u/_acedric_

For years I told people I get writer's block. I'd sit down, stare at the document, write nothing, and walk away feeling defeated. I called it block because that's the word everyone uses and I never really examined whether it described what was actually happening.

It doesn't, for me. What's actually happening, almost every time, is that I don't know what the scene is supposed to do yet. I know where it goes in the book. I know which characters are in it. I might even know roughly what gets said. But I haven't figured out what the scene is actually about underneath all that, and I can't write it because there's nothing to write toward.

The fix isn't to push through. The fix is to stop trying to write and start thinking. Go for a walk. Get away from the keyboard. Ask the scene some questions. Why is this conversation happening right now and not three chapters earlier or later. What does each character want from the other one. What's the line that, if it gets said, breaks something open. Almost every time I do this, the scene shows up within a day or two, fully formed, and then it writes itself in one sitting.

What I was calling block was just the gap between when I sat down to write and when I'd done the actual thinking required to write. Sitting at the laptop wasn't going to close that gap. It was just going to make me feel bad about the gap existing.

I wonder how many of us are calling "block" what's really just the scene isn't ready yet.

I've been writing for about four years and I still can't keep track of my own work. Where I left off, what I rewrote, which version of a scene is the current one. It piles up and I lose things.

I just finished chapter 2 of my novel last week. Instead of rolling straight into chapter 3 I sat with the mess for a few days, and honestly the tracking problem has been slowing me down more than I wanted to admit. So a friend and I put together something small to fix it. Just for me, basically. Nothing commercial, no plans, no copyrighted anything.

A couple of my writer friends have tried it already and their notes helped a lot, but I want more eyes on it before I call it done and get back to the novel. I'm too close to it now to see what's actually annoying about it.

If you write long-form anything (novel, memoir, serial fiction, whatever) and you'd be willing to mess around with it for a bit and tell me honestly where it breaks, I'd really appreciate it.

Also, if you've actually solved the tracking problem for yourself, I'd love to hear how. Half of me suspects I'm just bad at organization.

Trying to meet more indie merch sellers who are already deep in fandom/bookish merch.

Things like:
stickers, pins, charms, stationery, mini prints, bookmarks, acrylics, etc.

been talking with creator-owned projects lately (authors/webcomics/indie games) and realized there’s a huge gap between creators with audiences and smaller sellers who actually know how to make merch people want.

Would love to connect with Etsy sellers or small artists already operating in this space.

Trying to talk to Etsy sellers / small merch artists who sell things like stickers, bookmarks, enamel pins, charms, stationery, or fandom-style merch.

We’re researching something interesting around official licensing for indie creators (authors, webcomics, indie games, etc.) and wanted to understand how smaller sellers think about permission/IP.

Would you ever pay for official rights to sell creator-approved merch if the process was simple and affordable?

Happy to compensate for a quick 20–30 min chat if you’ve got experience in this space. DM me if interested.

Any published mangaka or creators here ever get readers asking for merch based on your world/IP?

Not just book merch in general, but specific things like:
symbols, factions, maps, quotes, side characters, item art, insignias, etc.

I’ve been researching how smaller creators handle this stuff because it feels like there’s a huge gap between:
“fans clearly want merch”
and
“building an actual merch/licensing operation.”

Curious if anyone here has actually experimented with licensing, collaborations, merch sellers, convention vendors, or even small-batch merch before.

Did it go well? Was it worth the effort? What became difficult?

[ Removed by Reddit on account of violating the content policy. ]

Hey, I’ve been talking to a few indie creators lately and realized there are probably a lot of people sitting on interesting IP/worlds/art who’ve either tried doing merch before or wanted to.

I’m really curious about the seller side of this space. Especially people who’ve sold merch around their own original IP, worked with creators directly, or even tried licensing something unofficially/officially before.

Feels like there’s this weird middle ground where creators want merch to exist, but don’t necessarily want to become full-time merch companies themselves.

Would genuinely love to connect with people who’ve experimented with this before, even on a small scale. Mostly trying to understand what’s hard, what usually goes wrong, and how people currently handle permissions/production/selling.

If you’ve been in this space at all l'd love to talk, maybe we can figure smt

i've been writing for years and have shown my work to maybe four people total. the thought of posting a chapter for strangers to read makes me physically tense. i know this is something i have to get past. i know critique makes work better. i know hiding isn't helping me.

but the writing communities i've looked at all seem to assume you're excited to share. there's swap culture, weekly critique threads, immediate feedback expected when you post. that's the right setup for most people. it's not where i can start.

looking for a discord that has lower-pressure ways in. just chatting first. maybe sharing one paragraph instead of a chapter. people who get that some of us need to warm up to this. it's not precious, it's not avoidance, it's just how my nervous system is.

if you've been the same and found yours please share. and if there's a community that's good for slow trust-building, i'd love to hear about it

i've been writing for years and have shown my work to maybe four people total. the thought of posting a chapter for strangers to read makes me physically tense. i know this is something i have to get past. i know critique makes work better. i know hiding isn't helping me.

but the writing communities i've looked at all seem to assume you're excited to share. there's swap culture, weekly critique threads, immediate feedback expected when you post. that's the right setup for most people. it's not where i can start.

looking for a discord that has lower-pressure ways in. just chatting first. maybe sharing one paragraph instead of a chapter. people who get that some of us need to warm up to this. it's not precious, it's not avoidance, it's just how my nervous system is.

if you've been the same and found yours please share. and if there's a community that's good for slow trust-building, i'd love to hear about it

i've been writing for years and have shown my work to maybe four people total. the thought of posting a chapter for strangers to read makes me physically tense. i know this is something i have to get past. i know critique makes work better. i know hiding isn't helping me.

but the writing communities i've looked at all seem to assume you're excited to share. there's swap culture, weekly critique threads, immediate feedback expected when you post. that's the right setup for most people. it's not where i can start.

looking for a discord that has lower-pressure ways in. just chatting first. maybe sharing one paragraph instead of a chapter. people who get that some of us need to warm up to this. it's not precious, it's not avoidance, it's just how my nervous system is.

if you've been the same and found yours please share. and if there's a community that's good for slow trust-building, i'd love to hear about it

i've been writing for years and have shown my work to maybe four people total. the thought of posting a chapter for strangers to read makes me physically tense. i know this is something i have to get past. i know critique makes work better. i know hiding isn't helping me.

but the writing communities i've looked at all seem to assume you're excited to share. there's swap culture, weekly critique threads, immediate feedback expected when you post. that's the right setup for most people. it's not where i can start.

looking for a discord that has lower-pressure ways in. just chatting first. maybe sharing one paragraph instead of a chapter. people who get that some of us need to warm up to this. it's not precious, it's not avoidance, it's just how my nervous system is.

if you've been the same and found yours please share. and if there's a community that's good for slow trust-building, i'd love to hear about it

been writing the story for our game for a few months, last week i realised my magic system is basically titan shifting from AoT with the names swapped memory inheritance, bloodline costs, all of it.

mentioned it to a friend who writes for a small studio she said her lore is just dark souls' world-soul logic with a few tweaks
another writer i know said his pantheon is basically the FMA homunculi.
we all do this without realising.

so it got me thinking.
if you could license just the piece you wanted, like a magic system, a power system, a character, or a bit of lore, easy but affordable, would you?

not the whole IP, just the part you'd be borrowing anyway

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english isn't my first language.
i've been writing in it for about three years because the stories i want to tell don't have a home in the publishing scene of my own language. i can speak fluently, i read constantly in english, but writing fiction in it is a different muscle and i'm still building it.
most writing communities aren't unwelcoming exactly, but feedback often gets weird. either people fixate on small grammar things and miss the actual story, or they're so polite about the language stuff that you can't tell what's a real problem and what's just a quirk.

i'd love a discord where there are other esl writers, or just writers who get that the way i phrase something might be deliberate even when it sounds slightly off. people who'll critique the story first and the language second, and who understand that "your prose sounds weird" isn't always feedback i can act on without more context.

if you're in one, or you're an esl writer who found yours, please share

There's a chapter about two thirds of the way through my novel where almost nothing happens. The protagonist sits in a kitchen with a minor character who hasn't appeared since chapter four, and they have a long, meandering conversation about the protagonist's dead mother. There's no plot movement. The minor character doesn't reappear afterward. The conversation doesn't change anything in the external story.

Every workshop instinct I have said this chapter was self indulgent and needed to go. Every craft book in my shelf would have flagged it. Show don't tell, the chapter is almost entirely tell. Every scene should advance plot or character, the plot doesn't move. Cut what doesn't earn its place, this chapter looks like dead weight on a structural read.

I kept it anyway, because something in me knew it was the heart of the book.

When my beta readers came back, four out of five of them specifically mentioned that chapter as the moment the book opened up for them. The thing they didn't realize they needed. The chapter that made them care about everything else. Not because of what happened in it, but because of the quiet it gave them after a long stretch of escalation.

I think craft advice is mostly useful. I also think it can flatten the strangeness out of a book if you follow it too obediently. The chapters that make a novel feel like itself, rather than like every other novel, are often the ones that violate the rules in some quiet, specific way that you can't quite justify until you see the reader's face when they finish them.

Trust the weird chapter. It's almost always the reason someone will remember the book

The standard wisdom is that prologues are crutches, that agents skip them, that any information in a prologue can be woven into the main narrative more elegantly. I bought all of this. I cut mine. I spent months trying to fold the prologue content into chapter one and the early chapters, and the result was that chapter one became bloated and slow, and the original tension of the prologue got diluted across forty pages instead of landing in three.

I put the prologue back in last month. The book is sharper now. Chapter one can do its job, which is introduce the protagonist in her ordinary world, instead of trying to also carry the weight of setting up a hundred year old conflict that happened before she was born.

Some books need prologues. The ones where the inciting context happened long before the protagonist was relevant, the ones with dual timelines, the ones where you genuinely need the reader to know something the protagonist doesn't. Cutting them as a reflex because someone on Twitter said agents hate them is bad advice dressed up as craft.

Write the prologue if the book needs it. Read it back honestly and ask whether it's earning its place. If it is, keep it, and don't let anyone bully you out of a structural choice that's actually working

my girlfriend and I have been building games together for about 4 years now, she’s a writer and I build em,

we’re now building a building a game about broken empires, ancient magic & yokai’s manipulating humanity from the shadows and yesterday while deciding what to watch on crunchyroll we stumbled upon berserk, started talking abt it and suddenly its stunned us how similar our game actually is

we’ve been working on this for months and it really hit me like a rock that we were subconsciously working on something we watched years ago

Which made me wonder:
If licensing stories/IP’s was actually accessible for indie devs,

Why wouldn’t more developers just officially borrow universe the love instead of spending months trying to recreate it or find a workaround

If you could license a story, character, lore or plot, would you? and if yes, WHICH ONE?

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I have a list of about twelve scenes in this novel that I've been looking forward to writing for two years. The big confrontations, the reveal, the moment where two specific characters finally have the conversation they've been circling around since chapter four. I have notes on all of them. I know what happens. I know what gets said.

And every single time I get close to one of those scenes in the draft, I find a reason to push it back. I add a chapter in front of it. I tell myself the setup isn't strong enough yet. I write a different scene instead.

I think I'm afraid of writing them badly. The scenes have been so good in my head for so long that any version I actually put on the page is going to be a disappointment by comparison, and some part of me would rather keep the perfect imagined version than risk the real one.

The problem is, the book can't end without these scenes. Avoiding them is avoiding the book. I keep writing connective tissue around a hole I'm refusing to fill.

I don't have a solution. I'm posting this partly because saying it out loud might be what gets me to sit down and actually write one of them this week. Anyone else have this specific flavor of self sabotage?

i was walking a new sdr through our outbound setup last month and realized how absurd it had gotten
cold email itself is simple. Find the right people, send relevant emails, book meetings
but the tooling stack we built to do that which was apollo for leads, clay for enrichment, instantly for sending, a separate warmup tool and hubspot to track everything. five tools and none of them bad individually
the problem was the workflow between them
My SDR was spending the first 60-90 minutes of every day just moving data around before sending a single email
so i ran a small experiment, i pulled about 1,400 leads through fuse ai , set up 5 rotating inboxes and ran a campaign targeting heads of ops at mid market b2b companies for about three weeks. Sent around 4,200 emaill, got a 6.8% reply rate, 2.4% positive, 19 meetings booked. bounce stayed under 7%. Nothing groundbreaking but the interesting part wasn't the numbers
It was the operational difference
Leads went directly into sequences without exporting anything, replies showed up in a unified inbox, warmup and inbox rotation were built in. Dialer was native so calls happened in the same platform and crm synced automatically when someone replied or booked. My sdr started actually sending emails at 9am instead of 10:30
Apollo still has a better search ui and is faster for building lists, especially us tech coverage. I'm not dropping it entirely for research but the workflow of pulling leads, exporting, cleaning, importing, warming up separately, pushing to crm, that's where we were bleeding 6-8 hours a week across the team.

for a team of 3 doing outbound as our primary motion, collapsing five tools into one gave us back more selling time than any sequence optimization or copy tweak ever did.
For teams doing 3,000+ emails a month, are you still running modular stacks or have you started consolidating? genuinely curious where the line is before the all in one tradeoffs start hurting more than helping

if you're building anything in claude code the ten financial services plugins anthropic shipped today are worth reading even if you never touch finance, the architecture is a masterclass in how to structure agent workflows
Here's what they actually built ,each template (pitch builder, model builder, kyc screener, valuation reviewer etc) is a bundle of:
→ skill files defining trigger conditions and workflow steps
→ governed data connectors to external sources (factset, s&p capital iq, pitchbook, morningstar, moody's, daloopa)
→ subagents handling specialized pieces independently
→ slash commands exposing specific actions to the user
→ per-tool permissions and audit logging
the whole thing is on github and it's structured so you can fork and customize, drop your firm's terminology, processes, formatting standards, branded templates. Claude then works like it was built for your team specifically
the pattern worth highlighting for anyone building in claude code: they're using skill files as the core control mechanism, a SKILL.md with clear trigger conditions and workflow steps telling claude when and how to activate specific capabilities. This is domain-agnostic architecture implemented for finance.
I've been applying the same pattern to two completely different workflows in claude code and seeing anthropic formalize it in their official plugins validates the approach:
First is a content production pipeline where claude orchestrates visual production through magichour and kling's api (face swap,video gen, image editing all through one integration point) and programmatic editing through remotion. Each step has its own skill definition and the orchestration logic lives in a central workflow file so the subagent pattern from the finance plugins maps directly, one subagent handling script generation, another handling visual asset production, another handling assembly.
Second is an outbound sales automation where claude orchestrates prospecting through fuseai's api and routes leads based on intent signals, same architectural pattern, skill files defining triggers and connectors to external data The kyc screener template is structurally almost identical to what i built for lead qualification.
The microsoft 365 integration matters for claude code users too , context now carries between excel, powerpoint, word, and outlook automatically. the pitch builder outputs comps in excel, pitchbook in powerpoint, cover note in outlook. if you've been hacking around cross-application context with manual export/import steps this is the native solution
practical next steps are read the github repo, study how they structured skill files and subagent definitions then fork the financial analysis plugin as a starting template and the rebuild the skills and connectors for your own domain.The architecture transfers directly regardless of industry.
anyone else poking through the repo?what patterns people are pulling out for nonfinance use cases