@freequaybuoy
I once wrote 15K in 15 hours for the Clarion workshop, then critiqued the thing in all its draftiness the next day. You would be surprised how much story and character you can generate on the fly without research with a good idea and characters. A 50 K novel in 24 hours? I can't see how that's possible, but I certainly love to see some people try!
Two items brought to my attention today, in relation to Eve’s Peace, my Heroines of SOE sequel. One, the proof copy of the paperback version. Two, this wonderful review. “Love, distrust, trust, & secrets galore. Woven superbly by the author makes for wonderous reading, hard to put down book. Rating the book a 9 1/2 only because now I must look for sequels & prequels for this wonderful series...”
I'm seeing so much #antisemitism right now. Let me share with you my traditional response to it: my SFF #novels. The ones with #Jewish main characters are The Time of the Ghosts, The Wizardry of Jewish Women, and The Green Children Help Out. https://gillianpolack.com/my-books/ The Green Children Help Out is published by a Jewish press.
I would be very happy if people shared their favourite SFF novels by current Jewish writers. So many Jewish cultures to read about! So much potential for good fiction.
I currently read some crime #novels again. Fiction literature. And there are many encounters with police gaining access to someone's (either criminal or victim) #email content, private messages on #SocialMedia, text messages on #phone etc. I wonder if it could be really possible in real world.
Or what would happen if someone use hard disk encryption? Do they have these #data from service providers? Could using encrypted email service like #Protonmail or #Tutanota prevent this? If I understand correctly, emails content is encrypted in rest.
Are regular data deletion, history cleaning and/or disappearing messages (like #signal features) effective for this?
If someone avoid big mainstream services, only niche/encrypted/self-hosted ones are they safe?
Is it possible to become immune to this both via software/service choices and online habits? How to achieve this if so?
I don't want to commit crimes, only become "invincible" :blobcatjoy:
@madargon Holy moly. You're pretty much already invisible. 30-32 character passwords should be long enough. Are they made of words or are they randomly generated strings of characters? Mine are ~30 and randomly generated. They took a little time to memorize, but it's worth it for the security.
@detroit_yeet for things I have to memorize they are combinations of words not really existing. I was creative kid/teen, trying to create own languages, writing fantasy stories for myself with difficult to read names etc. - so I found my old notes and mashed the weirdest words in long, even more difficult to read strings. Sometimes I replace letters with numbers which has the same colour for me (I am synesthete btw, and it also gives some bonus points to memory, like some RPG character buffs, it's my secret why I could remember some IP addresses, my debit card number or some other weird things :D) My Yubikey or other numeric PINs are word-to-number translations. I don't even remember numbers, only words and I "calculate" numbers from these words in my head every time I have to use them, this way is easier for me.
I feel like creation of data is a modern day problem and the way to improve invisibility is reducing data production. Last days I thought my grandma who never used internet and doesn't want to is way more safe than most people :D Or my mother who use it very rarely, mostly when she had to for work. When someone use web regularly, data problem begins... :/
#PennedPossibilities 202 — What is something or someone that your MC takes pride in? How do they express that pride?
I'm not sure Wintereyes would /express/ pride—she's shy around people. She /feels/ pride, however, for how much more effective she's become using her gift.
With the wolf pack, it took years to stick without constantly refreshing it. It's one of the reasons she had to live with them. Now they always remember she's their friend, how she helps them and their cubs, and they tell her so.
Her gift worked much faster with the red dragon last fall, though the forest fire and the grain silo explosion did draw attention to her.
She's shy. She'd rather not be noticed by her kind...
This is a good discussion for authors on number use in fiction; read the comments.
I don't entirely agree. IRL, people round numbers, especially in their favor or to make them look stronger, causing them to use apparently exact numbers. Characters as well as people might use this tendency to mislead, too. Mine do. In any case, readers figure out rounding, IMHO. Using words like a few years, instead of 3 years (esp. when it was 2 year and 9 months ago) appears to be hedging. That is noticed.
@NaraMoore@taur10 Good beta reader. Praise them. Using exact numbers does mean having the responsibility of keeping them consistent, this is true. Of course, inexactitude could be a hallmark of a character. One character consistently getting the numbers incorrect would demonstrate that.
Wow. It looks like the Hugo awards are all sorts of pear-shaped this year. Babel wasn't even considered and the voting seems clearly jacked up across the board. I have suspicions about what happened, but I'm looking forward to someone smarter than me and with more information to explain things.
Finally back to actively writing a new novel after a brief interlude working on spec scripts, and damn it feels good to be back with fiction.
There is no paintbrush in the world quite like prose, IMHO, and no matter how good our screens and goggles and CGI rendering become, no software can possibly compete with the mind itself.
Agatha Christie wrote Nemesis, her final Miss Marple novel, in 1971 at the age of 80-81.
While no formal psychological assessment was made public, she was likely living with early #dementia at the time. Her writing is more repetitive and simpler, but the novel has a great plot and she wrote memory loss into it, letting Miss Marple tell us what it is like from the inside and how she tries to cope with it.
#WritersCoffeeClub Ch 2 Nbr 30 — Did the education system inspire you or put you off writing?
I feel like an oxymoron. I am an author and an avid writer, yet I struggled all through school to get a C- (barely average) in English. I /hated/ English class, especially anything to do with grammar, charting it, figuring out the mechanics, or dealing with (ugh!) predicates. In retrospect, I think those classes taught what it took to analyze the language rather than how to write it. I guess they aimed for the qualitatively testable.
Nothing. Ever. Made it. Fun.
Learning to write means writing, writing, writing, and more writing until you figure out how to make sense. My teachers made no sense!
Literature was no better. Those classes concentrated on "the classics," which (again in retrospect) are really the advanced course in reading. It seemed that teachers picked the hardest, most turgid, most complex material available, guaranteed to put high schoolers to sleep. When I read that some critics still can't agree about what this author or that author really said, I feel like I should facepalm. Teachers needed to figure out how to get kids to /read,/ to be able to measure their progress in books per week voluntarily read, not in one or maybe two classics per semester they forced down students' throats—only to be regurgitated and completely forgotten with extreme distaste.
Whilst I had read a lot of science books and some SF, I wouldn't become an avid reader until I took a genre literature class as a high school junior. In SF, of course. Bless Mrs. Schlesinger, who fought for that class. I hope she knew how many people she inspired to become avid readers, getting kids to discuss what they read and willingly write book reports to share. I certainly told her how I felt. I shared my first book with her. Until I took a mystery genre lit class at university, I didn't discover my love for Dickens (the prototype pop author of serial pulp fiction).
I only started writing when my love of SF made me think I might have stories I too could tell. I copied Frank Herbert's, Anne McCaffery's, and Andre Norton's style, trying to figure out the magic. Then, when an AP analytic geometry final exam turned out to be open book (and I'd invested so much energy in preparing for something incomprehensibly hard for me), I overflowed with creativity and wrote my first novella. 25,000 words and two weeks later, I also found I was a touch typist. That happened during winter break in 1975.
So, yes, in the end, the educational system inspired me in unintended ways—when it had once stifled me.
@sfwrtr I feel this SO hard! I never got C's, but I got B's. And I hated every minute of it. Now? I write all the time. I've written hundreds of thousands of words with my wife over the last five years or so. Who knew?