u/Fognox

Which do you think is optimal for human s diet

There aren't human universals. It's all individual and based on way too many environmental and genetic factors.

I've been heavily experimenting with things lately and I don't seem to have an optimal diet myself, though I definitely have a preference. I ended up doing something close to a ray peat diet for a couple days without incident -- taking in sugar only when I was hungry and watching as it actually sated. And then had quite a bit of starch afterwards without the usual consequences. So both of those could just slot into my existing diet if I wanted them to.

I don't, though. I feel like LCHF is ideal for me for a bunch of different reasons -- fat as a primary energy source just makes way too much sense, and my stuff sure does taste good. But there's still flexibility there -- I can drink milk freely without worrying about carbs, or take in sugar or starch here and there and be metabolically flexible around it. That aspect is very different now that neither of those cause inflammation/cravings too. But I don't feel quite right if carbs are taking up too much of my energy needs, and definitely don't feel right if I'm restricting fat. Protein is pretty variable -- I don't restrict or target it, and all my fat sources contain it.

Prose is an entire toolbox, not a single tool. The sheer variety of writing styles is a testament to that. Imo, it's best to shape your prose to your story and particularly whatever it needs at any given moment. Sometimes you want the cadence to sing, sometimes you need complex metaphors with copious asides, and sometimes you just need the prose to get the hell out of the way to reach the emotional effect you want.

First of all, I'd make sure that you actually need that much dialogue:

• Characters explaining things the reader already knows can be replaced by "X explained."

• Characters explaining things the reader doesn't need to know can also be replaced by "X explained". Sometimes you'll want a character to be in the know and not the reader, for example, or sometimes it's just too long and the relevant parts can be gleaned in later interiority or what they talk about next. There's a real art to implication -- master it and your word count will shrink by an enormous amount.

• Pure worldbuilding exposition should just be cut altogether. I have yet to see a case where it's explicitly needed, and I've written four books with very alien settings. If it appears in dialogue, it's short and gets embedded inside something else -- plot movement, characterization, two characters reminiscing, whatever. It tends to work better when it's embedded inside interiority or description instead, and you can get away with full infodumps if emotion is high.

• Regular exposition follows similar rules. You do sometimes need it in a pure form because you're explaining some mystery that's existed for hundreds of pages, and the character talking is the one that's revealing it. So, the best strategy is to make the character that's getting the information emotionally invested and an active participant in the dialogue, which itself tends to mean that the mentor figure is egregiously cryptic and the other one is asking specific questions instead of just sitting there nodding. You can definitely break this kind of thing up with interiority too.

• Banter is great if it's humorous and doesn't repeat itself -- keeps things entertaining.

• For anything else, pay attention to the density of story beats. Ideally, you'd want every single line to be doing something, even if the "something" is just a character expressing emotion. If you have a lot of lines that are transitions between story beats, consider rerouting around them in a more efficient way during editing.

• And then, similarly, each exchange should have exactly one point to it -- you can embed other plot threads and bits of characterization in there, of course, but there should be a singular goal that makes the scene end when it's reached, or leads to an action beat that itself makes the scene end.

Tl;dr you need a lot less dialogue than you think you do, and if it's interesting and sufficiently dense, you just don't have these breaking-up problems in the first place. And, so long as the reader knows who's speaking at all times, pure dialogue is good enough.

I just aim for consistency above all else -- day #203 of daily writing/editing currently, which has outlasted two jobs, a move across the country, a major death in the family, etc. Some days I can do only the absolute bare minimum, but it still counts -- consistency is what sustains momentum, not output. If you can get five minutes in before bed or write while eating or whatever else, it'll make your actual free blocks way more productive. You don't have to fill every block of free time with writing, but finding one of them to do something does a lot more than you think it would.

Look up 3rd objective. The novel The Maltese Falcon was written this way.

A lack of interiority is rare for obvious reasons, but yes, it can be done. If you plan on writing one yourself, treat it as any other experimental piece of storytelling -- you're going to be missing a lot of what makes novels work well so execution is everything.

and it feels so much bigger than me sometimes

That's a normal feeling even with experience. Writing just involves a lot of work and time and tests you in novel ways with each new one. Then editing is even worse.

Fortunately, you can edit. It's perfectly fine to write something -- anything -- and then revise it into the book you want it to be, even if you're a planner. You don't have to write in order, either -- if you have some scenes in mind, you could write those out and see if they generate new ideas for the rest of the book. Or themselves. Writing is flexible with whatever you have to work with and however you want to approach it.

Dinkuses work particularly well, and:

• Opening a scene with the character's name as close as possible to the beginning (first word is best but not always possible)

• Having distinct writing styles for each POV so the reader gets oriented more quickly.

• Having a fixed POV order for similar reasons.

• A high contrast between one POV's ending and the next's opening helps. My tendency is ending on a piece of interiority that deeply summarizes the scene and doing openings that focus on the environment or off-page events for that character. Strong lines in both cases too. As an example, I have "Their reckoning would arrive soon enough" --> "X's heart pounded in his ears."

If you're writing omniscient, you can just freely move around -- but in that case you'd want to transition cleanly between POVs. If you're deep in a character's head, get back out to shallow thoughts or them focusing on the environment, and from there to 3rd filtering (X thought, X saw), then you can focus on the environment itself before zooming back in to someone else. There's a bunch of tricks you can do to skip steps, but in general you're best served by holding the reader's hand as much as possible.

Head-hopping itself can work if you follow the rules above very closely, and you actually have a good reason for it. In my book, for example, there's a scene when two characters become disembodied minds inside the same tree and can pick up on one another's thoughts. So, it switches back and forth between them, one POV per paragraph, always starting with the character name, they both have distinct writing styles, and the back-and-forth of their thoughts works a lot like dialogue where one character's thoughts relates directly to the last sentence of the previous character's.

Normal when you work on one for a long time. It's your brain asking if all this effort is worth it. Spoiler alert: it is.

But it was all a dream. I woke up and immediately went to my mirror.

It's very hard to get actual novelty, and when you have it, you absolutely need to execute it to perfection or it'll cause mass DNF.

I always look for whichever path connects the most plot threads together, unless I'm earlier into the book, in which case I do the opposite. There's always some hard cutoff point when the story goes through a major shift, so I use that as the dividing line between the two different strategies.

The stories that won't leave me alone are the ones that I turn into full novels. The ones I need a break from end up in the graveyard instead.

Consistency is a problem for the second draft. Having a good structure might be too, but ideally you'll pin that down on the first pass. The first (and, possibly, only) thing you'll want to figure out is if your characters are creating the story or are being affected by it -- very different structures with each approach. Hybrids also work, and ensemble casts tend to work like hybrids even if every single event is caused by a character.

My fourth book is ~127k that takes place over about twelve hours. Very close to real time -- I structured it in a way where POV gaps create needed time skips, though occasionally a few minutes will pass within a POV. My first book was a similar length, one POV, and took place over two and a half days.

This kind of thing works basically identically to any other kind of book, except for a few major differences:

• The scale of your world is going to be very limited, unless you have fast transportation or something. My fourth book has flying mounts that have speeds similar to cars at highway speeds, but it still took close to the entire length of the book for my starting character to get from one side of the map to the other.

• On a related note, real-time stories where civilization isn't incredibly dense is going to have a lot of transition time on journeys. Transitions tend to be boring and are best skipped, but if you can't do that, then you have to make them interesting. In my case, I leaned in heavily to characterization and tension --> action cycles, both of which led to major plot movements. Dialogue-based dual character development worked really well too.

• Your map gets fixed, too. You can't just handwave away spatial ambiguity with time skips. I had to keep going back over the text to figure out how long some journey took for another POV to make sure the new one matched up. And figuring out differences due to mount speed as well.

• You can actually create meaningful friendships, relationships and character arcs during that span of time. But everything has to be incredibly dense on a timewise basis. If events are progressing rapidly, this does tend to help -- it changes character clocks as well, the same way it does in real life.

• For whatever reason, I find that real-time novels work better with a time-skipped ending. That happened with both of my books. My time-skippy two, meanwhile, had falling action and long third acts that took place entirely in real time. Maybe it's the contrast that makes it feel right.

• The lack of time limits the amount you can do with plot events, unless your map is sufficiently small (or people have a way of getting around quickly). The solution is just to make smaller events feel larger than they are. My fourth book had a war start in the middle of it (and two other large conflicts). Obviously, the remaining six hours isn't anywhere near long enough to play that out, but individual preliminary battles can feel like major ones if you frame them right. My strategy was just to focus on the sheer chaos of it -- one of the battles had local forces, forces gathering from abroad that were allied, forces gathering from abroad that were attacking, and a fourth force that was attempting to convert all three other groups into part of their hivemind. There hadn't been anywhere near enough time for actual armies to form but it nonetheless felt like the middle of a complex war.

Don't introduce the plotline until later, build other plotlines towards it instead.

The way I build novels is to have several plotlines going at once that are very separate from one another, then when they start to connect and resolve, I slam them into one another instead and flesh out the combination as a central plotline. If one ends early, no problem -- its consequences form the next plotline along that thread. Then, since I have no idea what this central plotline will be in advance, I go back through during editing and foreshadow it better.

Everytime I try, I get hit with the fear that everything I write will be heavily derivative of what I have read.

Well yeah, that's going to be true no matter what you do. Everything you've read, watched, played, experienced, hell, nonfiction ends up in there somehow. So, if you want to create something more unique, widen your influences. Read well outside your genre, read pulp from a hundred years ago, read amateur fanfiction, etc. Whatever frankenstein monster comes out of that won't be like anything else.

From there, you can just refine the unique thing you're doing further, breaking new ground. Reading weird unrelated things will still be helpful, however.

Use the object as the subject instead:

X saw a mountain out in the distance --> The mountain rose up from the horizon.

It also works with things related to a character:

He ran his hands over the door, trying to feel the hidden keyhole --> Hands passed over the door's surface, searching for the keyhole hidden within.

And even interiority:

He felt like he'd been on this path for too long. He'd journeyed for months and was still no closer to his goal. --> The path continued to stretch out ahead. Months spent on it with no end in sight.

No matter how dense your book is, you can always cut more. And there's no way in hell that your first book is already maximally dense. Things that help here:

• Rewriting scenes is a big one. There are more efficient ways of reaching the same story beats then the way you did on the first pass, and that's even assuming that they're all necessary in the first place. Sometimes a beat is just a transition between two that are important and you can cut it altogether, or find some shorter transition. Sometimes beats will connect together on their own if you rearrange them. Sometimes they're important for something later on, but there's a way more efficient way of doing the same thing in a different scene.

• Heavily scrutinize the way you're doing worldbuilding. Explicit exposition should really just be cut altogether. I'll instead embed it inside narration or interiority that serves some other purpose, or I'll rely on description to tell the reader how the world works, or mention important locations in passing during dialogue that serves some other purpose. I've done worldbuilding edits that are all of one word inserted at some optimal location that explain something that's otherwise a hole.

• Some worldbuilding is just completely unnecessary in the first place -- anything that doesn't appear in the current book, for example. Yes, you sometimes need to prep for sequels, but what you want here are small intriguing hooks embedded in other things, nothing explicit. Also, if you're seeking traditional publishing, there's no guarantee that you'll be able to make sequels -- they depends on how well your book does. Something to keep in mind with option #3 too.

• If you're not already doing it (unlikely for a first book!), plot development can actually happen inside character-heavy scenes. The opening of threads in particular. Much harder to fix than other targets, granted.

• Since it's a first book, look into the way you're handling transitions. These should all serve some purpose. If they're not, remove them altogether and imply them instead. If they are, consider that they might not be doing enough -- they're ideal targets for characterization and foreshadowing, which you can move from elsewhere.

• Make sure you're not narrating things that could simply be implied. My first book is full of stuff like "he picked up the book". If he's reading the book, he clearly picked it up. There's just no need to describe every single little thing that happens, unless you're doing it for the sake of tension or some other kind of slow scene. Sometimes you can imply entire scenes rather than writing them out, or have a few sentences of past perfect after the fact -- sci-fi does this a lot for whatever reason, and you're conveniently in the same genre.

• Interiority is typically an area where you're way less efficient than you could be. I tend to heavily overwrite these scenes because the characters are confused and take a while to reach some useful story beat. During editing, I'll kill a good 50% of them because it's more clear what the POV's thoughts are leading towards, and I can just tell confusion rather than showing it. Emotional interiority is trickier, but can still be done with a rewrite. And backstory is typically underwritten instead.

• Make sure your other characters are being introduced at the right time. The "right time" there means that the introduction is kicking off plot threads or character arcs, not that it's most logical for them to be there instead of somewhere else in the future. You can retcon all manner of things to have them appear right when it's relevant to the story. Go too far away from their original location, and there will be repercussions, but sometimes that's worth it if it allows you to cut giant scenes that serve no purpose. Meanwhile, if the MC stays in a location for a while, you have a lot of opportunity for a later introduction. If the new character is guiding them around, find some reason for the MC to go there instead -- fixes that problem and adds more agency as well, which is always a good thing.

• On that note, characters can often cause events that were previously external. Finding a path here means less plot that you have to set up, so you get a lower word count, and you get the improved agency bonus again as well.

• Scrutinize plotlines that just end because some other one becomes more important. If you're looking to cut, cut the useless ones. Yes, you're going to have to kill some darlings in the process. An alternative, however, is to repurpose them to cause something whose transitions and development you don't mind cutting. Something too long that's only necessary because of what it leads to, for example.

The rules are write 1st but change the pronouns/use names if you need to. Easy.

My action scenes went from descriptions, to kinetic and tactile. Emotions went from words, to viscerally sensations of emotions.

You can do that with past tense, but good god you sure do learn quick in present. It definitely doesn't come naturally in past, but once you learn it, you can apply it there too.

Same deal with 1st/3rd -- free indirect basically turns 3rd into 1st but it's helpful to actually use 1st so you know what kind of constructions to write in the first place.

If you feel the need to go that route, there's a few options:

• Exogenous ketones are the easiest.

• Classical ketogenic diets raise ketones because they directly imitate fasting. The basic idea is having some ratio of fat grams to everything else, with 3:1 and 4:1 being common. 2:1 is pretty damn sustainable; I've been doing that for over a decade -- instead of limiting protein you're instead just throwing fat on top of your very fatty protein.

• Fasting raises ketones, so rigid IF schedules might help, particularly with smaller windows.

but would be counterproductive to the entire point of ketosis, which is brain support.

The entire article accepts this an axiom. But no, relentlessly maximizing ketones isn't the primary reason most people use ketogenic diets, otherwise they'd religiously follow Charlie Foundation ratios and/or add fasting, both of which are proven to raise ketone concentration.

I'd also argue that you get more therapeutic value from better-controlled blood sugar than you do from ketones themselves over the long-term. Neurological issues are tied to poor brain-glucose utilization and what's probably ultimately a form of insulin resistance ("type 3 diabetes"), so keeping carbs low enough that GNG keeps blood sugar stable gives the brain time to recover. Same deal with systems elsewhere in the body -- your body should be able to handle a giant influx of glucose without its lack of clearance causing IR in the first place, and keeping carbs very low for long enough gives those mechanisms time to recover as well. And, there's also mitochondria to consider -- ketosis makes them proliferate, so the brain is then more able to use glucose via oxidative phosphorylation.

So, I'd argue that the point of long-term therapeutic ketogenic diets is keeping the glucose-metabolizing systems healthy, not in keeping the other stop-gap fuel source elevated. Besides, 0.5 mmol/L is still ketosis; you're still reaping the epigenetic benefits.

These observations support a human brain that is not just ready to adapt to ketosis as a fallback when glucose is deficient, but ready to use it maximally at any time.

That doesn't necessarily indicate that it's a preference. The same argument that counters the idea that glucose is a primary fuel source works here too. When blood sugar is high, cells will preferentially use it instead of fat -- is that because it's the preferred fuel source, or is it just a way of mitigating hyperglycemic damage? Similarly, excessive amounts of ketones are destructive -- see: all forms of ketoacidosis. There are other mechanisms in place to eliminate excess ketones, too -- new ketogenic dieters experience them: excretion in the urine ("hey my test strips work") sweat (keto BO), breath (keto breath). The brain's ability to maximally use ketones might just be another one of those systems.

Anecdotally speaking, yes, elevated ketones produce an absurd level of brain sharpness, however even without that, there are valuable long-term effects from lower (but not absent!) ketone concentration -- drastically improved focus, a much much much higher capacity of both short-term and long-term memory, brain function being close to normal when mildly sleep-deprived, and so on.

It helps to just reword the sentences so you're only using names when you're making a switch of topic. It's a pain to find constructions that work sometimes, though not nearly as bad as my side project where the MC's pronoun is "it".

3rd limited is basically just 1st but with more flexibility. There's enough implied psychic distance there that you can dip into your own writing voice without it being jarring, and meanwhile, free indirect works identically to 1st, just with different pronouns. The only downside is how screwy sentences get with ambiguous pronouns -- lots of line editing involved there. Well worth the tradeoff.

It's also a hell of a lot easier to handle multiple POVs, particularly in an ensemble cast. This kind of thing just breeds confusion, and being able to use names early on and having pronouns that aren't all exactly the same helps a lot.

My first two books were written in 1st, and then once I realized what 3rd could do, I switched and didn't look back.

For most of the book, I pants, mentally plan, alter plans, and make minor consistency edits simultaneously. Pantsing sessions are structured in the sense that I don't know where the scene is going but it does have to go somewhere. Plans are left vague and the story is slowly nudged in their direction -- this will uncover new details and potential hooks and maybe even other plans. Edits are made when I need some earlier detail changed to make an idea go through. As an example, one of my characters burned down a library early on to smoke another character out, but I needed it to exist later, so I just made them burn + throw individual books instead.

Early on, it's pure pantsing unless there's some likely event that I need to get the timing right on. There aren't any plot threads open beyond whatever POV motivation / short term goals are, so I pants to dig new ones up. I have no idea what these will actually be, and I therefore have no earthly idea what I'm writing.

When I have enough of those, I switch gears and start developing what I have instead, trying to maintain distance between the plotlines. Some development is planned, quite a lot is pantsed instead. Somewhere in here I get my first glimpse of the climax -- usually all of one or two story beats.

Then, when plotlines start interacting with each other more, I switch gears again and start slamming them into one another, simplifying the story and prepping for the climax. Everything during this stage is planned, and more and more details of the climax are uncovered -- I've learned not to actually plan it out manually.

Then I write the climax with the details I already know, and pantsing to fill in the blanks. And the ending, which resolves the events of the climax, sends off the characters, and wraps up the book as a whole. The ending tends to be largely pantsed, and it's hard to predict the length -- sometimes I need falling action to make it work, sometimes a time skip is better.

Research is done on an as-needed basis, sometimes is delayed for editing, and sometimes I'll heavily research something only to either not use it or use it for all of one paragraph.

Prior to writing, I try to work out some basic details of the setting, character motivations, and where/when the opening happens. That's all I have going in, though, no outline, no major events, no premise. Sequels have a bit more because the previous book established a few things, and the worldbuilding is obviously way more fleshed out than usual.

Is writing in your eyes more an intuitive process with flights of creativity, or is it a highly structured endeavor.

I'd define it as a relentlessly chaotic process more than anything else.