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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   2761 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 15, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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So, what are you reading?

I'm going through Plato's Protagoras. Have been reading about the sophists recently.

Paper I'm reading: Crombe and Nagl's A Call to Action: Lessons from Ukraine for the Future Force.

Turns out writing a book eats up the free time you had for reading them!

At least it's going well, I'm genuinely happy with progress made, especially tying up dangling plot threads in a satisfying manner without too much in the way of ass pulls as reverse dental floss.

A mark of success in rational fiction, or thrillers in general, is when the audience successfully predicts or theorizes about upcoming plot twists.* A good sign they're invested, and it makes it easier for the author when they spot something you didn't consider so you can write that in ;)

Then again, I'm not irony poisoned enough to "subvert expectations" just because people are smart enough to see things coming. It's heartening, it means your world building is internally consistent and you're expressing your intent correctly. Hard enough to do in a very hard scifi story, harder still when you have superheros, the latter genre certainly being tempting when it comes to explaining shit away or having something show up to break a convenient deadlock.

*Hell some readers have predicted all 25 of the 6 plot twists till date!

A mark of success in rational fiction ... is when the audience successfully predicts or theorizes about upcoming plot twists.

As a reader, the sweet spot is when I pick up on something a few pages before the protagonist. That's more luck than author's intent, since an equally smart person reading the same book but after lunch instead of before will be a few chapters behind the curve, but it's the most fun I have.

Maybe second most, after seeing a movie with a friend and whispering "are they really X?" but then the people on screen really do X—before my friend has time to reply.

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