justdaveisfine

Well not all empty and pessimistic, but yeah there's certainly a lot more of that than good content.

A long time ago on a random modders forum, I was a part of a very small contest to judge mods at the end of the year. No prizes, just kind of a honorary showcase post which I guess was considered cool at the time.

It essentially fell down to just me to play about ~6 entries over the course of the month and then post the rankings.

Well I was having dire internet and computer issues at the time. My internet was bad but my average was suddenly dragging at 0.5kb/s on average and I had what I later learned was a failing HDD. I kept thinking it would eventually get better but it didn't. I barely got a single mod downloaded.

Now the dumb part: Rather than be a sane person and admit I was having technical issues and would have to hand it over to someone else (which I was already running up on the deadline, leaving anyone I handed it to unable to complete it before then), but instead I tried to power through.

I kept expecting the internet to magically get better and then use the power of last minute energy to tackle it. When the magic never happened, at the last minute I simply ranked the mods based on vibe with the only one I played being in the number one spot.

No one seemed to dispute it until one contestant saw his entry didn't have a single download and immediately figured out I never played it. Then it all came into question and soon enough the site Admins banned me from being a judge and canceled the whole thing.

That was the last contest the forum hosted until it ended up folding a year or two later.

Fake one. Bought it a decade ago and its still doing just fine.

Readers are voracious and always looking for new things to devour. But your writing isn't for them, its for you. Every page is slowly honing your craft, getting your ideas onto paper, and turning an amorphous idea blob into a tangible story.

I hate when people tell me this but annoyingly it works, but sometimes 'just write' is a solid strategy to just start putting words on the page. Sometimes its rough and you'll want to go back to edit it, sometimes seeing things start to flow is a great feeling, and the words get easier.

The other trick is spite. Just lots of spite. Spite for the sometimes terrible writing that gets published anyways, spite for the reader who you might lure into falling into love with a character you plan to brutally murder, and spite for the music player that can't seem to find the right song to match your mood for the scene you're writing.

Any shows that feature other cats or birds. They get pretty interested pretty quick.