#PennedPossibilities 877⅛ — Do any of your characters have troubles with deadlines, like getting a term paper done before the last day, or buying holiday presents?

Wintereyes considers herself a member of the wolf pack first and last, but now that she's forced to attend a human university and needs to act as human (and she barely knows how!), it's confusing, she makes mistakes, and she's become horribly shy. She'll wait until the last second to do things in hopes she'll have figured them out, or rehearsed to death in her head how to act, and interact as little as possible—and then makes a mess of it anyway. Wolves are so much more forthright and straightforward and predictable!

@floofpaldi, Enjoy a night off!

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#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2025.12.18 — Are there writing ‘traditions’ which ought to be preserved?

While I don't advocate for anarchy, I think it isn't for me to define traditions or suggest authors ought follow this or that historical precedent. If an author wishes to sell their work, however, I suggest that they be aware of the traditions expected by their readers.

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#WordWeavers 2025.12.18 — Does your antagonist save money or spend it?

This is a very difficult question. I will try to distill this down so it is brief.

Money is an agreement and a contract to exchange something people value between themselves over time. During the Unification and Interstellar Periods (the last 300 years) that I'm writing in, Rainy Days can neither save nor spend money because wealth is something that flows from her and belongs to her. People gain stewardship of property and coin through their efforts and maintain their stewardship by using it in a way that benefits the community as well as themselves. She (or rather her bureaucracy) retracts or increases the money being stewarded by the population as needed to these ends, and through execution of policies. How money returns to her is beyond the scope of the question. Thus, whilst she lives simply except when she doesn't (she loves tea parties, men, teaching her students, and occasionally starting wars), spending and saving is meaningless for her.

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#PennedPossibilities 877 — Are any of your characters terrible with time management?

Hard to say, but the main series antagonist is certainly a very responsible person. Whilst she delegates most of her power, the Director of Home and the Nine Outer Worlds takes very seriously what responsibilities she keeps, mostly judicial and foreign affairs, but she's also a university dean and a professor. Her middle name should be "Busy." In Reluctant Moon, Streak, one of the two MC's, gets to follow Rainy "Busy" Days around for a few days and notices how her grueling schedule affects her wellbeing. He's sure she's going to snap at some point from the stress. He doesn't know why she's having him follow her around†, but after a harsh one child claimed by separated parents King Solomon adjudication, he pulls her aside to rub her shoulders. I won't say what distraction from her schedule that leads to and whether it's particularly publicly scandalous other than it's inadvertently†† public, but always keep in mind that it is never safe to attract the interest of an absolute ruler.

=====
† Likely, she's testing him.
††Never assume this antagonist does anything haphazardly or frivolously.

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#ScribesAndMakers 2025.12.17 — Reveal the answer to yesterday's poll. (https://eldritch.cafe/@sfwrtr/115731275197784432)

About My Projects Poll

Yeah, the first one is a deep background element for my current stories. I love taking stereogram photographs (stereographs?) of trees; see image. I absolutely did design and build a house, when I was far younger. I live in it now. I used "built" in the sense of managing of and contracting for the construction of my house.

All of the above things I consider creative.

I also wrote a command line interface for #IBM #software. I don't really consider that very creative. Pretty much by the numbers work, after deciphering convoluted poorly documented open source software. I used #ZOWE, if you are interested in searching for more about it. I even gave a number of presentations about it at IBM conferences. I am pretty sure nobody other than me ever used what I wrote, but management wanted it, so I did it. It sucked all the creativity out of me, thus number 3 was the correct answer.

PS: The image is a #wigglegram #stereograph. If you look, it also moves back and forth subtly, helping your mind see the tree in three dimensions.

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#WordWeavers 2025.12.17 — How many hours of sleep a night does your MC average?

There are not many good things for Bolt (a day angel) about being a mob courier, but most days being able to sleep as much as she wants is one of them. Occasionally, her duties means she has to be a transporter, and that can take hours or days to complete, but usually she's flying little envelopes around the city and to nearby towns that sometimes make the addressee want to kill the messenger. These can be hand delivered at the first opportunity during the day.

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With a hat tip to @xoagray (read quote first), I'd like to be authorial:

What do a photographer and an assassin have in common?

We'll both shoot anyone you want, for the right amount of money. ;)

When I write about photography, I avoid using the word shoot. Its use in photography comes from pulling or maybe cranking a roll of film through a canister (shooting film), not from launching a projectile. Maybe there's a gun resemblance there, somewhere. It's an unnecessary in today's digital world, semantically. Yet we shoot and plan a shoot, etc. The MC in my Reluctant Courier is also a photographer (her hidden talent), so I discuss image capture regularly, and think on this a lot. I also don't like the word take because of the connotation of steal. "Yeah, let's go take some photos!" It's difficult being a thoughtful author!

What words do you avoid because of alternate meanings?

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#PennedPossibilities 876 — Does your MC like being the center of attention? Why or why not?

Bolt's first reaction is, "Flap! NO!" She works as a courier for the mob. The less her employers, or the clients, notice her, the safer her flight. Now that she has made some friends, however, a few of whom are intimate, if you caught her at the right moment, she might grudgingly admit that being at the center of attention ain't half bad.

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#ScribesAndMakers 2025.12.16 — Create a poll describing three creative projects you've worked on and one you haven't. Ask people to guess the one you haven't.

Below are three creative projects, and one that isn't, that I worked on. Pick the one that's isn't.

Please Boost when you answer for sample size.

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#EroticMusings Final Question?

At the start of June, I decided to trial Erotic Musings until the end of the year and then decide if it was worth continuing. Would you like Erotic Musings to continue into the new year? If so, is there anything you'd like to change about it, or do you want it to carry on how it is?

— @pentup

I would like it to continue. I like the month of weekly questions format. It gives my subconscious a long time to cook up answers.

Whilst I don't write erotica per se, some of my current stories contain rather spicy content. The hashtag challenge has challenged me to think analytically about content, craft, and social issues, and to organize my ideas better. It has value to me. I find the often thoughtful responses useful windows into my own works. I don't think much needs changing, other than acknowledging that the questions can both pertain to erotica and stories that feature sex as integral to the story.

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#EroticMusings 2025.12.14 — Week 29 (December 14-20) Culture: Why are most relationship stories about beginnings? Does your erotica ever explore endings?

Most relationship stories are about beginnings because the characters' mutual explorations often involve adventure (of whatever sort) that define their character. It's where they fumble and misunderstand, and their emotions escape their control, to the amusement of the reader. There is less fire in relationships that have lasted a long time.

I have in-passing explored "endings." I wrote a few stories about Raven Caw, a fifty year old man who became the main series antagonist's lover, with whom she had at least one daughter. Five hundred years later (she's immortal), she reminisces about him with her current lover, whom she says compares favorably with the long dead man. She outlives everyone, lovers and her children. There's definitely emotions to unpack there.

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#WordWeavers 2025.12.16 — Is your MC more philosophical or action-oriented?

On the face of things, this sounds like an either-or-question, but it is phrased as a continuum. Since I write stories in 1st person, the reader is always privy to the MC's inner thoughts, or rather those they are willing to share. Philosophically, I'd rather characters consent to telling their stories instead of an author telling a story about them using their voice to make certain points. The POV might still make a fool of themselves telling their story, but at least they are aware of doing so, and by extension are aware they are being read. They sometimes break the fourth wall, but only assuming they are speaking to someone of their world. It is more than a distinction without a difference, especially when they spin things in their flavor but inadvertently report discrepancies.

With this preface, you can guess that philosophy plays an outsized role (as it did in the previous paragraph about consent). It's not an intellectual exercise. My MCs think about what is happening, plan, and reflect on what has happened; they worry, too. Even Bolt, the MC in the current WIP, who is a jock and an involuntary high school dropout, is often reflective and sees her past stupidity as coloring everything she does, can do, and is capable of doing, enough so that her empathy and integrity makes her intervene such that others don't make her mistakes, suffer by association, or are hurt. She won't sit on her rear-end, though she will run reflexively if threatened, but she's been known to use a fist or kick to help someone out.

While she is very action-oriented, and respects action, she's at least 51-49 weighted toward being more philosophical.

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#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2025.12.16 — Do you have one format you write in, or many?

"Format" could mean story layout or it could mean story length, so I'll address both. What I would and will write depends on the story.

I consider myself a novelist, thus my Mastodon handle. However, I write chapter books, that is stories broken into chapters. Moreover, I also write episodic stories, larger stories broken into parts (or books) that are each composed of chapters. This means that I am actually a novellaist, writing novellas that I collect into a novel composed typically of four novellas. However, my current WIP contains no parts and exceeds 70K, so is genuinely a novel, rare for me.

I do write novelettes, which for me are often one long story without any breaks. I like this format when I want to make the story seem to happen in real time, or in a breathless rush. Novelettes could be likened to 6K-7K chapters in a novella, were a bunch collected together, but are standalone.

I write short stories, too. They are one act stories, or three act (more or less) with breaks.

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#PennedPossibilities 875 — Does your SC feel like they fit in with their community or culture? Why or why not?

It's the nature of the beast. Stories about happy people aren't often interesting. Here's the rundown of SCs from Reluctant Courier (for the Mob). It's a good excuse to pull backstories together in one place.

• Steamed Milk and Sugar: He's considered effeminate (for his culture) and isn't trusted by women professionally or understood by the men around him. (See yesterday's Penned Possibilities.)
• Night on Fire is well-to-do, an associate magazine editor (think The New Yorker). However, she's a night angel, a minority amongst minorities, and in a culture that values diversity, she's often too exotic. Her fish-out-of-water feeling matches Steamed Milk and Sugar's, which may be why she got him is newspaper job and they live in the same uptown flat.
• Blue is the very poster boy of success, but he sees it as unearned. He doesn't understand that finding things easy doesn't mean it isn't work. He undervalues himself, but his new job as a praetorian (applied for on a lark) definitely interferes with him raising a family, and now they're promoting him to a rare command position. He feels like he's being torn apart, tied between horses.
• Pigeon the Pilfer doesn't like being a punk gangster. Nobody likes him, and it's dangerous uncomfortable work, but if he leaves he might be killed or starve. He's merely a high school dropout. Using his fists are all that he has learned.
• Molt ought be living his best life. He was accepted on a scholarship to an elite school for a quintessential male profession that rarely gets a university education. Unfortunately, Pigeon associated him with Bolt, who lives in the same apartment. He's now been noticed by the mob. He feels he has a target on his back such that he feels unsafe everywhere, even at school, and certainly on the street.
• What the devil-girl wants is to attend school and one day go into research, or teach, maybe both! After working to hide her past and reinvent herself, she's been discovered by a crime boss in Home City. Everybody wants her for what she can do, not for what she wants to do. She feels perpetually out of place, but if pushed too far, she has no compunction about making her ire known.
• Boss Mead always wanted to be a big muckety-muck, recognized for being a minor hero who was kind and hardworking, but in fact he's simply mediocre. He's good at seeing how people interact and excellent at planning for others (not so much himself). He got used to help others build a criminal syndicate, but eventually they figured out he was the golden goose that laid the golden egg, so they kinged him. He'd rather be respected in high society, but the stink of his illegitimate business ventures follows him. Worse, he's seen as nouveau riche. It leaves him frustratingly in the shadows.

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#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2025.12.15 — What’s a non-literary artistic tradition which inspires you?

Not sure what an "artistic tradition" is, even when the adjective "literary" is applied to it, but with that clue I'm going to posit that I can blithely state that works of the Impressionist Movement inspire me—Monet and Van Gogh and others—especially in their fractal nature that takes them from, up close, meaningless blobs and dots of color to near photographic clarity at a distance, not to mention how the best of artworks abstract and distill the nature of the scene to its essentials. It's what authors do with words. It's how I write.

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#PennedPossibilities 874 — What physical feature is your SC the most insecure about?

Pardon some indirect language and some prevarication here. You know. Spoilers. Right?

Steamed Milk and Sugar's culture is very different from ours. It has nothing akin to body shaming for either gender. He's husky and softly rounded and not strong looking, despite that he is. People grow up understanding it is attitude and it is aptitude that makes one truly attractive. The difference is made manifest by how extremely hot it is all the time—people's physicality is on display all the time. One's looks, skin color, hair type, body type, etc. are a bit meaningless to them, though not one's grooming or presentation! Physical difference, to them, is attractive. It promises adventure. I'm not going to say that scars, disfigurement, congenital abnormalities, unfortunate homeliness, or the like, don't leave people self-conscious, or that these things are culturally unattractive per se. Nor am I saying that being especially attractive can't inflate someone's ego beyond their prowess to back up the advertisement.

They're human, after all, of a different flavor.

What Steamed Milk and Sugar is most physically insecure about is that he is a man. Not easy to hide. He feels he was born in the wrong body, but it has nothing to do with his preferences, nor does his culture care about who's attracted to whom.

Their philosophy on their biology differs from ours but it is spoilers to explain.

For him, the problem is social and has much to do with gender roles, which don't work for him. Throughout school, he associated with the girls, got along better with them, and when the situation wasn't competitive, he was always accepted into the in-group as one of them. Not so much as an adult. He's very self-conscious of his gender, what his gender represents to his co-workers, being branded as behaving aggressive or oafish in ways he isn't and hasn't been, resents that he's treated as incapable and unskilled for the job, and moreover that many assume he was hired unfairly. He knows he faces an uphill battle for acceptance—and, no, in their world cross-dressing is not an option.

For what it's worth, the MC Bolt (a woman), has a history of being discriminated against for her gender, too. She's athletic, but she's looked down upon as weak. They become buddies.

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#WordWeavers 2025.12.15 — How much profanity do you include in your story, and why? CW: Um, you can probably guess there might be questionable language in this post. You've been warned!

For those who've read my excerpts, or are aware of the grittiness of my stories, this might be surprising, but… if by profanity you mean use of the f-bomb or other unimaginative insults of the ilk, I don't. I don't use them. That doesn't mean my characters don't hurl epithets or use foul language. They do! They are human, after all. It simply means that they use their own words. (I typically write far future SF and magical fantasy.)

For example, Bolt from Reluctant Courier (for the Mob) is a day angel. She flies and she has wings. She uses the word "flap," which for her people is a crude masturbatory reference. It helps that it resembles a certain other word in our vernacular…

Another character takes great pride in interrupting people when they use foul words, warning, "Language!" It serves me to omit the offending words when they're almost appropriate. It't not prissy when she hurls it like a middle school teacher: she's often the most threatening person in the room (she's an enforcer), or is fully ready to prove she is. In other passages, the narration might mention "heated language" or "peeling paint."

I'm well aware of the tendency these days brush such things off as common verisimilitude that's even acceptable in mainstream writing, but couched right, rough dialogue doesn't need the added color. Rather than another hackneyed round of "f-you!" and "No, f-you more!", I think it enough for the narrator to mention that between the characters gleefully smashing in each other's face, their cursing burned the bystander's ears off whilst making the sawdust smell like it might catch fire. Since I don't write stories that take place in the here and now, my reluctance to use certain cheerfully crude colloquialisms is never a problem.

But…

When it could be, there is nothing like reserving a certain special specific word for when a startling fuck you will be a slap to the reader's face.

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#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2025.12.14 — Share how you tackle a first round of revisions.

This cried out for analysis. I revise while composing, so that's where I do my first round of revisions. I fix typos, but since I tend to compose using passive is/was constructions, I look for places where I can utilize verbs instead, then flesh out descriptions to bring in all the senses.

What follows is a before, after, and marked-up difference version of the first paragraph of Reluctant Courier (for the Mob), thanks to Scrivener. If your Mastodon instance strips formatting, skip the difference version unless you can read markdown.

Before (First draft):

Click! went the shutter on my camera, and I realized I'd caught a teenager with a broken legs and bleeding from other injuries being loaded on a flatbed ambulance. I blinked at the daemon's rams horns, then up at the 5-story high apparition behind him. That he'd stepped through. It resembled a circular looking glass, but so black it reflected no light, depthless, defined by the lightning circling its rim.

After (Only a second draft!):

Click! went the shutter on my camera before I realized I'd caught a dark-skinned teenager with a broken leg, bleeding from other injuries. A constable and a grunting bystander horsed him onto a flatbed wagon—a makeshift ambulance. I blinked at the dark daemon's golden ram horns, then up at the five-story high apparition behind him. He'd stepped through what resembled a giant circular looking glass, but was a demonic field so incredibly and absolutely black that it reflected no light. Depthless, like a hole punched out reality, only the lightning bolts continuously circling and strobing and booming around its rim defined the knife edge between sanity and city, and accounted for the scent of electricity that stung my nose. Vehicles had collided where the apparition had blocked off a boulevard. A siren strapped to the chest of an approaching day angel wailed.

Difference

Click! went the shutter on my camera, andbefore I realized I'd caught a dark-skinned teenager with a broken legs andleg, bleeding from other injuries. beingA loadedconstable onand a grunting bystander horsed him onto a flatbed wagon—a makeshift ambulance. I blinked at the dark daemon's ramsgolden ram horns, then up at the 5five-story high apparition behind him. That heHe'd stepped through . Itwhat resembled a giant circular looking glass, but was a demonic field so incredibly and absolutely black that it reflected no light ,. depthlessDepthless, definedlike bya hole punched out reality, only_ the lightning bolts continuously circling and strobing and booming around its rim defined the knife edge between sanity and city, and accounted for the scent of electricity that stung my nose. ¶
Vehicles had collided where the apparition had blocked off a boulevard. A siren strapped to the chest of an approaching day angel wailed.

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#WordWeavers 2025.12.14 — Are your characters incapacitated by injuries, or do they brush them off as flesh wounds?

Fighting isn't a pride thing for my POV characters, but different ones react differently.

It's not that Bolt won't stand up for anyone, but she knows she can't really fight, and if she's hurt she's going to make noise, flee, and curse—and then avoid such situations in the future, which could mean ambushing the miscreant or getting help from someone else to fight in her stead. She considers herself a coward, though I think readers will see it as knowing her limits and being smart.

The devil-girl was a prizefighter, but before that she'd been rigorously trained in defense. She knows her opponent will take advantage of her reactions when hit, hurt, or wounded. She doesn't like being hurt, but a deadly very painful early encounter taught her that she could fight to save herself from being killed, and that she need never be chattel again.

She really liked that feeling.

She's willing to be hurt to train if that makes her more capable. That's how she dealt with the pain, bruises, split skin, and broken noses prizefighting meted out. That year of her life taught her to judge the pain and to never mistake what it means—not be stupid and refuse to retreat when necessary, but never miss the opportunity to press forward when it's real. Brushing off injury is never pride, even later as a bodyguard. She'd never boast it was "only a flesh wound" when it wasn't (she doesn't lie well and people read her better than she reads them). Her job was to save lives, however. Her toughest opponents impression of her quickly becomes that fighting her is fighting someone insane; it's actually her working to the best of her ability to win, even if that means frightening said opponent.

Treating her afterward is often messy.

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#ScribesAndMakers 2025.12.14 — Shameless someone else (ON MASTODON) promotion day.

• Liked @Firlefanz's Wolf's Quest books that I bought.
• Liked @stephanieburgis's cozy comedy fantasy audio books that I bought. Good Neighbors was fun and am looking forward to the next one.
• Liked @LianaBrooks's All I Want for Christmas is a Kiss Gargoyle magical urban fantasy book. Plan to buy others.

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