Rabid Sharks
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Prison Blog

In which Possum recounts his experiences as an offender in the system.

Possum Bones is autistic. He has identified as a dirty kid in the past, and he’s attended multiple rainbow gatherings. He has several years left to serve in the Washington Correctional system.

He has been making art since he could sit up. He communicates better in writing than speech. If you are interested in the experience of an autistic person doing prison time, check out his Prison Blog. If you are a fan of comic art, underground/outsider music, Lovecraft, Clarke Ashton Smith, Murakami, Cixui Liu, etc.

In praise of consistent world building

What makes Charles Stross's Laundry books much better than something like Room 13 or Red Dawn ( is that the name?) is there’s a degree of commitment to portraying a realistic sequence of events in response to an unrealistic scenario. Many times books like this lose me because they go all action-hero and have improbable plots and characters. This is one of the most important fundamentals of good speculative fiction or sci-fi. Its not whether or not there's impossible elements, its whether the impossible elements of the story are portrayed in a realistic , consistent way that follows rules, and whether the characters respond to those impossible elements in a believable way. I have so much more patience for a writer when I don't have the constant feeling that I'm being strung along by a mess of hard to swallow coincidences. And having read a lot , a LOT of stories in my time in prison I have come to recognize when that is happening very quickly. Ultimately, this quality of a work of fiction is far more important than actually being able to write a pretty sentence. I can easily make words sound good together, it comes naturally to me, but this is a skill that takes a lot more thought, research, and experience. Its important not to tell a boring story, but believable characters and consistent world building will actually take you very far into basically writing your story for you. This is also a super important skill for any game master or ST, because the quickest way to continue the game in response to unanticipated player moves is to use common sense to flesh out your world in an instant.

Elisa Carlson