This is a fun warm-up exercise meant to help writers write with fewer inhibitions and hesitations. It's open to anybody who wants to join in.
You can participate on Twitter or off, even just out loud or in your head.
Today we're using the random animal list generator at randomlists.com/random-animals. When you click that link, you should get a list of six different animals with pictures. You can refresh to get others if you're not feeling the first mix.
One of your six animals has just announced something. Who is it, and what do they say? (You can decide based on the pictures, or the order of the list, or whatever makes sense to you.)
All five of the other animals probably have something to say to this, but one of them is going to be the first to speak. Decide who it is, and what they say.
Continue writing dialogue for each of the animals that you think would have something to say, whether it's in response to the news or to something else that someone in the dialogue said.
If you think any of the animals would be silent, narrate why and what they're doing or thinking about instead.
Conclude the dialogue by describing how the first animal leaves the scene and (briefly) what they are going to do next.
Bonus: Describe what happens next with some or all of the other animals.
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Weird writing trick that might work for somebody else: I have gotten *much* better at writing a Pratchettian "tell the story to yourself" draft when I started writing them as numbered lists.
All the psychological baggage that goes into trying to even start writing down a story goes away when I format it as a list. So does the feeling that I have to get it "right" (polished, finished, final) from the very beginning.
I do this in programs that have a numbered list format option (which is almost anything that's not a plain text editor), so I don't have to renumber the items if I decide I need to insert a new one. This means making it a numbered list doesn't add any overhead.
One thing I'm finding very useful when planning out my time use for a day when I intend to work on multiple things is:
I make it a part of the plan that I'll give more time to something if I'm on a roll with it and don't want to stop...
...but if I hit the end of the allocated time for it and I'm behind because it's hard and it's not working or something went wrong, then I stop. There was an attempt, possibly some progress. But the time is up, time to move on to something else.
This is useful on a day to day basis because it means I'm not losing half my day or more to something that's a struggle, but it's even more useful on a longer term basis because it lets me see when something is just not working
Thread up and down, but this is blockchain tech in a nutshell: solution in search of a problem, technology that does nothing but in a complicated enough way it's easy to convince yourself it MUST be doing something, and the only sellable product is hype attached to the concept.
Yeah, I feel like all the "but now the state can't touch it!" hype about crypto forgets that the state has last resorts not easily available to the rest of us, such as wanton and merciless violence.
And people are apt to answer "But they wouldn't know where to direct that violence!"
But the state also allows itself to use terrorism tactics. If they can only get 1 in 1,000 transgressors, they need to do something horrific enough to that 1 to dissuade the rest.
This thing I think is at the root of a lot of cis gender ideology and how they tie it in with sexuality: to ciscentric society, gender is waaaay more about sorting people for sexual relations than it is for anything else.
They can't imagine someone having the conviction that they are a particular gender unless there was some sexual reason because that (to them) is what gender is for.
Like, whatever reason it is that I say I'm a woman... if I'm not being motivated by a gendered sexual desire, it's unfathomable to them that I could care that much for it to be worth saying so or throwing my life into upheaval over it.
I'm working on a micro RPG (not a one pager, for more reasons than just "I'm so verbose it should be verboten") where the players are a group of ghosts awakened by an (unwittingly) psychic family moving into the house they haunt.
The game's setting lore assumes that ghosts are dormant most of the time because psychic energy leaking from the living is what animates them and this energy is most available when humans are afraid of ghosts without being confident ghosts exist.
Fear activates the psychic energy, but fear of ghosts specifically directs it towards the ghosts. If the humans are certain that the ghosts are real, though, their energy redirects inward as they attempt to deal rationally with the situation.
It was the bathtub running at odd hours of the night. It's not unusual for someone to have insomnia and take a bath at three in the morning in our house, but when we heard the water running when we were all awake downstairs, we knew something was up.
The footprints were a big clue, and so were the glimpses of a spectral tail whipping around a corner, but of course we couldn't confirm it was an alligator until we got a good look at the snout... at the cost of a rotisserie chicken. #NiNoBilMa#GhostGator
When we were getting glimpses of it, it was hard to be sure of what we were seeing... but when we saw it going through the locked door up into the attic as though the door wasn't there, we knew the gator wasn't.