@sfwrtr@eldritch.cafe
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sfwrtr

@sfwrtr@eldritch.cafe

RS, pronounced /är' əs/. Professional #SF #fiction writer coming back from burn-out. Writes character-driven #SFF (science fiction #fantasy) and some #fanfiction (#MLP). #ClarionWest 98 graduate. #SFWA life member. Studied non-western culture, #folklore, and #mythology. #Feminist #Writer and #Author in the #WritingCommunity amongst the #WritersOfMastodon.

Goals: Return to paid publication. Provide interesting content for followers. Make friends; attract colleagues. See intro post for more...

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sfwrtr, (edited ) to StarTrek
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This cloaking device would probably work in space, especially for Bird of Prey starships!

https://laughingsquid.com/invisibility-shield/

sfwrtr, to photography
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The wisteria is in bloom – and so, apparently, are the squirrels!

The photo shows white wisteria in bloom at the Huntington library and Gardens. Off to the left, there is a continuous stream as squirrels.

sfwrtr, to 13thFloor
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266 — What are your favorite blogs or websites for writers? Share them for others to see.

  4. All my followers

Really. When I read blogs and articles for writers, I often start comparing myself and become anxious. They don't help me much, but the on-point responses authors here give, relating to their stories or experiences, is both fascinating and mind-expanding. It's sometimes inspirational, and it makes me feel supported and ready to write. Forgive me that I've no links for ya.

[Author retains copyright (c)2024 RS.]

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sfwrtr, to ai
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Well, you'd think #AI and #generativeAI like #DALL·E wouldn't be a problem for #fanfiction and #fanart, where you can't own the IP or sell it, but you'd be wrong. People posing as fan artists and LoRa's and artist style stealing are all in the article. The fandom is #MLP. There are links to other related issues.

https://www.equestriadaily.com/2024/03/the-ai-warnings-continue-new-loras.html

#boostingIsSharing and #CommentingIsCool

#writer #author #writingCommunity #writersofmastodon #art #artist #artistsonmastodon #mylittlepony

sfwrtr, to 13thFloor
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265 — Which of the four seasons suits your SC best, and why?

On Home, there's really only two "seasons," if you could call them that. There's hot and humid and hot and not humid. When hot is greater than 95°F (that's 35°C and -3°B), humid is bad news. Heat is such an issue, they measure temperature as degrees below blood temperature.

Since day length does vary, longer nights limit the amount of sun you might have to seek shade from. Sadly, humidity and longer nights coincide.

So... guess which season the my SC likes best. 😇

Actually, everybody is so used to the heat and sweating that they don't notice seasons much. Timing outdoor activity, sleeping midday, and housing compensates for a lot of issues. All things being the same, Bolt likes the longer night "season" best. Gliding on night thermals over a city with your wings out is very cooling.

[Author retains copyright (c)2024 RS.]

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sfwrtr, (edited ) to 13thFloor
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Ch 7 Nbr 22 — Are there any books which should be banned, or is book banning always wrong?

This question is a weedy overgrown field of unexploded land mines. I won't step there.

All I'm willing to say is I hope my books never get banned, and that some malcontent, with an axe to grind with my view on how humanity actually works, never decides to make me an example.

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sfwrtr, to 13thFloor
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#PennedPossibilities 260 — What is the one thing your MC desires most in the world?

It's interesting that for my WiPs, this turned out to be difficult to answer. Neither MC is into material things. Both thought they had control of their lives (but were wrong). I don't think either has some thing they actually desire in this world. Lots of little things would make them content—enjoying friends, finding love, being helpful, receiving earn praise, and since we're talking fantasy here, learning magic. Neither are focused on personal goals, per se.

As for the devil-girl, she's definitely discovered not having complete control in her life ended up fun. Challenging, but fun in the end. Even when you don't win, you learn something you didn't know.

For Wintereyes, life has always simply /happened./ She fits in, and likes that. Her friends are, well, beastly. If she hadn't been living amongst the wolves she'd befriended, would she have ever befriended a dragon? It was burning down their forest, so... That incident changed her life, and will potentially change the world. Not something you can plan for or desire ahead of time.

[Author retains copyright (c)2024 RS.]

#BoostingIsSharing and #CommentingIsCool

#fiction #fantasy #sf #sff #sciencefiction #writing #writer #writers #author #writingcommunity #writersOfMastodon
#RSdiscussion #RSInklingsStory #RSReluctanceStory
#RSstory

sfwrtr, to 13thFloor
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Ch 7 Nbr 19 — What do you put into your coffee? Or tea? Is this a vital part of your writing routine?

A coffee question! Oh my gosh!

What do you put into your coffee? Califia Barista Blend oat milk. Depending on which beans I've ground, I may add one or two teaspoons of coconut sugar.

Or tea? Can't have tea, though I love it, because it interferes with the medicine I take to treat fibromyalgia.

Is [coffee or tea] a vital part of your writing routine? Nope.

[Author retains copyright (c)2024 RS.]

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sfwrtr, (edited ) to ai
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Arguments using AI tools beyond summary and organization for students and even teachers is spurious and fallacious in proportion how well the putative student is able to detect and reject corrupted or fabulated facts. The requirement to learn facts presented by AI might be more onerous than using traditional methods that rely on texts and articles traditionally used. The idea that a student, or a teacher, might proofread and factually revise a paper or thesis generated by an AI rather then generating it from their own mind completely negates the goals of education and guarantees a generation that can't think or create, relying on editing whatever is trending.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/steveandriole/2024/03/18/how-generative-ai-now-owns-higher-education--now-what/

sfwrtr, to 13thFloor
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How would your characters attempt to catch a leprechaun?

If the devil-girl got a visual, she'd drop a gravity fold over it like a bell jar.

The main antagonist would charm the pants off of the guy.

Wintereyes isn't allowed to magically befriend anything humanoid. She might ask her dragon friend to speak fire to the fellow dressed in shamrocks, to convince him not to run.

Would the little guy notice Bolt dropping down on him from the sky? She's very fast.

[Author retains copyright (c)2024 RS.]

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sfwrtr, (edited ) to 13thFloor
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Ch 7 Nbr 18 — Do you ever use parentheses/brackets in your writing?

I use em-dashes in 1st person narrative quite often, mostly in the sense of setting off parenthetical remarks. I occasionally use parentheses, usually in dialogue but sometimes for very short or one word inserts.

I rarely use brackets, except for out-of-context author inserts in essays (see below), for inline author clarifications usually in front or rear matter in a larger work, or for attributions in quotes or epigraphs.

[Author retains copyright (c)2024 RS.]

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sfwrtr, (edited ) to 13thFloor
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Ch 7 Nbr 17 — Have you taken high school or college courses in Creative Writing? Were the classes useful?

Yes. At community college, I recollect taking a class. I recollect that mostly it wasn't so much about story telling, as it was way for the students to air their demons and bad life experiences through journal writing. I didn't stay long.

At university, I tried again expecting an academic approach to writing fiction. That's was what the catalog promised. I think it was just before I got an agent and I hadn't yet published. I had a couple completed novels and had short stories making the rounds at the magazines. I submitted an SF short story, necessary to be enrolled. The first critique session, the professor acknowledged that I had a completed work. However, in the next breath he said, "We only write Christian stories in this class."

I dropped the class like a proverbial hot potato.

[Author retains copyright (c)2024 RS.]

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sfwrtr, to 13thFloor
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Ch 7 Nbr 12 — What would one of your stories be like in an alternative universe?

Me: "Well, my first story was about a white-feathered dinosaur girl who falls in love with a human—"
Her: "Non, ce n'est pas vrai! She had the red scales!"
You: "White /feathers./ Baka! They proved that with fossil—"
Watashi: "You're both wrong! She was white, but she was a fox of five tails."
Boku: "She wasn't female. My MCs are always guys—"
And with that I closed the parallelogramaphone. Sorry. Next question...
[Author retains copyright (c)2024 RS.]

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sfwrtr, (edited ) to dystopia
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I know Amazon warehouse jobs are notoriously dehumanizing, but they pay the bills for those desperate for jobs. Let's just replace more people so they can't make a living without providing for them, right? Labor is expensive. If this works, you can buy your own warehouse bot! Yay. #theComingLaborApocalypse #dystopia #writingCommunity Ideas #writingCommunity #labor #basicIncome https://newatlas.com/robotics/humanoid-robots-work-amazon/

sfwrtr, to 13thFloor
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244 — Do your characters have any co-workers they’re close with? Are there any they can’t stand?

My MC grew up rather distrusting of people, after being betrayed by a friend at a young age. When she got assigned a team to transport things-you-don't-ask-questions-about for the mob around the city, she didn't feel any attachment to the people assigned to her to help her complete her task. They could fight. They could take orders. They could run when she said run. She'd also been setup to take a fall.

Rival leadership in the gang tried to use her to bring down the Doña. With her co-worker's support, she turned the plan on its head, capturing one of the plotters and successfully delivering the merch. Over the following months, they worked together as they were obviously a perfect team, but then the rival leadership tried to kill her on another job. Her co-workers had become friends, and she'd always had their back, so they backed her up. They protected her. They all survived, and insisted they were all friends, even standoffish her.

She acceded.

They became the core of the team the MC formed as the bodyguard for the Doña. Two turned out to be married, but separated. She didn't like the husband much; he had tried to pick her up once. She ended up beating him up as part of knocking some sense into him and getting him back with his wife, but that's another story...

[Author retains copyright (c)2024 RS.]

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sfwrtr, to writing
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So, and , I got a chance to use , the latin abbreviation for "et merda" (and shit). The best insults are those that go over the insulted head. I found something really irritating in Siri, more than usual irritating, that should be fixed, so I wrote a feedback:

The "Siri, Lights" command on Home Pod makes no sense as a toggle. If you have 5 lights in a room and 2 are on, if you say "Siri, Lights," it turns the 2 off and the other 3 on, etc., etm. Is there an actual use case for this? This doesn't feel very intuitive. It seems to me that this behavior would teach the majority of people in this situation not to use the "Siri, lights," commands the first time this fails like this.

on good

sfwrtr, (edited ) to 13thFloor
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2403.4 — If your SC had to describe their world to an alien who knew nothing about it, what would they say?

Bolt would say pleasant, with plenty puffy little clouds and thermals that allow you to spread your wings and fly all day. You find boring cities and surrounding farmlands and occasional large forests most everywhere.

Her statements are in /her context./ Here's a much needed 21st century context that I wrote for (hashtag)WritersCoffeeClub today:

Do environmental concerns feature in your work? Not usually, but are tangentially important in the Reluctance series.

[Minor spoilers follow.]
Thousands of years ago, humanity solved the climate crisis and was on the way to becoming a multi-planetary patriarchal species when something purposely collapsed civilization [spoilers], seemingly to make humans go extinct. The planet is now mostly uninhabitable due to incredible cold or heat, with one stretch just barely cool enough to not cook mammals and grow food. There's practically no temperate zones, and they're reserved for agriculture and special needs.

None of this plays a role in the stories except peripherally. After some time reading, you might ask yourself these questions: Why do people never use anything disposible? Non-renewable resources are few and mostly inaccessible. Why is child mortality so high? Heat exhaustion. Why are buildings almost always white, spherical, or built like ventilated chimneys? Heat dissipation, by reflection, minimization, or convection. Why do many people take "siesta...?"

People who have no choice but to cope, will. To them it's not odd so they won't note it. It will simply show up as Easter eggs, now and again.

[Author retains copyright (c)2024 RS.]

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sfwrtr, to 13thFloor
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2403.03 — What food from your fridge or favorite restaurant would your MC enjoy the most?

Wintereyes lives amongst wolves, so of course she eats a lot of meat. Since her teeth aren't strong enough to eat meat raw, she cooks it enough to chew. Her pack has gotten a taste for it that way, especially the eldest wolves. Thanks to her magical gift, they can use fire, too.

It's not the meat in the fridge that would attract her, it's the cheese. Nothing so delectable is imaginable to her, especially the Romano and gouda. She might like the smoked salmon, especially since everything she eats is also smoked by wood fire.

[Author retains copyright (c)2024 RS.]

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sfwrtr, to 13thFloor
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Ch 7 Nbr 4 — Do environmental concerns feature in your work?

Not usually, but are tangentially important in the Reluctance series.

[Minor spoilers follow.]
Thousands of years ago, humanity solved the climate crisis and was on the way to becoming a multi-planetary patriarchal species when something purposely collapsed civilization [spoilers], seemingly to make humans go extinct. The planet is now mostly uninhabitable due to incredible cold or heat, with one stretch just barely cool enough to not cook mammals and grow food. There's practically no temperate zones, and they're reserved for agriculture and special needs.

None of this plays a role in the stories except peripherally. After some time reading, you might ask yourself these questions: Why do people never use anything disposible? Non-renewable resources are few and mostly inaccessible. Why is child mortality so high? Heat exhaustion. Why are buildings almost always white, spherical, or built like ventilated chimneys? Heat dissipation, by reflection, minimization, or convection. Why do many people take "siesta...?"

People who have no choice but to cope, will. To them it's not odd so they won't note it. It will simply show up as Easter eggs, now and again.

[Author retains copyright (c)2024 RS.]

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sfwrtr, to 13thFloor
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243 — Imagine, if you will, an alternate universe… Which of your characters is most likely to attempt karaoke?

The way I see it, to do karaoke a person needs one or more of the following:

  • A good singing voice or being deluded about the same
  • Succumbs easily to peer pressure
  • Likes to do goofy things
  • Willing to become inebriated
  • Doesn't care what other people think about them
  • Willing to use it as a tool for other objectives

The devil-girl inherited her singing voice from her mother who was an international opera star. She hates singing in public, but does sing in the bath. Show tunes, mostly her dead mother's. She's bulletproof to peer pressure and couldn't care less what people think of her—unless it would help her achieve her goals. As a leader, she'd definitely suggest karaoke to bring her new classmates together, or in a more military setting to build moral and team spirit. She'd demure from singing until given no choice, then would hide her talent.

Seems to me that though the concept of karaoke is foreign to her world, it could very well exist, too. People do a lot of the things machines do in our world, so it might require live musicians or phonographs.

[Author retains copyright (c)2024 RS.]

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sfwrtr, (edited ) to 13thFloor
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2403.01 — Introduce yourself as if you were a character in your story. What would your role be?

Can my story be autobiographical?

My first recollection was looking up at a dashboard in a car. It was green, made of metal. My dad was driving, but I don't think there were seatbelts.

I don't remember much from those days because I acquired language late, and then it was French because Mom sent me to a Montessori. I don't remember French, so I don't remember much. Autism was a secret that ran in the family, though I wasn't as bad as Uncle who stayed home all day building houses with cardboard and tape.

My specialness would account for other factors when I grew up, and, oddly, lead me to becoming an author. I think I had little native understanding of people's behavior, less of their expressions. It led me to intensely studying them, learning to predict what they'd do as if my life depended on it.

It did. If I didn't get it right, bad things happened. Don't remember specifically what, but I'm sure of this. Not understanding the language, nor the people, made it hard to remember more than images.

My next recollections come from when I was 7 or 8. It was night and I was home alone, no lights on. Batman was on primetime (/POW! Zowie! Holy Guacamole!/). By the flickering light of the the TV, Chef Boyardee raviolis heated in the pot and smelled really good...

[Author retains copyright (c)2024 RS.]

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sfwrtr, (edited ) to 13thFloor
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Ch 7 Nbr 2 CW: Author b evil

Have you ever based a character on a real person? Yes. And I published the novel. It sold through the first printing with almost zero returns.

Do they know? He read the novel, or claimed to; with him, who knows? He didn't recognize himself, AFAIK, though I had based the evil stepmother on my narcissistic a—e evil stepfather. Pretty obviously. Self-awareness wasn't his long suit.

It makes me really happy.

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PS: He died a few years ago.

sfwrtr, to 13thFloor
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240 — What inspired the idea for your latest WIP?

Me. In her shyness, Wintereyes is a lot like me. I wanted to write a character who dealt with what gets in the way of my own self-actualization. Unlike me, though, she's almost completely incapable of becoming invisible.

[Author retains copyright (c)2024 RS.]

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sfwrtr, to 13thFloor
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241 — MC POV: If you could relive one day of your life without changing anything that happened, which day would you choose? CW: She's not censoring herself.

The first thing I did that day was learn it behooved me to find out more about him. By afternoon, I'd bought him shrimp kabobs for lunch, but ended up fighting him outside a café and we bloodied each other's noses. That evening—after the three-Ds: Dinner, Dancing, and Dessert—I'd invited myself to his townhouse and were f— ourselves silly. I learned a lot about what I liked that day, because he wanted to learn. Good kisser. Good student. I wouldn't change a thing.

[Author retains copyright (c)2024 RS.]

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sfwrtr, (edited ) to 13thFloor
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Ch 6 Nbr 28 — Should you avoid running around the Wrekin, beating about the bush, and avoid colloquialisms?

Think of colloquialisms as salt. Too little in the soup makes it insipid. To much makes it unpalatable. Moreover, you must judge whether your colloquialism will be understood by the audience, and if not whether it is still appropriate. The Wrekin one went over my head as a north American reader.

  • In Dialogue: Use colloquialisms as appropriate to the character speaking. Like using dialect, I would suggest choosing clearly understood ones and opting for not using them most of the time.
  • In 1st Person Narration: This is the narrator as the main character or the Watson character. They are protagonists in the story and you must use them in narration as you would in dialogue.
  • In 3rd Person Reliable or Objective Narration: Best practice is to make your writing as transparent as possible. Make the prose in narration neutral and unopinionated. Remove colloquialisms and clichés from the narration during revision, recasting sentences as necessary. You reap the benefit of contrasting the narration against the dialogue.
  • In 3rd Person Storyteller or Subjective Narration: Whilst all narration can't escape being authorial to one extent or another, there is a great tradition of storytelling where someone, vague or identified, is telling the story without actually being in the story (as in 1st person). This person may speak familiarly to the reader, sometimes as if they are actually in the storyteller's audience. They jump between character's thoughts. They give opinions. They explain stuff. They criticize. They foreshadow, like spreading butter thickly, what is going to happen and even why. The voice may or may not be entirely folksy, but a good colloquialism or two /that is appropriate to the audience/ but /contrasts (usually) with what the characters would use/ will make the narration shine. This goes for clichés and salty language. Like 1st Person Narration, the Storyteller is a character in your story. Note, however, you may be speaking instead as the actual author. If you think the reader can sense this, you might want to tone it way down lest the story come off as opinionated or written by a rube—which is why many authors hide behind a storyteller.

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