Struggling Writers’ Daily Den: rant, share, complain, ask, daily progress thing (Part 2)

I’ve been thinking of re-writing my current chapter :thinking: something about what I’ve written so far doesn’t fit with where the characters are at this point

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me: search engine pls show me images of colour ink tattoos on black skin

search engine: you mean tattoos on darker skin? you want darker skin tones? shows me images of tattoos on light skinned black people

now why does it feel like my search engine is being both Woke ™ and racist at the same time.

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My cat does this :smiling_face_with_tear: I always warn people when they come over that she bites but she plays all sweet and cuddly and tricks them into petting her. And then bites them. Like a little demon. idk what her problem with other people is, she’s been fine with me since day 1, but I guess one human is her tolerance limit lol

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I am 843 words into chapter two of Project Succession.
I feel very good about that.

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Rant: WHO AT GOOGLE DECIDED IT WAS OKAY TO REPLACE THE DICTIONARY FUNCTION WITH AI SLOP?

If it would not draw any—severe and horrible—consequences for myself, I would’ve tracked down who exactly was responsible for this idiotic downgrade and threatened them at knife-point to bring the dictionary back.

WHAT IS THIS BOLLOCKS? (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻

I have actually changed my default search engine to DuckDuckGo from Google because of this. Dictionary and thesaurus lookups make up a very big chunk of my searches. If Google won’t give me the results I want/need anymore, I’mma go elsewhere.

Sure, DuckDuckGo might use AI too, but at least I can turn it off.

This is what I want to see, Google, when I want to look up a word.

The only downside of the DuckDuckGo dictionary, I guess, is that it doesn’t explicitly state which variant of English (US, UK, Australian, etc.) the word is from. The loss of the Oxford Dictionary as a source is another one I guess. I’ve also added a dictionary extension to make up for this; ironically, it’s the Google Dictionary extension. It’s working well so far and I hope they don’t mess with this one.

So yeah. That’s my rant. The loss of one of their best functions, all for what? More AI slop?

Thankfully my violent tendencies are all confined to my head :skull:

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they’re trying to force the use of AI in order to justify sinking millions into it’s development :zany_face:

fyi if you add “-AI” to your searches it will remove AI search results. But tbh duckduckgo is better anywaysss

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Unfortunately it doesn’t always work :face_with_diagonal_mouth: what “-AI” really does is remove articles with the word “AI” in them, regardless of their source or content. I use a similar function when I want to search for articles without a certain word or phrase (for example, if I want to look up “frozen” but not get results about the movie, I would enter “frozen -movie -Disney” into the search bar).

I did add a filter to uBlock to remove the AI overviews, but unfortunately it removes the dictionary boxes with them. I’ll happily give more traffic to DuckDuckGo instead. I did consider Bing but then I remembered how much I disliked its aesthetic :skull:

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The last thing I wanna see in my liminal spaces is a giant unhinged alien robot that screams like a banshee and whose name is synonymous with “backstabbing traitor”.

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I wrote a chapter! Very badly. But hey, it’s something. :woman_shrugging: It’s an angsty chapter too. I’m at the ending of the prequel I’ve been working on since… according to the doc’s info – 2022. :sob:

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I want to start a new story as I am having a bit of trouble with Project Succession. Unfortunately, I am finding that I can’t start a new story for whatever reason.

It poses a bit of trouble for me.

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Sharing!

Ha! I finally made it to the chapter that talks about the Disgraced Imperfect! (a milestone) :grin:

Okay, so, basically this is about Tovmeyidnan in Project Demon Friend. It goes by “it“ or “Tovmeyidnan“ (a name it gave itself) and it used to be an angellic (a heavenly energy) who went out of the laws of an angellic and became a demon, but as a demon, it went outside demonic law, and so became disgraced (belonging nowhere).

“imperfect“ comes from how it looks. In its desperate search for greatness it turned itself into a monster with many different parts of creatures it thought were “great“ and “perfect“. Think of an Eldritch abomination.

Despite becoming the Disgraced Imperfect, it was pardoned by Lucifer, King of Demons, which never happens. Ever. If you’ve done something wrong, you are never pardoned. You’re punished. Lucifer will not disclose why he made this choice. And because of this, it’s somewhat infamous among angellics and demons. After the pardoning, it disappeared and no one knows what happened to it.

Well, it’s in the land of the living as Tovmeyidnan, a demonic creature who can turn into a boy and an old woman. It’s in partial servitude to a demon prince in exchange for food and shelter. The demon prince, Vassago/Charcoal, doesn’t know Tovmeyidnan is the Disgraced Imperfect. If he did, he would certainly send it away.

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The biggest hurdle that I am facing is trying to understand what Aeris’s normal looks like. I didn’t think that would stump me so much. I’m struggling to figure things out and even though I had something, I’m still unsure.

Man, this is so hard!

Rant: My Monday started horribly. I downloaded a video game that turned out to have malware, went to sleep in the middle of the day, and woke up to my Discord accounts being hacked. I was thankfully able to recover the accounts and change their passwords, but it was not fun. Add in the fact that it was super noisy outside my room—my aunt had contractors and other people in the apartment—and I was left weighing whether it was worth going to write night or not. I really wanted to, but with my heightened stress, sleep deprivation, and the inability to leave the house unnoticed at the time, I decided to skip.

AND DAMMIT.

THE ONE NIGHT I DECIDE TO SKIP, MY LONG-ABSENT FRIEND SHOWS UP.

(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻

I’m happy he’s back and no longer being overworked by his boss, but I was so upset at myself. If I had the power, I would’ve gone back in time and beaten myself up. And gone further back to make sure I never downloaded that game in the first place. I’ve been looking forward to seeing him again and he shows up when I’m not there.

It still makes me upset that I didn’t go. I should’ve sacrificed my sleep and endured whatever interrogation my aunt had in store for me.

And the worst part is that the prompt that night was “nightlife”—this prompt was made for me; I’m literally nocturnal! :sob:

“Well, you can still write based on that prompt!”

It’s not the same.

For one, the time restriction won’t be there. I can set it myself, but it’s different from having someone else keeping time for you, for everyone else in the room, and then being with people around you, and then…

Man, someone please invent a time machine so that I can visit my past self and bash her head against the metal railing of the bed until she bleeds and falls unconscious. She was already on her period anyway, what’s a little more blood loss?

Not the first time I wanted to beat myself up.

But yes, I am mad about this. I don’t know how many more Mondays I have left. I can’t skip on another meeting because I don’t know when will be my last.

Share: My Kentucky friend whom I recently had a reading exchange with texted me an update. He said that he had submitted a few of his poems to the group publication that the writers’ group was making, and he said that our reading exchange last Friday gave him confidence. I’m glad that my comments made him feel that way :slight_smile: hearing that brightened up my already horrible week.

Ask: For those who’ve read books as a way to overcome writer’s block or gain inspiration, how quickly does it take for you to get back into writing mode? Sometimes I find myself itching to write (and writing) after reading a few chapters, but I’m wondering if anyone else does the same :eyes:

Progress: I didn’t do as much writing for Chapter LXV as I hoped, but I did get some progress on Chapter Two of The Forgotten Kingdom of Draconyn! It’s a more lighthearted book than Blood Will Tell, and I guess I needed a change in tone from the tenseness of LXV.

Rereading a webtoon I’m following—Lucy’s Endless Night, for those curious :eyes:—also helped with inspiration.

I’m only inspired by reading when it’s within the same genre, but I have trouble finding that because I don’t think my genre/flavor of writing exists in novel form. :laughing: Not in Western novels anyway.

I’m more inspired by video games, webtoons, and anime. Finished the second season of a Korean drama called “Bloodhounds” which fired me up for my prequel because the main male characters are also fighters.

Other than that, I just read to read. And just highlight sentences where I like how an author worded something that I never remember when it’s actually time for me to write. :sob:

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Wrote a little more to the angsty ending of my prequel. Once I’m “done”, then my first draft will finally be finished, and I can continue either the second draft or go back to the main novel that happens after and write the second draft to that. :thinking: Choices, choices.

Okay, time to write something random, unhinged and totally new now that ONC is over :smiley:

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