What is this?
Good question!
Zeal's Garden (aka 20-Hour Mind Project) is a narrative project (??? format tbd) that has been eating up my brain RAM in various forms for years. Its most recent iteration started in December 2023, when I was playing Book of Hours in between semesters of grad school and thought to myself, “what if I just trapped all (most) of my OCs in a non-Euclidean mansion/campus/conference center and had all of them work on their weird little projects and didn't explain fuck all?”
At the time, I was really struggling with worldbuilding. First, I worried about whether all the background details in my writing projects made sense in case some random geologist/doctor/horse veterinarian happened to read it so they wouldn't Make Fun Of Me Online. Then, I got frustrated at the concept of worldbuilding in general, because the worrying got to a point where writing anything felt like squeezing old crystallized honey out of a bottle (almost not worth the effort even though the end result still tastes pretty good). Every time I tried to write ended with me basting in misery at my desk and composing some truly wretched search inquiries (“is the ocean cringe reddit 2024”). So I tried something new, and decided to just write what I feel drawn to and justify its existence later.
“This will definitely make writing less complicated!” I said, out loud. Snakes instantly began to manifest in my home.
Bibliography
- Book of Hours
- The Last Question
- The “good ending” (??) of SOMA taken to its logical conclusion
- House of Leaves
- Piranesi
- The Buried Giant
- What if Final Fantasy 10 and Silent Hill II had a weird egg baby?
- What if Yume Nikki and World of Horror had a weird egg baby?
- What if Yiik was good?