#PennedPossibilities 635 — Are there any specific cultural influences that shaped the world or characters in your story

Two major cultural influences, one not so good and one good. Contrast.

The main character comes from an end-stage religio-fascist oligarchy. She live's in Chicago. She's also an atheist and bristles under restrictions put on women. I work to give an impression of an Anglo-Saxon culture suffused with religion and hypocrisy, but I never describe the main character other than at least one of her children have dark hair like her. With a name like May Ri, you wonder about her heritage. Constricted by patriarchy, she chooses Mars hoping for opportunity.

On Mars, the first child born on the planet was borne by a Japanese refugee. She learns Japanese from her mother and teaches it to the other Nisei (first generation Martians in Japanese), and the cultural aesthetic plays a part in the plot, as do some specific Japanese words.

Beyond that, I drop hints all over that the colonists are culturally diverse and are from across the planet—and poor because who signs what's essentially a slave contract to work on Mars and bear children? The Nisei with absent fathers and overworked mothers (who build the colony) are raised communally and increasing develop their own society free of gender roles and constrained sexuality. A trans character plays a role, and skin color is seen a beautiful.

The people back on earth don't like this. Mars Needed Women is a story of cultural and planetary conflict.

[Author retains copyright (c)2025 R.S.]

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Full time black disabled student trying to survive my major with outside learning in poetry/fiction, puppetry, and stop motion.

I'm aiming for $100/month in support (books, travel, payment plans for classes). You can check out my monthly (sometimes more) newsletter to see what I'm up to and find alternative ways to support me all in my Ko-Fi bio!

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#PennedPossibilities 634 — MC POV: How much do you value companionship? Do you always keep people around, or do you prefer to be alone?

[Devil-girl] An odd question. I've never really thought about it. Companionship is good, and I enjoy it when people are around, like when I train at the gym or am at work. What I do is all about teamwork, so I'm good with people. Yet, I don't always keep people around. I really do like to throw open all the windows and study a good book. I live in a converted dance studio, so two walls open to the outside and the other two are mirrored. Laying on a mat, with the breezes, and the quiet you get living in a university town. Hmm. I guess I'm finding more use for what people call friends. I've certainly found a lot of use for men…

[Author retains copyright (c)2025 R.S.]

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#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2504.03 — How do you navigate scenes with many characters?

Carefully. I don't want to step on anyone's toes or disrupt them saying their lines.

In the Saying the Quiet Part Aloud department, I will admit that most of the advice I give is actually analysis of what I've written. I don't necessarily plan these things out, or have check lists. Sorry. What I do is simply write what I think sounds right, then go back and study whether it worked. I have plenty of experience (close to 2M words written), so I often get the sense of it right.

"Intuition!" you scoff, adding, "That's not helpful."

Here's a speed bump I navigated. Kyv is the current POV. I'm handing off to May Ri (the so-called princess).

...The book plate lit up. Kyv recognized the woman on vid[,saying]. "The Princess of Mars and her Five Daughters!"

May Ri, in her alighter outside, watched the growing crowd of men, wiry, lightly muscled, androgynous for that, all moonborne, adapted to 1/6th gravity. No weapons. She sighed. "You saw the vid of the nuking of Hershel?"

Handing off a POV is one way of navigating, I did that between those two paragraphs by transferring succinctly from the book plate (think cellphone doing FaceTime) Kyv is looking at to who he is looking at on said book plate. This is a 3rd person technique.

Beyond that, dialogue attribution is another technique I use. He said, she said. And you get to add a bit of visual or noise at the same time, which I call character tags. Indeed, you can avoid the said-ism in back and forths if the characters have an accent or manner of speech, but you have to be careful about that. While this seems like 3rd person also, keep in mind 1st POV characters often describe what's going on around them, and they do that in 3rd person, more so if they are telling a story of what happened to others.

[Author retains copyright (c)2025 R.S.]

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#Trump and #Musk and AI, oh my?

From my favorite historian pundit, Z:

… no serious economist is going to endorse [Trump's] approach to tariffs. No unserious one, either, probably. So, where did the White House come up with this formula? Well, if you put the phrase "balance bilateral trade deficits" into AI engines, the administration's approach (or some close approximation) is what you get. That is the case with ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, and Claude. If you put the phrase into Grok, you get the EXACT formula the White House used. In other news, Grok is the AI platform owned by... Elon Musk.

Guess you don't need the terminator to destroy the world. Simple AI is enough.

Scroll down to "Fuzzy Math" at this link, but the whole 4,000 word article will clear up the whole muddy mess.

https://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2025/Items/Apr04-1.html

Writing a Book? Here's How to Find Your Audience and Become a Bestselling Author

https://www.entrepreneur.com/growing-a-business/how-to-turn-your-book-into-a-bestseller-with-the-right-pr/486012

#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2504.04 — What are some tips and tricks you use to convey strong emotions?

I think this is where my use of Grammar B helps me. Strong emotions, even things like anger, I think are associated with confusion and levels of self-doubt, which leads to cycles of justification or re-evaluation on the fly, quickly, immediately, erratically. or it just might conceivably—or very possibly since MURPHY in all things, right?—get worse, far worse; that type of thing.

The last sentence is a short example of a Grammar B run-on. It is non-grammatical; your high school English teacher would grade it a Fail. What it does is breathlessly fire off thought after thought in a continuing sequence, no sequence dependent on the sequence before. It flows. Like a speech. The reader never needs to backtrack to deduce meaning. Such a construct could be cut into individual sentences, standardized. But. Why? Rhythm of any sort drives the reader forward. It creates tension. All useful when writing emotion. A flood of description to overwhelm the senses, like the emotion itself.

Another construction I think works, usually mixed carefully with the run-on to break repeating rhythms, is telegraphy. I used that in the previous paragraph. Did you. Notice? Short, non-grammatical sentences. Missing a verb, a noun, or what not. It works like a drumbeat, focusing the reader on individual word or unsupported phrase meanings—and you get extra credit if you use a word with multiple meanings that could conceivably apply in context; emotion is confusion, innit?

In a sense, Grammar B is like finding poetry in prose. Used right, it uniquely depicts emotion. This is why I call myself a "prosaist."

[Author retains copyright (c)2025 R.S.]

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#ScribesAndMakers 2504.04 — Can you handle praise well, or do you get embarrassed and play your achievement down? CW: self-analysis

Oddly enough, this devolves to gender roles and the confusion an autistic can discover in any social illogic. As a child, I quickly evolved into a listener, observer, and a pleaser with my shyness providing me an escape route from any confrontative situation—things I worked on (had to!) as I became an adult. Wanting to be an author is not entirely compatible with these personality traits regardless of gender—there is a definite forwardness and egoist nuance to insisting on communicating one's ideas—and I couldn't rely on others to meditate for me.

I got praise growing up, especially when doing well in school. Then again, my mother had me convinced I'd die if I didn't bring home top marks. I mostly got to hide from praise. It's not that I don't, didn't, like it, but I could better process it unobserved and generally make it appropriately and comfortably undeserved. A pleaser can't accept being pleased well!

Yeah, I got help. If you've heard of EST, I did that.

Now my reaction to praise is a Venn diagram of who, what, and where. If it is online, where nobody has to see me physically react, I'm a lot more copacetic with it. In person, it can be uncomfortable. I can still find ways to minimize the input but as I get older I'm better at fairly assessing my abilities. I do remember having this one fan at conventions that would greet me. She really wanted a sequel. Maybe she sensed I was shy, I don't know. But I grew to like her reminder.

[Author retains copyright (c)2025 R.S.]

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Today In Labor History April 4, 1866: Russian revolutionary, Dmitry Karakozov attempted to assassinate Czar Alexander II. He failed and the government executed him. Some believe that Karakozov chose the year 1866, since that was the year in which a character in Chernyshevsky’s “What Is To Be Done?” planned to launch a revolution. In the book, the protagonist, Vera Pavlovna, escapes a controlling family, and an arranged marriage, to start a socialist cooperative and a truly egalitarian romantic partnership. She starts a seamstress commune, with shared living quarters, profit-sharing and an on-site school to further the women’s education. Chernyshevsky wrote the novel in response to Turgenev’s “Fathers and Sons.” He wrote the book while imprisoned in the Peter and Paul fortress. The book inspired generations of Russian radicals, including the nihilists, anarchists and even many Marxists.

#workingclass #LaborHistory #nihilism #anarchism #communism #chernyshevsky #russia #novel #fiction #Revolutionary #commune #socialism #books #fiction #author #writer @bookstadon

Poll time!

I'm publishing my first middle grade (MG) story, and need to set a price for the PRINT format. It will be 5x8 inches trim size, with 104 story pages.

I don't have kids, so I'm not sure how to price it. If you have middle schoolers, enjoy reading MG stories, or publish your own MG fiction, what's an acceptable price?

Again, this is for the PRINT format. Thanks!

I think my new website is ready for prime time! Built with @eleventy https://sightlessscribbles.com/ #WebDev #Writer #Blogger #Blog #Blogging #11ty #IndieWeb

#A7Radio > #Découverte > Emeric & Jeanne-Lise
https://buff.ly/xRuSuAO

Emeric, artiste auteur, compositeur et interprète, dévoile son nouveau single "Il y a des anges - Remixes 2025" en duo avec Jeanne-Lise, qui marque 25 ans de collaboration.
Pour fêter ça, l'un de leurs titres phares dans une version remixée par le jeune DJ Riwall Harjay.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c68zESK_wC8

"#Writing a story/novel is a mysterious process. You sometimes don't know where the words come from, but they are there waiting for you. They come from the farthest reaches of your mind and hit you like a hammer, or slowly work their way out to you over time." - Wrtr #amwriting #author #writer

Beauvais: La suite bureautique LibreOffice, Le samedi 5 avril 2025 de 09h30 à 12h00. https://www.agendadulibre.org/events/31965 #oisux #logicielsLibres #atelier #libreoffice #calc #writer #draw #libreEnFete2025

#WordWeavers 04/03/25 - Is it easy for you to kill characters? When is it the right thing to do?

No, it's so difficult! While I do like writing a good death scene, I feel like it's something you have to be very careful with because of how much it can impact other characters and the plot. I only kill off characters if I have a really good reason to. For example, Fenrir & Rhea would not be part of the story at all if a certain someone didn't die first.

Now that I want to compile a book in #Scrivener, it keeps only exporting only in the first page of each chapter. Makes for a shorter book, sure does. Can't find an option to export the entire chapter. Help!

I guess I'm going to RTFM. I do dislike doing that, but .