#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!)
#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: ☑️
“No writing is wasted. Did you know that sourdough from San Francisco is leavened partly by a bacteria called lactobacillus sanfrancisensis?... Even a failed loaf is not wasted. Likewise, cheese makers wash the dairy floor with whey. Tomato gardeners compost with rotten tomatoes. No writing is wasted: the words you can’t put in your book can wash the floor, live in the soil, lurk around in the air. They will make the next words better.”
#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.
@DonDeBon Yep. Ray Bradbury. I think both him and Asimov told how they wrote a story DAILY for a few years (and submitting) before making that key first sale.
It was impossible to write 52 bad short stories in a row. One of them had to be good.
#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.
#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?
"I'm Cascadian, so I grew up in an arcology. They are the best! All my cousins were around all the time, and we are together and went to school together, and everyone was from everywhere. They were floor cousins. I miss them all so much."
#PennedPossibilities 321 — Did your SC once admire their parents? Who else did they admire growing up? What about today?
She loves her parents. She loved growing up on a farm, and she's still a kid really, so she's not done growing up on a farm. But yeah, she gets all her values and sense of safety from her parents. They're good people.
#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.
"Read writing manuals." I haven't. I can't bring myself to do it. Maybe I should! But I know that I'd get obsessed with following the "rules," and I just don't need the joy sucked out of my writing process.
#WordWeavers May 1: Introduce your setting as if it’s a character in your story.
The Greater Cascadian Megalopolis was born from the need to house the population of the Pacific North West but leave the bulk of the continent free of humanity,"re-wilding." The fetal megapolopolis started as superblocks and then arcologies,multiplying until they formed an urban organism that now stretches from the middle of British Columbia all the way to the California border.
#WordWeavers May 21: Do you consider how your MC's appearance may contribute to stereotypes?
Yeah, of course. To do less would be unethical. Especially for me, a white man. I deliberately steer away from stereotype, and the result is a story that's lively and unexpected. I don't rehearse the same old thing, at least not when I can help it.