If you see me somewhere please let me know. I’ve no idea where I went.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • This is why I joined a track-a-week music challenge this year! I’ve been dabbling for 5 years and still have no idea what I’m doing musically (no theory or anything) but I figured cranking out a finished song every week throughout 2024 would force me to get better and it’s really working!

    I mean, I’m still cranking out garbage, but now it’s higher quality garbage and I can make decisions faster, let go of ideas that aren’t working without a second thought, and learn from other people taking the challenge.

    As far as art goes, I’ve been drawing live caricatures for 15 years and I’m WAY better than even a few years ago. Definitely stick with it. Be too stubborn to give up. Keep doing the thing. Skill will develop the more you persevere.









  • A Mary Sue can fail, but those failures don’t usually have a massive impact and are easily reversed without the feeling that the MS had to struggle to earn the reversal.

    The more flaws a character has, the more they have to work to balance them out. Readers are more likely on the side of a character that has to work and make sacrifices to make it through the difficulties the plot throws at them.

    Random Example: Diana Rowland’s “My Life as a White Trash Zombie”. Protagonist Angel has a criminal record, drug addiction, abusive home life, and generally makes very bad decisions. Because of her life course, she has very few resources (she can’t go to the cops, nobody she knows has money or connections, etc) but she can think quickly and has a sort of desperate resourcefulness. Because everything is working against her, she has to fight for any positive forward movement, and one misstep can be a serious threat - and those happen frequently, undoing any success and forcing her to burn her resources to try a new path. IIRC in one of the books the B-story is her trying just to earn her GED as the main plot around her is utter pandemonium. Just that struggle to graduate high school is a herculean task given the deck stacked against her. Readers aren’t thinking “how will she win”, they’re thinking “well what’s going to go wrong this time?”

    TL;DR: If every time your protagonist has a setback the readers shout “can’t she ever catch a break?” instead of “ah she’ll just breeze through this” you should be doing okay.