ITS THE BEST. I also really love this phrase 
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Why can’t I focus again?!
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also cannot focus. must be a bad day for writing 
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poor brain, it needs a rest.
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I will ruin it tomorrow.
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Ruin it?
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Feed it sugar and alcohol, like I am a teenage wasp, ready to aggressively sting the first person that annoys me 
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great plan!
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the fuckers cancelled it without telling me so i guess i’m not getting one 
I should write a memoir about being a sentient churro that escaped out the window of a bakery. 
Joking aside, my brain is being a jerk right now. It knows that I need to rewrite Ricky to insert Steve into the story. But the brain is like write more Ricky!
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that would certainly be an interesting memoir
uhhhh, beat it into submission. here’s a stick 
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I know right?
hits it so hard, it writes something else 
Hmm, I’m not sure about that. We’re all different people, and it’s impossible (imo) to create a character that everyone can connect with, at least 100%. There are some characters that I’m like, I don’t get this person. It doesn’t make me hate the show/book/story as a whole, but sometimes it’s not possible to put myself into every character’s shoes. When you say connect, do you mean whether someone likes the character or at the very least empathizes with the character’s motivations?
I think that characters you can’t fathom, people who you think are so far removed from what is acceptable as a human being, are important in story telling too. And not just in “villain” form, they don’t even have to be villains. But if you can convince a reader that this character is realistic, like they logically know people like this truly exist, then I think that in itself a skill even if the reader is like, there’s no way I could ever understand this person, but I know people like this exist. It’s believable. 
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I like this.
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Time to be Monty again and just think about things and
figure out what is actually going to be written. Or else
just invent something else. Invent my own genre.
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I think that’s part of the problem too. I know we were talking about “quick shallow” books earlier to make a “quick buck.” I think some people just don’t have the critical thinking skills to read something, and not see just the surface level. Like they take everything literal, or don’t sit there and think, is there a reason why the author wrote it this way? Or even like, hey, the author really made me hate this person! That’s just as awesome as a skill as the author that can make you love a person. If an author can make you feel real feelings at all for characters that don’t exist, it’s a testament to that author’s skill. But I feel like yes, most people just skim the surface, and aren’t really looking deeper.
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Do you know what I never seem to see in a lot of recent YA fiction? A lot of fighting. A lot of compromises, a lot of passion, or a lot of raw emotion being expressed. Diversity of thought. Genuine acceptance and realism. It’s all about being cute.
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I agree with this. And I think feeling empathy toward those who aren’t innately easy to empathize with is an acquired skill. An important one, too. I think a lot of discourse around writing has shifted recently to trying to prostrate oneself toward the “readers,” whomever they may be, to get their attention or to get them to connect. But there’s always the real possibility that this isn’t all the writer’s problem, and that readers are shifting in what they’re able to empathize with. This sort of discussion comes up all the time whenever the classics/older books are discussed, not just with changing social norms about depictions of race and gender but how hard it is to connect with the plots and characters—listen to any high school classroom discuss The Great Gatsby and you’ll think the book was written for Martians and not for 1920s socialites. The truth is, being able to understand, connect with, and find interesting a character or situation that feels unfamiliar isn’t some sort of magic wizardry one only learns in lecture halls: it’s a critical skill for life that people should be expected to have.
And exactly this too. I don’t think the solution is to dumb things down so people don’t have to think or work to engage. That would be like saying a bunch of kids are failing the 9-minute mile, and that the solution should be to make it a 12-minute mile so everyone passes. There are a lot of ways to disguise the fundamental argument at hand, but one can’t deny that sometimes a lack of reading comprehension (which includes, IMO, skills like feeling empathy for difficult characters) is the fault of the reader and not the writer. It’s one thing to acknowledge the sad truth that reading comprehension skills are slipping, because they aren’t viewed as important; it’s another thing to normalize that. It breeds complicity and means that a myriad of complex and challenging stories are going to be tossed by the wayside—or never written—all because nobody thinks any reader can do better.
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Why don’t we have… both?
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