Chatting with a visiting Kiwi author, Rachael King, in the bookshop today, she recognised me - turned out I had chaired her fellow Kiwi scribe at @edbookfest a few years ago, and she remembered me!
It really is a small planet (especially the literary part of it!)....
File this one under the #comingLaborApocalypse. Really, I can't think of a job that is safe, but these are soon toast. Consider supporting basic income #ubi before it's too late.
#PennedPossibilities 303 — Is your SC one to be haunted by adversity, or to use what they've gone through to become stronger?
I was going to answer only stronger, but because it is true, I'll answer haunted. She calls him /The Monster,/ and he savaged her, but from that experience she learned she could fight, and win, and never be chattel again. She refers to The Monster often, comparing her current actions to that paradigm of evil, and sometimes finding herself wanting. She's not what is often called /good./ Those who know her say she has a death wish. Once, when she thought she'd murdered in an act of enraged vengeance, she tried to stab herself at the source of her magic in her guilt. She's since then experienced and reacted to other things. Bad, things. She remembers. When she encounters situations in the current work that remind her of how she became stronger, they haunt her as she fights to make surviving her past worthwhile to those she helps in the present.
#WordWeavers 2405.02 — What are your MC’s living conditions like? Are they better or worse than average?
Wow, this question! A bit of background: I wrote the original novella, then wrote a prequel novel based on the history in the first story, then retconned the novella, worsened the situation and followed it with new events to make it a novel, /then/ wrote the sequel. It's her life story, now.
In this last story, the answer to this question is the running joke. The new work takes place over three days. She starts having been living with a fellow student, an ever-seeking-male-companionship elite who months ago offered her a free roommate situation—so long as the MC slept with her in the same bed (and her new roommate only sleeps well being held). The next day it's the couch after the MC is reunited with a former coworker (bodyguard) whom she introduces to her elite roommate. They hit it off. Noisily. All night long! The next night, not wanting a repeat performance, she connives to spend a (satisfying) night with her new boyfriend in "palatial" digs in the Residency where the main antagonist lives, but is currently out on a military adventure. Having reconciled with a childhood friend, the subsequent night she ends up on his bed, in a Residency guest suite, sleeping with him and a pile of thaumaturgy books they nerded out over. She regrets not having had more fun with him, but he's too sweet and obviously not ready for that. The next day, she's fighting for her life in a hospital.
Her living conditions are way above average, arguably superior.
Previous Living Conditions
Born in a nice house in an obscure village
Raised in a newly built mansion for a newly titled elite (her)
Homeless for months, having run away, living in encampments and wandering the east coast
Big city hostel for over a year
Gangland trainer's nice apartment with separate beds
Boarding house with aspects of a brothel, where she must defend herself
Leased a one room dance studio where she sleeps on a mat between a wall of open windows and a wall of mirrors, having no need of further furniture
A series of high line hotel and mansion rooms owned the Doña she works for
As for the homelessness, she was moving around without money while hiding her identity, and rarely stayed long. The worst was trying to sleep under eaves in the city during storms; she didn't always have a tent. Regardless, it qualifies as below average living conditions for a total of about a year. It did focus her like of asceticism.
#PennedPossibilities 302 — What is the one thing your SC desires most in the world?
Caramello, aka Caramel-eyes, né [unpronounceable polysyllabic tropical islander name], is the last son of the Chieftain. He is the last in the succession. He's been "exiled" to the Endless Island (the mainland) to avoid his siblings after his father is murdered. What he desires most is to be forgotten. No scratch that. What he desires the most is that his mother, the Chieftain's second wife, survive what he fears is going on right now...
#WordWeavers 2405.01 — Introduce your setting as if it’s a character in your story.
[/Well, I decided to jump ahead in the WiP and write what might be the start of the next chapter. The title may be named:You Have Mail. Pardon the Dickensian texture; this is a first draft. —RS/]
I never expected a human habitation to feel as protective as my dorm room did. Sure, my lodgepole tent protected me through the blizzardy winters in the Fell Wood, as it did the wolf pack that had adopted me. I provided the tent, though. I repaired it, stored it, and raised it year after year. I maintained the cooking fire for all the wolves and cubs. It was I who was being protective, not it—or so it felt.
My dorm room wanted me to know that for the next few years, at least, it existed solely to protect /me,/ to comfort /me./ Increasingly, it did so as I added memories. Mother Wolf and I used one of the two small beds, the left one, piled with fuzzy brown blankets as needed or clothed with luxurious white cotton sheets that felt cool against cheek or jowl. Since I was tasked with the cleaning instead of the dorm servants, my room smelled of us, faintly of yeast, sweat, and a wolf that occasionally hunted rabbits but favored the cafeteria's pasture-beast stew.
The little red iron stove kept us warm through winter; the room's wood panel walls kept us shaded from the hot summer sun. It lovingly provided a rare enclosure—almost like walking within the orange and white rock walls of the slot canyons of the south woods—creating a remarkable silence in a land of noisy humans and huffing machines. This and its soft radiant cloud-light ceiling made me feel... what? Swaddled? Like being /home,/ as my parents would have used the word back on the farm when I was a child. My spirit books, fashion magazines, and papers cluttered the worn ink-stained blond pine desk. I ran my bare feet over the oval tapestry rug letting the patterns of wands and dryad trees caress my toes. My skin stuck to the cushy tan leather chair as I stood, but I knew that was it hugging me.
Situated to the rear of the building on the first floor, the casement window at the end of the rectangular space opened to the clay roof of a shed. Crisp autumn breezes fluttered the gauzy drapes as I looked out at the barrier forest beyond the stables, lit by the setting sun. The window conveniently allowed Mother Wolf to jump up, as she did right now, and clatter into the room as she pleased. She greeted me with an ever-wet red tongue on my face and backside. (A white wolf opening the front door of the women's dorm, with a key in her mouth, and walking in always frightened at least one student or professor. People called me their Wild Woman, but still never got used to the implications of the name.)
Best of all, as the special guest of Her Highness, nobody dared inspect my room. Everyone knocked, no exceptions. Wolf inside, right? Framed pictures of my boyfriend hung suspended by single powder blue silk ribbons, and they were /very/ inappropriate. Looking at him warmed me deeply, reminding me of being /us,/ together—so I didn't care that my foolish "civilized" human brethren might think. People existed to enjoy themselves, regardless of what nosy people might say. This room supported me as I lived here, trapped in the Townships because circumstance required me to learn to be "more human" as Her Highness was fond of saying. My little supportive enclave encouraged me to be me, and allowed me to dress or not dress as I pleased behind its closed oaken door.
When the House Mother knocked, I simply threw on a dressing gown. I turned the pictures around before answering—to be respectful. It tickled me that she never asked why I always smiled when I opened the door.
#WritersCoffeeClub Ch 9: The Writing Duds of May Nbr 01 — OMG! What happened to your MC's parents?
Well, after nearly 300K of story, you'd think I'd have noticed a minor plot hole, but noooo. I'll retcon if necessary in later stories what the public knew versus what the MC said in the stories (which would be secret). Background: MC's mother was an international singer and theatre actor; her father is her manager.
Publicly, while on an overseas musical tour, the pair were on a privately chartered day cruise when their small ship got caught in tropical squall (shades of Gilligan's Isle). Wreckage was reported as found, but no bodies.
At their private funeral, the ruler of the nation posthumously named the MC's parents as heroes of the nation. Her mother was a powerful thaumaturge and together they were spies. They'd "died" on a mission that saved uncounted lives.The MC wasn't yet five years old and blames the ruler for their death. How the ruler treats the MC at the funeral (spoilers) cements her in the MC's mind as the main antagonist.
Revealed a decade later, intelligence indicates that the MC's father was captured by a hostile nation and is being kept as a bargaining chip against invasion. That the MC might get the opportunity to rescue him is part of the reason the MC has made a deal with the main antagonist in the most recent novel.
As part of the reveal of the father above, her mother is thought to have received a severe head injury, but used her magic to escape anyway. Her whereabouts are unknown. Not canon until I use it is that the MC's mother can magically put herself elsewhen (future) and elsewhere. This part is substantiated in the Reluctance version of the character in that the civilization has achieved interstellar travel. How you ask? Spoilers. Regardless, elsewhere could be anywhere.
Volume three of the Wizard's Scion is now scheduled for release on May 6, 2024, titled 'The Third Wish'! It will be in Ebook first, with print to soon follow.
In this novel, old enemies of Heart Forge band together and seek to alter history with a time machinel, forcing the Steel Wizard, Levi Jacobs, to take action, despite the pain of having recently lost his parents.
"Accuracy is so important to me,” Goyhood #author Reuven Fenton told The Algemeiner. “People assume that the ultra-Orthodox #Jewish community is the Jewish version of the Taliban and that’s not true at all.”
“Whenever you see anything media-oriented that has to do with Orthodox #Jews, if you’re part of that world in any way, you look at it and roll your eyes because they never get it right. It’s full of flaws, exaggerations, and misinformation,” added the first-time author, who is also the only Orthodox Jewish reporter on staff for the New York Post. “I felt it was my obligation, [and] that the least I could do in writing this #novel was to get everything on the money.”
#WordWeavers 2404.30 — Does your MC have any pets? If so, what are they?
/Pets/ is a bad word for Wintereyes. It's the word the very irritating Thaumaturgy Dean uses whenever one of her wolf family makes themself seen on campus, as in, "They're frightening the other students!" She's human, but doesn't understand the term (upbringing). To her they're beasts that humans keep around that are neither food nor work for them, which makes them subject to unpredictable human whim. She "befriends" beasts, but that's a totally different thing...
Wintereyes has little experience beyond the most basic of basics, though she's fairly expert with footwear, having built her own. She really wants to get it right so she can ensure she can fade into the background and not be noticed—but failed big time her first day in the Townships. She's shy. Being shy doesn't mean she doesn't want to communicate; it doesn't help that she fears babbling in this aspect of human language. There's so much to learn! In her drawing class, she's concentrating on fashion though it seems like an advanced language course at the moment!
#WordWeavers 2404.29 — Who's feeling shame in your story? Is it justified?
/It's'a [#brainfog#fibromyalgia day, but I'm gonna write this to get something out. Hoping it's coherent. —RS/]
This question made me think hard for quite awhile until I—like an artist or a photographer deciphering how shadow defines volume and dimension—saw /negative space/ in a story... where something wasn't. Emptiness.
Wintereyes /doesn't/ feel #shame, and I'm realizing this is an #emotion with which I can make a #feminist point in my story. Whilst shame is IMHO used more often to control women than it is men, it is both incidious and /learned./ Shame is a combination of built-in emotions programmed into a person to make a person self-punish for "wrong" behavior even if it's secret; it's related to, but not the same as guilt.
Wintereyes was raised by wolves, but not until she was 7 when her "gift" caused her to seek a second set of parents. Her early childhood will require investigation in another story, but I'm pretty sure her human parents didn't teach her the emotion; it's not that she forgot. Forced to live again amongst humans over a decade later, to become more human, people's behavior baffles her. Late in the story, when she's asked to disrobe by stylist at a modeling shoot, and does without a thought, the stylist observes, "You don't feel shame, do you?" This is where Wintereyes will go off like a firecracker, and it should be very interesting.
The stylist may actually feel ashamed...
The author is [#actuallyautistic and retains copyright (c)2024 R..S.]
This comic should amuse #writers. I did some research on the #etymology of the cited #homonyms and wrote this to my lit friend. My thoughts, anyway, which may amuse ewe:
It is obvious from an orthographic perspective that many sounds represented by groups of letters in English ought be pronounced differently and emphasized, putting aside that Germanic and French derivatives are also different. Problem is that human hearing and blurring of sounds due to regional accents mean we do a lot of error checking so accurate sounds don't always matter. As such, we have homonyms which shouldn't logically exist because we learn language by hearing not reading. But humans aren't logical (and are lazy speakers) and language is living. Scent = sss sen t. Sense = sen sss with a weak seh at the end. Scent without emphasis on the introductory s sound, sent, and cent are homonyms. Scent is from the French and cent from the German. Sent is the past tense of send so doesn't count.
#PennedPossibilities 300 — How does your MC or SC react to change? Do they struggle to adjust or go with the flow?
Like her reactions to stress (299), my MC leans in. She was raised to be responsible, and if the change is posed as helping or saving people, or helping the MC reach goals she has or would find desireable, she'll often agree. (This is how she ran away from home to learn magic, to train to be a prizefighter, and later become a bodyguard for the mob.) She hates she does this, though, and change often makes her life difficult. Let's say that good reactions to stress and dealing well with change aren't necessarily a good thing!
How many times now has she nearly died? As of the current novel in serialization?
Stress is almost always due to problem she hasn't solved or a situation she isn't in control of. Whereas running away was a solution she's employed a few times, it was to take control of her life again not giving up. She does tend to become tense and irritable, visibly worrying. Since she discovered her love of physicality, having discovered she likes to fight despite the pain, and that training herself makes her better than just physically, if she can't find her solution, she'll hit the heavy bag and the speed bag. Better, if she can find someone who's a better fighter than her, she'll fight until she learns something. Sparring with equals or teaching makes her feel like she's trying to procrastinate. In tense situations, she may end up bullying to see if she can shake alternative solutions out of subordinates or gatekeepers. Lastly, she'll act out doing things that are clearly not solutions hoping that by trying, she'll blunder into something effective, or someone will find it to get her to stop.
In a sense, stress makes her keener. That said, she doesn't like it. Her ideal life would be as an ascetic, practicing her miracles and martial arts, studying new ones, and reading a lot. Oddly, she doesn't think of relaxing with a good book to clear her mind. Maybe I'll have her discover that one day.
Now that's she's discovered male companionship, I may have her think of that as a stress reliever, but that'll be in sequels.
#WritersCoffeeClub Ch 8 Nbr 29 — Do you share your name with other writers?
Now, in publications or on the Internet, no. People do call me R.S. I first used this pen name when I went to Clarion. I used it to obfuscate my gender in email before the workshop for reasons of what I write. The gender of the author adds subtext to gender fiction. Statistically, most people guess wrong. In person, and when money is involved, it's inescapable and I share my name. I use a different name in photography and a different ungendered pen name when writing non-speculative fiction. Who I am isn't hidden, but I'd ask you not to investigate or reveal it for the reasons stated above.
Seen elsewhere: name 10 authors of whose books you've read more than 5:
Elizabeth Moon >5
Margaret Atwood =5
Stephen King >5
Dean Koontz >5
Jennifer Roberson >5
Anne Rice >5
CS Lewis >5
Octavia Butler =5
Susan Cooper =5
JRR Tolkien >5
Thank you @courtcan, I like reading these lists. My five or more books/or stories read by #author list. This isn't all of them; I haven't got to the attic bookcase, yet. A pattern emerged. Can you see it?
Lissanne Norman
Patricia Briggs
Clare Bell
CJ Cherryh
Andre Norton
Lois McMaster Bujold
Joan D Vinge
Connie Willis
Anne McCaffrey
Tamora Pierce
Nancy Kress
Nicola Griffith
Barb Hendee
Julie Kenner
Diana Rowland
Agatha Christie
Phyllis A Whitney
Danielle Steele
I hope everyone takes this #challenge to write up their list, too.