You probably shouldn't stick around too long.
SCP-9256 - Wynths - 23 Oct 2025 16:18 - 29
SCP-9139-J - Wynths - 13 Jul 2025 02:49 - 12
4012: The Play - Wynths - 20 Jun 2025 03:25 - 24
ANILILAPHILIA - The Matriarch (and the Prince) - Wynths - 04 Jun 2025 04:44 - 16
Dominoes - Wynths - 15 May 2025 23:35 - 17
To Learn To Fly - Wynths - 05 Apr 2025 01:34 - 8
SCP-B74B70-ARC - Wynths - 03 Apr 2025 16:10 - 26
Thine Eyes as Stars, Thy Name as Air - Wynths - 03 Apr 2025 16:09 - 10
I also have something on the Backrooms Wiki: Selenophilia! It was posted Nov. 15th, 2025.
This is the Personal Log of Dr. Mark "Wynths" D. Excerpts from this Personal Log will be irregularly added to his personnel file.
I've been thinking quite a bit about prosody over the past few days — more precisely, how to implement it in my non-poetry writing. After being alerted that this is a writing concept that I had previously been unaware of by Jezixo's Tales of the Mosaic, I've thought about it and played around with the idea.
I realized quickly I had just been calling this by a different name: flow. While I'm not the biggest rap fan, I've been listening to some more and, hopefully, being not an embarrassing sack of shit when it comes to that area of life (I tend to not like being ignorant, willfully or not, of anything that's even vaguely interesting.) I'd noticed very quickly that the difference between good rap and bad rap, more than topic or beat or rhyme scheme or even veracity, was prosody. Easy to explain — Generally, the more regular the rhythm, the more polished the writin', right?
Right.
I regularly listen to the back third of Orwell's 1984 — these scenes, in my eye, provide valuable insights into both the true message of all of his writing and writing as a whole. It's where I learnt how important extrapolation of events could really be in writing (Chapter 2 likely wouldn't be so impactful if Orwell hadn't lived with the poor and likely seen tons of pain) and, although Orwell doesn't really care so much about prosody or even about the pleasure of writing in this section, it does let me know something interesting.
One of the ideas that Orwell really wants to push in this section that, unfortunately, didn't take off is O'Brien's sentence, in response to one of Winston's criticisms of the Party's "reality control" (doublethink):
GOD IS POWER.
I think it's a great look because it both shows why the Party can't ever exist in actuality (briefly, because no person actually wants power in raw form.) and it demonstrates prosody well.
Sounding it out in my acent, you get this:
Gaw: -
D: /
is: -
Pah: /
Ehr:-
It's very nice and regular — makes sense why it stuck in my mind.
Another example:
Fuh: -
Ree: -
Doh: /
M: /
Is: -
Slay: -
Vah: /
Rie: -
Again, two simple patterns strung back to back, with a nice break in the middle.
I don't know what, if any, utility could be gained from this, but I think it's interesting to know. I tried to implement prosody in ANILILAPHILIA when possible (though due to its volatility, it does have to be sacrificed a lot of the time), and it made my poetry apparently decent (I have a record of making dogshit poetry.)
All this to say: I'm impressed a tiny shift could bring about such a great rift.
(In quality.)
I'm checking in for one thing:
I want to shout out on my author page this song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5r8IA2nZh4&list=PLW3cATQVEmwXS5GjXAIKf4ADXAexKUnGc&index=14
I've been addicted to this song since I discovered non-a through their bandcamp page about 8 months — it was a chilly winter day, though it was fine enough to go out in tees and shorts (I live in Texas!), and I was mowing the lawn. Usually I elect to listen to an audiobook or a podcast episode, but I decided then that it would be best to go through some of the new rap albums I had downloaded.
I was unaware that non-a was a mashup artist, but since I was unfamiliar then with Aesop Rock, I completely swallowed the album was original. As I have a bad habit of doing, I ignored the lyrics to the songs, and simply listened to the rhythm of Aesop's voice atop the classical instrumentals: it was fine, but nothing fancy.
Until I listened to the fourteenth track.
I will do naught more but to paste a section of the song's lyrics below:
Past the pyrotechnics undetected and invisible
Woke the sleeping beagle skipping toward the kidney swimming pool
Off into the yawning blue
The splash would mum the rocket-ships
Ruby's lungs were filling by the time her kin were cognizant
Many sprung and sprinted down
All arrive belated but
The beast she had earlier stirred had been alert since waking up
Canine let his gainer fly
Water top commotion grow
Howling guests assumed the cloven hoofs had come to do-si-do
Frenzied and congested deck
Part to let the elders see
Soggy beagle gently dragging Ruby in his yellow teeth
Laid the tiny body in the sun before her Father's feet
When she choked the liquid through her bluish lips he dropped his knee
I recommend that you listen to the song linked — rap never comes out the same when you read it as opposed to hear it — in order to just… listen to the way he enunciates all of the words. It's beautiful and something that inspires me in my authorship, though I know full well I might never reach this sort of height in my meter. It is just peak.
That's all!
I've been thinking a bit recently about appealing to audiences, about how to get ideas across to a certain kind of person, and how the effort to do that will inevitably alienate others.
I'm talking, of course, about an SCP that I wrote for Classic Con — SCP-7884. As of this date, I think that of all the short form I've written, for actual contests and Medium blogs and, yes, SCP, it is one of the best things I have made. It also got deleted in a few days.
Initially, it stung quite badly to see my work do so poorly; I had put a lot of time and effort into outlining the steps of a story. I asked myself: "What would a reader do here? How would they Google this? What would they find? Would this important term come up, and would it click in their mind?" I also asked myself: "What is it that SCP readers want in a Classic article?" The answer, as I determined it, would be a fun, screwy puzzle, one that unravelled itself as you read it. The realization of that was 7884.
Since it's deleted, I will summarize the article as best as I can: It was a heavily redacted entry, a Level One file. It described how people became… beasts of an unspecified sort when their wives or husbands or boyfriends or girlfriends told them that they loved them, unprompted, in a moment of sincerity and spontaneity. It told this through glimpses of an apocalypse, both in the form of a table and a note from some official (I intentionally left who it was blank in my mind; I thought it both unimportant and potentially troublesome for multi-interpretation work, which was my goal.) All of it, again, heavily redacted and in a terse style.
The basic idea I wanted to get across was this: The noosphere was, through some unknown ritual, damaged — this one transformed person, who wanted to get at the core of the Earth, tugged at it and initialized (the precise word I used.) Afterwards, it spread like a virus (I tagged the article as such), and soon, the varieties of ways in which people got this ended, and it became simply a flurry of people who buried themselves and were subsumed into the core of the Earth.
Why?
Here was the obscurity, the thing that was not well-done. An important detail to note was that Earth was not the only planet affected — I wanted to imply that there were alien species. This implication, like the planned cause, was not implied in any in-article way, however. Yes, there was the "death toll" that was in the tens of billions, but outside of that, you needed to reverse-image-search a cropped image of an external star system's graph, and you had to interpret the words I wrote in the note in the exact way that I meant them. The wrenching feeling that I got when I thought about something so toxic that it killed the human spirit was locked away, because all that was left through the black boxes and Google searches was a feeling that I had insulted the reader by writing something that was smarter than they were.
The truth was, I made a blunder that was far stupider than anybody noticed, because I assumed that people were me and that they would labor to understand the work the way I had understood it, because I am the reader who feels insulted and then tries to remedy themselves by solving and interpreting meaningfully the vague, sloppy work before them. I did not want to think of 7884 as sloppy or vague; indeed, I still think that it was some of my finest work, but it was something worse: mute.
In my hubris, I lost track of the real motive of writing, the thing that even pre-schoolers know when they pick up their first pencil and trace dotted lines on the thin white sheet before them. It was this: communication.
Stephen King in his seminal work On Writing introduced this as an idea to me. Before listening to his narration of it, it had never crossed my mind that fiction was a form of communication as valid and important as public speaking, body language, and cuisine. This idea greatly assisted me — in conjunction with the prosody which Jezixo's series has taught me to consider — because I really began to visualize who I was writing for for the first time.
For the longest time, I wrote for no one, simply clacking or scribbling away the plotline and perspective that seemed to be the most clear and clarifying (two distinct things!) to me. Making this process conscious, I think, helped with some of my outside work. But, in writing 7884, as I look back at the Discord messages sent on the server, trying to understand where I went wrong in this cycle and how my article could have such vocal supporters and yet an approval rating in the low 30s, I realized that I had taken this concept too far.
On this site, what's important is the basic model of the marketplace of ideas. While I am not deeply opposed to receiving crit before posting, as I was before posting 4012: The Play, I still find it easiest to visualize how people respond in this way. After all, you cannot say that writers who labor to fill the halls of a library or to fill up a used bookstore in a trailer have the same methodology or goal behind them. The thing that they are doing is creating and crafting, which is a remarkably different thing, only vaguely intersecting with the sphere of public writing that you want to succeed.
Because, goddamit, I wanted 7884 (Entwined) to succeed! I thought until now that merely putting in effort and writing something technically proficient was enough; it had never once been put to me that the ideas and the communication were capable of tanking a piece for someone. It's a nasty thing to say in crit channels, and on the Wiki, there aren't a lot of pieces that break the mold in a real way. I wanted 7884 to be a prototype for something that would do that — all I had done, in the end, was appeal to people who also saw that vision, who thirsted for it, and who loved what I wrote not for its virtues but for what it represented.
Unfortunately, representations and hopes do not get you very far.
My next work, which I will post for the Backrooms, has been written with this factor now a conscious thing at play: I have to make sure that the type of person who reads the Backrooms understands what I am writing and why I have wrote it. I cannot write a line that I intend to refer back to 3000 words later and pick up from exactly where it was dropped off — I would do that, but that's because I do not read nearly as much, and so chew on what I read for as long and in as much detail as possible. Now, I have to consider making it a paragraph, a memorable paragraph, and then specifically mentioning that it is that same thing when the payoff is made. It feels maddening, like I am writing for children, but then…
…Perhaps we are all children in our own way. Like children, we on these Wikidot Wikis share our work eagerly, lovingly, freely, against the force of evil that works in Entwined. And, like a child, I want it to be loved and appreciated. Like a child, when I read, I do not comprehend everything, no matter how much I want to — I cannot be inside the author's brain and commune with them as they engage in this holy hobby. And, like a child, I forgot for a period the Theory of Mind, and why it is essential to learning how to talk. Babies only talk when they know there is someone different to talk to; I, in writing 7884, had assumed that just because I was eloquent, I was understood. The reason I assumed that was exactly the opposite reason the baby learns to talk: I thought my audience was homogenous and perfectly understanding.
Next time, when I go for a better puzzle box article, that is the lesson that I will carry with me from the failure of 7884. It doesn't matter if your work is deep to people who are like you, because several billions are different from you at the most fundamental level. The authors who fail to understand that are the authors that rot in garages and trailers and dusty library shelves.
Fuck that.
My Discord username is "ellevant". If you would like to contact me, send me a DM! Or, alternatively, you can ping me in the Official SCP Discord server. I also check Wikidot PMs, if you would prefer to message me on-platform.