This may or may not come as a surprise… but I really enjoy frogs. I hope your new noble amphibian neighbor eats all the most annoying insects as a trade-off for all of your hard gardening work to give him that awesome little spot!
On the topic of em dashes: I love them too much and I refuse to change. Also, I like how they read in general — they visually feel like how my brain thinks. No idea how better to explain that, but it’s all vibe based.
This is upsetting, too. Taking advantage of… what I suppose is essentially fearmongering in a sense, is pretty low. I don’t pay too much attention to the stylistic things that people say are AI indicators mostly because then I know I’ll become overly conscious of it, then try and adjust, with the likelihood of inadvertently making my writing seem more AI written.
I probably read too much sci-fi, but I am lowkey too scared to use generative AI tools because what if I forget to say thank you and it remembers in 20 years when it’s even more sophisticated and machines take over the Earth? I want it to remember me fondly — as in not at all.
I’m actually more fond of en dashes than em dashes, since those are what Finnish punctuation uses (we have only two lengths there, “syllable-dash” and “thought-dash”), so much so that I have the Windows alt-key combo memorized, but I’ve already had to adapt to English commas, so that’s not so different.
The curse of multilingualism. I’m constantly finding extraneous commas in my writing that just don’t belong in English. Not every clause needs to be separated by a comma! Unlike some other languages!
I wish Finnish lists used Oxford comma (I need to routinely reorder them to avoid awkward interpretations), but the end-of-quote commas are a bane of my existence. Why would you put that inside the quotation marks? It’s not part of the quotation!
I was going to put this exact message. I seldom use them because I was never taught them. They have only been added to my writing because of my editor. The only accepting to this is if a character is cut off from saying something.
Now I’m going to look them up and see if I can start using them.
This is what my Finnish teacher taught us. “Do this, unless you’re getting these grades on your essays; in that case, do whatever you want.”
(What my English teacher taught us about hyphenation of English was “don’t bother, it’s not worth the trouble”, so I still have no idea about English syllables.)
I’m in school to become an Elementary School teacher. You’re not the only one who struggles with them. Syllables are very intuitive, so sometimes in class we’d disagree with how syllables a word had. Even my professor struggled with it sometimes.
The definition in my textbook: a syllable is a word or part of a word which is a unit of pronunciation that includes one vowel.
I mean, I can tell Finnish syllables perfectly, even when a dialect morph I’m familiar with changes them (there is this nice one that makes two syllables one syllable). It’s the English ones I don’t understand, which (in addition to the whole “which syllable has stress”, it’s always the first one in Finnish apart from some loanwords) is why I can’t write poetry in English.
You can say if someone is British or American by how they write ou/o
Colour-color, harbour-harbor, honour-honor… (and both pronounce them the same way)
I just reached a third through the chapter I’m drafting, hooray!
And a game I did some narrative consultancy for, Date Everything, came out today- it’s very nice to see it in the wild and how far it’s come since I worked on it (everything was very placeholder back then!)
That’s really rough. I have a similar problem with bullet points. I have always loved using them for their visual clarity and efficiency, but now it’s fraught. I was in a community a bit ago where I used bullet points and a cheerful intro when explaining something I was familiar and got accused of using AI.
Which was really insulting, since I had gone through the trouble of getting my hands on a specific reference book to write my response.
Absolutely awful, and I completely understand being worried about having a quirk of your writing clocked as AI. : (
I’m working on a project, and I think I can manage it, but the math makes me want to scale back my expectations. Based on my structure, I’d need to write about 50K words. Even though I’m breaking things down to make it easy for me to complete small parts of it, that’s still a significant amount.
I should probably embrace a more limited vision where I just follow 1-2 of the plot lines and write something around 20-25K words.
I have ADHD and have to very carefully pace and structure what I’m doing to avoid having it slide gently into the mound of WIP that I have.
I get it! It can be hard to work on one thing when starting new things can feel so exciting, and especially if the thing you’re working on seems like it’s going to take forever to finish.
My advice is to break things down into sections, then break those sections down into sections until you get to a size that you can complete one indiviudal unit of the task in one sitting.
I’m dividing up my work into six sections, then splitting each of those into five, then dividing those up into sections of five again- so that I can decide on the general theme of everything and then work on things in small 200-400 word chunks whenever the mood strikes me.
I just have the Obsidian app on my phone and jot down notes that are almost complete “units” of the project, so I get the sense of forward progress, and I try to only focus on things that are one “step up” in terms of long-term stuff.
This way, I’m always completing a little task that is directly progressing to another long-term task and they’re very achievable.
I’m not sure this would work for all people or story structures. I’m intentionally trying to make something that’s atomized and easily divided like that, so it flows very naturally, since an individual unit for me is a few scenes that convey a thought or mood, which are intended to be linked together by interstitial bits that are selected from a random pool. May not work for other things?
I’ve been playing Burden of Command so much that I’m now fantasizing about making a game where the MC can be replaced mid-playthrough. Wonder how it’d be received.
I do that in my notes app. Bonus for cloud syncing and not having to install extra stuff that always drops out of the app store when I turn my back (the best development helping apps I’ve usef have been doing that aplently).
I don’t pay too much attention to the stylistic things that people say are AI indicators mostly because then I know I’ll become overly conscious of it, then try and adjust, with the likelihood of inadvertently making my writing seem more AI written.
It’s the English ones I don’t understand, which (in addition to the whole “which syllable has stress”, it’s always the first one in Finnish apart from some loanwords) is why I can’t write poetry in English.
