Link & domain name updates

Lee Lacaille-XingLeave a comment

First of all: I’m letting the jayargall.com domain expire in December. I’m not using the pen name anymore, so there’s no reason for me to have it as the name of my website. This means that this blog will go back to being an obvious WordPress blog, with the address selenicseas.wordpress.com.

The problem is that there are a lot of links that point back to jayargall.com. This doesn’t just include the pages where I link to my artwork and novel chapters – it includes probably 50% of the blog posts I’ve made on this site. It’s a lot of stuff to go through.

I hope to have everything updated by the end of the year. If anyone find any of the old jayargall.com links in 2023, please post a comment on the page/blog post and I’ll fix it as soon as I can.

Why am I blogging so much, anyway?

Lee Lacaille-Xing1 Comment

I genuinely can’t remember if I made a post like this before. Maybe I did in 2021? Who knows. I’ve written so much on this blog that 2021 was basically centuries ago.

I originally decided to get back into blogging because I thought it would help my writing skills. Writing is writing, right? Writing blog pots should totally help with writing fiction, right?

It definitely has helped…my ability to write blog posts. It has not helped my fiction writing skills, of course, because writing fiction is what improves your fiction writing skills.

Despite that, it hasn’t been a waste of time. I get a lot more traffic to this blog than I did before. More people visiting means more followers, which means more people potentially reading my actual fiction and comics. It’s the kind of attention I like!

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Pillowfort

Lee Lacaille-XingLeave a comment

I’ve been using Pillowfort ever since I found their Kickstarter in 2018. I’d say it’s the social media site I’m actually most active on. It’s a text-based blogging site with zero algorithm. You control who see your posts. You can follow individual people and communities, which are sort of like subreddits. You can blacklist post tags if someone you follow posts about things you don’t particularly care about.

It’s also entirely user-funded, which is the most attractive part of the site to me. There is no investor funding whatsoever! That does obviously mean that the site isn’t nearly as big as the major social media sites, but…that’s not a bad thing. I’ve found that a smaller community where I recognize a large number of the people posting is a pretty nice situation to be in.

Anyway, I thought I’d just give a shoutout to a website that I actively use and monetarily support.

Why did I decide to use Kishotenketsu this year?

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When I first started planning the story I’m writing for NaNoWriMo, I didn’t set out to use a particular story structure. It isn’t something I’ve ever done. I’ve never outlined in a way that uses a particular story structure before, unless you include the creative writing I did during English classes in school a very long time ago. I don’t.

I’ve never set out to use the typical Western three-act story structure. It genuinely isn’t something I’ve ever thought of doing – and I’ve been writing seriously since 2008. Picking any kind of story structure and actually following it is very new to me.

Sometime in October, I remembered reading that the kishotenketsu structure has four parts: introduction, development, twist, and resolution, with the “twist” part recontextualizing everything that happened so far in the story. That was actually very similar to what I already had planned for the story, so I thought: why not? It certainly wouldn’t hurt to try out an actual story structure this time, especially since it wouldn’t require much (if any) extra work.

So that’s the whole reason I’m using kishotenketsu this month: basically, a coincidence.