Intro

Welcome to dcnblog. As the saying goes, there are many like it but this one is mine. I’m both a programmer first and writer second, but this blog is dedicated to (story) writing related topics.

I have been writing for a long time unprofessionally, but I’ve never thought about having a blog like this until recently. I usually stay off social media outside of a few specific forums, or if I’m on social media I’m usually not logged in, so I’m not usually one to have discussions online. But for various reasons, I’ve been rediscovering old blogs, forums, Tumblr sites, and more. And it made me a little sad. Many of them are abandoned or no longer being hosted. Some are still alive but only get a post or two every six months. Seeing a community that used to have tons of activity — some I even participated in — makes me worry about the future of online communities.

It’s not like people disappeared; they went to other sites. One of the most recent forms is short-form content. You have some sort of feed, you get a bunch of people’s videos, you go “oh that’s funny” or “wow I never knew that” and continue scrolling (or let the app automatically scroll for you) until you decide to do something else. Sure, it’s easier than ever to get into the space, all you have to do is have a phone and feel okay recording yourself.

But I’m not a fan of that kind of content. There’s so much complexity to things around us in the world and I feel that short form content can trivialize things. It’s not just shorts that are like this. Everything feels like it’s getting more clickbaity. Even regular YouTube video thumbnails are pretty awful, and that’s only done because the algorithm makes you do those kinds of things to be seen. SEO is going out of control, and pushing more AI garbage sites to the top of the list rather than real human-written posts. And good luck finding an actual recipe on the internet for God’s sake.

To me, I value the hard work that goes into deep dives into topics. Those two to four hour video essays? Love those. Long blog posts about a really specific niche thing? Ferb, I know what we’re doing today. Is it Sunday? Is this episode of CBS Sunday Morning not a rerun? Guess we know what we’re watching. I know not everyone has a ton of time to allocate for long-form content. Isn’t it better to get a lot of small nuggets of information rather than a large focus on one thing? And what if I get bored halfway through?

I hate to be that person to use “back in my day”, but back in my day things felt… better? Power was in the hands of people and not the algorithm. Blogs were publicly accessable without an account and all kinds of craziness could be found. There are definitely still internet subcultures but… they don’t quite feel the same. You can find a lot of people that might agree with me and a lot of people that might disagree with me. And that’s okay.

So that’s the reason I’m starting the blog. It’s one thing to discuss small things on Discord and it’s another to have more detailed writeups on a dedicated website.

About me, dcn17

But that’s enough of that. Let’s back up a bit. What is this blog really about? To get there, let’s start all the way at the beginning. (The audience sighs because they know they are in for a long lore dump.)

Way back in Pre-K, I was reading Dr. Seuss books out loud. I don’t remember anything about when kids learn to read, but apparently it was surprising to my teachers at the time. As a result, they occasionally moved me to a 1st/2nd grade class to learn more reading and writing. I think at the time I was actually just really good at memorizing text and reciting it, but it didn’t matter — I was excited to be in a class with older kids. It was through that class that I started to learn about what it took to write stories. I don’t think I was writing back then, but I was at least paying attention to what the other students were doing.

There was a system to write stories called “three pen writing”. The teachers would provide a topic (or just a free topic) and the students would write on the topic. The paper used was special large text pages with a dotted line through each row. I presume this was to practice handwriting.

The story would first be written with a black pen. As the story was written, every other line would be skipped so edits could be made later. This was called the “writing portion”. The next part was called the “revision” stage which called for a blue pen. In it, you would make changes to the overall “design” of the writing rather than specific spelling or grammar mistakes. Sometimes you could revise your own page, but often it was exchanged with another student. They would do some revisions on the empty line underneath, drawing arrows pointing to where the revision should go. Often you would get your paper back with changes that you don’t totally agree with and you’d take it up with the teacher to find out if the other student correctly annotated your page. And finally was the “editing” stage which used a red pen. This is where you fixed spelling, grammar, and punctuation.

As a kid, I found the process very interesting, and along with all of the books I was discovering in the school’s library, I wanted to make something like that too. In I think second grade, I finally got a story together called “In Space 3” (In Space 1 and 2 were assignments and have not survived to this day) and “published” it — in Microsoft Publisher. “Wait, is that a thing?” you might ask. Microsoft themselves are even doing away with Publisher. But I thought it was cool and I used it to make a book. I printed it out on paper, cut it out into smaller pages, and glued it to cardboard. I then showed it to the principal of the school who probably flipped through it, thought “wow, how cute, but this definitely feels written by a second grader,” then proceeded to go about their day.

But for me, I was super happy. I finally got someone to see the work I had done. And with that I started coming up with and discussing story ideas on the playground with my friends. And so with that, I started writing tons of random stories that popped up in my head. Some were influenced by stories I read in school, others by movies I saw, and one even based on a song I really liked at the time (whose name I don’t even remember anymore).

One of the strategies I started back then — and even continue to this day — is the deep-end-first approach, although ironically I have always been afraid of the deep end of the pool in fear I might drown. The deep-end-first approach is to start learning a new subject by attempting to produce a throwaway product at the level of what you want to reach. For example, in software development, I might start learning a language by trying to implement something really difficult like a game engine or web server. I often do it without going through tutorials and instead get straight into developing the project. If I mess up, I find out what mistake I just made and remember to not do that in the future. It doesn’t work for everything and it’s not the approach everyone should take. But it’s the approach that I take.

Even way back in elementary and middle school, I took this approach to writing. Sure, there are writing resources online. I also have teachers that could teach me a thing or two. But why use those resources? I already know what it takes to write! I read books all the time and I can just copy the kinds of things they do. So, that’s what I did for quite a while. While I feel like the ideas are still somewhat salvagable, the writing style, characters, and dialogue are all… not good. Bad, you could say. But in realizing the issues with those books, I could slowly improve on the next one. And while it isn’t the most optimal way to write, it was my way of writing.

Nowadays, I feel like I have a better grasp of things. Not just of writing in general, but a better understanding of people, places, cultures, and other concepts. I’ve been through a lot more in life than I had back then which gives me a lot of things to draw from and ideas to express. That’s what this is all about.

And to be completely clear, I am still not a professional writer. I do this as a hobby, same as many others do. I am a programmer first and foremost and do programming for a living. But there’s nothing stopping me from writing novels or thoughts about writing novels. Plus, I find that programming experience can bring an interesting perspective to writing, as I’m sure I’ll talk about more in the future.

What’s with the name?

One of my core beliefs is that we should have more fun with things. Circling back to my “back in my day” thoughts, one of the things that I rabbitholed into was the Web Design Museum. The site shows tons of different fun and interesting new site designs. Sure, they may not have been screenreader friendly, mobile friendly, or worked on a screen larger than 1024x768, but they had fun with those designs.

Just like those designs, I want to have fun with this pen name. Why use a real name when you can use funny gibberish like dcn17? And that’s not even the craziest I’ve seen. I have seen some fanfic writers with emojis for names. Some with obsolete Chinese characters. Some that are just a series of button mashes someone did at one point and time and went “I guess that’s my name now.”

As for my pen name, it didn’t have any significance when I started. I just picked three random letters and a two digit prime number (because prime numbers feel more “random”.) The name I originally used was “dcp17”, but I have since changed it to “dcn17”. That’s for two reasons:

• 1. It reminds me of HDCP (High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection) and I don’t want to be reminded of DRM features when I think of this name.
• 2. More importantly, it ends with “CP” (a “joke” also made by the Cyberpunk 20XX communities) and even has the number 17 — a number when paired with “CP” makes it sound like I’m implying something bad. So I’ve changed it in recent times.

Recently, I’ve made dcn17 a backronym for “dino chicken nuggies” for no other reason than it’s funny and fun. It’s a silly contrast between the usually serious stories I write.

So what’s going on dcnblog?

A lot of things are going on the blog. While I call this a “writing blog”, it’s going to be a lot more than “how to write a <blank> story” type of thing. There will be opinions. Lots of opinions. I’ll be talking about broad culture and entertainment subjects as well. Here is a (non-exhaustive) list:

• Writing
  • Things I think about when writing
  • Loved and hated tropes
  • Themes (there will be a lot of talks on themes)
• Culture
  • Cultures around the world
  • Unusual things people do that you may not have known about
  • Internet subcultures
• Entertainment
  • How movies/tv shows/etc. are made
  • Economics of how media is produced
• State-of-the-world
  • A lot of stories I write are about how I’d like to see things change in the world. Not everything is worth becoming a story, however. This is where I write about my opinions about various things.

Wrapping it up

Anyways, that’s it for this post. I plan on writing a post at least once a week (most likely every Sunday.) The site will definitely need some work in the future, but I wanted to get at least one post out there. Some future plans for the blog:

• Links page. Discovery is tough in this day and age and I think it’s important not only to get this blog out to other people, but people looking at this blog to other people. I plan to put whatever I find interesting and relevant enough here.
• Short stories page. There are tons of stories that I’d love to write that are low commitment that would be perfect for the blog.
• Carrot page. Random crap I feel like putting there on a given day. Could be writing related, could be music, could be a silly webpage. Who knows.
• Comment section. I’ve seen some suggest making a post on social media (i.e., Bluesky, which I’ve just created an accoutn for) and using it for comments. I’m not entirely sure how I feel about that, but that could be a low-effort option.
• Tags. I have a strong opinion that we should be making content easier to find. Nobody wants to wade through tons of articles to find what they’re looking for. I hope to have a decent tagging system in place at some point.

See you in the next post!