iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Matt DeBarth @korivak.bsky.social · 15/10/2026

Agreed. I knew of her for years (because of the webcomics), but then one day my spouse referred to her as “Cousin Katie” and I was all 😳. (She’s cousins with Katie’s brother-in-law!)

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Matt DeBarth @korivak.bsky.social · 15/10/2026

That’s an art style I would recognize anywhere!

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Matt DeBarth @korivak.bsky.social · 15/10/2026

I’ve written a number of words on my phone when that’s all I have, but that many entirely on your phone is like a whole other thing entirely! I’m proud of you too!

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Matt DeBarth @korivak.bsky.social · 15/10/2026

Oh man, mere apathy would be an impressive. The system wants to nickel-and-dime us to death for every minor thing that used to be free, paid once, or just included in a service, while also cutting wages and laying everyone off.

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Matt DeBarth @korivak.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

Only once he can reach the water.

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Matt DeBarth @korivak.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

I would be okay with Bluesky still being smaller. Less like drinking directly from a firehose, much more chill vibes.

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Matt DeBarth @korivak.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

Ela fishes most days, to catch the food for her injured water dragon hatchling. She’s patient, stealthy, and loves being in nature. Rindle is only injured on land because he can’t walk, but he is an amazing swimmer. Like, highway speed through the water amazing. Whittier would absolutely juggle.

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Matt DeBarth @korivak.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

The #PilcrowChallenge is working. It’s been a long day and I’m tired and I didn’t want to write, but I made myself open my WIP and add a paragraph. But then I discovered I had something to say and powered through most of a chapter after all. 751 words out of a 33 word daily goal to keep the streak!

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Matt DeBarth @korivak.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

GenAI is for people that think that writing is getting in the way of being done writing. Writing is for people that love writing, even if they are never actually done writing.

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Matt DeBarth @korivak.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

Ela: “So, I was a little upset, and waved a small cast iron frying pan at him.” Rindle: “At an elf. In front of the elf guards.” E: “I still think they overreacted.” R: “Elves are magically weak to iron!” E: “They are?” R: “Yes! Everyone knows that!” E: “…oh. So that’s why they arrested me.”

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Matt DeBarth @korivak.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

My main characters make a fun pair, because Ela is a very curious and ignorant human refugee, and Rindle has a dragon’s innate ancestral memory but is secretive and evasive with what he does already know and like all dragons is not curious. She does crazy things because he doesn’t tell her not to!

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Matt DeBarth @korivak.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

Well, personally, I am working on changing my voice from a cooler, understated one for hard sci-fi to a more whimsical and exuberant one for middle grade fantasy. The single biggest thing to try is READ YOUR STORY OUT LOUD. “Author’s voice” is a metaphor, yes, but it is also literal.

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Matt DeBarth @korivak.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

Definitely all later draft considerations, yes! If you find yourself slowing down to carefully consider something in your first draft, you are focusing on the wrong thing for that stage!

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Matt DeBarth @korivak.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

Most Irish stories are tragedies for that exact reason.

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Matt DeBarth @korivak.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

Ruin a book by adding a word. Looking for a Nome, Alaska

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Matt DeBarth @korivak.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

Oooo, good question! While I haven’t planned out any such hard choices yet, since my story is inspired by Irish mythology it inherits the concept of a “geis” – an oath that cannot be broken without death/ruin being the direct result – as a genre convention. So no, never. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geas

en.wikipedia.org

Geas - Wikipedia

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Matt DeBarth @korivak.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

Update! I hit my writing goals for the day while waiting on the meds to be ready!

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Matt DeBarth @korivak.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

Oh, interesting. I’ve been cleaning and I’m about to get pick up medication, and I am in Canada…but it’s Atlantic time over here. No words yet, but I’ll be sitting waiting at the pharmacy, so here’s hoping. #ScribesUnited

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Matt DeBarth @korivak.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

Not exactly the same thing, but my head canon is that while my preteen MC is having her middle grade fantasy story about hiding something magical from her family happen to her, her older sister is having a secret YA supernatural sapphic romance story happen just “off screen”.

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Matt DeBarth @korivak.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Correction: “Lake Extreme Communists Who Hate Our Great America.”

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Matt DeBarth @korivak.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

#LitHodgepodge 9 Well, I’ve borrowed enough other inspiration from my beloved His Dark Materials, so why not: Lorne Balfe. youtu.be/eXW4VOWEyE4?...

youtu.be

The Compass Points North

YouTube video by Lorne Balfe - Topic

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Matt DeBarth @korivak.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

I feel this. I was once compelled to start writing a story by the feeling of incandescent injustice to the treatment of Alice in the Stephen King novel Cell. (But I had already been writing for years by that point.)

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Matt DeBarth @korivak.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

As of today, I have written a total of 90k words on my current story! 🎉 But because that count includes earlier drafts, notes, random fragments from much later in the story, and such, my current draft is only about 20k words long! 😬 Ah well, just keep writing. At least one new paragraph each day….

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Matt DeBarth @korivak.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

This is the answer. I firmly believe that writing is the logical end point of a deep love of reading.

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Matt DeBarth @korivak.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

My dad had a (for then) top-of-the-line monochrome DOS computer so he could write the (snail mail) newsletter for his professional association, and while it did have some (very early) games on it, it also had a word processor. I had my own floppy disk to save my own stories on, and it was fantastic.

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Matt DeBarth @korivak.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

😳 120k is my *annual* goal this year! I wish you luck on your *one month* goal! I definitely understand encouraging students to do hard things, though; my WIP grew out of a NaNoWriMo YWP project (that I thankfully backed up on my own cloud storage before the abrupt existence failure of YWP!)

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Matt DeBarth @korivak.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

“But Matt,” I hear you say, “if it happens after the main character already leaves, then it can’t really affect the main story! Why include it at all?” Because it’s fun. And raises the stakes a bit. And advances character and theme a bit, too. It’s like a bonus short story for dessert!

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Matt DeBarth @korivak.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

I was already having a good writing day, and then I had a delicious idea for a fun little epilogue about what Ela’s Changeling gets up to after Ela left her living her life to cover for her, so that the original Ela can sneak off and have an adventure. That was an extra thousand bonus words! 🤩

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Matt DeBarth @korivak.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

That is exactly my use case, too! I can run Scrivener on my own computer or my phone, but it’s easier to just write on my work computer on my coffee and lunch break!

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Matt DeBarth @korivak.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

As do I! Literally writing in it on my computer while browsing Bluesky on my phone right now! (I run my snips through Bear for export, so it may not look it, but my whole story lives in Novlr.)

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Matt DeBarth @korivak.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Oh, that is a fun little technique! I may have to borrow that. (Also, hello, fellow Novlr user! I would recognize that UI anywhere!)

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Matt DeBarth @korivak.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

As for which they would each rather, Rindle can’t imagine not just already knowing everything his ancestors knew and wouldn’t change, while Ela does immediately regret forgetting her family and life, and fully plans to return and replace the changeling and get her memories back.

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Matt DeBarth @korivak.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Oh, this is a fun one for me! So my two main characters are foils to each other, because Rindle the water dragon does already have perfect ancestral memory, while Ela trades all of her memories of her life to a changeling that she leaves in her place so she can go on an adventure. #LitHodgepodge 8

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Matt DeBarth @korivak.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Slightly longer #WIPSnips today, and I had to substitute. I describe Rindle as “lizard-like” a bunch of times, but he apparently self-describes as a reptile instead, which I discovered when I couldn’t find this passage in my first search!

Ela crawled in through the little door of the henhouse, holding the cup of milk in front of her.
“Little dragon?” she whispered. “Rindle? It’s okay; it’s me.”
The dragon was still basking in the nesting box. “Oh, hello again. Back so promptly?”
“I can’t stay long. I just realized that I need to feed you too,” she said, holding the cup in front of the dragon’s tiny snout.
“Well, I appreciate the thought, but what is that?”
“It’s milk,” Ela said, as if it were obvious. “You are a baby, aren’t you? Babies drink milk.”
“Young miss, I am a hatchling, not a baby. And more importantly, I feel that I must point out that I am not a calf.”
“Okay, sure,” Ela said, still offering the cup of milk. “And?”
She thought she could hear a tiny exasperated sign from the baby — hatchling, she corrected.
“I do not,” it said slowly, “drink milk. Dragons are ==reptiles==; we do not make milk for our young. I am not a mammal.”
“Oh,” Ela said, withdrawing the cup bashfully. She had, dear reader, a considerable amount to learn about the care and feeding of a dragon.

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Matt DeBarth @korivak.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

My narrative voice (on this work, at least) is the sassy, fourth-wall-aware narrator of The Hobbit crossed with Lemony Snicket, with more punctuation and parentheticals than is necessary (GenAI can just try and take the beloved em-dash from me). (It might get toned down in edits.) #LitHodgepodge 7

Once upon a time, a young girl named Elizabeth lived on a farm, and her life was pretty mundane until one morning, when she discovered a tiny blue dragon in the chicken coop.
It is worth noting here, dear reader, that she will be quite surprised when she does discover a baby dragon slightly later in the story. No, not because of the incongruous location where she finds it, as in she expects to find only chickens in the chicken coop. Certainly, so far in her life, during her daily trips to the hen house — it was her job to check for eggs twice a day, you see — she had found only chickens in there.
No, she will be surprised because despite the fact that she lives in a world in which dragons are very real (like your world, dear reader), she firmly believes — for the moment, at least — that she lives in one where they are not. Sort of like you probably do too, dear reader.
It is a misconception that dragons are very obvious when they are around, all soaring across the sky like the jumbo jets of your world and roaring and landing amongst armies of tiny, pitiful humans in a geyser of magic flames.

No, dragons start out small. Very small. Like the size of a kitten small. And they grow very slowly, so they will stay small for a very long time. And while they are predators, they are small ones that will easily fit inside the jaws of other, larger predators, which is obviously not desirable for the dragon in question, dear reader.
Accordingly, dragons are extremely sneaky. Even once they eventually do reach full size, they have spent decades hiding like their life depends on it — which it does! — and lifelong habits are hard to break, which you will know if you have ever tried it. There is almost certainly a dragon somewhere within a day’s journey of you right now, I would wager, but the chances of you finding it are extremely remote, as in you are not likely to ever know that it is there.
All of which is to say dragons very much do not want to be seen by you. It’s nothing personal — I am sure you are lovely, dear reader — it is just a simple fact of biology.

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Matt DeBarth @korivak.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

“I know you don’t want either, but you deserve both cheese and a gender, your majesty” is kinda fantastic, actually.

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Matt DeBarth @korivak.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

“Okay, every single previous strike was stupid, unpopular, pointless, destabilizing, costly, self-defeating, reduced our combat readiness, invited counterattacks, and just made the situation worse, but…hear me out here…what if *this* one somehow wasn’t?” apple.news/AmHki1tmsQRm...

apple.news

Trump Is Considering a Plan to Strike Iran Before the Midterms — The Atlantic

Pentagon planners are weighing options though no final decision has been made.

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Matt DeBarth @korivak.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

It’s a bold new direction! (And thank you.)

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Matt DeBarth @korivak.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

But I’m already a traitor to the patriarchy for being a soft-spoken librarian who works part-time in childcare. Not an enemy of it as many are, but even the parts of the patriarchy that do still work in my favour are gross to benefit from.

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Matt DeBarth @korivak.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

“Don’t Rape” is the absolute lowest bar. We need to also reject things like the male gaze, gendered division of labour, the wage gap, undermining consent for minor non-sexual things like forced hugging, gendered language, and failing the Bechdel Test, to name a (very) few. The culture is bad.

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Matt DeBarth @korivak.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

(Gestures vaguely at the pilcrow PFP.)

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Matt DeBarth @korivak.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Well, for many years it was “It’s not about feelings; it’s about ideas” (thanks, @daveyogrady.bsky.social), but I’m working on changing that now by switching audiences and genres so I can show children by example that anyone can write. I suppose I’m the “just write one paragraph a day” guy now.

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Matt DeBarth @korivak.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Good afternoon, #ScribesUnited! Goals, as always, are: ✅ Open WIP; write at least a ¶aragraph. ✅ Write more words than my average WPD (including my non-writing days). 👨‍💻 Keep plugging away at book one until the draft is done. Two outta three, as they say, ain’t bad.

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Matt DeBarth @korivak.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

A victimless crime. Like, no, literally. It can’t be kidnapped and is unaware that it is being tortured. But good job taking it down so it can’t do its (terrible) job, I guess?

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Matt DeBarth @korivak.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Billionaires will spend any amount of money on anything, no matter how stupid, just as long as they don’t have to spend money on… *hisses like a vampire confronted with a cross* …wages.

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Matt DeBarth @korivak.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

A product of an evil industry rotting women from the inside until they fall apart versus the source of all life and heat? Masterful simile.

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Matt DeBarth @korivak.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

If you want some actually good creatures inspired by folkloric brownies with some actually good worldbuilding around them, The Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett is right there.

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Matt DeBarth @korivak.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

So it only spends like five minutes in a school setting, but might I humbly suggest also His Dark Materials? It’s got witches and a shaman, shapeshifting animal companions made of pure magic, and gay angels.

Cover art for the third season of the television adaptation of His Dark Materials, featuring many characters and settings from the series.

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Matt DeBarth @korivak.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

My daughter has never read HP and only watched the first few movies, but she devoured all of the Tiffany Aching books and mentions thing from them regularly.

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Matt DeBarth @korivak.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Damn, I already hated seeing the heating oil truck last year.

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