 So, I've actually been thinking about doing something of a counterpart to my harsh critique series for some time, and last night on Discord a couple of my Patreon backers and a few other people were mentioning to me that they would like something like that to be done, so I decided to start doing it now. This is kind of a test case. I'm going to be examining an article of mine that I wrote back in 2014 that I'm not actually a particularly big fan of. It's still positively rated at plus 74. I'm just not really a big fan of it. In fact, it's the only work out of the 95 or so articles I have up on the wiki that I've downvoted. So after the break, we're going to talk about SCP 2065. SCP 2065 is essentially a diet book called Eat What Everyone and Still Lose Weight, written by a fella called Christian Pullman. If an individual reads a part of the book itself, they will actually be converted into an SCP 2065-1 instance. Now this diet book doesn't actually do a good job of helping your diet, but it does have a fairly anomalous effect. It causes you to increase your minimum calorie intake by 4600 calories, and if you can't maintain that extra caloric intake, instead of losing just fat, you also lose internal organs and bones literally everything. And the only thing that doesn't get consumed by this effect is the skin and head of an instance. But it also doesn't kill them, even though the only thing they have left is their skin and their skulls. After that's done, the skin will actually become capable of moving on its own, and it can stand, sit, jump, whatever. And the organs located in the skull will become capable of elasticity that allows them to squeeze into certain areas. And if you don't feed them, they become incredibly hostile. Now one thing I'd like to point out about this article, and I've got a link to it in the description down below, so you can definitely take a look at it either during or after this examination, but the description takes a total of six paragraphs to get through, and they're not short paragraphs, and there's three very detailed phases that it goes through, which is actually sort of the start of one. I don't particularly like this article. It's a fairly basic concept. It's a book that when you read it makes you lose weight until you turn into a skin monster. That doesn't need six paragraphs of explanation. That needs three, maybe four at best, and so the pacing of the thing is seriously hindered by its length. Also notable, not just as the description, six paragraphs, but the special containment procedures are also three paragraphs. Even though they're a little shorter, they still, it's way more information than you absolutely need to make this article work. And that's the thing with dealing with flash fiction, and this was something I wrote almost five years ago now. So it was before I learned a lot of the lessons of how to write SEPs for the Wiki, and some of these lessons that I've learned mainly apply to me, not necessarily to other people's articles, because they can make pacing work with six, eight, 12 paragraphs in the description. Not always. You'd be surprised how often people get that wrong, but some people can make it work. For me personally, I look at this and I go, this is way too much information. It could be condensed down. And I actually think that most people, even if they can make it work, could do better if they were to condense down their works into less space, less words. Now, interestingly enough, the six paragraphs of badly paced description is then followed by four more paragraphs describing the specific stage three instance behaviors. Now, the reason for this is that I'm essentially creating what's a monster manual entry, and it's inspired by something I saw in Dwarf Fortress, which is they created a necromancer type magic, and people who had, say, skins laying around from skinned animals saw their skins get up and become mobile and hostile. And I thought to myself, wouldn't it be cool if that was an actual SEP, which not really, not personally anyway. Now, the four paragraphs in the stage three instance behaviors section describes basically how the thing moves around and attacks using stealth. And it actually consumes individuals like a snake. So these walking skin monsters will jump in to people's mouths, jam them up, choke them to death, and then consume them like an anaconda. And while I don't personally find that particularly interesting, I can see the appeal to certain people as to how that would be an interesting monster for them. And in fact, if that was it, it'd probably be okay with it. Unfortunately, that's not it. It didn't focus in on one thing. And this is where thematic consistency is important to me and why I usually preach it when I tell people about their drafts. See, the next section again focuses in on the monster, which is fine. It talks about how some of the monsters escaped, tells about how some of the monsters are a little bit maybe more intelligent than we think they are, which is hinted at earlier, when it talks about how the brain of the instances is actually preserved. As a monster, it's decent. But the last incident report tries to turn this into a personal story about the original guy that made it. He had a breakup, he's a terrible person. And also, he decides to write a diet book. And the diet book turns him into a flesh monster. And then we run into some of the most heavy handed dialogue I think I've ever written. So these are all little notes that were found in the guy's apartment along with the books. I can't go into work. I can't. They don't get it. I can't smile that empty smile. Get it? Empty? And say those empty words and be that empty person anymore. Get it? He's empty. He's not going to literally be empty. I can't eat. I can barely get up. I just want to rest. I'm having good and bad days. Yesterday I think the landlord came for the rent. It's been a few months. I just want to rest. I don't want to be alone anymore. I put on the front. I played the game. I pretended there was something beneath the skin. Real subtle. I stretched myself thin. Subtle again. And she saw right through. Saw me for who I was and left. I hope she dies screaming. I just want to be real. I can't fill the hole. So as you can see, that's not exactly the most subtle or nuanced description. Essentially it's just like, hey, you know how this guy turned into an empty skin monster? Well, it's comfy with actually failing empty. You always want to have a little bit more subtlety than that. I can't believe I actually, I mean, literally uses the words empty over and over and over again. It's like, hey, in case you didn't get it here. No, no, seriously. Now, overall this article, I think works as a monster. It definitely doesn't work in a personal story. And part of the reason why I still dislike it, even if I were to take out the personal story bits, which I'm not going to edit this, it's up, it's doing plus 74, fine, whatever. I might not like it, but other people could. But the reason why I don't like it is because it's just body horror. I'm not a big fan of horror. Now that may be hard to believe considering I write for what's considered to be a horror website. But there's a reason why I consider it to be more science fiction, horror and contemporary fantasy milled together than it is just pure horror. Thank God, because I can't stand horror stories, not in the sense that they like, make me feel so uncomfortable, I have to go away from them. Although body horror definitely does that. Like when someone shows gore or like violence in a movie or in a story that I read, it doesn't make me go like, that doesn't give me that sense of thrill that other people get from horror. Like you know, you get scared and you get that little bit of an adrenaline rush, and that makes you feel better. And so you kind of start chasing horror in that way. I don't get that. I've heard people describe it, I understand it, but I don't get it myself. So when I talk about this body horror creature that I've created, to me, it's just disgusting. If something is disgusting, you don't want to see more of it. Same thing goes for most horror for me and especially body horror. So even though the core monster could work, it's not the kind of thing that appeals to me specifically. And I should say, the reason I wrote this article specifically was because I don't like that kind of horror, and I wanted to get my brain around how to write it, even if I don't like it. Plus 74, I mean it's been five years, so that's not great, but plus 74 means at least I've succeeded somewhat. So what positive lessons can you take away from this article? Well, first of all, pacing is important. When you have a simple idea, don't go overboard with explaining it and explaining it and explaining it. The problem with the SCP Wiki is it's a very dry format. And if you go on forever in the dry format, you're going to lose your audience. So make it punchy, make it quick. Make the purely descriptive context work for you. And don't go on long tangents. And definitely don't go on those tangents and spoil your theme. You want to have a particular thing you're doing with an article. You're not writing a short story or a novel. There aren't a dozen different things you could be doing. You need to focus in on just one thing at first. And if you start to see your work getting longer and longer and longer, you can start to think about it. But this work is maybe at most a thousand, two thousand words. It's very short, and there's not enough room for two different themes. You either get the body horror monster, or you get the guy who's pining after his girlfriend. You don't get to have both. Anyway, that's it. I'd like to thank two new patrons, Samantha Crawford at $1 and Scott Nicholson at $10. These are new patrons that just pledged the last day or so. And as I said, they get a shout out because they joined this fine group of people who are helping make sure that I can continue to bring this content to you. If you want to see your name up here and get a shout out out loud on one of my weekday videos, just pledge any amount and I'll make sure and say your name. Remember, the Patreon link is in the description below, but it's patreon.com forward slash D. Sumerian. Make a donation and make sure this content keeps getting made. And let me know if you like this kind of video. I plan on doing more of them if they work out. I wanted to test it with one of my own articles just to kind of get an idea of how it works. But there's a very good chance I could start going over older articles and explain to you why they work and why they don't work from a writing perspective. Let me know if you like it. Thank you very much for watching, and I'll see you in the next video.