No annotations after page 30; must have gone for a lie down. That would be totes litro me btw.

Hi. I have a passion project that is nearly finished and that I dream of publishing one day. I am participating in a discourse that has come up quite a bit recently: I am a human writing a romance between narwhals.

My story is about a narwhal investment banker trying to balance love and success in the Arctic Ocean. The novel tackles themes of animal biology, hierarchy, vulnerability, cetacean identity and the choice of love. My main character isn't simply "just a narwhal." The reality of being an animal is centre-stage—not a fetishization of a species I am not a part of.

I have lived my life as a human, and have never been a narwhal. Never fucked a narwhal either. I cannot understand the full reality of a narwhal, and never will. I've always been fascinated by heated Arctic tension in literature. I have done a lot of research on tusks, migration, and pod dynamics, but I know that my research could never substitute for firsthand experience. I accept that this may be logistically difficult: I plan on finding narwhals to beta-read my book. But I will always be a human, not a narwhal, with the unfortunate risk of being mistaken for a 4chan zoophile.

My general question is this: should writers tell stories about species they are not part of? Should you instead leave room for actual narwhals to tell the stories you are trying to tell?

So what's your opinion of this matter? Will PETA get involved if I write this? Will my publisher tell me to fuck off for writing narwhal porn? Will the narwhal audience feel uncomfortable if they find out I'm a human?

Should I keep writing more about animals? Or should I just let narwhals write it for them?

Curious to hear your thoughts!

Haha you guys ever think about if Moby Dick was actually about a literal penis instead of a whale? Haha, it’s funny cause it’s like a classic and rather than regarding it as one, we are making crude jokes.
Credentials:
I READ all the time. Just how everyone says you should.
I do not use my computer to write. EVER!
I am a classic form writer. Using stone to strike the words onto excavated cave wall tablets.

I’ve preserved your text as requested.

However, I wouldn’t recommend posting this. The joke feels forced, and I’m unclear why you’ve included a “Credentials” section.

Would you like me to revise it?

Seeing all the adverb discourse, I propose a motion to replace the use of suddenly with swift as a coursing river.

Shout out your favorite way to replace adverbs. Don't give me that argument of just use stronger words. I don't know that many or how a thesaurus works.

I met a bestselling author at a book signing, and she had time for a few writing questions on positioning your book to agents. They were questions caused by what I had heard on Reddit. The answers the author gave were disappointing. And she could point to her recent books I haven't read yet. She obviously does not have the authority to answer these compared to Reddit.

I don't know what it is about trad pub authors. I can tell you the demographics lean old and thus less experienced using Reddit.

My best advice is read Reddit (old and new posts). They're all relevant to how you position your own inspired stories to agents. The posts don't just become "old" and irrelevant over the years. The commenters don't become dinosaurs, as one called them before. She said to be upfront with the agent about the direction you went with the characters and explain why, especially if it's uncommon for that reading audience. I'm keeping it broad because my personal story isn't unique.

What I have found is that I prefer Reddit over trad-pub authors. You may never get the chance to talk to Reddit posters in person, but their posts generally have the answers we writers seek. That is an additional reason why we must read Reddit.

I think avoiding trad pub writers is the best thing you can do as an author. Don't learn from them. Learn from Reddit. See what the users did. Ask yourself why did it work in this instance. Let that be your confidence that, yes, you can write a story inspired by those novels that had something uncommon and special in them. You don't need trad pub successes telling you that you can't because it doesn't fit nicely with your target audience.

ps. I can't believe this post is getting downvoted currently. If they don't like advice from Reddit users, then what is their own advice worth?

I see a few posts here about men writing woman but I am the opposite, a woman whose main characters are mostly men. I'm afraid they might not be manly enough. Like, do I have to have them punch each other at least once a chapter? or is tough talking enough? What other manly traits should I give my main characters so my readers won't know that I, a woman, wrote them?

Hi all,

I'm writing my peak novel about this girl who is chosen to boobily boob everywhere, but I've ran into a bit of a hiccup.

One scene in the novel is this absolute cinema conversation about sesbian lex, but before I knew it the word count of it racked up to over 200k words. The book is about a million words in total.

There's no action between them or anything, just an intimate and emotional scene between these longing souls. Would it be boring to read about sesbian lex for that long? Or is it just about right? Let me know your thoughts!

OG writers, I just started writing today. Sounds like a really fun hobby.

I'm still learning from scratch. Learning all 26 letters made me sweat a bit. It was a good exercise.

Writers who've been writing since this activity came out, sorry if this question sounds impatient, but how much experience would I need to finally make witty, relatable one-liners?

My first language is pain, and I truthfully only understand pain and suffering for the most part. Since I barely have a grasp beyond rudimentary formulations of the English language, do I have any hopes of eventually succeeding in the craft of writing and being formally published (in English)? I want to go on to publish an intense tragedy spanning multiple epic poems that redefine entire cultural perceptions of literature and entertainment. I can see my inability to properly translate my first language into English every moment I draw breath on this wretched Earth. I picked up pain pretty early on in my life and mastered it before I can remember, but English has always been a struggle for me. Is there maybe another language that translates better or am I just another lost cause doomed to live a life unable to ever be understood or seen beyond a meaningless existence defined by nothing? Thank you for reading and sorry for my poor English.

With the condition already set that it must be two sentences, and therefore already posseses an emergent soft limit on length, which ebbs and flows from the wit and wisdom of the writer, who finds himself restrained by tyranny of the other, that non-writer who always restricts, and also by the audience who has been conditioned by these same restraints, deforming rather than reinforcing that same condition, as can clearly be seen, it becomes clear that the 300 character limit, a deeply authoritarian mesure, is nothing short of stalinistic hitlerism.

A revolt, not of class but of culture -- a cultural revolution -- must be organised, if not for the liberation of the writer than at least for the liberation of art, which rises so far above the men who make it, so as to unite the people, and,in effect, to educate them on their repression, against the tyranny of the moderators who shacke the author, whom therefore make revolt necessary in the first place.

I mean it must end somehow; but only the Lord knows when it will, and I have run out of most punctuation, so tell me: should I invent new ones or should I finally put this sentence to rest...

For the past eight years I have queried probably every single agent in the United States and spent my entire savings plus the money I got from the city after my grandma ran me over with a bus (she was a city bus driver and she was doing A LOT of cocaine that Christmas) on travelling to writing conferences all over the country. No one, and I mean NO ONE, not my girlfriend or her husband or their kids has expressed ANY interest in my 80,000-word novel "Moist Tomorrow".

"Moist Tomorrow" is a political thriller about a hotshot FBI agent named John Fetterman who doesn't play by the rules. During a routine investigation into an illegal kombucha ring, Agent Fetterman discovers two Chinese men who take off all their clothes and lick each other from head to toe. If he can't stop them before they reach the wider population, they'll get everything sticky and wet with their damp bodies.

THIS IS EXCITING!! THIS IS RIVETING!! WHY WON'T ANYONE READ MY BOOK???????

I'm done. I'm tired. I was diagnosed with gonorrhea today. I don't know how much time I have left, but I don't want to spend it trying to get validation from the publishing industry. I'm going to focus on enjoying life and cherishing my final days with my girlfriend and her husband and their kids.

To everybody still hunkering down in the querying trenches, good luck.

I met an orphaned little fucker in Gotham once. He grew up, put on an edgy Hot Topic cape, and started calling himself a superhero. Never smiled. Everyone asked him, "Why so serious?"

"Justice!" he said.

Everyone laughed at him. After all, what could justice possibly entail in a peaceful city with a zero crime rate?

And admittedly, I was curious. I found his conviction encouraging. Everyone needs justice, after all. I could feel how much it means to him. And surely, a man passionate about justice must have a point. That should justify it.

I don't know what it is about Gotham. The population seems increasingly disillusioned and senile, and thus becomes less concerned with justice.

If I may, the superheroes in Gotham's history cared deeply about justice. They weren't merely symbols of heroism, nor the edgelords people made them out to be. They were inspirations.

What I have found is that I would rather learn from these old superheroes with a strong passion for justice than from these stale, lifeless, weak people. We may never get to speak to the heroes of old, but their legacy lives on. In my case, it has inspired me to beat the crap out of civilians who laugh at us in the name of justice. I consider it a small tribute.

That's why I became Batguy's sidekick.

I think breaking the bones of these civilians is one of the best things you can do as someone with passion. Just look at what we're doing right now. We're beating this guy to a pulp because, again, it's justice. You can't expect everyone to understand what you're doing, especially when they're the ones receiving it. Besides, if we let the people we're delivering justice to decide what justice looks like, we'd never get anything done.

So, again, avoid listening to the civilians of Gotham. Some people will never appreciate the people trying to make their city a better place.

ps. I can't believe the civilians and the Gotham News Network are portraying us as villains. These god-damned pseudo-heroes. If they don't like heroism—or justice—then what are their morals?

Call me a fantasy author

I've spent the last 12 years honing my novella. My OC MC is Brian Stevens. He's a middle income secret shopper. He likes vases (don't worry, it's not unhealthy) and he likes toblerones and trombones because they sound like they should be related but they're not. Maybe one should be a smaller or thinner version of the other? Not sure.

Anyway, there was a news story today about a bus driver called Stephanie Bryan or r/uknews .. she got fired due to bad farts and bad higine (how TF do you spell that) and people thought she was carrying hazardous waste under her hat or something.

Now I'm thinking I need to abandon my novella because people will notice the names are 46% the same?

I don't want people to think the book is political. People might think I have opinions about buses, but that's not something I'm comfortable committing to right now.

How controversial are buses anyway? Could this controversy maybe even boost my sales? If so, I could name another character Breen Stovens? Is there an optimal number of B.S characters?

He’s so nasty in this world that his very first victim was his own grandpa, whom Michael molested when he was just five years old.

I have nothing against Michael personally. I’m just doing this so I can stop this mother fucker from ever wanting to produce a film based on my work when it blows up.

And it goes without saying, Christopher Nolan appears as a biracial firefighter with a 15-inch cock.

My character lives in a fictitious land with a very complicated language, but he works as a professional translator to a neighboring country. I hate AI just for context so what I want to know is if I should hire a professional linguist to create the two languages so that I can have him translating documents and scientific articles from one language to the other in the story or if I should just let AI do this for me.

Inspiration

So, I've noticed this phenomenon for a while now. In this sub, whenever someone posts their writing for feedback and mentions that they're an ESL speaker, the first response they get is to write in Klingon.
If someone wanted to write Klingon, why would they post their writing in English in this sub in the first place? They're trying to improve their English, and instead of helping them do that, people are pointing them in a different direction they never asked to be pointed in. It is not helpful but patronizing.
Many great writers have been ESL speakers. It's the writer's choice to decide which language they want to write in, rather than having others poke their noses into their business and tell them what they should do.
SulaDpu'mo' Satlho'! 'ej yIqaw: yIghItlh neH!

Do not be nice, though yet it is in draft. A man cannot guess these things, he either is the thing, or he is not (as said Friedrich Nietzsche). I would of you ask to forsake even your conscience but I will not (though, you may think, I have asked this of you) for truly fear. Enough of that. Look to the work. Inspired by that of the Waste Land, Cantos, Blood Meridian, Kafka's Metamorphosis, the terminal comedy (as I have called it, mock at that what you will) of OCD, and much others works (Dostoevsky, Dante, Melville, Joyce, onward-onward). I have not been able to properly set even these months later the first chapter to... a presentable degree in my eyes, but I will present it yet. Perhaps you will laugh at this too ("He plays as if he were the Underground Man!")

As the title says, I just finished my story inspired by Robin Hood.

I was heavily inspired by Robin Hood as a kid.

Fittingly, the storyline came to me after I began raising funds from nearby homeless people here in New York. It wasn't exactly voluntary on their part, but claiming the money straight from their homeless bowl was empowering.

But I knew it wasn't enough—I have to get to the real level of Robin Hood's larceny.

After my career of being a redistribution beneficiary in New York came to an end, I flew to England and dug up the graves of every single possible author who might have written Robin Hood. I brought them back to my basement, sat them in a circle of chairs, and asked for their perspectives.

The grotesquerie gave me an idea: Why learn about Robin Hood? I'd steal their authorship instead.

So I began working with them. We passed ideas back and forth, and came up with Robin Hood, but stealing from the poor and giving it to myself. I wrote it. It was an imaginative, creative and more importantly, collaborative process.

It was a tremendously fun experience. Reading the notes buried with them gave me moments that I found genuinely funny and touching enough to put in the book.

IMHO, it's a very satisfactory story. One that fulfilled my obsessions.

I'm not sure if anyone other than capitalist pigs would relate to it, though. And I'm sure the "morally correct people" will think it's disgusting and call the cops. But that's fine. I made it for myself and my collaborators—whether they like it or not.

Just wanted to share my experience.

Me & my thousand-year-old co-authors.

I (26m) and my ghost riders (32f, 35f, and 24f) want my booty.

I couldn’t pay them after they wrote my last book, since it flopped.

I wouldn’t mind taking all three of them as punishment, but they said they’ll use something bad during it.

The words that came out of her mouth was able to freeze my entire body. My face fell into a cold slumber because of it.

She said a word that shouldn’t even be uttered to me. The word click to my mind like a verb impregnating an adjective.

The thing they said was something that curl my toes in a warm bed at night. It was something that no woman on earth would ever dare to.

I’ll tell you it; it was something so evil that you can’t just believe you. Enough stalling, they told me something.

I would tell you it and it was a—-

This is the halfway point of the story, which brings today’s sponsor: Chat GPT.

Do you not want your butthole eviscerated by 3 dominant women? Sign up for free and we’ll test that story of yours. Cya!

——-

They said they were going to use the thing on me— a position and an item to narrow it down.

I gasped as they said they were going to use it (sorry I’m struggling to say what the thing is).

“No,” I yelled. “You can’t use the thing on me!”

The women laughed and pull out the thing. “It’ll be three seconds!”

I stared at the thing in horror. “No, it’s too sharp!”

The women laughed and took another thing out. “The things are thinging, Yoink-A-Daisy.”

I stand to the corner as the things surrounded me.

Recap:

I (26m) and my ghost riders (32f, 35f, and 24f) want my booty.

I couldn’t pay them after they wrote my last book, since it flopped.

I wouldn’t mind taking all three of them as punishment, but they said they’ll use something bad during it.

The words that came out of her mouth was able to freeze my entire body. My face fell into a cold slumber because of it.

She said a word that shouldn’t even be uttered to me. The word click to my mind like a verb impregnating an adjective.

The thing they said was something that curl my toes in a warm bed at night. It was something that no woman on earth would ever dare to.

I’ll tell you it; it was something so evil that you can’t just believe you. Enough stalling, they told me something.

____

Episode 2:

They surrounding me with it. I look at the… thing. It was a soft tool wedged between their fingers.

“THE THING!” I shouted.

The women giggled like maniacs.

“Yoink-A-Daisy~, your ass is mine!”

I yelp and grab the recoding. “If I get my butthole stretched, I’m delaying the thing’s reveal by 3 episodes.

One Piece pacing later:

The thing is a whip.