Hey Patrons, both current and future! This is just to remind you that supporters at even the lowest monthly levels get full access to the catalog of professional-grade releases of fiction and any nonfiction worthy of publication—feature-length, short stories, and everything in between.
This will include audio works also as soon as I find a suitable volunteer or find a way to compensate a professional.
STUMBLING TOWARD ENLIGHTENMENT in Seoul: university friends now in their thirties find heartbreak and lesser forms of anomie in this eloquent, multivocal experimental novel rich with details of life in today’s South Korea. B PLUS
#PennedPossibilities 325 — SC POV: If you could relive one day of your life and change its course of events, which day would you choose?
[Adds to my response for the SC in 324. —R.S.]
Let's see. Relive a day and change it? Hmmm.
The day I told my parents that I wanted to haul furniture and machinery as a living? Basically, become a mover? The day they reacted badly, grounded me, starting nagging me about school, wouldn't let me fly anything for my friends that weighed more than a few books—or airtaxi anyone—started telling me I was weak in the head? The day I ruined my childhood?
Yeah, I'd keep my enthusiasms and dreams to myself, could I rewrite history.
Or maybe it would be that day that I threw a brick through the Moving Guild's window. Wouldn't let any company hire a woman. Okay, I turned over all the parked moving vans. For the record, only one rolled down a hill. Hmmm...
#WritersCoffeeClub Ch 9 Nbr 24 — Is there any work of fiction you could have written better? Don't be shy.
There are plenty of TV or episodic dramas I could have written better. Doing so would have been procrastinating for me, though I have written my share of fan fiction and retconned really egregious plot advancement by stupidity...
Almost anything I've written, even a few years ago, could qualify as fiction I could have written better. I recently "rewrote" an earlier novella, changing and fixing a few details to retcon a prequel (including typos and grammar faults), then used that as an excuse to tack on the rest of a novel by changing the last couple of paragraphs.
#WordWeavers 2405.24 — While drafting, do you avoid or binge watch similar material?
I binge watch all the time. K-dramas and anime. I avoid watching or reading similar material to what I'm writing while I'm composing, so I'm not influenced. I want it to be me writing; I want the voice to be mine.
I avoid reading Dickens. I think his is my default writing style and I need to avoid it at all costs.
#PennedPossibilities 324 — SC POV: If you could relive one day of your life without changing anything that happened, which day would you choose? Tootfic: Reframing the Experience
[When my SC says armor, it's really a weightless magical exoskeleton that melds with her body. It looks like blackened bones, because it is. —R.S.]
Oh, there's plenty of days I'd relive unchanged. Like the day I fledged, when I first flew on my own. Or the day learned the thrill of hauling things through the sky. Both good events in a rather dull and awful childhood that turned to cinders when my parents disapproved of the way I wanted to live my life. Said I aimed for the dirt not the sky. Maybe they weren't so dumb—I ended up badly, flying messages for a crime boss over a dozen years. But, then, there was that day last week...
I've told you a few times how I ended up with the armor and a new job training as a pretorian, you know, having faced down the greatest thaumaturge who ever lived, having nearly killed her. Impressed her.
I thought.
Well, my drill instructor was training me that dawn. I wore the armor. The thaumaturge dove at me, full speed. She's a monster flier, taller, more massive, immortal. I jumped into the sky. Fled.
She followed.
Though the armor let me fly like a sparrow, change direction in a heartbeat, and take a thumping only slightly changing my course, it had been her armor once. She kept appearing before me, striking at my face or heart, sending me into spins toward the ground, stalling me out, almost panicking me into flying into trees or buildings. For all her mass and the inertia that implies, I barely avoided her, half the time with her cackling at my barrel rolls or dives that sent down feathers flying. She had muscle; I tired despite the armor until I thought my heart would burst from my chest, at which point a flyby pitched me into the ground.
I skid across the running track on my belly right up to my instructor. I don't know how I didn't break a wing or my neck. Ok, I do: The Armor.
She landed beside me with a loud thump. She wasn't even winded! She told him, "She lacks stamina. Train her harder."
She leaned down until her face was in my face. I smelled maple syrup on her breath. She said, "You need to use the magic in the armor. There's a class at first bell in the Ivory building, room B7. Shower and be there ON TIME."
I have wings.
I don't do magic.
I showered though, once my legs stopped shaking. I slunk into the class still half-frightened out of my wits. My new friend was there, the curse breaker, a former prizefighter, the one I'd fought beside against Her, that ended up with me getting the armor. It was some sort of advanced special Ed class for mages. I suddenly felt totally inadequate and I cried. Me. At the age of 27, I cried telling her my story, pointing to my purpling bruises, complaining that had She gotten in a good strike She would have caved in my rib cage.
My friend was having none of it. She said, "You're a day angel who just went ten minutes fighting Her. Somehow, you're still alive."
I hadn't thought about it that way. I later learned the word, "Reframing."
The instructor came in with a truckload of tomes and grimoires. She had prepared him for me. He gave me a magic primer. I knew it was a primer because it had PICTURES of youngsters playing. Despite the stares of the other students, I read the book.
Half hour later, I got the armor to glow dull red, like iron out of a forge. Truly. Awesome. Didn't know what it did except look intimidating, but still...
Awesome.
I felt my heart grow large in my chest, and it struck me. Someone (okay, the ruler of the nation) wanted me for who I was and who I could become, and because I was capable. She wanted me to aim for the sky. My new friend supported me and pushed me forward. I liked this, who I was, what I was finding I could be, could become.
And.
Oddly.
I realized, for what it was worth, my parents would approve. (And flap them if they didn't!)
For no particular reason, I had The Rooster Bar by John Grisham on my TBR and started reading it this week. I don't normally go for "airport books," but this one is a ton of fun. Now I remember why I read over a dozen of Grisham's books in the 90s and early 2000s. It's been a while since I picked him up... almost a couple decades, but I'm glad I did again.
FTR, The Rooster Bar has nothing to do with chickens. 😉
In the week Jenny Erpenbeck won the #InternationalBookerPrize catch her on the @fictionable#podcast recalling the fall of the Berlin Wall and discussing her prizewinning novel Kairos, translated by Michael Hofmann.
If you haven't yet had a look, check us out now! The book is free as in speech, and free as in beer! And if you like what you see, please rate us, review us, and tell your friends! (or foes!)
#PennedPossibilities 323 — What's a piece of advice for writers that you listened to and are glad for?
An Australian author, Lucy Sussex, told us at Clarion West 1998 to be shameless in promoting ourselves. Being a shy person, networking and promotion has been a heavy lift, but I'm working on it and I know it's going to help. Mastodon: ☑️
THE LONG-AWAITED SEQUEL TO Jasper Fforde’s enigmatic 2011 novel Shades of Grey is a fascinating, mysterious science fiction picaresque where decoding the secrets behind the worldbuilding is part of the fun. B PLUS
Now free for all to read... I'm a fan of the humourist author PG Wodehouse, and have occasionally visited places connected with his life and work. Here are four of them:
#PennedPossibilities 322 — What piece of advice, as an author, did you once receive but hadn’t followed? Looking back on it now, you might wish that you had.
Advice: Don't only write novels. Write lots of shorter pieces.
When I started I saw that you could only make a living if you sold novels, so I wrote novels. That completely discounted the fabulous practice you get completing lots of smaller stories. Completing a novel takes lots of time and there's a mounting anxiety that in the end the plot will fail or no publisher will be interested. Yeah, true with short fiction, but the investment is far lower (or should be if you're doing it right). There used to be lots of magazines you could sell short fiction to... for pennies a word, but it was something, and it offered a chance to build a brand name and a following. Such notoriety could help you sell novels, too.
#WordWeavers 2405.22 — Is your antagonist more a dragon or a dragon rider? CW: Innuendo
This question has me rolling on the floor laughing, but then you'd have to know the context of the story Fire Brand is in. The antagonist's type of human is called a... You guessed it. The MC has described his "attributes" cough intimately, having let herself be captured by him... And, well... "riding" is a euphemism she's well acquainted with. So, will she become a dragon rider...? 😊
I wrote about the dynamic between these two characters in the tootfic Ms George and the Dragon https://eldritch.cafe/@sfwrtr/110603595653290409. Please read it, if you haven't already. It should amuse you in this context...
#WritersCoffeeClub Ch 9 Nbr 21 — Do you format as you write or do that at the end?
I am writing a manuscript for a fiction book or short story. Since I use a computer and now use #scrivener, the question is, what formatting? If you mean do I /italicize/ words? Yes. If you mean to I occasionally indent for stylistic meaning?
Yes.
I do.
It's ard to show on Mastodon.
Centered chapter breaks? I use a style.
Beyond that? What formatting? Scrivener blats out a manuscript when I'm done. If I want a book, I'll likely find someone to edit and design for me, if a conventional publisher doesn't buy it first.
#WordWeavers 2405.21 — Do you consider how your MC’s appearance may contribute to stereotypes?
Yes. Which is why I leave most details vague. Since I write fantasy or SF that's generally in the far future, I discuss issues like racism and inequality from different angles. For example, my devil-girl (her term for herself) in her internal dialogue might call a day angel a featherbrain, but if one of them should call her a /devil/ (it's not the "official" term for her kind), them's fighting words...
#PennedPossibilities 321 — Did your SC once admire their parents? Who else did they admire growing up? What about today?
Caramello admired his mother. He felt loved growing up despite a difficult situation with hostile step siblings and a status as the youngest child of the chieftain that kept children his age away. The chieftain took her as a second wife because he needed help ruling Crab Island; his first wife, though she gave him many children, had him on disaster patrol keeping her from ruining things. The business marriage required a child, Caramello. His mother did everything to protect him while she worked, saw he had a good life and a real childhood, ensured trades folk trained him in fishing and sailing (he admired them, too), and the mainland traders schooled him in letters and numbers. She saw him safely away on the mainland when it looked like a succession bloodbath might start between his siblings. Today, he misses her a lot, and fears the next letter he might receive via ship.
The sound design and graphical arrangement is minimal, the (often randomly chosen) texts are written greatly – they are highly poetic, beautiful, fey ...In „A row of chairs abandoned on the beach“, humans do consequently become coast, night, and sky – but the world is turned into a living, equitable, and vivid instance in return.