Welcome to Inktrap

Happy 2025, y’all.

Finally, after ages of being “House of Error,” I’ve rebranded the site to “Inktrap.”

“Why Inktrap?” I feel like it’s an appropriate term for what all of us get stuck in, as writers. The practice of writing is as unforgiving as it is addicting. Couple that with how brutally unrewarding it’s getting and “Inktrap” feels like a fitting moniker. A grizzled, old smoker’s way of talking about what we do. “Gonna get ready for bed, start washing dishes, and get caught in that goddamn inktrap again–I know it.”

A little bitter, maybe, but also probably the most honest outlook on writing these days–at least for me. Despite AI and Hollywood regurgitating the same set of ideas over and over, we keep making art for art’s sake. Tired and worn out, stuck in a world where everyone’s taught to mock the unpublished writer and forget the published author. A world where “Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton” turns into “Jurassic Park,” which turns into “Universal’s Jurassic World franchise.” All complexity and meaning totally lost and no one bats an eye.

At a certain point, you start feeling tired all the time, hiding the work you do. Suffering setbacks and hurdles but putting the time in anyway. Hoping for a better future–fighting for it.

Like some kind of rebel.

If all of us feel the pull of the trap, it means we’re rebels together. And that’s the part of the idea I want to focus on here; the camaraderie.

My goal this year is to pass along as many writing tools as I possibly can, for free. These will be featured on my Resources page, which should be up and running now, with the first tool, the Plotter’s Inventory, already posted. If you haven’t checked it out, I encourage you to give it a look. Maybe it’ll help you or someone you know settle into their process.

That said . . .

From here on out, the intention is to post once a week, which feels like a nice compromise between the extremely lax, once-a-month schedule and the breakneck, once-a-day posting I did a few years back (I seriously just cannot go back to that).

Aside from posting writing insight and offering developmental tools, I’ll be venting about my works-in-progress and writing about pop culture stuff–in a way that I hope is entertaining for you and therapeutic for me.

I’m also going to try to make money on here–eventually. For now, I want to get back into the rhythm of posting, but I acknowledge that, at some point, sooner rather than later, I will have to figure out a donation set-up so I can justify continuing to post here. When I figure that out, I’ll post about it, but the one thing I can promise is that I will not paywall any of my writing tools or posts; as a poor, young writer, it always sucked for me when getting assistance required money. So, now, I refuse to demand payment for the little help I can provide.

If you’d like to be here for this new era of posts, please consider subscribing or checking in again; it would help me build my platform on here and hopefully expand what help I can provide to other writers.

Either way, thanks for stopping by.

~L. Santiago