Anonymous Guest asked: hello um this one was hoping for your advice about writing. it really looks up to the make up a character writing prompts community on cohost and wants to write about mech pilots and robots and magical girls like they do. just it also feels safest in the empty spaces community and also wants to write about dolls and moths and witches like they do. it is worried that if it writes science fiction fantasy stuff with characters that often are people with genders like the writing prompts community do, it will accidentally expand the definition of empty spaces in a way that will make itself and other things in the empty spaces community feel less safe and make empty spaces feel not as much of a refuge from trauma and normalcy as it feels like for this one and others right now. do you have any advice about how it could think about writing so it could write stuff others in the empty spaces community would still find comforting?
Boy, howdy, uh... you want this one's advice? I'm honored but... you know, this is something I worry about, too.
I also worry about how big this response got, so, read more cut.
a thoughtful and considered response, and one that this one shares several sentiments with.
also, thank you for being so kind as to mention this one alongside such excellent writers! wintergreen in particular is a favourite of mine, and a part of the reason i started writing ES-adjacent work to begin with. it makes this one happy to be considered in the same breath as it.
if empty spaces/Doll Twitter had waves, this one is very much at least second. the names it knew when it lit up a Twitter account with this name for the first time were sacred_machine, badend_doll, egregirls, else, arachnixe, purposecravings, mars_phobos_L1… at least one of whom is active here (hello) and at least two of whom it had muted at some point on its main for Dubious Vibes. (consult the empty spaces directory and maybe you'll find where some of them are today.)
it was dollposting before it was Wintergreen and before empty spaces, but empty spaces refreshed its understanding of horror and gave it new words to name and use traumas it had already known and some it had not. wonderful additional knives in the knife roll.
does this one think it was shitting up the place with unworthy sentiment at times, or softening the edges? yes. but such is the nature of experimentation… and also, most of those writers had comparable range before it got there. it suspects that the best horror writers are those perfectly capable of writing fluff, and that choose to turn all their decisions down different paths.
on the other hand, there are two lessons it would like to highlight that were common to the parts of early empty spaces that it loved, and that it wishes had persisted into later iterations after the original was murdered:
- Twitter gave you only 280 characters to do as much psychic damage as possible, and if you were very lucky, the reader would consider tapping on a further post to take more, but not if you didn't land that first one
- a witch is not a therapist
also, for the record, this one is pretty sure that "empty spaces is dead when someone makes a wiki" was, in fact, one of its posts 🤍⚙️
