05/03/24.
- Right, done fucking with css for now. I can get back to my favourite part of writing - making notes.
- Scenic locations. In a greenhouse garden. Under a flowering tree, blossoms falling. In a second-hand bookstore. In a very narrow, yet sunlit and warm alley. A cozy cafe. A bare room with wall-length windows, with a grand piano. What if a house was a garden? A hardboiled detective agency. A loft, with the ceiling at an angle, and a window to climb out onto the roof. An ice cream store. A train station next to a forest. A small river with wooden railings, passing between two houses, a bridge connecting them. A sunflower field. An apartment on a magical street, near or above a magical shop. A subway station that goes back in time. A rich person's dining room. A studio office. A balcony with partial shade, with a chair and shelf for plants. In the metal guts of a building, playing cards next to a boiler.
- Character idea! A gardener desperately trying to grow a certain kind of flower, with only frustration. Lilacs or something. And they just keep dying - probably due to environmental conditions. Metaphor for how certain kinds of growth are impossible in certain environments, and that the source of your frustration is due more to your situation than in any personal shortcomings or inadequecies.
- A very rare and dearly treasured handgun. Gunslinger style, but in a setting where guns are way rarer. Only three bullets left. Narratively, the first two need to miss.
01/03/24.
- Okay! Right, so, gonna summarise my plans right now, and where I'm at.
- Website's getting updated daily at this point, hence the chunky update stat. (I'm coding in the neocities editor, so I'm checking how things look on the page a lot). Going to post more stories. Problem is, that takes time. Here's what I want: an art gallery, to change 'stories' to 'writing' so I can add articles, poetry, and experimental storytelling as well. I want - crap dropped my phone. You know what, here's the notepad to do list so far:
- Been browsing neocities pretty heavily to get a sense of what other people are up to. Gotta put - hang on - gotta go add a cool person's button to the homepage, I just remembered. Shit, gotta follow them too, brb.
- Okay done.
- Writing notes: want my stories to be well written, off the bat. Short pages are more fun to click through, so might adjust for that. Chapters as episodes, each as its own little standalone story? Could have overarching narrative as well, but I feel the former is more accessible. Stuff like Star Trek. Also want: comedy, proper funny humor and jokes, well articulated anger, slow sadness, terror grief, mysteries, and murder. A low level of magic and worldbuilding to begin with, built up over time. The main thing I've found that makes me want to revisit a story I enjoyed is relationships between characters, so I definitely need to focus on that right away.
- Note: nobody is going to scroll all the way. They will scan. They will check the first paragraph to see if it interests them, and 80% of them will stop there. We know this, so let's use it to our advantage.
- I love music, and as much as I want to, I don't know I'd have enough content to make my own little music page on this site... unless it was a bookmark of other neocities music artists? Sigh, I wish I could compose music.
- Horror and creepy spooky stories are so fucking fun. Psychological torment. AM type villains. A house that's alive.
- Idea! Fairy people horror stories! Casual cruelty and talking frogs.Thumbelina meets Game of Thrones. A tiny little beatrix potter house, with a little redwall mouse, with a teeny paperclip that is in fact the Sword of Destiny! Let's go.
- Once I get more established, I want to think about doing fanart for other sites.
- Wikipedia layout for experimental storytelling, which shifts like 17776. This would be a great project, because it would combine narrative and coding, something only possible on a site like this one.
- Another idea I had was a 'choose your own adventure' written via submissions to the guestbook by visiting users, like in the early days of homestuck. Potential to get very silly, so would need a durable premise. Haven't got one yet.
- Did you know the word 'sound' for a lake or inlet actually derives from the root word 'sund' as in 'divide'? Interesting. Okay, tangent over.
- Our strength here is in finding people who want to do the same kind of thing as us: being in a community will inspire us to do more.
- Going to clean up this blog section and organise it by month. This dot points are useful for me, but I'd imagine hell on earth for you reading this. I do want to clean it up.
- Okay, that's the whole to do list. We'll see how much of it I get to. Oh! I also saw federiefederi was looking for project submissions. Can't do much about that until I'm on the wall, but putting a pin in it here as something to come back to.
- Okay sick I'm gonna go trawl through their wall for more sites to follow.
- Labyrinths fucking rule. It's just you, alone with your thoughts. The perfect metaphor for internal and external confusion. Searching for literal and figurative freedom.
- There was some worldbuilding notes here before, but I moved them to the appropriate section.