We have entered the Screaming Chimney days of windy winter.
Yet a single meaty cloud passes and you no longer have enough light to see across the room.
It’s the season of accidental shiny-surface-induced blindness.
I’d forgotten how the Big Christmas Tree acted as a diffuser. At this time of year any unobscured sunlight comes in through the rear window like a laser.
The perfect winter’s evening reading soundtrack: loud-enough-to-be-heard wind and empty-sounding streets.
December is when I started to follow mainly photographers and artists on Mastodon rather than predominantly just the same old ‘opinionated tech’ folks from the other site. No regrets.
Ah, here we go, the first vague anxiety of the new year: wondering if the neighbours silently judge me for the Christmas lights still blazing from every surface inside the house like a lighthouse beam.
Strong winds and the low winter sun turning trees into disco balls.
The precious discovery of an unopened, family-size box of Maltesers that mysteriously survived Christmas.
“His eyes seemed to root back under all the bulk of that forehead, too thick, too jammy, all full of resistive meats and fluids; exhausting to cut into sections, should such a thing come up.”
I think I may have the turkey sweats.
All Christmas mini-rolls already consumed well before Christmas Day, regardless of the amount stockpiled. The great tradition continues.
Lovecraftian office space.
Wondered why I could see a reflection of a cat in the TV. Probably time to trim the beard a tad.
Something I wasn’t expecting with ChatGPT is its non-trivial use in gamifying ‘the blank page’.
As a non-writer sounding board you can feed it some half-thought-through notion for a story, ask it to produce an outline or where to start, then essentially find ways to do the opposite.
If it produces a standard, formulaic approach to an idea, you can then tear that apart, or invert it. You can much more easily see your story, the one that it wouldn’t tell.
Long abandoned technology.
Unexpected ruins.
A little while ago I was sharing the Stable-Diffusion-generated images I use as visual writing prompts–in case they were of any use to others–but stopped when the ‘AI art’ debate really kicked off.
Taking a cue from @Curator and the .art instance guidelines, I may re-start sharing but will self-impose the same basic rules: they’ll be behind a content warning, with an hashtag, noting the generator used. Nothing I post here uses any artist styles in the prompt.
Is there a term like nerdsniping that applies to fiction writers when presented with an endless, winter photography stream of isolated, spooky roads?
Disused, disintegrating factories and schools, near-empty night-time train platforms, odd stones in the hills, distortions seen through glass. All those agoraphobically-vast interior spaces and claustrophobically-forested exterior spaces–the shared art that I find most compelling and comforting here is an almost-overlapping set with childhood bad dreams.