I went ahead and made an account 
I’ll mess with it later.
Seems like getting the yearly sub is cheaper than a monthly sub when you look at how much they charge per month
Do you use sparks?
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It is very expensive to do it month by month! Even better is a lifetime sub - I always buy those where there’s an option to, and I told myself last year I’d start putting funds toward it… but then a lot of very expensive, but much needed, purchases happened. I might try saving up for it for next Black Friday.
Are the sparks the AI things? If so, no. I don’t use AI in my work, and most of the ones I’ve seen it spit up aren’t very good. They can provide a bit of extra ideas, though, for those who are okay with using them! 
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Pitching in to say that I use Grammarly for Wattpad, and can confirm that it’s wrong a lot of the times 
The main reason why I have the Grammarly extension is because I have the tendency to mix British and American English at times, and Grammarly’s helpful with filtering that out. It’s also quick to catch typos and other mistakes I might’ve made while writing on four hours of sleep at three in the morning 
I wouldn’t rely on it for anything else. The really annoying thing about the free version of Grammarly is that it often gives “Premium” suggestions and attempts to change the voice of your writing to something more corporate HR–friendly. Not helpful when you’re writing a fantasy novel in third person omniscient—or any story, really. I don’t know if the paid version allows you to tailor suggestions to fiction but I haven’t heard of any.
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I have written the best opening line to a story ever:
“What the hell happened to your face?”
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Idk if it’s AI, but apparently you get 5 sparks or something.
I haven’t checked what a spark actually is yet
This needs to be in the out of context thread, too! XD
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I’m typing actually, but thank you.
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Maybe either your desk needs to be higher, or your screen needs to be higher?
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Probably, but that is WAY too much work to do.
So, I am just going to try and take care of myself.
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Do you have a laptop?
When my back was bothering me, I took my laptop in bed and sat up in my bed and typed.
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Yes, I have a laptop.
I have it hooked up to a monitor on my desk.
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Trying to find out what volcanoes smell like. Evidently it’s mostly rotten eggs and burnt matches. Pretty interesting information so far! ヽ(^。^)丿
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Ooo good idea I’ll add it
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The rotten eggs part is probably sulfur and stuff like that
I wonder if lava smells like that, too?
Thinking of that scene in LOTR at the end where all that lava is flowing down around them…must have had a pretty bad odor
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I’m still on chapter 15 and honestly, I haven’t been trying to write because of the lower back pain that is still there.
Though the pain is slowly going away, I don’t wanna risk it.
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I am done with chapter 15 and reached over 40K!
Thank goodness for me!
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Just finished the first draft of the book I’ve been working on since January. Writing this book has been like pulling teeth, so when I counted the words just now I’d expected it to come out to about 100k.
Turned out to be 61k. (♯^.^ღ)
Guess I’ll be adding stuff in November. __〆(．．)
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This is gonna be a long one, buckle up 
Share: Write Nights at the neighborhood tea bar have been fun, and I feel like I’ve made a somewhat close writing friend through them already! We’re at the stage where we’ve sought seats next to each other, exchanged phone numbers, and remembered things about the other person already.
I woke up later than I usually did yesterday, which meant that I left my apartment earlier. I texted my writing friend along the way, saying that he might arrive ahead since I had just started walking. Coincidentally, he just arrived at the tea bar when he read my text! Our usual table was taken since I wasn’t early enough to claim it in time as usual, something he noticed. We ended up sharing a table with two others, one of whom was an event organizer.
The prompt was very interesting! It was basically to start a piece with the following sentence: “If I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear.” Yes, it was inspired by Frankenstein. I may or may not have impressed people with my sheer typing speed. And I may or may not have intimidated my writing buddy with how fast my fingers are, or how far I am into Blood Will Tell 
his reactions to seeing that I had nearly 156K words, spread across 57 chapters, with an estimated reading time of more than 12 hours, was really funny.
And another coincidence, by the way: the spooky prompt we did was also the 13th prompt I wrote with 
Ask 1: I know that we’re all in an online writing group, but is anyone else part of an in-person writing group? 
Could be a casual writing group like what I’ve been going to every Monday, or a more formal writing group.
Ask 2: For those who’ve attended write nights and similar writing group meetups in person, have you ever come across someone who was low-key soliciting or advertising? I feel like I’ve had two encounters so far.
The first happened a few weeks ago. My usual writing buddy couldn’t show up, so I joined another table with three other writers. As usual, during the discussion phase of write night, we talked about whatever writing projects we were working on.
Later on, a woman strode in and asked if she could join our table. We all enthusiastically welcomed her. She mentioned how it took her a while to come up since she was from the other part of the city, and I was thinking that it was totally fine. Then she asked if any of us were into poetry.
The weird thing was when she produced two hard copies of her book and passed them around 
I get the eagerness to show your work and hope people will buy it, but it came off as very saleswoman-y. We had not met her before and barely known her. I’m not saying that she’s a bad person because she does seem very nice. I don’t know, it just seemed less sincere and that she was mostly there to market her book.
The second encounter happened just last night, actually. This was towards the end, and a decent amount of people had left the tea bar by then. My friend and I were sitting next to each other and talking about stuff when a man dropped by and gave us his business card, saying that he wanted to make friends and form connections, something along those lines. I gave the business card a quick glance and it was one that advertised tech services and related stuff.
The guy then asked us what we were writing. I said that I was working on a dark fantasy novel, and my friend mentioned that he was working on a sci-fi mystery novel. My friend then asked the dude about his writing, and he said that he was mostly writing stuff related to diets, health, something along those lines.
“So, you write non-fiction?”
The guy just nodded, yeah, and then he talked about marketing, the prices of books, and just how hard it was to sell books to people. I gotta give props to my friend for doing most of the talking.
After the guy left, my friend and I both talked about how… “interesting” that was. We did look up the guy’s website that was on the business card, and a lot of the things on that site were vague, to put it one way. I told him about the first weird encounter I had too since he wasn’t there when it happened, and he remarked that he also found it odd.
I don’t know if that’ll be the last of them. Probably not. But what about you guys—have you experienced something like that before?
Progress: Chapter LVII is officially up on Wattpad! 
I only wrote about a hundred words of it at the actual write night—partly because I was watching a Chicago Bulls game at the time instead of writing —but I managed to finish the rest of the chapter when I reached home.
I quite like this chapter. It might not have high stakes, uncovered lore, or battle scenes like the other chapters, but it does feel like a nice change of pace to me. Lots of contemplating.
You know the memes about dudes hanging out alone on a bench or bridge to ponder in solitude? This chapter captures those vibes
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Ask 1: Nope! I’d love to join an in-person writing group, but there’s only one in my town that I know of and that’s for elderly people writing memoirs. I don’t write nonfiction, and never even read memoirs. ¯\_(ﭢ)_/¯
Ask 2: I can easily believe that happened, but the closest thing I’ve ever encountered personally was a guy at a sidewalk art show recently who was selling his books there. Why they’d allow a writer to sell books at an art show, I don’t know. From the covers I assumed he writes pulp fiction.
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