#herowndream — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #herowndream, aggregated by home.social.
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How skyscrapers get built (and how #AI gets cheap)
Heard the AI advice again: break the task into small steps, hand each step to something cheap. Works fast with AI - but it's not really an AI trick. It's how we built skyscrapers before we had reliable fire.
In my #book a heist runs on thousands of workers, each doing one dumb move, perfectly timed.
What's the last big thing you broke into small pieces?
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On the metro, a stranger across me held a book so I saw the cover. Title unreadable. What if it rewires my head? I got off at my stop, never knowing.
Marichka in Her Own Dream collects the same half-stories: a painted skeleton watching her like an old friend, a baguette rising to a window on a rope. Cities are full of plots we never finish.
Attached: what I imagined inside that cover.
What book almost happened to you?
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I light incense, lie down, ten minutes of silence. Minute 7: my brain plays a scene - someone walks a corridor I've never seen. Open my eyes. Write it down. Not mine. But it exists.
1963: a man knocks down a basement wall, finds Derinkuyu - 18 storeys underground, already built. He didn't invent it. He found the door.
Some corridors in Her Own Dream arrived the same way: uninvited, fully built, waiting.
Ever had a scene you didn't build?
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A 3-minute voice note arrived. I saw the length and left it unopened. Not because the person isn't interesting - because 3 minutes of someone's voice is a resource I don't have today.
In Her Own Dream, the #cat Dream lives by one rule: kittens aren't lazy, they conserve - energy is a rare resource. And in Koch's Friends, listening is a whole posture. I want to give it fully, not in the gaps between things.
Voice note: gift or debt?
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Woke up at 5 AM not to an air-raid siren but to the cat sitting on my chest, staring into my face. Not meowing. Just staring. And I lie there, unable to move - what if he has something to say?
In Her Own Dream, Dream the cat never meows either. She just watches - until someone finally reads her. Marichka (Dream's own girl) learned. I'm still failing at 5 AM.
What does your cat's stare mean?
#WritingCommunity #AmWriting #IndieAuthor #Fiction #HerOwnDream #cat #cats #Art #Ukraine
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Someone left their laptop open and walked away. Screen awake. What if that's a novel in its penultimate draft? Read or close?
The Awwam inscription has been 'open' for 1,600 years - nobody ever came back for it. A café laptop is the same, except yours comes back.
Her Own Dream keeps circling the same trespass: what it feels like to be read before you're finished.
Would you read?
#HerOwnDream #WritingCommunity #IndieAuthor #Fiction #archaeology
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How skyscrapers get built (and how #AI gets cheap)
Heard the AI advice again: break the task into small steps, hand each step to something cheap. Works fast with AI - but it's not really an AI trick. It's how we built skyscrapers before we had reliable fire.
In my #book a #heist runs on thousands of workers, each doing one dumb move, perfectly timed.
What's the last big thing you broke into small pieces?
#WritingCommunity #Fiction #HerOwnDream #lifehack #thriller #photo #art
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#Paranoia, but make it useful.
I don't regret the times my gut was wrong. I regret every time I called it paranoia and stayed quiet anyway.
Real threats rarely announce themselves. They move oddly, laugh off-beat, and want your fast reaction more than anything else.
My book's most patient predator never explodes into a room. She goes still and waits. Even the softest paws leave a print somewhere.
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If you don't disable comments but never answer mine, I #mute you. Not spite — just not spending #empathy on someone who has none to spare.
Mutual friends get a pass, always. #Friendship survives silence; strangers' pride doesn't earn my time.
Heroes of my book learned that fast, before they even had words for it: who's worth answering, who isn't.
Where's your line for muting?
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The #car that still holds its shape underwater
#Spielberg builds machines that still hold their shape decades later - every gear pays off, every detail earns its place. He just stopped noticing which century he's building for (Disclosure day)
Most blockbusters either strip the mechanics bare (swap Nolan's characters for wind-up toys, the plot runs the same) or skip the engineering - just vibes and a runtime
I steal his chassis, not his decade
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Every good twist doesn't break its promise to you - it just reveals you were reading the wrong genre the whole time.
Sugar - is a slow-burn detective show with Colin Farrell - the kind that wears its Golden Age Hollywood DNA proudly.
It pulls the floor out from under you so hard your teeth rattle.
I stole that structure shamelessly for my own book's midpoints.
Steal loudly. Steal from everywhere. Just steal from the best.
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Just watched #Odyssey - a $250M #fanfic with Discovery Channel narration energy. I'd pay real money for a Sean Connery voice-clone doing that narration, gravel and all.
I didn't steal a single beat from it. I learned what to avoid: swapping the ancient, bloody satisfaction of revenge for therapy-speak - "let go," "accept yourself," "walk away."
Homer's hero fights to reclaim his home.
This one just leaves it. -
What practical effects taught me about writing violence
My thriller runs in two-chapter "episodes" - cliffhanger at the end of each. Stole that structure from #TV writers, not novelists.
This week: what else I stole from film. First up - practical effects. That seam between latex and skin taught me to write a body breaking apart: texture over spectacle.
Want the scene it shaped? Ask and I'll paste it.
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I finally started blocking back
I never blocked anyone first. As a #writer, I used to think other people's damage was #free research — every grudge, every tic, potential material.
Not anymore. Block me, I block back. No investigation into what's broken in your head. I don't have the bandwidth — not while staying alive is a full-time job for every Ukrainian right now.
Tell me the line that made you block someone last.
I know how to listen. -
Why #AI will never build your wall (hi, Pink Floyd) right
I don't think what we call AI is #slop. It's closer to an uncanny valley — it copies human mistakes with terrifying precision, right when those mistakes stop being true.
A human builds a wall with holes in the wrong places. Not carelessness — being broken is how we live. Real scars, not makeup.
AI can paint that wall, tell you how to build it better.
It will never know where the holes need to go.
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The cardboard-box theory of bad writing.
Ever open a huge box of chocolates and half of it is empty plastic tray? That's most #books and #movies. Whole chapters, whole episodes - pure packaging, zero chocolate. Filler that tastes like styrofoam.
My rule: if a scene is set in #Amsterdam, it doesn't get to be canals and a bike. That's the plastic tray. Show me something the postcard never does.
So - I do it again and again in my #book.
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A nursery rhyme scarier than my horror scenes.
King shows childhood fears never leave — they just change costume.
Mine: the impossibly high ceilings of train stations.
I stared at photos of vaulted station roofs until the old dread came back then let it write itself.In the station, in the shadows
Lay a corpse without a head
While they searched for where it vanished
Legs got up and off they spedStill don't know why ceilings. Still can't unsee it.
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The fight-or-flight epiphany that rewired my writing
Meditation didn't calm me down. It showed me something sharper: if I get caught, I'll run. If I get knocked down, I'll get up.
That's the whole rule.
It sounds obvious — until you write a character who actually lives by it.
Their fear suddenly has edges instead of just weight. Took months to land, not one sitting.
And it so wide and wild.
#Writing #WritingCommunity #HerOwnDream #Meditation #foto #art
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What city's biggest bookstore taught me about my #book.
I did market research the old-fashioned way: walked into the biggest bookstore in Kyiv and stared at what's selling.
Three piles: reheated copies of what was popular 15-20 years ago. Heavy, plotless "classics" (sorry, Nietzsche). Non-fiction that reads more like a soap opera than actual insight.
None of it was the book I wanted to read.
So I tried to write the one that steals the best from all three. -
How my #cat learned to purr in two languages.
"Mriya" (this was also the name of the world's largest plane that was destroyed by the #russia) means "dream" in Ukrainian — and it happens to sound like purring: mrrrrriya.
Rewriting the book to English, I needed the same trick. Turns out "dream" purrs too if you drag it right: drrrrream.
Some things translate better than words ever could.
But not the same)))
#Writing #HerOwnDream #Cats #Translation #blog #WritingCommunity
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There’s no need to be afraid to steal openly.
But it’s like, for example, Stanley Kubrick stealing from painters, or me trying to steal from Hitchcock.
Despite the asymmetry of the talents listed, none of us will ever succeed in stealing everything.
If anyone’s interested, I can let you read the first two chapters of my #book #HerOwnDream — maybe you’ll give me some feedback or try to steal something from me, too.
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I wrote my #book #HerOwnDream as а form of entertainment that aims not only to entertain but also to educate
I understand that what I want to teach is uninteresting to Western readers because it is precisely what truly frightens them
I wrote a book about what a person experiences when living under the constant stress of a state of war
My book is not just another work based on the war itself
This can be illustrated, for example, with the following image
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My #book ends in the Ukrainian Carpathians, which most people around the world do not consider Ukrainian and associate these mountains with Dracula.
The count lived a little bit elsewhere, because here it’s a rather picturesque and pretty wide region that differs significantly from the Alps, for example.
Every location in the book should have the opportunity to reveal itself to the reader in real life.
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Instead of writing a sequel to my #book, I’m writing a prequel about the supporting characters.
First, it can be read as a standalone story.
Secondly, reading both books gives a stereoscopic picture.
Third, this keeps the setting from becoming stagnant.
In life, we usually use the filter of our own personality and thus make our perception poorer.
I overcome this with my approach to writing.
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The #cat in my book is based on two real cats.
The first one is my cat, Lamp, who got her name because we adopted her from a shelter while she was wearing a plastic collar.
The second one - stray Parisian cat named Félicette. She was sent into space on a suborbital flight in 1963. She survived and returned safely.
We speak openly about #slavery but remain silent about #vivisection.
It's time to talk about that.
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So my #book is not a typical #thriller - it’s an attempt to translate war pain for Western readers who are tired of this war and don’t want to hear about it.
A close friend of mine was killed by russian in the #war just a few days ago.
It’s about war trauma, without transcribing all the horrors of war.
It's an attraction of pain for people who need just a fun.
This is an attempt to reach an audience that is hiding from problems.
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My #book starts simple: Marichka, a schoolteacher from #Ukraine, takes a job escorting someone's cat.
What follows moves through hijacked planes, Amsterdam back rooms, and a black-market contractor economy where killers are hired the way you'd order a ride - fast and anonymous.
This is a buddy story where you're never quite sure which one of them is actually in charge. Nobody here - including the #cat - is who they first appear to be.
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Is there a national #cartoon in your country?
In #Ukraine, there are a few, but what exists is a #culture phenomenon rife with quotable lines.
When I was writing #HerOwnDream I tried to capture that very recognizable rhythm - something akin to a Disney R-rated cartoon.
Here’s an example of such a cartoon that plays on vibes of #Australia
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Advice on getting good sleep, taking vitamins and minerals doesn't work at all in the conditions of war (a real, not a fictional danger) as a reality.
So breathing exercises, meditations, motivations are marketing noise from a hothouse person trying to monetize his education.
In reality, harsh antidepressants and other frightening things work.
I wrote a #book where I told this and throw all these dead godzilla gurus in the trash.
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I’ve been actively looking for a literary agent for two months.
Here’s what that means for me:
- 33 emails sent, each tailored to the recipient’s preferences.
- 12 rejections, varying in politeness.
- 2 requests for the full text.In my opinion, these are decent statistics for this period, considering both mathematical models and my initial expectations.
#Summer brings hope.