#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2025.05.26 — In your work, how much of an active character is your setting?

To any extent that a setting is an active character, it is as an antagonist. Mars is toxic and dust must be dealt with when entering and leaving. Gangsters when transporting "product" across town have to deal with buses and subways and bridges. When wanting privacy for a triste, the pair must deal with Death Valley type heat as well as their own sweat, and (because they are nocturnal) sunshine.

This isn't to say my settings don't have character. They are what the MC will either notice when they look (like shining a flashlight into a black room to illuminate important bits) or remember (exclusively what they like or annoys them) as it becomes a venue within which MCs and SCs interact. Take the following setup (the entire description of the setting):

... [It was] a dance studio. Two walls of French doors. Two walls of mirrors. A barre with a brass top. Golden oak wood floor. A black tin ceiling with an embossed red fleur de lis pattern. A tiny kitchen and a smaller loo. She threw open all twelve windows; breezes billowed the thin drapes. ...Draperies flapped like a sail as they played noisily. Pepper trees spiced the air.

The following happens:

• The MC feels the cold mirror against her back.
• Bits of broken door are strewn across the floor.
• SCs climb down trees.
• The antagonist (an angel) flies out one window and in another.
• The antagonist checks the loo for an attic door, then opens the oven.
• The antagonist checks the mirrors to see if any push in to hide a door.
• The MC rolls the unconscious antagonist out a window, hidden from outside observers by the drapes.

If my settings are anything else, they're background characters.

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#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2025.05.24 — What in your writing ‘dates’ you?

When I look at casual writing in sms, toots, and whatnot, I am tempted to say my use of correct punctuation and sentence capitalization. what dates me ain't grammar or vocabulary. i work to keep that contemporary, and my embracing Grammar B seems very modern.

Worrisome, however, is that I can't embrace the modern mystique of stupid being sexy or attractive. They can still get into plenty of trouble using every faculty and wile to the best of their abilities. My characters read books and tend to be educated and brainy, even when brawny. They don't get drunk. They don't follow trends. They aren't gamers. They didn't have parents that treated them as if they were delicate china and insulated them from the world and maybe falling down and scraping a knee. They walk home from school. They had adventures growing up, without adult supervision. They are not thrill seekers, though considering the stories they get depicted in, you'd think differently.

All-in-all, it feels very not modern.

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#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2025.05.22 /2 — How do you make a location you’ve never visited feel ‘real’ for the reader?

How?

I have the character interact with their environment. They encounter a green newspaper machine, put in a coin, hear the machine clank, smell the newsprint, then the coffee from the cart down the street, then salivating until it hurts, smelling a frosted donut then biting into the crispy oily maple goodness while talking to the pretty purveyor with blonde hair, before putting the back of their hands to their ears (with the sticky pastry in one and a cup of coffee in the other that splatters drops on a black sweater) as a fire truck with a clanging brass bell clatters down the cobblestone street pulled by a team of six white work horses with blinders.

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#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2025.05.23 — Do you prefer to write urban or rural settings? Why?

Since I write SF and SF-style fantasy, it's usually in places with lots of people. It could be in a spaceship, it could be a city. One early story was rural, where the main character was trying to escape the farm by pretending to be a boy; later scenes take place in a coastal town. The latest novel takes place inside arcologies on Earth (cities inside giant buildings) and dome cities on the surface of Mars, connected by high speed monorail. It's not only "urban" but always "inside." The novel where the MC deals with the mafia, becomes a bodyguard, and ends up as a championship prizefighter takes place in a city modeled after Baltimore.

Why urban? Besides where the idea takes place or where the character lives, I know urban settings better.

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#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2025.05.22 — How do you make a location you’ve never visited feel ‘real’ for the reader?

If by location, you mean real places? Easy. I don't write that. Whatever possesses people to write about places that exist that people might actually criticize them about not depicting right (oh, that crossroads isn't *there!), I cannot understand what-so-ever. Too much work, too little writing story. Horses for courses.

I will admit that one of the ways that I make fantasy city settings more real is that I use Street View for a real city that I model the fantasy world city after. He's a tip: I stick to the real world map, which causes the characters to deal with things like bad city planning, their destination being across bridges, having to take mass transit (I had gangsters taking a bus and dealing with a rival gang on a subway), and tidbits like not finding a coffee shop when you really really REALLY need it. Tip #2: Mention or describe the restaurants, government buildings, newsstands, streetlights, dead-end alley, etc. that you discover following that map (in moderation). Remember places stink. Works wonders.

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#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2025.05.21 — Are there facets of your work best understood in the context of when you wrote it?

I think Mars Needed Women will stand the test of time because the struggle for women's rights and self-agency is likely to continue as long as patriarchy survives, sadly. However, it is a novel inspired by this very year despite taking place 110 through 145 years from now. There is plenty of background satire, starting with what the E. M. in EM Mars Colonization Corp stands for, the States becoming a theocracy, and there being Co-presidents and appointed Members of Congress— all of it starting in 2025. Thirty years from now the story may either remind people of a quaint last reactionary gasp of anti-democracy, or discussion of the same warning signs noticed-but-ignored before Hitler destroyed his homeland. I hope the former and fear the latter.

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#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2025.05.20 — Pick two other writers’ works that would pair well with yours.

I don't read much of what I write, mostly because AFAIK it doesn't exist. Hard to say whose work would pair with mine. Even amongst the feminist SF I've read, nothing is quite like it.

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#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2025.05.19 — Is there a creative habit-building method you swear by?

In March, I took a one chapter a day novel writing challenge where I composed 750ish words a day to fit a women's rights prompt, revised it, and published it that same day on Mastodon. Well, mostly. Some days I ended up creating two chapters because the chapter the previous day slipped. I got the last of the 31st out 20 minutes into April 1st!

I spent most of April and the beginning of May, practically daily, revising and adding content. I've sent the novel to the beta readers.

Now in May, I'm back to writing…whenever. Not daily.

So, no.

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#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2025.05.18 — What do you do to actively avoid writer’s block?

What passes as writer's block today (spicy story passages), the only thing to work is to sneak up on them like Elmer Fudd hunting Wabbit, not to think about what I am writing, to keep my mind as blank as possible, to sit with the file open, then start typing.

This mantra, in the Introduction post pinned to my profile helps:

Are you blocked by your internal censor? Do you worry you're revealing your embarrassing true self? Say what I say to myself:

I am not telepathic.

Repeat that: I am not telepathic.

Louder: I AM NOT TELEPATHIC!

I DON'T know what the reader is going to expect.

I DON'T know if the current scene is going to frighten, trigger, or be too explicit for my audience...

Because I DON'T have anyone looking over my shoulder, clicking their tongue, and saying, "Tch, tch, tch!"

I am going to take a deeeeeeep breath, now,
clear my mind,
and write the flapping scene—
full stop.

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#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2025.05.16 — International Day of Light/Peace. Tell us about your favorite use of symbolic imagery.

If I understand correctly, plenty of it in this passage. #RSMarsNeededWomen

May Ri didn't seethe for long. A woman, especially, couldn't fight the male-dominated system. She knew to grab opportunities. Five days later she found herself outside, tethered, magnetic shoes clamped to the spine of the ship. Behind, aft, she saw the black radiator plate beyond which lay the nuclear rocket. A totally reflective, totally misnamed "starship" shuttle stood as a fat needle at the bow. A clip from an ancient vid called 2001: A Space—May Ri couldn't remember what—had featured in EM Mars propaganda. The four rings looked like that, but silver. The stars, though: Static, unmoving, except as reflected in the rotating rings. Enthralling.

Still…

She regarded herself in the mirror-sheened stainless steel cladding of the transit vehicle. Her tools? She could easily mischaracterize them as a mop and a wash bucket (they weren't), and herself as an exhausted housewife with a sweaty brow (it was) left home to do worthless work. Yet… she could properly characterize it as removing rocket burn debris and polishing out micro-meteor gouges. Most of all, she was doing it in a spacesuit, not Mom's kitchen apron.

"Kind of exciting," she had to admit.

"May Ri?" a comm duty officer asked.

She smiled. "Nothing."

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#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2025.05.17 — How do you ‘write what you know’?

Oddly enough, though I am a very shy person (and autistic), I am also (or by definition) very observant. I've known and met people from all walks of life (with the help of intermediaries). Bank robbers and other crooks, likely a few mafiosos and judges, business people, engineers, authors. I know gay and trans folk; there are lesbians in the family. I had an evil stepfather. No joke. Evil. And I'm happy he's dead. My mother was a bailbondswoman and did her own bounty hunting, but had poor taste in men. I was able to shoot before I was 10 years old. I even had a pony, who absolutely wanted to kill me and almost did by rolling over in a stream with me on top. I know how to muck out a stall. Got raised by a single mother; as a latchkey kid, I learned to cook at 7 years old so as to not have to eat TV dinners. You know, those aluminum trayed frozen abominations that never had on the interior what was promised on the cardboard exterior? Look up the Galloping Gourmet. My TV hero. There were a succession of dogs. Cats. Building a house. Programmed. Dabbled in writing. Did lots of things. Mostly uninteresting.

Some of it leaks into my stories.

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#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2025.05.14 — How do you use cyclic structures in your work?

Problem ➾ angst ➾ solved worsening ➾ angst ➾ solved ➾ etc. This is the general structure of a genre novel. I rarely write specific cycles, though with the devil-girl, getting used as someone's sharp tool ➾ feeling abused ➾ user regrets having met her does seems cyclical, except she levels up and the user is a bigger boss. Does that make sense?

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#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2025.05.11 — How does your setting contribute to the conflict in your work?

In the broadest sense, it's the worldwide climate disaster that the primary characters and society in general think is normal that is at the base of most conflict. Day to day weather constrains how people live and how the world works, and how people deal with it adds plenty of conflict. For the main series antagonist who works constantly to ensure it doesn't get worse, it colors most decisions that she makes. One mistake could cause humanity to go extinct. Besides causing personal conflict for her, she understands she can't do the job alone, which brings her into conflict with those she chooses as her students.

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#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2025.05.08 — Give an example of a project you’ve had to give up on.

It's frustrating when I get a wonderful character in a wonderfully interesting predicament, but I don't have the depth of knowledge necessary to write their story completely or I can't work up an appropriate ending to work to.

I've a story about someone who appears naked on a sidewalk in Tokyo in our world with only a leather-bound notebook lacking pages, suffering amnesia. She's not Japanese, never gets adopted. Later, strange writing shows on the interior slate-like surface offering to teach her magic. I wrote the chapter, and it's wonderful. I have her as bilingual. I had her as coming to the US to study. I even know the mystery of whom is writing her on the slate. I just can't come up with further chapters for what must be an urban fantasy, despite the blank slate (pun intended). Quite frustrating.

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#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2025.05.05 — Have you ever worked through a bad experience by writing fiction?

As a feminist writer, much of what I write is what I feel for others, or the experiences I've garnered from listening and being the shoulder to cry upon. As a shy person, I've been pretty successful navigating conflict.

My latest novel (which I should be EDITING right now), is me working through a bad experience, watching the world falling apart. I was brought up in a time where they actually taught civics in high school. I learned how government was supposed to work, about civil rights legislation, about the theoretic "American Way." I also took history and learned about slavery and the devil's compromise it represented, the Civil War, the Guilded Age, Roosevelt and Trust Busting, about petty aristocratic squabbles starting the First World War, fascists starting the Second World War, and the civil and women's rights movements.

Do they teach these things any more? Or is it an elective!? You shouldn't be allowed to graduate without passing these subjects.

Mars Needed Women is me working through wanting to cry when I read the news today, even the non-clickbait-y kind. Money corrupts some people. Even if it is a microscopic number of folks that become megalomaniacs, the power money lets them wield is outsized and scary. Didn't we learn why that doesn't work with the nazis? Like, maybe 85 years ago?

It. Makes. Me. CRAZY.

And yes, Mars Needed Women is a takedown of the fatal idiocy of fascism (i.e., loyalty being more important than capability) and a certain over-the-top a&&hole with a fascination for Mars.

I feel marginally better having written it.

Marginally.

Still crying when I read the news.

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#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2025.05.06 — What does your usual workspace look like? Share a picture.

Funny, you think? I often log two hours pedaling and writing, so [makes a raspberry]. Read the #AltText for a full description.

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#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2025.05.04 — How do you take notes? Share a (redacted?) screenshot or photo.

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#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2025.05.03 — World Press Freedom Day. How has journalism influenced your writing?

What, apart from spending most of a decade as a part-time computer magazine columnist, then five years doing it for a full-time living?

Nah, mate, journalism never did nufink for me!

#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2025.05.03 — World Press Freedom Day. How has journalism influenced your writing?

Generally, no, it hasn't. Mars Needed Women? Yes. Definitely. I even included a journalistic chapter in the story.

I've (sadly enough) become an expert in electoral politics and how the US Congress is supposed to function, with a minor in Presidents. Until the current one, I'd have willing met any of the former office holders because of my fascination. I have to give Bill Maher props for his moxie.

In any case, whilst having written extensively on site about how the novel came into being because of 31 women's rights prompts and the French word for March (when they were published), namely Mars, it was journalism that drove the story forward, providing infinite fodder for what felt like a horse race. My interest in the fall of a powerful country in realtime reported in the news greatly influenced the book.

Who? Who in the news is famous for shiny spaceships misnomered starships, and for an obsession with Mars? One newsworthy person's infamy is clearly evident in the first lines of the futuristic feminist SF novel. It begins with:

May Ri bought into the hype and the spiel, not realizing it was the last gasp of a long dead oligarch's dream. When the money dried up, nobody would finance the supply missions. Who cared about the ten thousand up there [on Mars] when you could outrage the millions down here with something less expensive?

There's a lot of satire in the story, dystopian backstory predicated in the news of today being the beginning of permanent change, and another generation fighting back having learned what had been written and then censored over a century before their time.

Yes. I was influenced by the result of many people's journalistic pursuit, for without their effort we would know none of what's happening today.

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