's a lot of time dilation.

>>10371748
megazone 23

>>10371513

A 12 year old trans girl and a 66 year old comedian named Al Franken embark on a 30 day road trip exploring the United States and each other’s bodies. Zeta Catrel members come after them, but are thwarted by ninja vampires on motorcycles who desperately need the blood of a transpenis to live.

It’s called Dickgirl.

>>10372171
will it end up in ss13-tier destruction?

She's gone boys. My /lit/ waifu has been archived. Anyway...

A 6/10 qt discovers that an old photo of herself circulating online has developed a small but devoted following. Disgusted and confused, but at the same time somewhat flattered, she infiltrates the cult of "her". The temptation to manipulate her admirers becomes too much and she starts instigating fights among her fans. Things escalate, she starts (unwittingly at first) encouraging violence among her fans, soon these "waifu wars" spill over to the real world with deadly consequences. One day everyone just moves on without explanation, no one seems to care about her anymore. Her confidence is shattered. The story ends with the qt failing to muster the courage to ask a hunky Chad out on a date.

A single second of a lunch scene drawn out for 30 pages. It's metaphysical horror

>>10374945

Metaphysical horror isn't synonymous to boring

not a novelist but sometimes I think of stories I would write if I could. Here's one that comes to mind

A young woman is obsessed with finding her 'soul mate', but having no success. During a bout of fever dreams she sees visions of a chicken laying an egg. She is convinced there is meaning behind the dreams; specifically, an epiphany in her mind that two souls meant for each other may only reunite if the soul is split in the first place. She believes the only way to do so is to impregnate herself and depart the egg inside her. She finds a mate to help her do it, but when her egg delivers a daughter some months later, she is faced with casting away her bizarre philosophy and becoming a loving mother

>inb4 'no wonder you're not a novelist'
i know

>>10375426
stay off the shrooms yeah?

It went to the trash so you're wrong about that faggot

An odyssey story of a living mummy, his page (The narrator), and a large stone guardian with the world experience of a child. The mummy will travel the world with his expendable retinue that grows and wanes throughout the journey until the end when he reaches apotheosis. I kinda want it to be like Siddartha.

If I were really to do this, it would be a short story with illustrations. It's just a good excuse to be a draw-fag.

>>10375586
mummies are patrician, do you have any art of the design you have in mind for the retinue members?

>>10375590
Nah, not yet. I'm too busy creating fan art for Malazan.

I'm pulling from a lot of sources though. I'm really into the Japanese designs of the Dogu, and they also have very interesting stories of Buddhist mummification, where the monks mummified themselves. I love that idea so much. The retinue members will largely be dirt peoples of different regions.

>>10374153
caught my eye. mind elaborating a little?

>>10375426
Or she could... ya know, pursue/ groom her own daughter. Just sayin' is all.

>>10375586
>>10375613
interesting. what era does it take place?

>>10371674
Post them anon, it's not like it's going anywhere.

>>10376296

ok. Here is a link to what I've written on them so far:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YxoMMIA81XLFDqgB-ZW1YnBcWBnAHEhNOTsl2sCCOL8/edit?usp=sharing

Anything I try to write just ends up being shitty Dark Souls fan fiction with my OC waifu as the main character.

>>10375210
It won’t be ;)
Time is just really scary

>>10375613
Show me your Malazan fan art anon.

>>10371513
A manic-depressive college dropout gets a vision of the future, of his body lying unvisited at his wake, while in a laundromat and decides to make himself universally unlikable so as to make his premonition of dying alone and unloved come true.
He does this by abandoning his life as a gas station attendant to become an itinerant priest, preaching great things while believing absolutely none of it.
The bulk of the story is him disgusting and alienating everyone he meets as he stumbles through society with his sidekick, who he just follows around, a fat wannabe vampire who's trying to convince Satan to turn sin into a pyramid scheme.

A priest is assigned to a new parish. Having been raised a devout Catholic his whole life, he begins to abandon his faith after interacting with the mostly secular populace around his parish. His repressed homosexuality also comes to the forefront when a college student who goes by the nickname of Hyacinth comes home and begins going to services to see him, tempting him into abandoning the faith. But if he were to abandon the faith, he would have nowhere else to turn to. He resolves to keep his newfound atheism and his homosexuality hidden while still performing the offices of priest as an act of charity towards those in the parish who need it the most.

This is an idea that's been brewing in my head for a while, so apologies if it seems a bit half-baked. What do you all think? Any suggestions?

>>10376988
Here is a W.I.P for you anon, extra points if you can tell me what characters they are.

>>10376178
I guess aiming for around 600 B.C., around when the Buddah was born and Hinduism was big.

>late 19th century
>a gate to hell opens in transylvania
>legions of hell start invading europe
>european powers temporarily ignore their rivalries to fight off the demon hordes
>gates start popping up all over europe

i thought of a specific segment where there was one particularly devastating gate in ireland. irish soldiers win a battle against a few demons, and the demon prince curses them and so they wake up the next day to find all their daughters and/or sisters dead. this is supposed to be a very sad moment and it enrages them to the point where the entire troops sacrifices their lives in a berserk successful battle that destroys that particular gate.

>war starts before nikola tesla left for america
>he invents crazy ass weapons for europe to use against the demons
>the technology has something to do with heaven and the divine idk
>intel reveals that to defeat the legions of hell the european allies have to recover a weapon hidden somewhere along the rhine
>a special team is selected to maneuver their way through war torn europe along the rhine to find the weapon
>the weapon is a person in some tomb
>he leads a victorious army that annihilates all demons in western europe
>one gate left, the transylvanian one
>it leads to the innermost part of hell, the residence of satan himself
>some stuff happens and then some dude with an intense faith in humanity goes in there and kills satan with a sword forged of gold from the rhine
>overarching theme of human excellence and persisting in the face of adversity
i'd call it Kyrie Eleison

>>10371513
the main character is a god and doesn't know it, his life is a cryptogram that allows him to attain parinibbana at its final unfolding in the last scene

>>10371667
Dude, your shit fucking sucks.

>>10371748
Brian Aldiss, Non-Stop, its a scifi classic

>>10371823
before you decide that AI is an interesting idea, try write two pages about it that aren't in the Spielberg or Ex Machina movies

>>10373549
its spelling

>>10371667
Make the main character female and you could make money

>>10373832
Anyone got any opinions on these?

>>10377944
that's fair, and actually why I've teetered on that point more than any other. I feel like the guilty pleasure that is rhyme spitting robots has to have some context beyond 'this is just how the world is', and through bouncing ideas off of anons here for around a year now I'm pretty set on the dynamic AI.

I don't want it to be some ever present question running throughout the narrative, that's not the drive. I don't want it to be about the nature of AI. It's the answer to a question and not really the focus. A good way to frame it would be to say the realization that the bots' AI is being railroaded by outside stimuli, (primarily being the pirate radio station in this case) is an extremely slow burn from the characters' perspective, if they realize at all. The realization, if it does come, culminates in whether or not turning off the station is a good idea or not, and what that means for the bots' future.

I'm hoping the general levity of the setup and also the mannerisms of the characters will deflect any "meaningful" commentary or philosophical quandaries that may be expected to pop up in a story with AI. it's not important to the characters, because they're fuckin' rap battling robots, and it doesn't matter to me because that's not a story I want to tell.

>>10371823
This is a good. Weirdly, I have a character in a game that looks almost exactly like the katana dude except she's a grill.

>>10378076
The AI is an actual ex machina:)

>>10378076
unless you really have something to 'say' about AI, I'd try think of a different plot device. Its a topic thats like a magnet for autistics who post movie reviews about the 343 'plot-holes' in the last Marvel movie

>>10377973
This. Be sure to keep the part about seducing the king's wife though.

>>10378076
i thought your idea was dumb when i saw it in the previous thread, but with this expansion i like it a lot more
>>10378147
you're a retard

>>10378178
you're an obese anime fan

>>10378147
as I said I've flip flopped a lot with many aspects, anything can change and I'll definitely keep that point in mind. I think you're right in a way that in my head I'm taking to mean as 'Having something that major without a desire to extrapolate on it could hurt the story overall'.

>>10378178
maybe a cheesy one sentence summary really doesn't do my idea justice, but I hope it acts as a hook.

>>10378200
a) i'm not, and b) even if i were it wouldn't change the fact that you're retarded for suggesting he scrap basically the foundation for the premise because some hypothetical spergs might hypothetically get twisted out of shape because anon might not say enough about the effects and implications of ai for them. that's like telling benchley to lose the shark because he might offend marine biologists.

>>10371702
i'm suppose to call you a pleb pseud but i like it

>>10378201
>I hope it acts as a hook.
i think in a vacuum it would, but /lit/ has so many tryhards who take themselves and their ideas too seriously that it's becomr my default assumption about posters in these threads. it's difficult to know when someone is actually just having some fun with an idea, like you appear to be.

Think Ghost In the Shell but the human protagonist is the fugitive, not the AI, and the core theme is quite a bit different—the consequences of people becoming more than human, rather than the question of what it means to be human.

>>10371513
I'm writing an ethical theory that describes:
>Anything that promotes the most utility (e.g. happiness) as ethical
>Anything that does not promote the most utility as unethical

I call it utilitarianism. It's a work in progress. I think I'm getting somewhere, though.

>boy is sent back in time after his brother offs himself
>slowly learns his brother was a rat and kills him himself
>plot twist that's what happened in the first place
>whoa.jpg

>>10378430
the causal loop is the most played out time travel trope of all time. if you're gonna' do it go primer levels of insanity on the loops, or handle it another way.

that being said I would probably still read it

>>10378437
If I actually did it I would focus more on the boy's gradual realization of all the negative memories of his brother he suppressed and the development of his character as he mans up and makes a stand

>>10378390
>/lit/ has so many tryhards that take themselves and their ideas too seriously
Eh, really? The ideas I've submitted in these threads have been shitposts composed in about 30 seconds. I was kinda under the impression it was the same for just about everyone else too. I'd say the threads have been pretty comfy, as far as threads go.

>>10378225
the poster of that idea has iterated numerous times thats its NOT the 'foundation for the premise' (notwithstanding the possibility that your tautological nonsense actually means something). YOU are the retard because you're fascinated by an idea that only interests teenage dopes online, and hence your spazzattack when somebody pointed it out.

>young man who wants to make film, not act, just write scripts/direct
>he watches film all the time
>his goal is to create a feature-length movie
>very strong self-loathing tendencies coupled with depression
>devoid of any friends or company
>eventually fosters an extreme masochism fetish
>he takes to giving away his body to men he finds online, provided that they treat the meet-up like an imagined rape scenario
>the world is going to end soon
>living at home with his parents, they cry and celebrate their company together en lieu of their deaths
>he is scared and flees home regardless of their sentiment, completely detaching from the only ones who love him
>he wants to make his movie
>he cannot, after trying and failing to write a script several times that finally captures his life of failure and loneliness
>instead decides to film the remaining days of his life engaged in a series of bizarre, wildly violent sexual fantasies that are secretly filmed
>he is almost killed one night, ends up fighting off his partner and murdering him
>he drives to his parents house again
>they have both killed themselves with his absence
>he climbs to the roof and watches sky and fantasizes about being the lead role in a movie
>the movie is about him being in love in high school
>the guy he loves is nervous, but asks him to prom
>he agrees
>last minute they decide not to go to prom, instead they go drive up to a hilltop on a local hiking trail
>they are watching the stars and have sex
i've actually gotten a fair few pages into this idea but it bums me out too much and i kinda have to stop it

800 page novel taking place first in Paris, then Mogadishu, then Dhaka, (believe it or not i have been and lived in those three places, know them well) telling the story of two friends, man and woman. Though not explicitly mentioned they appear to be very good friends. The man is a fervent Catholic, does as best as he can to stay away from worldly pleasures, reads obscure philosophy and steers clear from social contact. The woman is a complete hedonist, frequently takes part in orgies, does hard drugs. There is no particular plot, rather just them going through their lives together in very different places.

>>10371513
Man shipwrecked on an island of broken glassware
first thing to find are a good rubber boot
the shards are all beautiful, made by artists of every bygone byzantine and otherwise era, and their seemingly irreverent situating is divine in the eye of the beholder with the keen, to all else it is an island of sharp garbage

>>10378562
lolwut. did you even read >>10378076?

>>10379041
if you're a good writer this could be really good

>>10371513
I've written a lot of shit, but I never wrote a tragedy.

Maybe I should.

>>10379146
What have you written before?

>>10379065
>lolwut
Maybe literature isn't for you.

>>10379154
2 novels and a collection of short stories.
Haven't written anything seriously in years.

>>10379164
What are they about anon?

>>10379164
my mistake was focusing on the plot, setting, ect. All stories are character driven. I wished I'd known that when I started writing.

I just find most people's behavior to be boring. Irrational people are interesting, but there isn't a whole lot of meaning to infer from an irrational persons behavior and thought processes.

Writer is a bad career decision for someone who is basically an autist, if you can't understand social interactions and interperonal relationships then writing is a bad fit.

Unfortunately, its one of the few things I really know how to do well, from a technical standpoint.

>>10379157
idk lol

>>10379170
Well the first one is about a revolutionary cell living in a dystopian arcology set in the future after a nuclear holocaust.

I guess the idea was that the nuclear war wasn't really an extinction event, it just made us all that much more miserable, and only a handful really learned anything.

The arcology had a bunch of super intelligent gentically engineered overseers who saw themselves as the caretakers of humanity.

They didn't really understand human nature or social interaction very well, so they ended up putting a corrupt institution in place known as the 'first estate' in order to reinforce their incredibly unfair, rigid class and social structures.

>>10379184
there are a bunch of other arcologies, and each arcologies has sort of evolved different social structures and societies to cope with the new environment after the holocaust.

The thing is my point was really kind of muddied, I was trying to say too many things at once. I wanted it mostly to be about one mans will and aspirations to rise to power and make his dreams a reality, but also about class struggle, mens rights, how we think of and treat emerging sapience, and what you should do when actually acquire power.

>>10379193
The other problem was that I was really young when I wrote it and wanted to make something that was action packed and full of grit and violence, more like a comic book than a novel.

It was also really long, like 350k words after editing it and giving it a re-write. Plus there were a whole bunch of scenes that were straight up ripped from other movies and pop culture, and a lot of really rough transitions and plot holes I kind of glossed over hoping I was going to fast for people to notice.

Point is, it kind of sucked, and my ADD has only gotten worse since then.

The other was a really generic tolkien derived fantasy story. I thought the characters were a lot more fun and energetic and it was fun getting them from point A to point B, but there was nothing really unique about it, i just didn't put a whole lot of myself into it and it felt pretty whorish.

Neither got published, never saw a dime from either of them.

>>10379202
As to the short stories, I had one very clean, very polished sci-fi story that I thought about submitting to Asimov's Journal (I forget what you call it) but I think it got stolen by a crazy cat lady cause it had a really hard feminist bent to it.

I also tried working on a couple of commercial submissions to the Battletech franchise and the Warhammer 40k franchise, never got anywhere but it was fun.

(sigh) I don't know what the fuck I'm going to do. I'm getting older and I've tried my hand at a lot of different things, none of ever really seemed to stick and I could never seem to commit to anything.

Doesn't help that I only have a 2 year and not 4 year degree, and its a little late to go back to college now.

>>10379216
ever since then its just been a whole lot of musings and journaling and general madness, none of it was really worth saving and it all feels kind of embarressing.

Its strange, cause I'm online all the time and technically write everyday, but I haven't made a concerted effort to write seriously or get published in very long time.

I feel like the culture has changed and I was already a bit old fashioned to begin with, all I wanted was to write dime store novels and pulp and maybe earn a little extra cash on the side, but I could never tone down enough where it felt like I could keep my feet on the ground.

>>10379227
sorry. guess you didn't ask for my life story. Guess you could say I'm just you classic hack writer, trying to my cheesy shit published.

>>10379238
I find it interesting anon, we're all just trying to get our shit going one way or another.

>>10379249
>>10379238
I'm still just trying to start writing, but I've got the fear that it'll be shit, and that will kind of be dream crushing.

>>10379254
thats not really something you need to worry about anon.

your writing is practically guaranteed to be shit at first. It takes a lot of practice for it get good.

What you really need to worry about is whether you have the discipline to follow through, to send out submissions, subject yourself to peer review, commit the time and the energy to writing and trying to establish a career.

its a lot of work.

>>10379294
I was always just kind of lazy and in it for the money. But if I didn't feel as though I had something to say, I wouldn't have made it through my first novel.

For me, the process of writing itself is enjoyable. I guess I just got kind of burnt out on it. But it wasn't like I was using the time for anything else, anyways. If I hadn't spent that time writing, I just would have wasted it.

>>10379302
>>10379294
Thanks for the knowledge anon, I plan to start writing after I get these finals out of the way.

>>10379238
I'm intrigued by your comicbook arcology story, can you post some? If you know it's trying to say way too much maybe you could condense it to the simple vers and trim to 150-200,000 words

>>10379326
sorry, its on a flash drive in a storage bin. I have a hardcopy here but I'd rather not transcribe it verbatim.

this is an old print on demand version i put up on amazon. Might be a dead link thou, don't know if lulu.com still has my manuscript on file.

https://www.amazon.com/Crash-Flux-Kevin-Battleson/dp/1304362787/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1512901212&sr=8-1&keywords=crash+flux

>>10379380
>>10379380
I think that edition has some atrocious editing, spelling and grammar errors as well.

The one with the green circuit board background is the most current, i think, but I can't find it.

>>10379380
no, i guess they do have it on file. this is the 6x9 version i posted after all the edits, should be a clean copy. Really weird tho, can't find the green circuit cover anywhere.

Ah, doesn't really matter, it was in pocketbook format anyway.

>>10379157
lolwut. maybe 4chan isn't for you.

>>10379051
sounds interesting, is there a plot?

>>10379380
thanks dude, I'll check it out

>>10378905
this sounds really awful and edgy but also potentially good at the same time

>>10376361
>roughly 47 pages
How long have you poured into this anon?

>>10377181
im just tired of thinking/hearing about/being reminded of gay people every fucking day. Maybe i just need to leave 4chan

>fictional city in which barely any crimes occur
>retired policeman with a life-long crush on his recently deceased sister decides to return to the police to try to prove that she didn't commit suicide, but was rather murdered
>is introduced to a serial killer who is probably going to commit another murder soon, and has to work on that case in order to stay in the police and be able to investigate his sister's death
>meets younger childish policeman who is basically a brighter version of himself
>mfw existential crisis about the passage of time
>the serial killer is an hypochondriac man who believes that when he kills, he is stealing his victims lives and therefore going to live more
>he fears to have alzheimers though
>eventually they find out who the killer is
>but the childish cop doesn't believe it, since he knew the man from childhood, so he runs to warn him about the police coming after him, and the man just poisons him
>meanwhile the retired policeman just realises that his sister indeed had killed herself and that he blames himself for that, so he kills himself
>the serial killer has a heart attack and dies
>mfw the 3 main characters were just metaphors for life periods and it was all a metaphor about growing in maturity

It starts with a dream this character is having. They're standing on a steep cliff by the ocean, enjoying the breeze, when a sudden, violent earthquake strikes. Against their powers and wishes, they starts slowly floating towards the ocean, which has since begun forming a vortex, which slowly deepens and gets bigger. As they end up pretty much hundreds of meters away from land, standing directly above the deep, loud and violent vortex, they stop floating towards the ocean, remaining simply frozen mid-air. Looking down, all they see is a huge black hole beneath them.
Of course, they then fall down within the hole, closing their eyes in desperation as the vortex calms and the water "eat them".
Then they wake up.

Does anyone have that chart of suggested books for reading and grammar? Want to start actually writing my idea.

I know it had how to read a book.

>>10378390
some people seem preoccupied with their writing having a deeper meaning, people that want to put up a facade of the profound, not going to muse on why people want that illusion because I'm sure people will yell 'pseud' from the rooftops at them anyway. I wouldn't say they're the majority, but they can be pretty vocal here, perhaps they want that recognition.

not to say that's a bad thing. it's expression and I wouldn't want to discourage anyone, but after a while it becomes white noise. I barely write myself, but my mind is stuck on these ideas, and I have no other way to express than to go ahead and try arranging words in a way that doesn't come off as painful. whether it's a good idea or not is yet to be seen, but a generally positive reception to my summaries makes me happy.

especially when the main one is something as stupid as glitched out robots riffing off faux ebonics.

>>10382504
That's pretty much 'The Crawling Chaos'.

>>10382105

I've spent some 5 years thinking about it, probably only a couple weeks writing in total.

>couple hundred years in the future
>climate change advancing
>suddenly aliens arrive, theyre benevolent
>offer to take all humans on board their space ark, to save them from their dying planet
>the aliens go around the universe saving intelligent life, who all inevitably end up destroying their planet
>the catch is they have to harvest the planet for resources after they rescue the inhabitants
>humans go on the arc, its almost utopian, and will ensure the long term survival of humanity
>enter protagonist, 40 years after humans go to the arc
>earth is going to be destroyed in one week
>he decides he is going to see earth one last time before he dies,hasnt been on earth in the past 40 years, since humans left.
>struggles, tricks, and fights his way, and makes it to earth, moments before destruction
>enjoys his last few minutes on earth before its destruction
>dies, happy

>>10382402
is the serial killer a very old man?
also who poisons whom? its very vague.
is it supposed to be semi-nihilistic? or maybe just a fucking downer? because none of the characters succeed at anything or grow at all, other than maybe the retired policeman who has an existential crisis, but for what?

usually even sad or depressing books have some sort of closure or catharsis, but I dont see any

>>10383241
no conflict, implausible “safe” plot, gay ending, trying hard to be star trekesque 3/10 its still better than the HP i’ll give u that buddy

>>10383294
most of the novel takes place in the
>struggles, tricks, and fights his way, and makes it to earth, moments before destruction
It also has a lot of exploration and discussion of the new culture and the impact of the aliens arrival, and how life has changed on the new ship

never watched star trek

>>10383294
What does that even mean? "safe plot"?
Catcher in the Rye has a "safe plot", but still managed to become popular. If anon writes it well and manages depth of character it could still have value.

But I agree I'm not terribly interested in reading the story.

>>10371643
this sounds awful

>>10373832
I think the first idea has some real potential

>>10383241
I would find this interesting if the protagonist had a different goal.

The ending made me cringe a little. I'm all for the exploration of culture on the ship, there's lots of interesting stuff you can do with that.

>>10383867
I appreciate the feedback, there has to be some sort of goal or closure, what would be more satisfying?

>>10384070
I kinda like the ending, probably just a preference thing

>>10373811
rather than a novel it feels like a retelling of how Alabama came to be

>>10384179
That makes me feel better. I wanted to subvert the classic "happy ending" trope, but I know thats almost become cliche itself, and the new "cool" thing is to have everything shitty and no closure, but I dont like that as much

>>10384242
He sorta gets the shit end of the stick, but there's beauty in that destruction. That's how I see it at least.

>>10384253
Do you think its more powerful if he knows he will die when he goes? or if he gets there and finds out there is no way to return, when he thought there would be? (he would be happy either way, not regretful)

>>10373817
Yeah isn't it great?

>>10384306
Personally I think that it would be more powerful if he didn't know it was a death sentence. He realizes that even though he won't ever get off earth that he is truly content with his choices.

>>10383859
Yeah I really like that one. Any opinion on the second?

>>10371513
I'm ripping off a semi-popular isekai web novel through a western grimderp lens.

> coming of age story in a fantastic post-apocalyptic setting
> the world is in a constant state of fog and rain, inhabited by monsters
> the characters are intelligent animals
> they fight over the artifacts of Mankind, who engineered intelligence into the animals before disappearing from the surface of this earth-like world
> the MC is a messager between different villages

>>10371513
Three book series covering dawn, zenith, dusk.

Male & femals protags, male follows standard path of the hero, failure abounds. Female path jumbled, failure also abounds.

Hesitant lovers at the end of dawn, war in zenith, death & love in dusk.

Don't know if I want it to be high magic so I can expand on some stories easily but I feel like it could be a cop-out. Might end up being modern day, or byzantian.

>>10371823
There's no reason for them to like rap anymore so why do they?

>>10384557
I want there to be a slight hint of hypocrisy in the characters' motives. the only reason they have personalities and an affinity for hip-hop is because their AI is being molded by the music playing from the station, on some level they're hardwired to enjoy it (for instance, if one of these robots lived in say, a hippie commune, it'd be just as insufferable as a hemp sandal grassroots toting human despite having no real reason to, it's all based on the context of their environment), but their goal is to shut the station off because they ""think"" the music is bad.

it's sort of a joke stemming from that part of hip-hop culture that loves to point out that "this music fucking sucks" but they're practically walking stereotypes that listen to nothing else. I hope it comes off as what it is, a joke, and not some sort of malice against rap as a whole because I love hip-hop.

>>10384607
I thought about it after I posted and you could make it so they loved hip hop and when the humans died, they carried on loving hip hop purely because the other robots did and they were fitting in, all of it based on nothing like real life.

>>10371823
Call it 'Signifying Robots'

>>10384625
.. one robot is actually a human pretending to be a robot, an up and coming rapper

>>10376361
>freedonia
keep it easy with flavor text and stick to game mechanics when you write design documents

>>10372169
>hip-hop inspired robots
Did you ever read that dead web comic 'Supertron'?

>>10384625
>>10384636
I toyed around with having the last living human being the guy running the station, trying to keep rap music living on in the robots, but completely blind to what it's actually doing to them. sounds sorta' like a jet set radio plot. That is mostly undecided though.

>>10384633
the WIP name I'm using at the moment is 'Diagnostic: Wack'

>>10384859
I think I saw a picture of this once but never checked it out, I'll be sure to look it up.

>>10384938
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLKYOSiW7U4

>>10384945
this is amazing

>>10371639
>>10373747

Ok, sorry, I will try to tell the skeleton of the story in a concise way.

>It is a mixture of Antigone with Malala
>It’s a tragedy settled in Afghanistan post US invasion and after the fall of the Taliban
>A young woman (let us call her Antigone for now) enrolled in a Kabul school and got a degree as a teacher. The school was supported with financial support by the U.S.
>The girl goes to the village where her father was born, the place where her uncle still lives in, together with their tribe.
>The girl wants to create a school there, for both boys and girls.
>Her uncle, the chief of the tribe, is opposed to the idea. He states that he is opposed because he doesn’t want the outside culture to corrupt the centuries-old traditions of their tribe. In reality, however, he holds a terrible grudge against the U.S. because of a drone attack during the war that killed his wife and children. He sees a U.S. supported-school-education as a submission to the enemy.
>Antigone explains to the elders of the tribe that education is not an American value, but an universal one. She remembers her uncle that his brother, her father, although being a liberal and a pacifist, a man who migrate from the village to Kabul to find work and eventually learned how to read and write, was also killed during the war by accident. She states that she has not an allegiance to the U.S., and that she doesn’t want to let go of the traditions of her culture. Rather, she explains that people must be seen as individuals, and that Americans can be good or bad, just like everyone everywhere. She says that she was lucky to be able to live and learn with good people, even if they were from an aggressive nation. Finally, she remember a phrase from Ali bin Abi Talib, he cousin and son-in-law of the prophet Muhammad: “There is no wealth like knowledge, no poverty like ignorance”.
>The elders accept her proposition to build the school and teach boys and girls, what enrages her uncle.
>Meanwhile, the adopted son of Antigone’s uncle is enchanted and inspired by her, and wants to be near her, dreaming of maybe marrying her in the future.
>Latter, and ex-Taliban warrior, with his few soldiers, arrives at the small towm looking for shelter. Antigone’s uncle accepts him, because he sees the man as an hero who help defending the culture of Islam against the foreign invaders.
>Antigone’s uncle explains to the Taliban leader the situation of the new school and it’s “western roots”. He asks for the man’s help in clarifying to his niece the sins and errors that she is indulging in.

cont.

>>10385587

>The Taliban leader summons an Islamic court to judge Antigone. The elders are opposed to this, but they are silenced and kept in check by the ex-Taliban soldiers. Antigone’s uncle is scared when he realizes he had invited a brutal man to enter his town, and cannot see how to get rid of him now.
>Antigone’s, on the Taliban court, refuses to let go of her plans to teach the children. She states that the Taliban’s version of Islam is not the correct view, and that the Taliban warriors are just the opposite face of the American soldier’s coin: the same power-thirsty men fighting for control over other peoples lives and fates.
>The Taliban leader explains to her that he saved a number of girls from rape in the hands of older tribe leaders and warlords of Afghanistan. He states that he helped depose countless corrupt politicians, and that all of this criminals were approved by the U.S., since they were fighting the Communists: he states that he did many good actions for the people of the country, and that she should not treat his and simply an assassin.
>The Taliban leader decides that Antigone must accept to forgo her teaching plans and accept the simple way of living that his Islamic world-view professes. If she refuses, she will be executed. He gives her the night to think about it and answer him the next day.
>Antigone’s uncle is appalled by the perspective of his niece being killed. The Taliban leader explains that he would not go to that extreme, but that he knows that she would take the right decision after think about it in the night. He assures that he is not going to kill the girl.
>The next day, Antigone (after a terrible night of doubts and fear) decides that she will not let go of her world vision. In the middle of her trial, American forces, that were secretly spying the ex-Taliban member, strike the village.
>The Taliban leader, enraged by the attack, suspecting that the girl might have given the U.S. information about him, shots her in front on the American soldiers, stating that they are the one who actually pulled the trigger, that she represents the land he and his brothers loved being sacrificed by their own people because of the foreign disease and infection.
>The U.S. soldiers shot the Taliban leader and his soldiers.
>While the village elders are lamenting and Antigone’s uncle is still perplexed and in shock, his adoptive son, seeing the girl he loves dead, pulls out a gun and shots himself in front of his father.
>The old man is so devastated he can’t even hold his legs firm.
>The U.S. soldiers help holding the old man that formerly hated them. He doesn’t even perceive what is happening, and actually thanks the Americans as if they were sons to him. He can’t even distinguish them from the inhabitants of the village.
>The play ends with the Americans taking the bodies out and the old leader of the village exiling himself into the desert wilderness.

>>10376361
It's shit. For what it's worth, I also had a 10-15 page design doc for a game that had similar tones of over ambitiousness mixed with a lack of skill, but I learned a lot from it. Few weeks after writing it I scrapped it and used parts of it for other and better things, and it gave me some ideas for game mechanics that served as programming exercises. Keep doing your thing, but know that this isn't the masterpiece you might think it is.

>>10378905
so it's just a self-insert? no actual person who seriously wants to make a film is depressed and wastes his time online getting fags to bumfuck them.

https://www.wattpad.com/159904091-michael-and-the-sex-goblin

This has 12.6k reads and you fucks won't even take yours out of your .txt format files saved in that hidden folder on a flash drives you stash in your secret hiding places.

100 pages in now

>>10377181
Isn't this basically the plot of the Assbangers series?

>>10385785
I feel like kentucky is a good location

Bunch of horror short stories that takes place in our universe but some sort of entity is capable of manipulating reality as if it were data or programs from a computer
The stories would span several thousands of years in no particular order, but all adding up to the lore and the backstory of it all

>>10385962
Me too. I grew up in a small town outside Lexington and it’s like Mayberry from the Andy Griffith show. Sure there’s a hick every now and then but the stereotype doesn’t fit the whole state. There’s all different kids of Kentuckians.
There’s city people, suburbanites, rednecks, white trash, and people who are just “down home”. The state is mostly full of the latter

>>10385592
Its pretty good, it has the emotional / tragedy elements of a classic. However, you should be aware this is not the only "modern antigona" take on the original that has been written, I remember having to read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antigona_Furiosa during senior years of HS.

>>10386321
>Sure there’s a hick every now and then but the stereotype doesn’t fit the whole state. There’s all different kids of Kentuckians.

It's almost like every American state is like their own country with cities, small towns and large swaths of nothing special or small things inbetween.

Boy remembers how his gramps taught him to time travel and goes on adventures growing up very quickly. By the end of the story he ends up depressed and time travels to right before his gramps told him how and kills gramps and himself to stop the madness from ever happening and for this timelines version of him to have a normal life.

I'm kinda setting it up so it has pulp short stories in of themselves instead of chapters for the time travel bits. Here's the overall story
>boy get's rejected by a girl due to being good friend
>boy get's angry and goes to a spot his now dead gramps used to take him for fun
>remembers a joke grampa said about time traveling
>boy pulls it off to a month earlier, when the girl he asked out wasn't 'in the friend zone with him'
>she rejects him cause he's a weak ass bitch
>boy in rage time travels to Australia 1915, where he can be a cowboy with a cool accent
>oops here comes galipoli
>boy decides to continue to be a strong man
>first day on the field, get's shot in the head and has amnesia

>>10386360
Anon, thank you so much for taking the time to read the project, and for the mention to this modern Antigone work. It got me really interested: I will search for it. Thank you once again.

>>10386549
skips to a month in the present after he asked out the girl
>he's missing
>family is in ruins
>dad's drinking habit leads him to the liquor store
>local bum is shortchanged and the dad helps the bum
>follow to bum to behind the store, where he's hanging out with australian dude
>straya cunt remarks that this conversation is futile, but thanks the bum for helping him buy some food
>travels to the early point of asking her out, rejected again
>guy goes to bathroom, and realizes he doesn't have his scars from the war
>as he goes over each scar it shows a little flashback of his experience and a friend dying
boy says fuck it time travels elsewhere

that's all i have for concrete story right now, but as i said i want the ending to be older him shooting his gramps when young him was a child so that none of this happens.
it all goes by seperate timeline theory, and he can't ever go back to a previous timeline unlike in dbz where trunks goes back to his timeline. so every act he does only makes things more and more crazy for the world, with one ending being a cyberpunk world

>>10386549
>>10386604
one thing that a time travel autist like me would realize straight away is incongruency between causal loops and seperate timelines abiding by MWI.

for instance, if he time travels enough during the story, surely he would realize that his changes don't result in causal loops that can't be broken, meaning early on he'd gain an understanding that killing his grandfather would do nothing. the reader would realize this quickly too. so you either have to mask this somehow, perhaps by making the initial time travelling only minor, or by changing the ending entirely.

>>10385785
Isn't that kind of the plot of let the right one in?

>>10387774
IIRC in that book the vampire is a trap and it's basically a ruse for him to get a new sugardaddy to take advantage to.

Anon isn't writing romance, or featuring a trap.

>>10387819
>Anon isn't writing romance, or featuring a trap.
And that's why his idea is shit.

>>10387965
Traps are shit.

>>10385618

Your opinion doesn't mean anything to me, no offense.

>>10371513
> Newlywed husband gets into a car accident
> Hospitalized, wife finds out he loses his memory everytime he wakes up from sleep
> Wife goes through insanity trying to make this man fall in love with him over and over and over
> Slowly she starts losing it

Still thinking about what to do when she cracks.

>>10388426
>50 first dates except sad

>>10388030

>>10371760
>>10371755
>>10371751
>>10371722
>>10371703
autism

>>10385618
cool, i program and have been fancying for writing something for games but dont know anything about game dev itself (as far as large-scope development is concerned). what goes into the basis of a design doc?

>>10379041
>mogadishu
how? why? are you somali? explain please

>>10379238
self-publishing is the new pulp, might want to give it a crack again since its effortless to 'publish' now

A story about a young guy from Sweden in the late 9th century who joins a merchant's fleet of vessels going to Constantinople. When he gets there he involves himself in byzantine palace politics when he meets the important byzantine general Basil. He helps Basil I steal the throne from Michael III, then he helps found the beginnings of what would later be the Varangian guard.

Basically it's a travel story, a story of palace intrigue during medieval Byzantium with some battles thrown in for good measure.

>>10388010
Traps have shit in their butts, which is where you have to poke them for sex because they have a peen and you’re a faggo.

>>10384464
Could be interesting