#PennedPossibilities 649 — What research did you conduct for your WIP, and did you uncover anything surprising or fascinating?

When you are writing 31 chapters in 31 days and posting a chapter a day, having only come up with the idea and character the day before starting, research is a concept dealt with by quick and dirty searches. I did have one interesting factino in my pocket, though. I'd found an article about growing fungus to make building blocks for construction on Mars, and knew the blocks might help repel radiation. Another recent article spoke about inflating a balloon for a habitat. I combined both ideas in the 4th chapter titled Glue. Beyond that, I spent quite a bit of time Googling things about 16 Psyche (an asteroid) and learned that Martian dust is poisonous, and like moon dust, pernicious. Recent NASA tests lofted by a private company to the moon proves that electostatic grids can capture or repel dust. I used that. Much of the rest of the technology I punted on. I realized green minerals on Mars might be rare, so I backtracked on some red-green-black ferric metaphors. Yesterday, I read up on planetary transfer orbits and made changes to the revised novel. I also learned about the Lunar Gateway space station concept, and will revise that concept when I get to revising the relevant chapter.

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This post is to announce to all those who knew about my web-novel Mars Needed Women, who may have boosted or linked to it, that I have deleted the posts from Mastodon. I am heavily into revising it for publication.To prevent 404ing, I've left only the jacket blurb post of March 1st. As best I can remember, that's the only link I gave out. I hope so. I'm tagging hashtags to which I posted links to the novel this one time to prevent confusion. You are welcome to PM me.

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TL;DR

The story was published daily in March 2024 as part of a #Writever challenge, and I completed all 31 chapters one a day using all 31 Women's Rights prompts, managing to complete the last chapter and post it only 20 minutes into April 1st.

The story was definitely beta, with a plot hole and janky science and a few character boo-boos, but I like the result. I have since greatly revised the story and added plenty of material. Writing content daily to fit it into a toot-length that worked out to 750-800 words max forced compromises.

I plan to publish the novel in book form. As such, I have deleted the original free-to-read version. When I've sold or published the novel, I'll be sure to inform all my followers.

If you were part way through the story, PM me.

For you that read it, and for those who favorited chapters, Thank you.

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#WordWeavers 2504.20 — If someone gave you a million dollars (or equivalent) to never write again, would you take it?

I spent a lifetime scrimping, saving, investing, and being frugal to get to this point. Retirement. Now they offer me a million dollars? Sheesh. Gonna have to make me a better offer to stop me from doing what I like to do. [Sticks out tongue, makes raspberry.]

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#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2504.20 — What rôle does religion play in your writing?

Religiosity is important in many of my stories, even when it is as prominent as vacuum by its absence. Usually, I don't write in the point of view of the religious, but I did write an SF novel in the point of view of a shaman. I'd lived in Bali for awhile, and having studied the culture and theatre of the island during college, felt I had a feel for animism. At university, I studied religions and non-western cultures as part of my degree, as well as folklore and mythology. I find it fascinating. At least as far as my writing goes my degree has proved useful.

More often I write about how people wield religion to abuse society. My latest novel (now in revision) pits a fictional religion and a theocratic plutocracy (where our world is headed) against one woman's quest for freedom. It is the background main antagonist. For the people in the other WIP, the concept of a supernatural or the divine is absurd; they don't even have words for it in their vocabulary. Nevertheless, the MCs are destined to face people who bear unusual ideas about how reality actually functions, who might react badly when upon meeting a woman with bull horns and a man with ruby-edged white feathered wings.

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Welcome to my weekly Author Spotlight. I’ve asked a bunch of my author friends to answer a set of interview questions, and to share their latest work.

Today: Vonnie Winslow Crist is author of Beneath Raven’s Wing, Dragon Rain, The Enchanted Dagger, Owl Light, The Greener Forest, the “Shivers, Scares” series, and other award-winning books. Her writing appears in Asimov’s ...

https://www.jscottcoatsworth.com/author-spotlight-vonnie-winslow-crist/

#PennedPossibilities 648 — MC POV: Tell us about your home.

[Streak:] I live in an apartment building near the edge of the better part of town. It's remarkable for being in a neighborhood populated by day angels because it's not a village tree nor built into a hill, but a conventional building. I live there with my sisters and my mother, and I'm the middle child. My room is little better than a small pantry or a large closet, but I'm happy for it. My sisters hate me because I had to raise them and set rules (long story), so I'm thankful for a window I can fly in and out of, a black lacquer floor desk, where I keep my books, and a place to unroll a sleeping mat. Baskets and hampers hold my things. You would call the place a boarding house where you live. The apartment is only three bed rooms and a kitchen. The rain room (showers) are on the shared entry floor at the end of the hall, opposite the entry with the post boxes, next to the squats. Both utility rooms are unisex, so you'd better knock before entering.

[Thorn:] I'm a daemon, but live in what many consider a bad neighborhood populated by day angels. It's a village tree house my mother bought because she feels safer there than amongst people who look like us but refuse to accept us as their equals. Our entire nest is called an aerie, and it once belonged to a famous day angel who rebelled against the government a century and a half ago. It requires us to climb ladders to enter it and to levitate provisions to stock it.

My room is a chamber grown from a flattened lateral branch, in a crotch between an auxiliary trunk and uprights. The floor slopes upward and my bedstead is in a hammock across what amounts to a raised dias. I've a nightstand that is a cut-off stump. It's opposite from the casement windows installed at the lower end of the space. I'm thankful for the door like crank windows because they're convenient for when Streak comes to visit—when Mother isn't home, obviously! They provide light despite the tree's heavy canopy, and are enough that foliage forms an interior ceiling and I can culture moss and lichen as carpeting so I don't have to wear slippers to protect my feet from the bark. Smaller windows with rainbow-stained wedged rock glass also provide light to fill in shadowy corners during day light, and can be tilted to encourage convective circulation.

My desk is a form of wood ear mushroom, the top of which is polished to a glassy sheen. The shelves scattered up and down the walls for my hundreds of books are a combination of the same myco-archeculture and woven smaller branches.

I've hung posters by red ribbons, so as not to hurt the living tree, including a grand one Mother bought me of an exploded diagram of the structure of the crystal spheres. After our adventures with Rainy Days, I've also hung enlargements of pictures the woman gave us of her and Streak, though I know he finds them embarrassing. I can't help but admire my boyfriend's best attributes.

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#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2504.19 — How do you feel about using real people as look-alikes for your characters?

I don't. I don't imagine faces very well. That could be due my shyness; I didn't learn to look people in the face until I was in my late teens and I attended EST; learning to look people in the eyes, and to hold it, was a necessity for graduation from that seminar.

As a result, I can't imagine faces. Never learned how? People were voices or hands as I grew up. As a corollary: I don't need to. Mostly, I only minimally describe characters. Interestingly enough, if something gets described, if is almost inevitably eye color.

If my latest story, the MC is never described directly. Her only attributes we learn are she's a woman, she looks like she could bear children but is otherwise very average, and she has dark hair because some of her daughters take after her in this respect. She could be Asian, she could be Sicilian with this description.

Who knows? The reader will imagine what they think she looks like, and that's probably better than what I could come up with.

As for creatures and vehicles and places? I find pictures help me describe them. Go figure. The linked image is what I've used to imagine and describe the "red dragon" in Inklings, which is a giant bat wyvern.

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/b3/8f/7b/b38f7b59d5eb5afddc25d1187a4d6e91.jpg

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#WordWeavers 2504.19 — Have you ever learned something about yourself from your characters?

Almost every creative writing course instructor I've met has justified students taking the course on psychological grounds, not as a vehicle to learn the craft. They say something on the order of "write to get it out of you," the "it" being anger, trauma, toxicity, anxiety, unaddressed or unadmitted abuse or guilt.

Me? I scoffed. Of course, I did, because I was young and naïve.

For the vast number of people, creative writing won't become a craft—it'll become an outlet, maybe a confessional booth. It can lead to journaling or short stories nobody ever reads, something hidden in a dusty box or burned ritually in a fireplace. It might remain totally private. Or, these folk might write novels.

People tell stories about "somebody they know" in distress. Don't they?

We write from experience. I do. I admit it. My thinking my SF and fantasy wasn't that, also, was what I meant by my being "naïve" before. Yes, I've realized, and should have from the beginning, that my characters are how I work out my emotions and frustrations, how I learn about myself—and I've learned so much! However, since it's also personal, all I'm going to admit is that beyond my attempts at entertaining you and trying to say something meaningful about our world so I'm not simply contributing to the noise, my writing (the verb) has been therapeutic and my characters have taught me much about myself.

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Looking for self-published authors to follow in here. I’ve ditched my meta accounts and trying to figure Mastodon out (it ain’t that easy).

Cat-a-tude.

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A quotation from Samuel Johnson

I never desire to converse with a man who has written more than he has read.

Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) English writer, lexicographer, critic
In George Birkbeck Hill (ed.), Johnsonian Miscellanies, Vol. 2, “Apophthegms, Sentiments, Opinions, & Occasional Reflections” (1897)

Sourcing, notes: wist.info/johnson-samuel/19790…

#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2504.18 — Do you write under a pen name? Multiple? How did you choose?

My mum did not name me RS.

Names are symbols that point to a thing or a person. They aren't that person. Sure, I can input an identity into a name, just as a given name can gather that weight during life, but it is still a symbol. I've made peace with myself that whatever achievement or infamy I gather under this name still applies to me. The idea is fascinating enough that I'm playing with the idea of a society where parents don't name their children, instead the children are forced to choose, and can change them at whim throughout life.

I assumed my nom de plume before I attended the Clarion Writers Workshop. Mostly, this was me once more playing with the idea that as a feminist writer, the gender of the author does add subtext to all narratives.

Growing up, I thought Andre Norton was a man; it added a definite context to all his stories, like The Beastmaster, A Breed to Come, and Moon of Three Rings. I liked the nuanced way that the author depicted masculinity and femininity. The softness set the author's books apart, and it appealed to me. But Andre Norton wasn't male; I learned that quite sometime later.

Choosing a name of the opposite gender didn't work for me anymore. I could have chosen a name used by both genders, like Ryan or Riley, but when you think about it, that puts the onus on the readership to assign gender based on their experience with people of the same name. Either way, it creates creates a bias. Before I started the workshop, we were given an email group address. Back then, as now, I was careful never to reveal my gender nor my preferences. By the time I arrived in person on campus, most had guessed wrong.

These days, there are further reasons for noms de plume, especially since I write fiction that boosts women's rights, their right to sexuality without shame, gender preferences, and gender agnosticism. Further, I tend to add subtexts to my stories that question both secular and religious authority; in today's "climate," doing so can be… worrisome.

Best I don't use my real name.

PS: I write fan fiction under a different nom de plume.

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#WordWeavers 2504.18 — What would it take for your MC to become violent?

From experience writing the character, try to kill May Ri or her family, she'll kill you. Otherwise, no worries.

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#PennedPossibilities 646 — How would you describe your MC’s job or occupation? (You can be comedic about it, if you like.)

These stories hop around over more than a decade, thus the lists. Some stints are very temporary.

• Thorn: High school then university student. Occupational prefecture governor. Astronaut.
• Streak: High school then university student. Lover. Researcher. Test pilot. Advisor. Astronaut.
• Devil-girl: Homeless ascetic, grocery clerk, prizefighter, transporter, bodyguard, dõna, troubleshooter.
• May Ri: Student, mother, engineer, princess (she considers that one a joke but others don't), general.
• Wintereyes (feral but kind human): Friend of animals (including wyverns), wolf pack member and provider, involuntary student, idiosyncratic mage.

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#WordWeavers 2504.17 — Is your antagonist high maintenance? CW: Ugly potentially terrifying character description.

Today, not the usual suspect but a total cad.

Ezekiel Stan, one of the original scientist-colonists on Mars—one of the EM Mars Corp's colonial onsite directors until he butts heads with May Ri (the MC)—is a Decath religious macho jackass in plenty of unsavory ways. Depending on how you interact with him, he's super high maintenance, especially if you are a woman. It's hard to satisfy him; his wife knows about and must tolerate all his hypocritical indiscretions as we learn near the end of the book. For men, it might be worse. He has an eye for mistakes or venalities, and never forgets if he can use weaknesses to coerce and corrupt. He's not above violence, even against his own son who turns out "too feminine." If you must interact with him, especially if you live within his sphere of influence, you will do whatever it takes to placate him.

Except for May Ri. That makes Ezekiel and her mutual antagonists. She, however, is not the stupid woman he expects her to be—she's an engineer.

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