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.
So cocksure. so one eye blind. squeezed so tight. milked. you yanked it off the BBS once I explained what that was, but how you knew it was there I never thought to ask. my project was no longer something I could be trusted with. make sure there are off-site backups at a site unknown. torture proof. the phrase just sailed by, sent on it's way with a chuckle. tarballs were fine until Stephanie arrived and gpged everything that moved. Stephanie said you know you can work on that stuff, it's wasted on Wolfenstein. I was wasted on Wolfenstein. all last night. Stephanie is in early staring at my code perfectly still in the clothes I left her in yesterday. Stephanie is not in early, it is late for Stephanie. still late quiet alone just staring at my code with that discipline I found unattractive and should have been suspicious of. no pen no notes ever just quiet still only little finger PGDN not even smoking. shivered involuntarily sensing we were not alone but not realizing we weren't because I didn't know about ghosts back then. was that the assessment? the name was gonna be so lame. had to be eight dot three. a portmanteau of my name and turbo. or highway or boost. I was the only one who cared. Andrew Tanenbaum's open rebuff to Intel was mocked before being shredded and ignored. left ALT (yes they're different) ESC right SHIFT (yes they're different) F12. hertzbleed side channel oops my bad. Intel management didn't get final development approval for the Intel Management Engine. spectre oops my bad look a funny logo ready to go.
Lilith by Eric Rickstad has been in my mountainous tbr ever since I first heard about it. I’m nearing the end of Under the Dome, so when it came ready from the library, I jumped on it.
PS. The strawberries have nothing to do with anything other than they make for a lovely contrast & they are the latest haul from my garden. #books#photography#fiction
#WordWeavers 2405.20 — How did you settle on your antagonist's appearance?
Antagonists almost always are regular people with different agendas than the MC's. Rarely, they have a skewed sense of right and wrong or how reality works, which could describe a few MCs. In any case, I very much wish to prevent latching on to a stereotype as it will paint a divergent picture of what I want to represent and, far worse, comes with a subtext that I have no control over. Like the MC POV, I keep appearances vague so the reader can use their imagination, only less so because antagonists are seen and features important to the story must be eluded to. The MC will also make uncensored comments in her internal dialogue, aka 1st person narration.
In one case, the antagonist got her own side story as the POV. Note in the following #excerpt from Fledge, she has woken up with bodily changes (and amnesia). She self-labels herself as a chimera, a monster that's a combination of creatures but in her case parts of other people. She never states facial features, needs never say anything about hair color, or what we relate to as race. She does mention an in-story kind of human. However, the following feature is important to her "appearance" as it relates to the question, as well as the plot. She's squatting on a tree limb two dozen stories high...
He [her rescuer] pointed at the useless things on my back. "You remembered enough to shield your fall [...] using them. You're learning."
Below my normal right shoulder blade, a red-feathered monstrosity twitched. Adjusting my hips carefully, I glared left to see iridescent blue and purple feathers and down lit by the setting sun, better suited for a pigeon's breast. The day angel wing poked out, balancing, splaying breeze-rustled feathers to instinctively steady me. My blue "add-on" was larger than the red. Both went thwack to my back, acting as if they'd noticed I'd noticed my alien, unasked for, new limbs playing—behind my back—and hid. I had to steady myself with a hand.
At the funeral for her parents, her mother's best friend, the main antagonist, took the opportunity to make a political statement instead of comforting the MC. Yes, her mother was (secretly) the strongest mortal "mage" of the modern era and the MC shows signs of surpassing her, but what the 4-year-old needed was to be hugged and told it would be alright—not elevated, titled, and given estates to govern.
#PennedPossibilities 319 — MC POV: Where did you grow up? What was your childhood like there?
On a farm and in the Fell Woods. I don't remember much about the former, but the latter was both exciting and difficult every day. I chose to live with wolves, which because of my gift better understood me every day. They were still wolves, and they lived and ate like wolves, not humans. I survived despite the dirt, raw meet, living without shelter, and an incredible amount of walking. The wolves cherished the cunning and technology I brought to the pack and helped me find a way. They taught me to hunt. People, I learned much later, like to be touched; contact was natural to wolves, but sadly despite people liking to be touched they don't routinely do so. The whole leaving the wild to attend school has left me with what one of Her Highness' psychologist call species-disphoria. I'm more comfortable living amongst beasts than people because they are so much more friendly and, if not, so much more predictable. I'm sure I'll go back when school's over—despite having a new boyfriend.
#PennedPossibilities 318 — What do you need in your writing space to help you stay focused?
Less is more in this case. That doesn't mean that in a perfect situation I won't suddenly find myself sweeping the floor instead of writing. They don't call it displacement activity for nothing!