Thread by @AlexandraErin

Hello, creative mania my old friend. I'm here to write 16,000 words of an epistolary novel in 24 hours once again.

Not that I have ever to my recollection specifically done this with an epistolary novel in particular, but the feeling is very familiar even if the form is new.

I haven't even spent all day doing this. I was watching Muppets for a lot of it. I chopped vegetables. I had dinner and watched @dropout with my family. I napped. I dinked around and played video games. I had a video chat with a friend.

I just... this is the feeling I wish I could bottle and store up for the times when I'm in a pit of ennui and depression and everything feels hopeless and impossible, and writing feels doubly so.

But last night I had an episode of insomnia, continuing from the night before, and got up and took a bath and started hammering out an idea for what I thought was going to be a short story, and I got 3,000 words in and realized it was more like a description of a novel.

Weirdly, the story I'm writing is about what happens to humanity when we solve problems like this. The working title is "Project Veronica: A Post-History of the Transhuman Singularity".

Sort of 17776 meets Ready Player One, if I had to do an X meets Y pitch.

And I know that saying a thing is anything meets Ready Player One is not a great way to sell it, and also not how I'd try to sell it, but part of the premise is that a transformative change happened in human cultural development in the 2020s, so the reference pool stops there-ish

And the premise involves a group of what are effectively post-human immortals in the 22nd century disengaging from a global semi-hivemind enough to try to put things into words for future travelers who happen upon it, and so they keep referencing late 20th/early 21st c. things.

The part I'm writing now has one of them putting it into perspective to the other by mentioning the last three video games he played were Super Mario Bros. 2, Hades, and a nameless casual immersive micro-sim where you fool your brain into creating new basic tastes.

The only one of those games that didn't exist before the singularity doesn't have a name because people refer to it by thinking about it, and it's hard to explain to anyone who hasn't played it and not worth explaining to anyone who has.

So when he's talking to someone out loud with words, his conversation reference points will tend more towards Super Mario Bros. 2 and Hades than to the game that cannot be accurately named or quantified in words.

I'm not sure if "epistolary novel" is the most accurate description given that large chunks of it represent transcripts of conversations (or cyber/neurological processes emulating them), but the book purports to be a collection of documents, so I think it broadly fits the bill.