It can be. I wanted a bookplate that depicted how it feels to start a new book. All the potential of a fresh adventure stretching out towards the horizon.

So does mine,that's why I blocked it out for my online picture.

Check the Spiral Wars series. This setting starts out as humanity ends their first great intergalactic war as the newest member of the space faring spiral community. A conflict that nearly wiped us out.

The series focuses on the capital battle ship Phoenix as it is used as a scapegoat for a navy coup. The first novel mostly focuses on Phoenix and it's officers as the ship goes on the run from humanity's own navy. The subsequent novels chart Phoenix journey far beyond human space as it slowly uncovers a threat to the entire spiral galaxy.

The two main characters are the captain of the ship and the major who commands the ship's power armoured marine corps that is used for boarding and ground actions.

The whole series is very militaristic as Phoenix makes allies and enemies in its quest to uncover the threat and find a way to fight it. There's a ton of space battles that focus heavily on the complexities of ship to ship warfare while the marine company provides plenty of hard as nails up close action, both in and out of their power armour.

I'd love to see a picture of that result.

Show us your stamp then! I got my own bookplate but I want to redraw it to make it suitable for making a stamp. Stamps are a lot more convenient than gluing pieces of paper.

You've already the obvious answer that ideas are worthless and execution is everything. The more nuanced version of that is that every idea is a bad idea initially.

Even good ideas are bad ideas to begin with. As soon as you start trying to work out your idea, you run into all kinds of problems that need to be solved.

And that's fine. That's really what any creative who produces finished products does. They refine a superficially good first idea over and over until it is an actually good idea that results in a finished product.

There's countless good ideas that turned into shit final products because people screwed up that process. And there's plenty of absolutely fantastic products that started out as a very unremarkable ideas that got polished to perfection.

But someone has to do all that work and that person is the real artist. Trying to sell an idea is like trying to get someone to pay fine art prices for a block of stone with the argument that the sculpture is in there somewhere.

It requires a bit of context that many people don't have anymore. World War 1 wasn't just hideously destructive, it irrevocably changed our culture. Before WWI, people still had what we consider to be old fashioned notions of honour, chivalry, very traditional gender roles and so on.

Entire villages and neighbourhoods send all their men into WW1 with thoughts of chivalry in combat. And WW1 ground them up like a meat grinder and spat the maimed remnants of the survivors back out.

WW1 was a war fought by people with old fashioned notions but industrialised weaponry. It is hard to understate how horrific it was. Not just for the combatants but also for the survivors and the people back home.

It resulted in what they called the lost generation. A generation of people who felt absolutely no connection with the culture from before the war. Heroism, honour, chivalry, propriety, how meaningless it all seemed after the horror of WW1 put the lie to it all.

The lost generation, in the eyes of their elders, was a generation without any aim in life. A generation that just drank and partied and fucked and generally wandered their way through life without any of the traditional goals like maintaining ones reputation, finding a spouse and starting a family and career.

The protagonists in this novel are part of the last generation. And what Heinlein is doing is nuancing that opinion of the lost generation as a bunch of godless wastrels.

He's depicting them as people who had the illusion ripped away from the world was WW1 exposed the lie behind their society. It doesn't make them wastrels. It made them people on a quest to give new meaning to their lives.

So yeah, they travel, party, drink and fuck around. Their whole world was destroyed and now they have to figure out for themselves what their new values and goals are. And yes, that can make them look aimless and pointless as they indulge themselves to figure out what they want for themselves and from each other.

For me, that context makes the book feel oddly contemporary because it's a state a lot of young adults find them in today as well. A world that changes so rapidly, with many people being migrants who don't entirely share their parents culture. We're all just drifting, trying to figure out what we want our lives to be.

I don't keep a score so I don't really have a need to differentiate.

If someone asks me "have I read" then obviously I can't discuss endings or arcs for books I didn't finish.

>In fact the, last third is a turd. It's so anticlimactic. Writing that ending today would get you fired.

Welp, there's your problem. You're judging a 100+ year old novel by today's standards.

Characters are tools and selling points. Killing a major character means permanently losing a tool and selling point.

It's not really a job when nobody's asking you to do it is it? It's one of those things that just start out as an optimistic hobby that you dare to hope pays off one day.

That's the thing I tried to point out though. Just because you perceive something to be the correct way does not mean other people agree with you.

And you've replied twice to me now as if trans people are a single uniform group of people who all agree and that's never been correct either.

I've had trans friends who were dead certain that they've always been one gender in another gender's body. Who feel being deadnamed or misgendered is hurtful. Who can't wait to transition fully. Who only want to date heterosexual partners and so on.

I've had trans friends who fully embraced the fact they are intersex with physically demonstrable traits from both genders. They made a choice to be one or the other but they do not at all begrudge other people the fact that they're androgynous enough that people might see it differently.

I've had trans friends who happily proclaim they're chicks with dicks that'll choose which way they lean based on how they're feeling that weekend. They'll laugh at people who misgender them and don't attach any value to it at all.

Don't speak for everyone because you'll always be wrong.

I think trans people are still people and there is no one way they view them selves.

Reality and perception of reality are two different things. It's entirely possible for trans people to perceive themselves one way and for another person to not perceive them the same way.

When there's a mismatch there, it is not automatically transphobic. Being trans is a complicated thing and it can be made a lot less complicated with outside acceptance. But a transperson is not owed being perceived in a certain way by others, including other transpeople.

A transperson can demand others acknowledge how they see themselves but they cannot demand others agree with that. That's not transphobic.

Using words like transphobia so universally immediately tries to illegitimize people's perceptions by pretending one person's perception of themselves is an absolute truth and anyone who doesn't conform to that perception is negatively motivated.