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I've written 100,000 words of fiction between late January and late April which I am not going to publish.

I made the difficult decision that the current concept for my fantasy work "Emptiness Effigied" simply doesn't work. I simply could not finish it.

I had a beginning and an end in mind, but no connecting tissue to get from one end to the other. In the middle of writing it, I frequently paused to reflect upon what I was doing, and my brain would make a strange remark that reverberated within my skull and inside my ears the way that unbidden thoughts do, forming a voice in a way that if I explained it, you would probably think I was a "psycho"-- it said "this is not story-shaped." I struggled with this thought for a long time. I strung along plotlines. I wrote dialog. My beta readers told me it was good and they wanted to see where I was going with it. They trusted me too much. I was going nowhere with it. I thought I was going somewhere with it-- but the actions I have now taken mean I was going nowhere with it.

People trust me too much in general. I wrote that down because it was a thought that reverberated inside my brain, in the way that--

I eventually had to let it go. I couldn't come up with any further chapters to develop the 90% of the story that was not its beginning and end, and I was not having any fun whatsoever. Deciding to stop was not very fun either. I went into a weeks-long depressive episode throughout May, in the throes of which I still am. I played a lot of Wuthering Waves. I baked a lot of bread. Baking bread made me feel useful to the world. My wife eats the bread and likes it. Feeding my wife makes me feel like I have some positive impact on the world, like I am doing something that is better than being dead. After many, many bakes, I can make pretty ok rolls that rise REAL nice. I make veggie flatbreads every week as one of the week's dinners. Every week I plan at least three dinners, leaving one "takeout day" and one "flex" day. I cook these dinners for me and my wife. One of them is always a flatbread. I've gotten flatbreads down to a science. And I've lost the science, or whatever it was, which let me understand what the fuck I was doing with the original concept of Emptiness Effigied. When I thought about it further-- I felt like I'd somehow lost what stories are like generally.

I bake okay bread-- and I wrote a shitty fantasy story.

I felt like-- do I even understand anymore how scenes and events and dialogs cohere into a "story"? Did I ever understand it?

At a low point, I reinstalled Micateam's 2023 act of visceral sadism against the world "Reverse Collapse: Codename Bakery." I had told myself previously-- there is no fucking way I will EVER want to play the game's 2092R mode-- a faithful recreation of the 2013 version of bakery girl in the 2023 game's engine, which had such charming mechanics as "worse hit chances" and "weird greebly stat leveling". So immediately upon launching the game again, months removed from my pathetic victory over it on Casual mode, I did two things. I started a new game+ file on Challenging difficulty, but not Challenging+, which is like Challenging but More Annoying-- and I used this file to collect the tutorial mission collectible that has the code to unlock the game's 2092R mode, which I immediately unlocked and then started playing. I had a time I would call "somewhat negative" with it. Obviously though, Micateam are geniuses, and the game is gold. It is just that I'm "casul."

Normally when I am depressed enough to think about how youtubers say "unalive" now-- I play Dark Souls 2. (Now Scholar of the First Sin.)

Playing Dark Souls 2 usually calms me down because it is engaging. It's a challenging game even if you're okay at it. It requires execution.

But I subsconsciously yearned for media which is nearer my favored aesthetic sensibilities while still being grippingly difficult enough to consume my thoughts.

So Reverse Collapse it was-- and if I'm already squeezing my hand cathartically against an open wound to yield more pain-- let's *really* yield more pain.

As I watched Mendo scrounge up at most a 45% hit chance on enemies in flat ground standing right in front of him, with his submachine gun that will not kill them in one shot, I continued to think about that disparaging remark upon the object of 100,000 words which I had consigned to oblivion-- that it was not "story-shaped." I've read, watched, experienced-- a lot of stories in my Thirty Six whole years on Earth. I recently read a piece of fanfiction of my work Unjust Depths from a fan whose username appears to me to be a random string, possibly to anonymize them since they wrote a beautifully teeth-gritting sexual misadventure between the characters Elena and Marina. (For those lacking context, there are fans of mine who might be scandalized by this notion and find it a controversy-- not me though.) At no point while reading this fanfiction did I think about the "story-shapedness" of this work-- I am not going to spoil the fanfiction, but it has a sequence of events that I would call not only coherent, but lovingly predictable in the way you want fanfiction to be, when it is about two characters fucking, who probably ought not to, whether for moral or practical reasons-- your choice.

Recently I read several pieces which will go unnamed in the genre of "mechposting" or "mechsploitation". I chanced upon them through the scientifically rigorous process of "searching for the term on social media, gawking a bit, and seeing what webnovel type things come up." As a professed lover of "empty spaces" fiction you might think that I would enjoy the genre of "mechsploitation" or "mechposting", in which a "handler" bad dommes a "pilot" or "hound" or "dog" or "subject" etc who is often dehumanized and blasted out of their senses with dopamine or drugs or the shame of what they are doing or brainwashed and so on-- but I don't. I have read SEVERAL twitter dollposting dead dove accounts-- and I have now read several works of mechsploitation-- and I just don't care about the mechsploitation thing. Maybe I didn't read the right things. (Don't recommend me anything. I will read it less if you recommend it to me.) Maybe the dollposters are just better at touching my emotional core, and my loins, than the mechposters. (The dollposters are REALLY good at this.) Despite all this anonymized invective-- at not point did I think these stories were not "story-shaped." The events within them were coherent to me. I didn't like them-- but they were coherent. They had a sequence that was predictable to me because I have a college education in knowing how stories go so I can write essays about them from a feminist or marxist framework because there is essentially no point in writing about stories from frameworks that are wrong when you can write about them from frameworks that are right. Nowadays everyone is sick of things that are true about the world, so if I was writing to the present vibe, I suppose I would theorize about them under a-- I dunno-- a national socialist framework I guess.

(Some of these mechfucker stories would be really interesting to analyze in a national socialist framework because. They fit WAY too good into it. But that's not my problem.)

(I should also clarify: when I talk about things like this, I am talking about them as a normal, private person. I am not making some grand statement about how much something Sucks like I'm proposing a new universal axiom for you to follow. I feel like this is a common misunderstanding on the internet because on the internet everyone is insane and a weirdo. I disliked the mechsploitation stuff a Normal Amount and will proceed to just never think about it again. Thank you for reading this blog post. It is readers like you who make it at all happen. Like-- and subscribe. I've had a headache for 24 hours.)

Anyway. After reading enough stories where women get drugged into becoming Corpos from cyberpunk, I started having utterly unrelated thoughts.

What was it about *my* writing which seemed incoherent and disjointed to me? Why did I come to feel this way to such a degree I could not continue writing? How could I avoid this in the future by creating fiction that is "story-shaped" whatever that means? I immediately ignored the obvious but useless answer that "I am sad." I didn't abandon an entire concept because I am sad. I have written all of Unjust Depths while sad and to this day I think the framework which I developed for that story continues to serve its needs (it's just really complicated and difficult to write hence why you won't see any more until 2027 if you live that long.) I set about creating a new concept for Emptiness Effigied, which I call "The New Concept for Emptiness Effigied" or "The New Concept." The New Concept has more things which appeal to me specifically, like Russia, and communism, and weird meat women, and literally dinosaurs. I created a worldbuilding document and began to fill it with "inspo" and freewritten notes on themes, aesthetics, a truncated recent history of the world and a brief on its energy economy and transportation. I clipped a picture of the Leningrad oblast that I cropped from Google Maps. I borrowed "A Gift To Young Housewives" from the Internet Archive. All of this felt *incredibly useless*-- whenever I'm not writing fiction, it feels like any writing I do is just kind of jerking myself off about how much nonfiction I've read. (Nonfiction can be story-shaped too. It frequently is in fact. I am just being self-deprecating because, have I mentioned that I am sad.)

I wrote down a few characters, many carried over from Emptiness Effigied's old concept to The New Concept. They all have names that I had to research. Naming characters is like the pain that jesus felt. I am not giving up on these that easily. They're all coming back. (In fact, you will have to forgive me when you see several characters from my other works appear here in some fashion. Naming characters is like the pain that jesus felt and I have named so many characters already before. Think of it like a mihoyoverse thing, which you know is one of my inspirations. It's on a list somewhere. I've told people about this. I wrote an entire blog post about a piece of art of Bronya and another entire blog post about Firefly. You can't be surprised about this stuff anymore I'm sorry.)

I wrote extensively about the antagonists of this story. The details of which I will leave to your imagination. You probably know me and what I'm about. See if you are right or wrong in 2026. If we live that long.

At last I arrived at the section of the planning where I had enough ingredients in the soup to begin cooking. I tried to write down some story outlines.

"These are not story-shaped. Things are not happening like they ought to in a story."

In order to rectify some of these paranoid obsessions of mine, I realized I needed to have stories fresh in my mind, and I needed to have more of the right kinds of stories. Finding modern fiction to be forsaken in various ways after certain events previously described, I went back to where a version of me who I am adopting for this post, originated-- acclaimed literature from dead guys. So I researched and created a course on Russian literature in the 1800s, part of my target time period range for The New Concept. Starting with Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin, whose short stories I read as well as his immensely entertaining novel "The Daughter of the Commandant." (I'm not reading his poetry.) Ahead of me, I have Chernychevsky, Lermontov, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Chekov. I Minored in Education-- that qualifies me to educate myself. As the only student of my Russian literature course, I think so far it has been very fun and helpful, and my professor flatters me daily with her illicit affections. This is maybe the only year of my recent life in which I can safely say I am literally learning and growing, which I have heretofore refused to do. At least I'll have that at the end of it.

In order to properly enter the mood of my new chosen subjects and aesthetics, I ordered several bottles of the beloved Russian beverage "kvass." Kvass is immensely good. Kvass did more for my depression than playing "Reverse Collapse: Codename Bakery's" 2092R mode did. (Reverse Collapse: Codename Bakery is REALLY good though.) I made a cabbage soup using a Russian recipe too. It was delicious. This helped me with the writing of course. People who know my writing and enjoy it will understand that this is all immensely important to the process and for the final product.

As much as I am fascinated by/obsessed with Russian history, it is gauche to reveal too much of one's obsession in one's art. This is why you must synthesize multiple obsessions into one piece of art, such that they obfuscate one another. Did she write a lavish sex scene for that character because she's blond, russian, because she has huge tits, because she has small, lavishly-detailed pretty feet? If you weave all of these elements at play, any given one will be less gauche than the gauchedness of the whole thing. Convinced of this wisdom I began to research locomotives; gaseous fuel engines; Chinese immigration into the Russian Empire; in a fit of truly evil mania I redownloaded the Project Gutenberg version of Samuel Richardson's "Clarissa." I realized if I reread Clarissa, I would never get anything done, much less any of the other thousand things I've given myself to do. So I immediately deleted it. (Samuel Richardson was the first person in history to have a rancorous relationship with a surprise fandom of female shippers he deemed to be misinterpreting and debasing his work, did you know? Women readers of English language fiction have blorbofied fictional rapists since at least 1748.)

I already talked before about my dalliances with pulp fiction. Pulps are EMINENTLY story-shaped. Pulps are maybe stories sharpened to their keenest edge. I developed a scientific spread of 30 pulp magazines sourced from uploads to the Internet Archive, starting with a 1896 issue of "The Argosy" which bored me to tears; ending with a 1941 issue of "The Spicy Detective" which had me in complete hysterics. (I have not read all of them yet. I read the first and last in the spread exclusively to make this paragraph in the blog post. Maybe the Argosy will get good sometime I don't know its game. I am not superhuman and all this stuff is already a bit crazy.) I take down some quick notes about every story I read, hoping to create a one-sentence synopsis to help me understand "story-shapes."

Then I remembered something incredibly important-- I had learned of the concept of story shapes in college, from my fiction writing workshop where the professor had us work alongside a copy of "Making Shapely Fiction"-- an EMINENTLY useful little book for writing a bunch of microfiction in a college workshop. I tried to borrow it from the Internet Archive, but it was unavailable to borrow. Not understanding why I am doing any of this anymore-- WHY am I even borrowing things from the Internet Archive instead of just stealing them from libgen-- I ultimately decided I am already reading WAY too many books and I ultimately will have no use for instructions when I've finally recaptured the unhinged fiction writing energy that some people ascribe to me. But I was now armed with slightly more knowledge than I had before about exactly why brain was tormenting me with a specific verbiage that I was having trouble understanding at all prior to this discovery.

I realized also that it was time to continue a tradition which I held dear to my heart, as there was no better time than now-- I began my yearly reread of Mihoyo's 2018 Honkai Impact 3rd tie-in comic "Second Eruption." Second Eruption is genuinely one of my favorite comic books of all time. The artwork is gorgeous. The story is fast paced and keenly economical. While Mihoyo's current works are quite fixated on very comprehensive lore bloviations that build to a grand mystery that only the trivia masters on the fandom wiki could have possibly remained awake long enough to have solved organically, Second Eruption is written with the assumption you already care about Honkai and that you are a participant in its various offshoots. Because of this, it is immediately presented as a story about things rather than a vehicle for byzantine extrapolations-- you can just read it as a competent action tragedy fantasy comic, and along the way, just intuit stuff like "Schicksal is some kind of weird supersoldier outfit based in Europe" and "Honkai energy seems PRETTY BAD." If any story has impossibly tight story shape, it is Second Eruption. I read it end to end every year and I cry about Sirin every time. Also, all of the women in it are incredibly hot. It is truly absolutely insane that Cecilia Schariac lived so hot and burned so bright like that purely in the game's backstory.

Hungering for anime-style industrial aesthetic fiction that doesn't make me want to throw up, I watched the first Princess Principal movie with my wife, having already watched the first season of Princess Principal. (I haven't watched the picture dramas-- I almost never watch picture dramas but I will sometime with these since they're now part of my insane obsession I guess.) Princess Principal is very good-- it is THOROUGHLY story-shaped. In fact Princess Principal's "cases", which are not depicted in a strict chronological order episode to episode, provide a framework I have found very useful in thinking about The New Concept and how to efficiently deal with my penchant for "getting sick of the thing I am doing" and then "doing something else for artistic fulfillment that other people don't care about". I have one complaint about Princess Principal-- the geopolitical setup is silly. Ange should just have been a foreign agent, like, foreign foreign. I think Ange should've just been Prussian. She should've been a German spy trying to destabilize industrial green rock England and wooing a princess. And people should've commented on Ange's prussian stoicism. That would've pleased me.

Putting away Wuthering Waves for a little bit, I stopped putting off doing Escoffier's companion quest in Genshin Impact, in time to grab the limited-time rewards Mihoyo is now offering for genshin companion quests if you do them in the relevant patch. Now THAT fucking quest was MIGHTILY story-shaped. By the third insane plot twist, rife with kidnappings and druggings, I began to feel a kind of sublimity-- anyway it was a good quest. I am sure Genshin will continue to have good quests. I've genuinely enjoyed the past like three years of genshin patches and the quests they deliver. Genshin is just pure entertainment value. I like genshin nowadays more than I like star rail. Amphoreus is just not hitting right now man. I did really like Castorice though-- too bad about everything.

I returned to my planning document here and there, writing down any idea I got in the shower or while cooking or while cleaning or while doing various other banal activities. I tried to think about things in bits and pieces. Writing down disparate ideas for goals characters can have, such as wanting to stop a betrothal, smuggle intelligence to revolutionaries, or save a militant socialist leader from political imprisonment by a corrupt democratic apparatus; writing down ideas for villains, such as a senator, or a constable, or a journalist, or a misunderstood red-haired girl that eats people; ideas for aesthetics and scenery, like putting down a giant tree wherever there's a big famous church because christianity was culturally defeated in this world and neo-tengrism is just the thing.

At the time of this writing, it is impossible to know whether any of this will help me to write a competent piece of fiction again, or if I will succumb to buffoonery forever onward. However, I do feel like reading more, and not pushing myself to write and crunching myself to shit hitting fake deadlines after I gave up my real deadlines, has at least helped me feel a little bit more like a human being. I'm doing a bunch of things which, even in the midst of my most nihilistic thought streak since college-- (that Clarissa class made me want to--) have filled my world with colors and thoughts again. I am hoping that as long as I have colors and thoughts, I will be able to shape them into stories again someday. Whether people like them or not is yet another story, for another day.

Was all this "story-shaped"? What do you think?