Lmst

Heinrich Bedford-Strohm im Interview zum ÖRK-Beschluss. Ich bin so dankbar, dass da jemand an wichtiger Stelle ist, der tatsächlich ausgewogen und differenziert auf den Konflikt schaut und nicht müde wird, das zu erklären:
https://zeitzeichen.net/node/11934
#Israel #Palaestina #Gaza #ÖRK #WCC

#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2025.05.01 — What's your greatest weakness as a writer?

I get stuck writing scenes that some people might think are socially unacceptable, mostly feeling inside that when read the reader will project from the character to the author. Or be offended. Sadly, no matter what I write as a feminist author—or as a writer who thinks women should never be taught or feel shame—will make some people uneasy and others will think it unseemly, suggestive, or squick.

Sometimes it is difficult to power through. I've pinned the following to my profile to help out.

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.

#BoostingIsSharing

#gender #fiction #writer #author
#writing #writingcommunity #writersOfMastodon #writers
#RSdiscussion

#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2025.06.30 — When is a piece of writing done?

Composition? When the story is over. Pretty clear cut. If you mean when is it ready to be published? Well that's as clearly demarcated as when the last wisp of morning fog has lifted on a bright morning. Today, almost two years after publication, I found a typo when rereading. I considered fixing it… then sighed.

#BoostingIsSharing

#gender #fiction #writer #author
#writing #writingcommunity #writersOfMastodon #writers
#RSdiscussion

"But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream."
- Amos 5:24

The #WorldCouncilofChurches #WCC Central Committee falls for
- naming the reality of #apartheid;
- implementing #sanctions and accountability;
- affirming Palestinian rights and freedom; supporting the resilience and witness of Palestinian Christian churches and communities, upholding their right to remain on their land and to freely practice their faith.
#Palestine
https://www.oikoumene.org/resources/documents/statement-on-palestine-and-israel-a-call-to-end-apartheid-occupation-and-impunity-in-palestine-and-israel

#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2025.06.29 — Do you set rules for yourself while writing? What are they?

I read that question and my heart skipped a beat, like a hand had grabbed deep into my chest, worse than if I'd seen a ghost or the house made a spooky sound and called my name with all the lights off. That's truly a scary question. Set rules? For myself? To follow during writing!?

NO!

#BoostingIsSharing

#gender #fiction #writer #author
#writing #writingcommunity #writersOfMastodon #writers
#RSdiscussion

#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2025.06.28 — Would you join a writing residency? Talk about your reasons. CW: Name dropping

I attended a six-week writing residency called the Clarion Workshop. It took place at a college in Seattle mid-summer and we lived in the dorms. It's well-known on Mastodon that I am a shy person (in-person, not online) and you might wonder how that would have worked out. That was when I'd decided I would start with a new nom de plume for the express reason I have it now: As a feminist writer, my gender could add subtext to anything I write, including to the mailing list we all participated in. By the time I arrived, only a third said they had guessed my gender correctly. I counted that as a win for my writing.

The Clarion Workshop is about writing something new every week, and though I am a novelist, I took the challenge and wrote new short stories and novellas. You write, you read everyone else's stories, you critique those stories, and you attend daily classes with guest writers, editors, publishers, or agents who take up residency for a week. George R.R. Martin and Connie Willis were amongst the instructors. I learned worsening from her. Oh, yeah, and there were visits to Powell's Bookstore and readings at authors' homes.

Sleeping was strictly forbidden!

Okay, not really, but I did write a 13.5K novella in one day while I attended. It took 15 hours.

If you get a good mix of authors wannabes (I had Daniel Abraham in my cohort), a residency like this is magical. We were all creatives. We were almost all of us neurotic in some way. It was great fun.

I proved to myself I could be a writer and an author, and that I loved that life.

"Your mileage may vary." —It seemed to be Daniel Abraham's favorite saying, and it's true.

#BoostingIsSharing

#gender #fiction #writer #author
#writing #writingcommunity #writersOfMastodon #writers
#RSdiscussion

#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2025.06.25 — How frequently do other languages (or conlangs) appear in your writing?

Other languages "appear" in my writing, despite all my stories being written in English. The story line in Mars Needed Women implies that Japanese is a popular language amongst native-born Martians and might become their official language. Some words appear in the text. (I learned enough Japanese to get around Japan.) Other stories use some Argentine Spanish (mostly cursing). Other languages that would be similar to Chaucer's English or Latin, appear and are referred to mostly in thaumaturgic tomes and grimoires. I believe night angels speak something akin to Spanish in their native land, and due to how I portray Thorn Rose's immigrant mother, a refugee from the Dragon Lands, her accent is likely from Yiddish and Russian, with all the discrimination and prejudice you can imagine from the 1960s showing up when she or her daughter, who otherwise blend in, open their mouths. Mind you in these cases, it isn't those languages but they work as stand ins. I even fashion matching accents.

As for why, it adds a level of verisimilitude. Even in our connected world, hundreds of languages are in daily use. Few places are so purely isolated that there isn't a loan word or a traveler who sounds foreign.

#BoostingIsSharing

#gender #fiction #writer #author
#writing #writingcommunity #writersOfMastodon #writers
#RSdiscussion

#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2025.06.22 — What’s the best piece of writing advice you ever received?

I....I'm not sure... geeze, I'm horrible. It doesn't help that I'm feeling just very unmotivated and defeated lately. I think one of the best things is to find books that inspire you, whether story-wise or writing style, and try to figure out how to capture a bit of that magic in your own work.

#WritersOnWriting #Inspire

#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2025.06.23 — Conversely, what’s the worst piece of writing advice you’ve ever encountered?

"Write in 3rd person; it sells. Do not write in 1st person." —R.S.'s agent and conventional publishers.

While there are many reasons I burnt out as an SF writer, my difficulty writing 3rd person close POV (a la C.J. Cherryh) was a major contributing factor to problems in my manuscripts. 1st person past tense and 3rd person past tense close POV are essentially the same POV. 1st is the character narrating. 3rd is a narrator standing in for the character, but is completely tied to the senses of the character and must not let any information beyond what the character would sense or think leak in. Yes, 3rd can present a more neutral narrator who lacks the nuances of dialect or opinion—so there is a dichotomy between narration and dialogue—but this has always felt synthetic to me. 1st person is how we all tell personal stories of our lives; it feels more real.

In any case, it is easy to diagnose POV slips in 1st person. Moreover, since we are all familiar with telling stories of our adventures, it is easy to write, including letting the character have an opinion, spin situations, obviously censor difficult situations, and stretch the truth to be caught fibbing by events.

Once I set myself free to write 1st, most of my writing issues disappeared.

#BoostingIsSharing

#gender #fiction #writer #author
#writing #writingcommunity #writersOfMastodon #writers
#RSdiscussion

#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2025.06.22 — What’s the best piece of writing advice you ever received?

"Write what you know." To be clear, this is not, "Write ONLY what you know."

I am a SF and fantasy author, but I feel the difference between pulp and good story telling is how the characters come across. Do their lives seem real? Can the reader relate? I know how to cook, garden, take photos, drive, work in an office, be a student, hike, write essays, program computers, get married, plan parties, weight train, diet, run a workshop, build a house, and plenty more. Most of my life is what I do between adventures, and this is true for most people. Ask firefighters, ask soldiers, ask what they spend most of their time doing. Making the interstitials real was the best bit of advice I think I ever got, and if you've foreshadowed properly and raised the stakes, even the tension at an office party can be a page turner.

#BoostingIsSharing

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#writing #writingcommunity #writersOfMastodon #writers
#RSdiscussion

#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2025.06.20 — Solstice. What’s the most you’ve ever written in a single session? What made that possible?

13.5K words in 15 hours. I wrote Through Blood and Tears at the Clarion Workshop for critiquing the next day. I had to have something ready for everybody else to read! I was also 27 years younger!

#BoostingIsSharing

#gender #fiction #writer #author
#mystery #thriller #romance #fantasy
#writing #writingcommunity #writersOfMastodon #writers
#RSdiscussion
#RSstory

#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2025.06.19 — How would you describe the theme of the whole of your œuvre?

Comment décririez-vous le thème de l'ensemble de votre œuvre ?

Comment dans le présent peut-on appréhender les traces du passé et ce que ça dit de nous.

How in the present can we understand the traces of the past and what it says about us.
 #fiction #writer #author  #writing #writingcommunity #writersOfMastodon #writers #viedautrice

#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2025.06.19 — How would you describe the theme of the whole of your œuvre?

Women succeeding despite the odds.

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#RSdiscussion

#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2025.06.18 — The eye of the duck: Share a ‘nonessential’ scene in one of your works that ties the piece together. CW: Uncomfortable fictional discussion about women being oppressed.

I didn't know I do this Eye of the Duck thing, but apparently I do. A lot, apparently.

The Eye of the Duck is a scene - often flashy or surreal - which is NOT essential to the general action or plot of the film, but which reveals a key theme or element of the film more succinctly than the actual plot. —https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueFilm/comments/4m3vii/the_eye_of_the_duck_david_lynch/

This is a great question for assessing the texture of a novel.

This surreal scene is from Mars Needed Women. As the narrator puts it, "Five sols later, Stan's wife, Gwen, and May Ri got to talk. Somehow it turned into an interview." The whole chapter is an interview, the same way another chapter is an op-ed. Sometimes different formats better express major themes in a story. If the reader hadn't gotten that the story is about women fighting oppression, learned what oppression is often disguised as, and what it makes women do, this sequence ought clear up that misunderstanding. May Ri is the protagonist. Gwen, 45, is married to Ezekiel Stan, the in-person villain in the story. There are other villains, but none this in-your-face. I added gloss in brackets for outrages established at the top of the scene.

May Ri: You're a first contract colonist. What made you sign-up?
Gwen (sighs): Naïve? Heard Mars "needed women" in a sermon about brave men. I'd be 14 in two weeks, but rushed out into the fields to record an application. I tugged up peanuts setting flowers in the ground, got sweaty under the sun, got mud on my big sister's flimsy top and shorts and paid hell for that. The shoulder kept sliding off, and I kept pulling it back "barely" in time. I giggled. I made sure the wind pressed the cotton against my chest. The shorts rode up into the crack of my butt when I bent over. I smiled and wriggled it.
Father served an elite niche farm-fresh clientele; I got to be retro-exotic! I lied about my age.
Ezekiel liked them young.
(Waves a thumb at the 16-year-old nisei [1st generation Martian] co-wives behind her [both pregnant].)
Our town's minister okayed my EM Corp. contract when I promised to pay for church repairs. I also paid off father's mortgage. Nine months later I landed at Elysium. Nine months later I bore Gabriel.
Good enough?
Now tell me, how did you meet Ezekiel?
May Ri: He tried to rape me.

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#sf #s ff #sciencefiction
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#RSdiscussion
#RSstory #RSMarsNeededWomen

#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2025.06.17 — As a writer, how anonymous do you want to be?

I am a gender fiction feminist writer who also includes gay, trans, and autistic characters in their stories, sometimes in romance plots. My work might qualify to be banned in most southern states. Here's a poll. Let's see how I'm doing (and, yes, a few followers know who I am, but won't tell).

Click which is true.

#BoostingIsSharing

#gender #fiction #writer #author
#writing #writingcommunity #writersOfMastodon #writers
#RSdiscussion

#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2025.06.15 — Have you ever challenged yourself to write without editing? What were the results?

Wut? I cant even write to sentences without making a typo. LOLhelicoptering on this one. Me? Writing without editing? Never accepting that challenge!

#BoostingIsSharing

#gender #fiction #writer #author
#writing #writingcommunity #writersOfMastodon #writers
#RSdiscussion

#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 25-06-13 — Do you restrict what you read or watch while working on a WIP? Why or why not?

I usually surround myself with similar & adjacent material, like wrapping up in a pile of blankets for a Winter's nap.

Such as when writing about Nimue+VEIL I watched Ghost in the Shell, 13th Floor, and played various games such as Deus Ex. The underpinnings of my characters is the questions of 'what does it mean to be human?' , 'what does it mean to cease being human?', and 'what does it mean to not be human?'

#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2025.06.14 — Do you take notes for your WIP? How closely do you follow them?

Irregularly, but I do that. If I find myself waking during the night with the story running through my head, I write notes to try to get it out of my system so I can continue to sleep. If I were willing to do so, it would be better for me to get up and write the scene instead.

Do I follow them? With Reluctant Moon, I've written all the scenes for which I've taken notes, though not slavishly. Notetaking has its place.

BTW: I use a Kindle Scribe for note taking because I can make it very dim at night. Not entirely sure this is better than dimming the iPhone and thumb typing. WIP.

#BoostingIsSharing

#gender #fiction #writer #author
#writing #writingcommunity #writersOfMastodon #writers
#RSdiscussion

#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2025.06.13 — Do you restrict what you read or watch while working on a WIP? Why or why not?

I don't read while drafting, revising, editing. I'm paranoid that I'd accidentally steal from whoever I'm reading. I read while querying, though. To stay sane.

#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2025.06.12 — How much of your ideals are imbued in your work? Give an example.

This ought be my No Kings day post on the June 14th.

I definitely imbue my ideals into my works. I admit it, I write message fiction and each story has a message, though I work not to be to blatant about it. My characters tend to be honest (even when criminal). My women characters know what they are doing, and what they want, and are willing to fight for themselves and others in their own unique ways. Same as men, but with headwinds. They are more feminist than I am, often.

Of pertinence is the persistent theme, often subversively so, that royalty, in whatever form, is something you don't want to become tangled up with. You will get used. I have a particular dislike for princesses, more so the romanticized Disney-style ones I intuitively think corrupt girls. Many of my stories subtly or less subtly poke at great power (whether religious, political, hereditary, or monetary), at how it inevitably corrupts and makes people less human, inhuman, or completely alien in real life. My devil-girl is a great foil in this quest, but she too is powerful magically; she continuously walks the sword edge between good and evil in her brilliance and peculiar ignorance.

#BoostingIsSharing

#gender #fiction #writer #author
#writing #writingcommunity #writersOfMastodon #writers
#RSdiscussion

#WCC

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