Writing on Eturnip.com

715

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Yep. Still writing stories this week. In fact, I was in the middle of writing one when I left to write this post and I really should be getting back to it.

My last story was fine, I guess. I liked the premise and the some of the execution, but it needed to be much longer than it was and some character interactions need to be strengthened quite a lot. I will sit on it for a few weeks before going back to it and slotting it into my edit list somewhere. There are definitely several stories ahead of it in the list, but I will get to it eventually.

I need to get back to the story I was working on though. This one might end up being a little too short.

714

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

For the next few weeks I will be working on a small handful of stories. And punching up some others to get them ready to submit. And I will be submitting the ones that are already punched up and waiting. And I will be resubmitting the ones that have already been rejected at least once. And I will be looking for new places to submit stories. And I will be working on game art and code for my own game projects. And I will be creating graphics for other game projects.

So pretty much just like any other few weeks then.

In short through, I will probably write a little less here over the next few weeks, since I will be spending my writing brain power working on stories.

704

Mon, 04 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I hit a strange milestone recently. This is both the most stories I have had out on submission and the longest I have had multiple stories out on submission.

Let’s be completely honest, most, if not all, of them will be rejected. Now that’s not a defeatist attitude, that’s just the way this game goes. Most stories get rejected. Sometimes several times.

Maybe that means the story isn’t good. But maybe not, maybe it just means that the publisher had a similar story already, or that they don’t like that sort of thing, or that they have a specific theme they are going for in this issue and that particular story doesn’t match. Maybe they were just having a bad day and wanted to take it out on that story… who knows. Not really my business to know, and my job isn’t to cater to the whims of someone that I don’t know and may never meet. My job is to write these stories as well as I can and try to sell them.

That’s why this is an interesting milestone. As soon as any one of these stories is rejected, I actually have somewhere lined up to send it next. That’s a different thing for me. Typically I have one or two stories ready and I either have nowhere to send them, or they are already sold and I have nothing else in my back pocket to follow it up with.

I don’t know if I will ever sell any of these stories, but as long as I don’t suddenly sell all of them (a very unlikely eventuality) I will spend the next half year or more with at least one story out on submission. And I think that’s kind of a neat step in the right direction.

698

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

For the first time in quite a while, I have several stories out on submission.

If you have never sent stories out or submitted stories to a publisher, just sending the stories out means almost nothing.

The most likely thing that will happen is that these stories will be rejected. I will then have to either rework them to make them better or just send them back out someplace else. But, I’m not gonna lie, it feels good to have stories submitted rather than just sitting on my hard drive not doing anything.

I already had a handful of stories out and I just sent out another one. I know it might be a nice fantasy to imagine that I write these posts just seconds before you read them, but often I start one sometime around Tuesday or Wednesday and then finish it up on Sunday night so that it can get posted on Monday. Between starting this post and finishing it, I submitted another story.

I think it just feels nice to have them out there. I would rather that they were out there and published, but out there on submission is pretty good too.

Wish my handful of stories luck.

692

Mon, 09 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I just finished writing and editing another very short story and I am all out of words. The story writing will be slowing down after next week so I will probably be more interested in writing here again. Until then, I hope you have been enjoying these slightly more burnt out posts.

681

Mon, 24 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I just finished the latest rounds of revision on a couple of my stories. One, I think, is ready to send out now. The other might need another pass, but it’s getting close. These two are relatively short stories, so they are quicker to work on, but I do have a few longer ones that need some love. For those ones I have to work up some nerve before diving back into them. One thing though. I have been writing short stories for a few years now, so I have a backlog of ones that I haven’t finished polishing or sent out anywhere, and every once in a while I discover one that I had written, but completely forgotten about. While that is a strange feeling, it does mean that I won’t be running out of material to shine up and send out any time soon. That is in addition to the small handful of stories that have been rejected several times and I don’t really know what to do with now. They might end up in some sort of collection sometime, or maybe I will just post them up here if they can’t find some place that will publish them.

That’s all for this post I guess. I used up most of my word energy editing those stories. Maybe in some distant future I will be able to tell you about them, because they will be published someplace.

677

Mon, 27 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

It’s a funny thing, when you go back to edit older stories. You notice things that you missed the first few times around.

The terrible parts stand out, of course. Stark and prickly. It’s hard to say why you ever wrote them in the first place. It’s easy to yank them out by the roots to make way for new sentences that fit the flow of the story much better. Well, maybe not easy, but doable.

It’s always the good parts that catch you by surprise though. The things that made you think the story was worth writing in the first place. The subtle things. The parts that set off little parts of you like emotional sparklers.

Before you go back to edit, it’s hard to imagine those good parts will even be there. I mean, there was a reason that you moved away from the story. There was a reason it sat, untouched, for so long. It must be terrible. It just has to be.

It never is. There is always some core to the story that made you want to write it. Something that made you stick with it long enough to get it all down at least once.

They always say that you should kill your darlings. Fuck that. Pull the weeds that are choking your darlings. Clear a space for them to grow. Those great parts of your stories need tending.

Editing isn’t a hostile act. It’s creative and nurturing. It’s making sure that the great parts of your stories are free to flourish.

667

Mon, 18 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I recently finished the game Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. If you haven’t played the game and are spoiler averse, maybe you should just skip this one. I’m going to use this game as an example, but it might get a little bit spoilery.

A little while ago I wrote a thing about the concept of stakes in a story, and how a lot of people, including writers, misunderstand what stakes are and their function in effective fiction. My argument there boiled down to stakes being about empathy, not rising danger in the plot. Stakes are about you, as the audience, empathizing with the characters and what they personally have to lose or gain. Not in a material sense, but in an emotional sense. It doesn’t matter if they are a character that was always going to win, like a superhero or James Bond. Stakes are what James Bond has to gain or lose emotionally. Everything external is plot, not stakes. It’s the how, not the why. Stakes are about why.

The main characters of Clair Obscur are not only functionally immortal, they are mostly fictional. And by saying that, I mean that they are, in narrative, not real people. They are fictional constructs created by other characters in the story. Still, I dare someone to play through that game and not feel deeply for those characters. The creators of Clair Obscur understand stakes.

There is a point at the end of the game where one of the characters simply sits and stares at the camera. They convey a cold anger that forces you, as the player, to contend with all of decisions in the fictional world of the game. Have you treated this character well. Just because they aren’t real, does that give you give you the right to be dismissive of them. It is a moment that works on many levels. It works in the fiction of the game, but it is also unnerving to you, the actual person playing a video game. You have to accept the gravity of your choices. You empathize with this character, and you finally understand the stakes. By that point it is too late. The die has been cast.

The game includes plenty of apocalyptic moments, but it also understands that those aren’t stakes. Every characters connections with one another, those are valuable. Those are stakes.

There are so many more moments that I could mention, but I think that I have already been spoilery enough. If you have any intention at all of playing Clair Obscur, you should stop reading now and start working your way through the game. It is a really great game and it deserves your eyeballs.

665

Mon, 04 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I just finished reviewing a whole raft of other peoples stories. you might think that it’s difficult to write a story, but trying to constructively critique other peoples stories is so much more difficult.

It’s not like the problem is trying to build up bad stories, or find flaws in good stories. All of the stories I was reading were very well written. it’s more like it was a matter of fine degrees. There might be one tiny thing in a story that otherwise works fantastically, that catches me as slightly off. Or there will be a story that I didn’t feel was working as it was, but is technically so well written. The writer could absolutely adjust the story so that it would work for me. They have the skill. But maybe they shouldn’t try to change it so that it works for me. Maybe I am not their audience. Maybe their audience wants exactly what they wrote.

So there you go. It’s very difficult. I want to be encouraging. Like I said, the writing is almost always great, but I was asked to provide suggestions on ways to improve it, so I tried.

I don’t envy editors. Seems like a difficult job.

664

Mon, 28 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’m working on the last story in a group of stories. A bouquet of stories. Will I ever clean them up and send them off to get published? Who knows. Sometimes I just write to write, ya know. Anyway, I had this story idea worked out, but it wasn’t really crystallized. Like, all the vibes were there, but I didn’t have the details. So, instead of typing in random things, I went to exercise. I have a pretty strong belief in running background processes. When you aren’t actively trying to solve a problem, but are engaged in some other task that is more or less automatic, my brain at least, runs background processes. That’s when I figure out solutions to so many problems. Or, if not solutions, different angles of attack on particular problems. So I went to exercise and, whoosh, a whole wave of concrete ways to solve these story ideas flooded in. I had to stop at one point so that I could type up some point form story structure. Now, I’m back at the keyboard, and other than this short aside, I have been typing in actual prose rather than just mashing away at point form notes. I have a bunch more words to tap into this keyboard, so I think I will go do that. If I don’t it will be very late before I get it all punched in.

662

Mon, 14 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’m still writing short stories. Normally, I am pretty good at writing something based off prompts. It’s like rapid fire word association. I get a prompt, or a couple of prompts, as input, and my brain comes up with several potential stories a few minutes later. They are almost all terrible story ideas, to be sure, but I don’t really get ‘blocked’. I think I have recently experienced the closest I have ever had to being blocked. The last couple of stories that I have worked on have been more difficult than usual, but I think I might know why. I think I might just be less satisfied with my usual ideas. That’s not to say that I think my older stories are bad, but the seed ideas for them, I might pass on those now rather than writing those first few lines. So it’s less of a block and more of a slower ramp up and more searching before landing on an idea that I think might make for a good story. I don’t know if that means that I will be writing better things in the future, or maybe worse things. Maybe this is just normal, maybe it’s a passing phase. In any case, I do have an idea for this current story now, so I better get back to writing it.

660

Mon, 30 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’m writing a new flash story (under 1000 words) but this time I’m working on making it particularly ‘voicey’. I like to adopt a character for a story every now and then. It isn’t exactly easy to do, but it is an interesting challenge.

Well, this story isn’t going to write itself, so I’m gonna get back to it.

656

Mon, 02 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I have a neat little stack of stories that I am punching up for submission right now. That’s nice and all, but sometimes it can be a bit tricky to take these flash length pieces and rework them in a way that fills them out, without losing that flash length immediacy.

I’ve written somewhere around 20 stories near to 1000 words each. They are all composed of a tight core idea, with very little room left over for character development and world building. Sometimes I manage to fit one or the other in there, but getting a story out of these flash length pieces that feels complete in the way I want, is tricky.

On the other hand, they all have a rapid pace to them that makes setups and payoffs feel snappy and, occasionally, land harder than normal. So the trick is, how to add all the fun character development and world building without losing that propulsive quality.

After a few dozen more stories I will probably have some idea how to pull off both.

649

Mon, 14 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I had been writing a different thing about games for this post, but I thought instead that I would say this.

My story Birds, Vibrant and Wild, published in Kaleidotrope’s winter 2025 issue, received a nice review and recommendation in Locus.

While that is pretty cool, I did also receive an amazingly quick rejection for another story that I thought was not too bad, so there is some balance.

Anyway, if you haven’t read Birds, Vibrant and Wild, you should go do that. You can read it safely knowing that I’m not the only one who thinks you should.

642

Mon, 24 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

At the end of these story competitions it is customary to write a summary of all of your stories and how you arrived at them.

While I do enjoy reading other writers summaries, I really don’t like writing them myself.

I always sort of figure that I wrote the story, people read the story, that’s the end of it. If they want to tell me that they read the story, great. If they want to ask me anything about it, less great. Either I won’t have an answer, or worse, the answer I have won’t be very satisfying. It will probably be something along the lines of “oh, I lifted that particular bit of the story from an episode of Go-Bots”. And I don’t think that will be what most people are looking for.

I like to take concepts that I have seen in other media, and then rework them to be more grounded or more human. That’s about it. I do come up with new things along the way, or sometimes I might start with a “what if this anime went a different way” and then build from there, but I just don’t think knowing that makes the experience of the story any better.

That said, I will finish writing my summary, because I know that I enjoy reading other peoples, so maybe someone will enjoy reading mine.

641

Mon, 17 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Well, I wrapped up the last story for this short story competition thing. The results aren’t all in, but I did… fine.

A lot of my stories ended up somewhere in the middle of the list, but they got some decent comments. The thing with this competition is, it’s not really a competition at all. Really it’s a good way to get a lot of other writers, some of whom are very good, to look over a first draft of your work and offer a lot of opinions and advice.

The competition part of it Is just for fun, and a good way to try to push yourself, but really you do it for the reviews and comments.

Now I get to take all those comments and edit up these stories to send out. Weirdly enough, even though this is a flash (under 1000 words) competition, I think this might be the first year that I actually wrote things that could fit in a flash format.

Time to edit.

639

Mon, 03 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

If you read these, you’re probably getting as tired of reading about writing as I am about writing about writing. I just finished editing and submitting a story, so I’m low on words at the moment. I think I’ll just leave it at that. Maybe next week I’ll write about a game!

638

Mon, 27 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The Global Game Jam was this past weekend. And I didn’t participate. Because I was doing this writing jam. A jam is a jam though. One of the major parts of a jam is that you are given a prompt, or a bunch of prompts and what you make from those prompts will be anyone’s guess. I have done a lot of jams by now and I have a few rules for dealing with prompts. It turns out, for me at least, the rules are the same if I am jamming on a game or jamming on some writing. I’ll drop some of them here.

never take the prompt literally. If the prompt is, say, breaking glass, don’t just make a game about breaking glass. Like a breakout clone where all the bricks are glass. That’s dull. Maybe you are in a submarine and you are trying to patch a leaking window before too much water comes in or it shatters and kills you. Maybe you are doing a workplace simulation and you are trying to break the glass ceiling. Maybe you doing a crossing that transparent bridge… wait. No. Squid Game already did that. Just do something that isn’t the most obvious thing and you will have so much more fun.
Combine prompts. If you happen to get more than one prompt, or even if you didn’t, mix a couple together. This seems like it would make it more difficult, but, strangely enough, I usually find it makes the entire process easier. Something about adding extra constraints seems to make it more clear what sort of idea to chase.
Arrive with an idea. Now don’t come in thinking that you will make a certain sort of game or a certain sort of story, but set yourself some goals. One game jam I came in and my only goal was to animate something. Another jam, I only wanted to do pixel art. If it’s a writing jam, think about writing something sad, or in a strange style. Arrive thinking that you will write a sonnet and then work the prompts into that structure. But, of course, be ready to ditch that structure if you come up with a better idea during the jam. It will happen.
Do something fun. Doing jams is stressful, but it can be a very positive sort of stress. If you aren’t having fun with an idea pretty much right away, you definitely won’t be having fun when you are trying to squash some impossible bug at 3am. Same goes for writing… except without the bugs. Fun doesn’t have to mean funny or light hearted either. Sometimes making something very grim can be fun.

If you do any, or all, of those your jam experience will be so much better, believe me.

637

Mon, 20 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The writing competition I am in adheres to a very strict, very tight, word count. It’s pretty easy to blow past that limit and have to walk everything back, one word at a time. I managed to wrestle it down. This time. I have found this practice of hitting certain word counts really supercharges my editing. When you are looking for more concise ways to word things, you also find better ways to make an impact. Better ways to get to a certain feeling or vibe. You can’t count on long, flowery, descriptions. You need to get to the heart of what you are trying to say, quickly and efficiently. I have found that this practice had the effect of making me more aggressive when editing, even when I didn’t need to hit a specific limit. My current stories are more compact. I don’t know that this will work for everyone, but just like doing a lot of reps can strengthen your muscles, a lot of editing makes you better at editing. If you are looking to improve your writing, I fully recommend joining a similar competition or jam.

636

Mon, 13 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’m doing another one of those writing contest things. Writing very short stories every weekend for at least a little while.

I’ve only just started, so I don’t really have much to say about it yet.

What I have done though, is learned a little more about how to use Obsidian.

This is the first time since I started using Obsidian that I have had to export something written in it to a manuscript format. I have worked on some stories here in this app, but I had them in other places and other apps where the formatting had already been worked out.

You might think that it should be easy. Pick a font, set your line spacing and done, right? I wish. There are a lot of differences between how obsidian treats text and how other apps, like Word, treat text. It’s much simpler and more flexible, but it’s also not what people reading short stories want to see. A standard Word .doc or .docx format file is just nicer to look at in a lot of software.

I have found a bunch of .css snippets that are starting to get the format looking right, and I have a handful of ways to export. Some are easy, but aren’t quite right. Some take a few more steps, but seem to get the job done.

I know this though. After a few weeks of pushing out formatted stories, I will probably have a solid workflow. And that’s good, because I have a few stories here that I have to try to sell.

633

Mon, 23 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I would bet that everyone who writes fiction has some basic rules that they follow. Probably, a lot of them are rules learned from courses or instructional books on writing. At least a few of them will be something the writer came up with themselves. Some might even be unconscious or at least unvoiced directives.

I have a few rules for myself. They are simple things. Rules with lots of room in the margins. Here is a very short list.

The only grammar rule is clarity. Characters can get into trouble by accident, but they have to get out of trouble on purpose. Stakes are always personal.

I think the first two rules are fairly self explanatory. You could run any collection of words, use any punctuation, even modify spelling, but as long as your intentions are clear to the reader and it conveys the story you are intending to tell in the way you are trying to tell it, you’re good. Anyone who thinks that intentionally breaking grammar ‘rules’ is wrong, is a pedant who wouldn’t enjoy your story anyway. Shakespeare would have ignored them, and you can too.

The second one, I won’t get too much into. You know accidental solutions when you see them, and it never makes a story better.

The third one, I think needs some explanation, because I don’t think that people fully understand the concept of stakes.

Stakes in a story are not ‘the world could end’, ‘the universe is in danger’, or ‘someone could die”. None of those are stakes. They are plot. They are the answer to ‘what is happening in this story?’, not ‘why should I care?‘. Or, more important, why does a character in my story care, and why do I empathize with them. Stakes are about empathy.

You read a lot about things like superhero fatigue or that people find action movies boring. Often, they will often follow with, ‘If the audience knows the hero will succeed, there are no stakes’ , or that the stakes don’t feel realistic so they are taken out of the story. Of course it’s always painfully easy to point out exceptions, superhero movies that those same people enjoy, action movies that get them excited. Stakes are not about levels of danger, they are about empathy.

This is why the last rule on my list is there. Stakes are always personal. Stakes are not about the external events that put pressure on the protagonist. They are about the way the protagonist feels about them. They are not about the external people and things they could stand to lose. Stakes are about the parts of the character that could break as a result of those losses. The parts of their heart that couldn’t bear that level of suffering. Stakes are about burden. As an audience, we have to feel that burden too. Stakes are always personal, and stakes are about empathy.

So the next time you watch a show or read a book that leaves you feeling flat or unsatisfied, think about the stakes. Did they drive you to empathize with the protagonist. Did you feel what they feel. Did the writer make it matter to you. I think you will find, most attempts at stakes were only plot. They were an excuse for the action. They weren’t stakes at all. They weren’t personal.

If you really look at your favorite moments in any story I would guess that most of them don’t hinge on mortal danger. The risk isn’t life and limb. That can all be present, but the stakes will be emotional. If the hero survives this without saving the world, will they be able to live with themselves. Maybe it’s just a conversation. Is there something significant and personal to lose. Love, status, sense of self worth. Those are personal. Those are stakes.

When you write, make the stakes personal.

631

Mon, 09 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Well, I signed up for the weekend story writing competition again. It’s not for a few weeks, so I have time to back out if I want to.

I did consider that, instead of writing new stories for the contest, I would still block out that time for writing, but I would go back to some older stories that need a punch up. Try to finish more of them. Maybe even send them out and try to get them published. That seems like what I should do with these stories, right?

I have a small handful of stories that are a handful of edits away from being ready to submit somewhere. I have a few others that need some major reworking, but I haven’t given up on them yet. I think I only have a couple that I have firmly given up on. They will never see the light of day. I don’t think I even want to read them again to see if they could be fixed. But that’s okay.

There is a mild feeling of guilt that creeps in when I think about writing for one of these contests. It’s the thought of going to work on something new when there are perfectly good stories that still need attention siting, neglected, in a folder somewhere. Then again, the boost in general productivity I always have after working on one of these contests, or a game jam, is absolutely a real thing. So it might be the case that I need to shake off some cobwebs before I start back into those stories.

I don’t really have any answers. Who knows. I guess, either way, I’m going to be writing a bit more in January.

620

Mon, 23 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

So this is week two of using Obsidian to write these posts.

It’s just a tool, so using Obsidian hasn’t really changed how I write. I have used a lot of different word processors and WYSIWYG text editors. For a hot minute, I used VS Code to write. I have tried writing with a pen and paper and transferring the words to digital later. I really hated that and it doesn’t really align with the way my brain works.

I thought that using scrivener might change the way I write. It didn’t. Nothing really did. My process seems to be my process. I like to type. I like to have full freedom to change and edit on the fly. I like spellcheck. Any specialty tools don’t do much to change that.

The only thing that Obsidian has done for me is make it simpler. No converting documents. No changing file formats. No selecting fonts. Just writing. On whatever keyboard and screen I have available.

For the most part, I like to write with a small wireless keyboard on an iPad. I will use a full keyboard if I need to, but I sort of prefer this. It’s simple.

I think that’s what I like. I want to use Obsidian, because it’s simple. It’s quick, there is very little mental overhead, and I can pull out my phone and start using it in a few seconds.

It’s also very complicated. And I like that too.

The techy part of my brain that likes to have control over all the programs I use loved that I was able to set up my own GitHub repository for Obsidian and have everything sync through there. I can secure it how I like, and add the features I need without any of the cruft I’m never going to use.

When I write stories I like to have several documents open with my research and bits I have cut, but might use some other place. Doing that with Obsidian is trivial. It takes the best parts of VS Code and simplifies them down to only the essentials.

I know that I could use an Obsidian vault as a full blown project management system, and maybe someday I will, but for now I think I just really like the simplicity.

619

Mon, 16 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I’m testing out a new way of writing these post. I’m not sure if it will work for me yet, but I’ve been having problems with the way I have been doing it for the last (checks watch) ten years or so.

My method is usually to write them in google docs and then copy/paste them into whatever content management system I had going and then publish them to my website.

My site used to be hosted at one of the big hosting places as a custom built site. I changed over to one of them big Site Builder services for many years because they offered a really good deal and, up until a couple years ago, I was able to keep re-uping my subscription at that price. They stopped offering that price, so I opted to build the site myself and host it in a much more agnostic way. If, for whatever reason I have to change hosts now, I shouldn’t have to change my site at all.

This move has made it much easier for me to maintain my site, but I still had a problem. If I were to write a post on my iPad or on my phone, It became significantly more difficult to upload those to the site, at least not without turning on my PC to push the changes.

I have done some minor work on that, and now I can push changes and add posts from a few places, but writing the posts in google docs and then copy/pasting them had become fairly unwieldy. If there were any images or videos attached to a post, it became difficult to move a post without breaking formatting.

I have just now moved over to Obsidian for writing posts, which has the added benefit of being Markdown from the start. All my posts are now in markdown files on the site, so it makes sense to write them that way. I keep it all in a Git repository, and sync between devices using GitHub. I’ll test it out with images in a week or two. For now I think I’ll just play it safe with text only.

So far, this system seems like it should work pretty well. I suppose we will see, but I hope that I will be happier with this system than I have been with my old one for the past decade.