John Edwards missed usenet. The usenet of 1999, when worldwide conversations would do back-and-forths for weeks. Sure, it was mostly snark then, much like today, but sometimes there had been actual work and thought involved too. He and his anonymous collaborators had built algorithms that sparkled like diamonds. Now they were used everywhere: their work had gone on to underly the cryptography and big data mining and computer graphics that ran the world today.
Today, what was there today? Usenet had faded into google.groups, which wasn't even on their homepage anymore. The old sci.physics was nothing but cranks and spam ... he could still post to it, but nobody was reading to reply. Surely there were people who still built things? Where had they gone?
He'd been out of it for 20 years, raising children. One was William, who he'd just put to bed. That gave him an hour of free time to do whatever he wanted. Provided he made no noise and went nowhere. He walked down the stairs with their beige duck-taped walls to his bedroom and fired up a search engine (Bing) and pondered.
Free time! What would be most useful? Designing floors? Writing stories? Simulating the universe? Optimizing sort algorithms? "Online writing communities" he typed. "15 of the Best Online Writing Communities for Aspiring Authors", replied Bing. Click, scan, nope, click, scan, click, click. "9. Reddit, r/writingprompts". Click. He started reading. And stopped after an hour, got in bed, and thought about what he'd seen.
The next day he took his daughter Julie to school, came back and got Will showered, fed, dropped him off to school, then drove to work. Eight hours of staring at graphs, and trying to solve what various knobs really did, and sometimes writing new knobs. Then he drove back home. Reclining in his lazyboy chair was Mahala the nanny. She was a large Polynesian goth, covered with kanji tattoos. She furiously thumbed her smartphone. Will was asleep on the couch.
"Looks like a boring job," commented John.
"Ah no, I'm enjoying this," laughed Mahala. "He headbutted me earlier. He was riled when he came home. There's another hole in the wall by the door. I told him 'peaceful man!' and that just set him off, so I made him lie down. After I gave him a snack, he was happy, and he's been asleep since. I like this break. Julie's next door at your parents' house."
She got up and put her shoes on. Will got up too, hovering over her. He was as tall as John now.
"Are you going to show me out?" she asked. "Out the door?"
"Doe" said Will.
She went out. Will closed the door loudly behind her. He did a little dance. He went to the side window, watching to make sure her truck pulled away. John fixed dinner while Will hung around the kitchen. John cleaned the dishes afterwards, which incidentally guarded the kitchen from Will dumping all the sauces. Will, slightly thwarted, took out the garbage, and the recycling, and the yard waste, and the recycling again, then laid down. John covered the new hole with more duck tape. Then it was time for bed, so John brushed Will's teeth, gave him his medicine, and put him to bed.
Free time! He returned to r/writingprompts, sorted by new. Maybe he could use this as a writing group? Is there any point in writing? He had so little free time nowadays, there were probably better ways to spend it. Put off that question for now, learn the mechanics first. There must be dozens of prompts daily. Maybe a third had stories? The stories weren't bad. Most were short.
Can I post my own stories? What are the rules? He poked around and found a set of rules. [WP], [SP], stories must be 100+ words. No sex or religion or politics. Well, that's kinda limiting. No meta stories, wonder what that means. Can I write my own prompt?
Create Post. "[SP] Superman was feeling off today." Post. Seemed to work. Back to r/writingprompts, refresh, sort by new, nope it's not there. I'll wait a bit.
John read more stories. He was reluctant to upvote or downvote or comment for now. One thing at a time. Is this even a plausible writing group? Is there feedback? Most of the stories didn't seem to have feedback. What's the group dynamic? He started reading another story.
Checking back, his prompt still wasn't there. Hum. He found his prompt in his profile ... ah, it was under u/johnedwards, not r/writingprompts. He deleted it and tried again. r/writingprompts, sort by new, there it was! Ooh, and his karma had just jumped from 1 to 3. What's that for? Dunno.
He browsed more recent prompts. He made a point to remember two or three that seemed promising. One was about a vampire who bit a poet and afterward was compelled to speak in rhythm and rhymes. His hour was up, so he went to bed.
Three AM, he got up and wrote out a short rhyming vampire story. (The vampire cured himself by biting an aggressively incompetent English teacher). Post, check the original prompt, yes his story showed up. And back to sleep.
After dragging himself half-awake through the next day, John checked r/writingprompts again. 5 extra karma points for the story, no replies to the prompt or the story. He went to bed, choosing to spend his hour of free time that day sleeping.
The next day, after putting Will to bed, John decided it was time to get serious. His ideal writing workshop would have about one or two stories per prompt, and about two replies per story, each citing positives and negatives. By the golden rule, if that's the distribution he wanted, that's the distribution he had to do himself. That meant he was two replies short. He read three more stories and replied to two of them. Huh, he had only positive comments for both.The other story just hadn't interested him, and he didn't feel like saying why, it was quite likely just his own tastes. A lot of posts seemed to involve the SCP Foundation. Perhaps the site was mostly used as practice for a community writing that larger piece of fiction. He checked his profile, some of the karma from his story had faded.
He had only a vague sense of what the site really did. "Stop being normal," John scolded himself. "Be John."
Was the r/writingprompts database available? Not obviously. Could he scrape the site? Sure, but his Python was rusty, that would take time. He had half an hour left. What if he tabulated by hand? He ran the rates in his head, hand tabulation was faster, he didn't need much precision. A 100-item sample would give a 10-item standard deviation, which was good enough for his purposes. So he started.
He paged down to prompts from 2 days ago and started counting. 214 prompts until he hit 3 days ago. Wow, that's a lot more than a couple dozen a day. Counting again, 120 had only 1 or 2 replies, which seemed to indicated no stories. OK 120/214, about half the prompts get stories. Eh. Drilling down into prompts with 3+ replies, quite a few still had no stories. Most had one or two. Sampling, 31 stories had 20 with no replies, most of the remaining had one reply "loved it!" or something similarly unactionable. One prompt had one story with a hundred replies and six other stories, mostly uncommented or with a "loved it!". 2/3 with no feedback and about 29/30 with insufficient feedback.
Time for bed again. Well this sucks, thought John. If I want to be useful to this group, I should spend all my time giving feedbacks, because that's what they're way short of. And if I want feedback, I won't find it here. It's a black hole of creative writing. Still, there's the off chance someone will read it. It has that going for it over writing in a secret journal.
The next day near bedtime Will decided he wanted chocolate. He pointed at his chocolate icon. "Too late now," said John, "you wouldn't be able to sleep. I can give you some tomorrow." Will pounded the counter. John ignored him, taking dried clothes out of the dryer. "Here, put these away." Distraction sometimes worked.
But after Will hung up his clothes, he was back. "Cho," said Will.
"Tomorrow," said John.
Will banged the window with his wrist, threatening.
"No," said John.
Will banged the window with his wrist again, harder. That's getting close to its breaking strength. They'd gone through THAT before.
"OK, that's enough! In your room," said John. Will started yelling. John quickly grabbing both his shoulders and directing him to his room. Will tried putting holes in walls they passed and John pushed the other way to compensate ... no extra holes this trip.
In his room, screaming, Will put another hole in the wall. His room had windows, too, so John could not just shut the door, he had to stand over him.
"Lie down!" yelled John.
Will lunged at him. John pushed down on the top of his head, and Will purposely fell backwards onto the futon mattress on the floor. He likes G-forces, thought John.
Will got up again. "Down!" yelled John. Will tried for another hole in the wall. John grabbed him, pulled him down. Will did a roundhouse and got John in the ear. It rang. Ooh, good one, thought John. "Down! Stay!"
Will fell down again and started pounding his head with his knees. A well-practiced move. "No!" said John, but making no move to intervene. He knew physical intervention meant he'd get hurt and would enrage Will further. Will laid down, hyperventilating, then grabbed John's legs. John pushed his head and tried to pry him off his leg, but fell on the mattress beside Will. John got up again quickly. "Stay down!" Being up while Will was down gave John an advantage. So did Will's lack of fighting skills. John massaged his ear. He was really getting too old for this.
John counted. Whenever Will hit his head, or hit the walls, or tried to attack, John started counting over again. Slowly Will's breathing got more relaxed. After many restarts, John reached 120. "OK, I'll close the door. Should I close the door?"
"Koos"
"OK I'll leave you here a bit." John closed the door and stood outside, counting. Will soon got up and opened the door. "No, you have to stay there a bit." After counting to 300, John opened the door.
"OK you can do what you want." These fits tended to last about 15 minutes. And then they were over. Will had been doing them all his life. Maybe they were a form of exercise? Waiting them out like this was the only effective strategy anyone had ever come up with.
Will came out and sat on his beanbag.
"Should we go to bed?"
"Bet"
After putting Will to bed, John went down and opened his web browser. What he should really do is buy himself more time, by finding a residential placement for Will. He closed it again.
The state had given him 21 printed pages of potential placements. He started where he had last left off. "Happy Landings Senior Community," he read. This involuntarily brought to mind the image of Will throwing a fit in the middle of a crowded retirement home bingo game, with octogenarians very slowly trying to flee in all directions. He shook his head.
He heard a noise. He went up outside Will's bedroom. Will was sobbing. Why? A good guess was because he wanted chocolate but didn't get it. But who could tell? "You OK?" John asked. Will kept sobbing. John knew from experience that if he went in and asked what was wrong, he wouldn't find out, and he'd make things worse. This was Will's alone time, and Will valued his alone time. After listening a bit, John went back downstairs.
Back to r/writingprompts. How does one post an image prompt? He had an old photo inside a very realistic dollhouse, that you wouldn't notice was a dollhouse, except there was a regular-sized Rubik's Cube on the bed. Scroll, scroll, ah here's an example: [IP], then a link.
Hm. Should he? John saw his prompt still had no stories, his story still had no replies, but his replies had all been replied to by the authors grateful for feedback. Anything more than two days old was essentially forgotten about. Yes, it was a black hole for writing.
And virtually every prompt required the story to center on superheroes or demons or magic. What was with that? he thought. Write what you know, right? Who knows about being in life-or-death battles every day? Well maybe me. But, thought John, I doubt anyone wants to hear about that. If I'm going to write, I just want to write about normal people facing little everyday dilemmas. Maybe he wasn't a match for this group.
If he got better at writing, what would he do with it? Was there value there? Maybe it was like classical music. The world already has enough classical music, there's really no point in adding any more, unless you have something really unique to say. John knew his instinctive viewpoint was far from unique. The only way he could create value was by spending a lot of time and work in unexplored fields. Maybe there were other subreddits that were a better match?
Maybe his time would be better spent somewhere else?
What about vacuum balloons? With 3D printing and computer aided design, maybe those were feasible now. Maybe people just weren't looking at them in the right direction. He fired up Bing, looking for the tensile strength of graphene. He still had half an hour ...
This was in response to a prompt on reddit.com r/WritingPrompts, "[OT] How do you post an image prompt?"