I think the stuff that annoys you most isn't the stuff that embodies everything you hate and detest but the stuff that's just a few key elements away from being really likable ( Read more... )

A long, long time ago I wrote about how much harder it is to write an interesting good guy than bad guy, because good guys are a series of balancing acts while bad guys mainly just need to be plausibly threatening. I was trying to think of an explanation for why good guys are normally less interesting than bad guys. My theory was that bad guys are ( Read more... )

I did a lot of thinking while walking home from work yesterday, because I'd been talking to DJ about religion. There's something about Christianity that's always evaded me, some area where I feel like I'm out of place. While I know that I believe in Jesus, I feel confused about beliefs about Jesus. When other Christians describe their own beliefs, ( Read more... )

In my dream last night I had a pet snake. He wasn't mine at first. He belonged to someone who had a lot of pets and let me help take care of this particular snake for a little while, and over the course of the dream he became essentially mine. He was about a yard long, about as thick as two garden hoses, and a buttery yellow color. He liked it when ( Read more... )

There's a girl who's not human, she's fairy or nymph or some kind of ancient spirit, but she looks exactly human. She doesn't even have an obvious distinction, like a strange aura or different-colored eyes. She is small and not athletic, but if you tell her who you are she has the power of life and death over you. It's not knowing who you are, but ( Read more... )

Out of all scientific words, I think the most beautiful one I've ever heard is neoteny. It's from zoology and means "a phenomenon where animals reach sexual maturity while retaining youthful or juvenile morphology," like axolotls, or domesticated dogs.

So, I'm fiddling around with a story. The characters come in two groups of five; five Gods and five humans. On a tangent, I rarely see "gods" capitalized in stories. Why not? We capitalize "Senate" and "Senator." We capitalize "Asians" and "Asian." We capitalize "Londoners" and "Londoner." So a group of occasionally corrupt lawmakers, a group of ( Read more... )

They say not to judge by appearances, but I think that isn't because appearances can't ever predict actions, but because they can mislead you ( Read more... )

Okay, I've joked about wanting to marry Gackt, but after seeing this I'm serious. I've got to have him ( Read more... )

I have a theory that all forms of storytelling will have a weakness; a part of the story that can't be displayed directly. Prose can't show you any of the actions that are taking place. It can trigger your imagination with descriptive words, but it cannot show you a perfect image. A written description isn't really about giving the reader an image ( Read more... )