Apollonian Gasket Forge

@apollonianforge.bsky.social

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Writing and worldbuilding. Plotting chauvinist. Strong opinions about sentence form. Sci-fi/fantasy. Crank worldbuilding opinions. Craft practice. Regrettably, we cannot forge Apollonian Gaskets at this time.

500 days from today is Wednesday, December 6, 2026. This duration is equivalent to exactly 71 weeks and 3 days, or approximately 16 months and 20 days.
Achilles Defeating Hector or Achilles the Vanquisher of Hector (French - Achille vainqueur d'Hector) is a c.1630 oil on panel painting by Peter Paul Rubens, showing Achilles defeating Hector during the Trojan War, with Athena hovering above.
Agamemnon looking badass
The Chinese character for an umbrella that looks like an umbrella
A straight pride flag, which inexplicably has black and white stripes like an old timey prison uniform
The face Kip makes when he says he's never been happier
Garfield: You are not immune to propaganda
Shane Doesn’t Struggle With Being Gay — He Struggles With Being Perfect | Heated Rivalry
A graph showing an inverse relationship between Quality of Music and Quality of Writing
YouTube Thumbnail: "Heated Rivalry and Romance Without Patriarchy. The real reason heated rivalry has women obsessed"
A YouTube thumbnail that says, "Under the Currents | MM Swimming Sports Romance | 2 hour Audiobook"
A post that in part says: "I will be posing lighter content on that page because we can't live in a political hellscape 24/7"
Bsky post that says: "This is literally the biggest scandal in American history. And Disney, the avengers, and Chris Evans are trending!???! Are we effing serious y'all?"
An ad that says, "Meet a very special AI girl. Realistic AI Girlfriend. No stress. Just comfort. This is intimacy -- reimagined with AI."
"In Defense of Gale Hawthorne"
A YouTube thumbnail reading "I read the New Hunger Games Book so You Don't Have To"
Beverly Crusher saying, "I did fall asleep reading a particularly erotic chapter in my grandmother's journal."
A screenshot of a YouTube video titled "Signs Twilight Was Written by a Mormon." I am unable to fully capture the vibe of the thumbnail in alt text, and apologies for that, but a woman with YouTube face sits on top of a badly photoshopped collage of Twilight-related images; she has fake vampire teeth and a clip-art drop of blood
Climax is arranging any series, though let me shepherd you towards modifiers again, so that it ends with the strongest. It is a very natural thing to do, but attention to it is likely to pay off in both your writing and reading. “If we were taught to cook as we are taught to walk, encouraged first to feel for pebbles with our toes, then to wobble forward and fall, then had our hands firmly tugged on so we would try again, we would learn that getting good at it relies on something deeply rooted…” (Tamar Adlar, An Everlasting Meal) Notice how she climbs from grasping pebbles towards being tugged into walking! Add a sequence of phrases with a climax to these sentences: The wheel came to rest at the bottom of the hill. The hull of the ship failed. Marcus was a cruel boy.
As we shift into a week of rhetorical devices, we start with an old friend to most of us: Metaphor. Treebeard says of Saruman, “He has a mind of metal and wheels; and he does not care for growing things, except as far as they serve him for the moment.” (Tolkien, Lord of the Rings) Notice the way this links his mind to the destructive industry he’s creating, not simply using it for variety. Add a metaphor (and other modifiers!) to the following base sentences: Pollux was lost. The sun rode high. (Already a metaphor!) The vase wobbled.
What's your craft hot take?
Yesterday we tried to write some tasteful subordinate-coordinate sentences. However, we might notice this method lets us write looooooong sentences, admittedly something of a vice in our fiction. But let’s cut loose: Let’s write a monster sentence using the subordinate-coordinate techniques. Just one clause, stuffed as full as you can bear. And consider sharing---we all want to see some monstrosities! Exercise: Write a monster sentence with the base clause, “The servants placed the feast on the table.” You may move “on the table” as it suits you. Consider writing propositions to help you gorge this thing like the (presumed?) feasters being served.
Day 5: Subordinate-coodinate n Day 3 we went wide, on Day 4 we went deep, so now we explore both dimensions at once. These are sentences that use both strategies in tandem. “Her husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven—a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anticlimax.” (F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby.) Exercise: Create subordinate-coordinate sentences from the following base clauses: Still love waits. She said, “Absolutely not.” There’s something about Sarah.
A drawing from the Voynich Manuscript on vellum, presumably of the sun, with 18 rays pointing towards 17 lines of radiating, undeciphered text. The sun has an inscrutable expression
Day4: Subordinate Modifiers If yesterday we went wider, today we go deeper with subordinating modifiers. Instead of modifying the base proposition, we modify the one that came before. Example: Sabriel...turned as quickly as she could, skis sliding one way and stocks the other, framing her head in a St. Andrew’s Cross.” (Garth Nix, Sabriel) Exercise: Elaborate each base clause with a chain of subordinate modifiers. Use propositions as necessary: Beverly noticed Miranda. The ocean roiled. Eduardo sprung into action.
We now begin adding to base clauses more purposefully. We’ll see several ways to do this, but today we are coordinating them, giving multiple modifiers at the same layer. The elated Girl Scout went home, having sold all of her boxes of cookies, having knocked on every door in her neighborhood, so excited she could barely explain her success to her mother, so proud of her accomplishment she immediately wanted to get more cookies to sell. (Brooks Landon, Building Great Sentences) Write your own sentences in the pattern using these base clauses: The witch cackled. Lawrence steadied himself against the table. The wind rose.
A post that reads "We are in a constitutional crisis and the top 2 trending topics are Taylor Swift and Bad Bunny"
There are many different kinds of modifiers, and you probably use them all naturally: Bare adjective: “The red dog.” Bare adverb: “I quickly walked.” Participle Phrase: “...tears streaming down his face…” Gerund Phrases: “...tears streaming down his face….” Infinitive Phrases: “To be” or “not to be”. Prepositional Phrases: “...after the movie…” Relative clauses: “The boy who ruled the world…” Exercise: Add freely to the following base clauses. Write propositions first as needed: The boat sailed. The chef chopped the carrots. Her Majesty was not pretty.
There is the sentence: “The man billed as Prospero the Enchanter receives a fair amount of correspondence via the theater office, but this is the first envelope addressed to him that contains a suicide note, and it is also the first to arrive carefully pinned to the coat of a five-year-old girl. (Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus) This sentence is then broken into bulleted propositions: The man receives correspondence. There is a fair amount of correspondence. The correspondence comes via the theatre office. The man is billed as Prospero the Enchanter. This is the first envelope. The envelope contains a suicide note. The envelope is also the first to arrive. It is carefully pinned to the coat. The coat is of a girl. The girl is five years old.
Sentences are composed of propositions, ideas that the sentence asserts. You can represent them with very simple sentences. (See Example) Exercises: 1. Find a sentence you like. Break it down into propositions. 2. Write down a series of propositions adding to “A dog chased the boy”. Give many details about the dog, the boy, and the chase.
He didn’t say any more, but we've always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence, I'm inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought—frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon; for the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snob- bishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.
An image that reads: #Prosetober Daily writing practice in October hosted by @ApollonianForge.bsky.social Week 1: Cumulative Sentences Day 1: Propositions Day 2: Modifiers Day 3: Coordinate Modifiers Day 4: Subordinate Modifiers Day 5: Coordinate-Subordinate Day 6: Monster Sentence Day 7: Craft Hot take Week 2: Some Rhetorical Devices Day 8: Metaphor Day 9: Climax Day 10: Antithesis Day 11: Tautology Day 12: Anaphora Day 13: Anadiplosis Day 14: A striking sentence Week 3: Suspensive Sentences Day 15: Suspensive Sentence Day 16: Inverted Cumulative Day 17: Subject-Verb Split Day 18: Qualified Sentences Day 19: Extended Subject Day 20: Monster Sentence Day 21: Are Suspensive Sentences Old Fashioned? Week 4: More Rhetorical Devices Day 22: Chiasmus Day 23: Hysteron Proteron Day 24: Anacoluthon Day 25: Paraprosdokian Day 26: Asyndeton Day 27: Free Prompts Day 28: Monster Sentence Wrap-up: Day 29: Writing Skill You’re Proud of Day 30: Something You Learned This Month Day 31: Something That Still Scares You
“Some who have read the book, or at any rate have reviewed it, have found it boring, absurd, or contemptible, and I have no cause to complain, since I have similar opinions of their works, or of the kinds of writing that they evidently prefer.” ---Tolkien
An image that reads: #Prosetober Daily writing practice in October hosted by @ApollonianForge.bsky.social Week 1: Cumulative Sentences Day 1: Propositions Day 2: Modifiers Day 3: Coordinate Modifiers Day 4: Subordinate Modifiers Day 5: Coordinate-Subordinate Day 6: Monster Sentence Day 7: Craft Hot take Week 2: Some Rhetorical Devices Day 8: Metaphor Day 9: Climax Day 10: Antithesis Day 11: Tautology Day 12: Anaphora Day 13: Anadiplosis Day 14: A striking sentence Week 3: Suspensive Sentences Day 15: Suspensive Sentence Day 16: Inverted Cumulative Day 17: Subject-Verb Split Day 18: Qualified Sentences Day 19: Extended Subject Day 20: Monster Sentence Day 21: Are Suspensive Sentences Old Fashioned? Week 4: More Rhetorical Devices Day 22: Chiasmus Day 23: Hysteron Proteron Day 24: Anacoluthon Day 25: Paraprosdokian Day 26: Asyndeton Day 27: Free Prompts Day 28: Monster Sentence Wrap-up: Day 29: Writing Skill You’re Proud of Day 30: Something You Learned This Month Day 31: Something That Still Scares You
A youtube thumbnail saying, "Woman's literature does not exist" and "The degeneracy of Modern Writing"
A youtube thumbnail that says, "How Aragorn put Eowyn in the Friendzone using ARCHAIC language" and "FRIENDZONED IN TWO WORDS"
A screenshot from the video under discussion labeling Foucault a "pedophile" and Nietzsche a "drug addict"
From the chapter list: 12:15 - The Scourge of Postmodernism
Chino Otsuka standing on a beach in 1976 in Kamakura, Japan with herself from 2005 digitally inserted. Her younger self is wearing a brown overalls dress, red socks, and a white collared shirt. Her older self is wearing a dark, loose top, a mid-length jean skirt, and tennis shoes. Both are wearing a serious expression. In the background is a bay with gentle waves, and people walking and picking items up off the beach, and behind the bay are what appear to be apartment buildings or perhaps a hotel
A table of three binary features that only has 5 (of the implied 8) entries and a note saying some of the configurations are impossible, sans explanation of how or why
A clip from here (pdf: https://web.mit.edu/rbhatt/www/lsa130/l1.pdf) with four sentences: It took me an hour to write this letter. ?It took me an hour to listen to music. ?I spent an hour writing the letter. I spent an hour listening to music.