Game Drop! Affairs In Blood

The important things have passed, the post apocalypse concept is simply a fun world building thing at this moment thankfully. But man the, those dragons... I don't know why I became such a dragon lover in the past few months. I've been sleeping on em for years wtf. But I don't need another if idea, or any creative project by any means.

Wanting to make a story about dragons and another post apocalypse story. Why must my brain come up with ideas when I'm supposed to be doing important things, I must focus plss

When writing a character struggling with shame

Shame isn’t guilt. Guilt says I did something bad. Shame says I am something bad. It’s corrosive. It rewrites self-worth. And most of the time, it whispers, not screams.

✧ Start with silence. Characters carrying shame don’t confess it on page one. They avoid. They deflect. They joke. They become perfect. Shame thrives in secrets. Let it fester before it speaks.

✧ Show the disconnect. They don’t feel lovable, even when they are. Compliments bounce off them. Praise feels like a setup. They think kindness is a trick. Show them flinching at affection.

✧ Give it a backstory. Shame doesn’t appear from nowhere. Maybe they were told they were too much. Not enough. A mistake. Shame is always planted by someone else, then internalized. Find that origin moment and make it hurt.

✧ Let them sabotage good things. They get a healthy relationship? They run. They succeed? They downplay it. They get seen? They shut down. Shame convinces people they don’t deserve good things and they’ll act accordingly.

✧ Body language matters. Hunched shoulders. Arms crossed. Averted eyes. Shrinking into themselves. Shame has a physical posture. Write it.

✧ Watch their inner voice. Shame doesn’t sound like “I’m the worst.” It sounds like “Why would they care about me?”or “Of course I messed it up.” It’s casual. Constant. Cruel.

✧ Make healing slow and clumsy. Shame doesn’t vanish after one pep talk. It takes safe spaces. Relearning. A lot of awkward baby steps. Let your character accept one small good thing and then panic about it later.

✧ Let them rewrite their own story. Eventually, they’ll have to look at who they were and say, “Even then, I was trying. Even then, I deserved love.” Let them get there. Let it be earned. Let it feel impossible and then let it happen anyway.

Hope to make the prologue and maybe chapter 1 of the demo out by the end of May? Once I can seriously sit down and bang out something.

But the overall story will be the prologue, and 7 chapters. Each chapter will take place over the course of a day, so the whole story is over the course of a week.

Technically I have one more week and should be workin on my last essay but I am excited. Anyways I’ve begun writin the prologue~ 

I still dunno how to code thought :), but that’s whatevs until later.

Clawing at the walls of my enclosure. The enclosure is the 2 week end of the semester period. It cannot end soon enough

Great trees, man. Wheres the forest?

BREAKING NEWS: Writer discovers for the millionth time that they can write whatever they want. Join us now to see if the lesson will stick.

becoming more and more cognizant of my tendency to swing between past and present tense depending on what the feels more fitting. I should probably stop doing that, but y'know whatever really. I'll shimmy with that once I punch out this draft.

Worldbuilding Snippet: How to Get Magic

In the world of Talea there are two main ways for humans to attain magic.

The most common way is to get bind your soul to an familiar. A familiar is an incomplete being of pure magic, their forms are unstable and will eventually fizzle out of existence like a spark of ember in the wind. You act as their host, anchoring them to you. In turn they become apart of you, and you are able to harness their magic. It is a great honor to be deemed worthy by an familiar, at least most people hope you and bound to one because it deemed you worthy. Regardless of the reason why you are bound to one, an familiar is a life long companion; aside from practice a large part of using this joint power is getting along with your familiar. The better the bond, the more stably you can use the magic. This is especially important if you are bound with a particularly powerful familiar.

The much rarer way is to be imbued with magic by a more powerful being. May it be dragons, nyms, the Aasha or perhaps even the Imowu themselves, magic acquired in this manner tends to be more wild and unpredictable and come with less than desirable side effects. It is also debated whether any human who acquires power in this way is still fully human after the fact.

There is a 'secret' third way though. A human carefully handcrafted by the gods themselves, birthed or torn apart and remade some time after; a human made in such a manner is something to be feared. As far as humanity knows this has happened only once, and the scars it had left on existence itself have still jot healed.

“Find me a house where no one can ever come. I like talking to you, but to no one else in the whole world.”

— Virginia Woolf, from a letter to Lytton Strachey wr. c. September 1925