@golgaloth yes, tech changes very quickly but so do social attitudes. My books from 2012 seem dated now. And then there are international changes and Covid and natural disasters, impossible to keep up.
Yep. I love to use metaphors. Curiously, I use them more in the narration than in the actual dialogue. But some characters, like Laura, use them frequently. She likes to compare Our Hero to ridiculous things things, as in "This idiot's louder than an exploding orchestra", or "that dumbass eats more than a vegan castaway" =)
"Artists are people who are not at all interested in the facts—only in the truth. You get the facts from outside. The truth you get from inside." –Ursula K. Le Guin
@wendypalmer@golgaloth@adaddinsane I used facebook ads to target mathematics teachers in our region to advertise a conference I organized at a CC it was really effective— but also creepy how deep I could tune that targeting. I don’t think I could bring myself to dirty my precious little hands like that ever again.
I use many metaphors. I often carefully rephrased JP metaphors so people who are unfamiliar with them will understand and people familiar with them catch the cultural reference.
I like the metaphor of the frog in the well only knowing the world it sees. I have used speaking into one's nose to indicate snottyness. The most recent one I used was referring to the house where my characters live as a "mouse house."
Even monkeys fall out of trees is one l like
I had a story where characters engaged in a verbal game of upping each other with feline metaphors.
When I run into new metaphors I note them and wait till I can use them.
2/2 a partial list of Japanese metaphors I have used.
A frog in a well does not know the great sea
Even monkeys fall from trees
Like gold coins to a cat
Even want to borrow a cat’s paw
Cat’s tongue
A cat’s forehead
If you don’t enter the tiger’s cave, you can’t catch its cub
All my LI's are creative people. Some write poems. Kao wants to be an author and Ume is an author. In terms of creative material that appears in my novels Kao and Shiro are tied with several Hiaku appearing in the text. Plot wise Ume is the most creative. Konbini Idol is her telling the story of Fukitsu, Tomo, Kan-chan, and herself.
Currently, Ume is busy writing three ongoing stories, "Konbini Idol," "The Handmaiden's Tears," and ghostwriting "My Undersea Harem."
Today, in my adventures in foolishly asking the internet general research questions:
The internet, shamelessly repeating the same factoid endlessly: throwing rice at weddings is an ancient tradition dating back to the Romans!
An anonymous old lady writing a cranky letter to the editor in 1895: this is a modern tradition that doesn't date back more than forty years and needs to stop before it takes a new bride’s eye out.
More than one, and in many of my stories. Loren is non-binary and genderfluid teen, with variable preferences depending on the hour of the day and how their brain wired (literally) at the moment. Maistro is everything-sexual (as long as there's consent and of legal age). The Still Unnamed Daughter might have done some non-het experimentation. And Our Hero learned to like women's clothing and shoes…>=)
It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character.” Joseph Heller, Catch-22 #Trump#Writing#josephheller#uspolitics#Politics
There are 3 books (Origins, Marathon, and Labyrinth, last is ongoing), links are pinned on my feed. First is a space road trip that runs into a conspiracy, second is sort of like the game "FTL: Faster Than Light", third is essentially a space dungeon crawl with cosmic horror elements.
As my books are free webnovels in a genre that is rare nowadays, I am desperate for publicity! Check them out if you like hard sci-fi!
I am Max, a hard sci-fi fan and amateur writer. Since 2 years ago or so, I have been making my own constructed world and novel series to go with it. It is semi-optimistic, a contrast to the recent flood of doomer sf, but mostly respects science and puts a lot of effort to worldbuilding and "realistic" alien designs. In effect the setting is a modernized and science-ized space-opera, though the books have somewhat unusual premises for this kind of sf.