Are you still deciding?

I would probably not do a disease unless you are are trying to evoke feelings related to covid, or it’s very, very different in symptoms. (and maybe not even then) - only because I feel like that’s carrying a lot of baggage right now for some folks.

Of the rest, I love the alien creature idea!

Really glad to have helped even a little. Best of luck to you! 😀

ok but how about you tell me why to move from mastodon to firefish?

I like the UI better (by a lot), I like the “antennas” feature, I like that I can do a traditional blog post if I choose (“pages” they call it), it’s very custom-configurable, and in the 3 days since I’ve joined I’ve already seen bugfixes and improvements deployed.

Why move? If Mastodon is 100% great for you and nothing about the look/feel/functionality of Firefish jumps out at you then there is really no reason.

As someone who showed up a month late, can I just say I find both of these ideas wildly interesting! Now I’m a little worried that they don’t look bad to me. 😀

• The disgruntled younger sibling of the “Chosen One”
• The main character has traveled back in time to kill Hitler. Little do they know is Hitler is now a skilled killer of time travelers.

I think the second one especially could be a lot of fun. Not sure I’m clever enough to come up with all the interesting traps he would have to devise, but it could be a little zany if ultimately the story was entirely focused on their battle of wits, completely leaving the holocaust angle out of who Hitler is until the very end…

Apologies for responding to an old thread, but I’m newly joined and excited to participate. :-)

Best advice I’ve heard for this is - Make a goal that you will write one sentence per day. And write that one sentence no matter what. No matter if you do think it’s bad.

The reasoning is - some days you will just sit down and write one sentence, and that’s fine. But other days you’ll find that sentence turns into a paragraph, or a page, or five pages. But if you never sit down to write that one sentence, you never give the chance for those other days to happen.

That advice came from B. Dave Walters from the podcast “Writing about Dragons and Shit” - which is my second bit of advice to you - find a writing podcast you like and listen to it regularly.

I’m on my third pass through the back catalog of “Writing Excuses”, but there’s a few I listen to. I get motivation, inspiration, and education from them and I try to listen to at least one episode of one writing related podcast daily. It keeps me thinking about my story and usually makes me daydream about how something they are discussing would work in my story.

And I don’t want to force myself because maybe then it turns out to be just bad, you know?

Also - and I say this as someone who is still a couple tens of thousands of words away from the end of my first draft - you are going to have to revise your draft when you are done no matter whether you think it came out bad or not. So don’t worry about that.

Another B. Dave Walters nugget: “The worst thing you write is better than the best thing you don’t write.” An awesome story that lives only in your head lives only in your head.

Hope this is helpful and good luck! I have a hard time getting started again when life gets in the way sometimes too.