Aug 28: What's the highest praise you've received as a writer?
Fan fic based on my works.
#wcc
> #WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2025.08.25 —Talk about a way you've described the indescribable. If you can!
Not past tense!
The MC in the current WiP narrates in 1st person POV. She's human and she has wings (an extra pair of limbs). Flying for her is like running might be for other athletes. It is challenging to describe what it feels for her to fly. I am attacking it in various ways.
She absentmindedly lifts a man without wings to a fourth story roost and when he clings to her she has to remember that some people exist in only two dimensions.
She describes what she notices flying the way we do running. Curbs, hills, dogs as in thermals around skyscrapers, turbulence, flyers doing juvenile stunts, slotting down narrow alleyways, or flying under street lamps—not at all like teaching how to fly a plane.
Preening feathers with with sebum oil, humming of plumage in flight, dealing with inconsiderate people molting, falling off buildings as a thrill to skim just above street level.
All this is with another thing in mind: convincing the reader something as heavy as a human female can soar, and slowly hint at the bizarre physics of the world that makes it possible, remembering that's not the important part of the story! It's only the charm.
[Author retains copyright (c)2025 R.S.]
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Aug 25: Talk about a way you've described the indescribable. If you can!
I just narrated the character's thought process of trying to describe it to themselves.
> #WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2025.08.24 —Have you ever written a work that was a retelling of another work?
More when I was younger, usually because I saw a situation and a plot line that ought have zagged when it zigged. I applied my characters and world building, of course.
[Author retains copyright (c)2025 R.S.]
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Aug 23: Do you tend towards writing personal or universal cataclysms? Why?
I like it when personal action averts global catastrophe.
#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2025.08.23 —Do you tend towards writing personal or universal cataclysms? Why?
#WordWeavers 19. Could you imagine a story in the same world where your MC is the antagonist?
@elysegrasso brought the Casablanca Test to my attention which made me think about perfect antags.
Ume fails the test big time, bringing catastrophe to the world. She is amusing, witty, and would be a good friend. She is not a black hat, but between her choices and the entanglement of fate and karma brings about a terrible ill. She isn't happy about what happens and takes responsibility for her share, but she would make the same choice again.
She's the one who chooses the greater evil or the personal evil. The Trolley meme below illustrates.
#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2025.08.23 —Do you tend towards writing personal or universal cataclysms? Why?
Personal. I write stories about women and their relationships (Yuri), and personal supernatural crises generate a back-plot on which they move. Their concerns are personal. 65K words, not once has a character been out to save the world or even their country. Starting in volume 4 of my current series is the first time that "universal cataclysm" has even played a background role. C or D level. Like most of us, it happens without our having any control over it, nor do they try.
#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2025.08.23 —Do you tend towards writing personal or universal cataclysms? Why?
My stories tend to focus on slice of life that for circumstances scales up as events warrant. It is somewhat dependent on character. The current WiP is tightly focused on escalations in the everyday life of a woman who is a messenger for the mob against her will. However, the main series antagonist—who has a cameo part in the WiP—is facing a universal cataclysm: the extinction of humanity; her stories scale radically downward from universal to personal.
[Author retains copyright (c)2025 R.S.]
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What's something essential to your process you think other writers should try?
I place illusions on my windows that make it look like no one is home, so I can work uninterrupted.
Aug 20: Name something unexpected you had to learn for a work.
For my current WIP, I've had to do a deep dive into traditional Dwarf culture. Did you know that Dwarves traditionally had no concept of marriage? Apparently, they all lived in such close quarters underground that there was never any secrets about who was getting together, and general respect of these arrangements by the community. So they never made any kind of ritual around it.
#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2025.08.20 —Name something unexpected you had to learn for a work.
How to summon a demon.
To be clear, that's d-e-m-o-n not d-a-e-m-o-n. I even have a copy of the Lesser Key of Solomon.
You're welcome to ask the next question.
[Author retains copyright (c)2025 R.S.]
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#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2025.08.19 —Talk about the influence folklore has on your work.
Well. My degree included a specialization in Folklore and Mythology, but mainly dealt with non-Western culture, art, and theatre.
How much influence? A lot?
There frequency of shamanic cultures showing up my stories exceeds the mean.
When writing fantasy, I work to exclude all traces of Norse, European, or familiar fantasy tropes, and am careful not to insert other mythologies. If you noticed some of my stories contain day angels and daemons, well, it's not what you think—unless you're thinking the stories are likely totally subversive to the usual narrative containing angels and daemons, and you'd be right.
I rarely utilize my understanding of oral traditions in folklore, but I do understand this from my studies: Writing, even prose, requires rhythm and it requires style, elocution as well as rhetoric, and I endeavor to build my sentences—sometime rebuilding them instead—to allow them to be read aloud.
Enough on that subject…
[Author retains copyright (c)2025 R.S.]
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Aug 19: Talk about the influence folklore has on your work.
I tend to make it very clear who the heroes and who the villains are.
#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2025.08.16 —What's the most drastic alteration you've made to a work?
Scrapped everything and rewrote from scratch.
[Author retains copyright (c)2025 R.S.]
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#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2025.08.17 —What's changed for you from when you started writing to now?
I'm old now?
I've reframed procrastination to understand I'll write when the words need writing—and not to become anxious when they don't need writing—and thus I write more steadily? I'm working on the part where if the words don't need writing in project A, they can need writing in B.
More confidence?
More likely to write what I want, how I want, rather than be influenced by others? (I.e, the agent, the market.)
That sorta thing.
[Author retains copyright (c)2025 R.S.]
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Aug. 17: What's changed for you from when you started writing to now?
I'm semi-retired now. My schedule isn't as full, but I somehow don't get any more writing done now. 🤷♂️
Aug. 16: What's the most drastic alteration you've made to a work?
I added Ryan Seacrest to a spy thriller.
#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2025.08.15 —From which real-world events have you taken inspiration? CW: Discussion of a disaster with links to information and videos about the explosion.
Because I write SF and fantasy doesn't mean real people and real events don't intersect my stories. I repackage them for plot and character purposes. When I started writing the backstory for a certain character, I knew she needed a lot of experience with both fighting and becoming hardened to bad things happening to her. In passing, I had lampshaded her unflappable demeanor and tendency to help those she felt responsible for by stating she'd been involved with east coast gangs. That led to a vision of her surviving a downtown fire that consumed many city blocks, which in turn led to revelations her becoming inured to being used and abused in many ways, and using her ingenuity to rise in the ranks and learn from anything that happened to her..
Lots to mine for a novel.
The downtown fire, however, proved a phantom recollection. What I found researching it was the 2020 Beirut Port Explosion. Unfortunate events and negligence led to the largest detonation of a fertilizer bomb. It let me 1) design the character's story trajectory toward a lesser, but similar event, and 2) craft her subsequent life as effected by the event and her actions in the seconds, minutes, hours, and days following.
An echo of the event appears in my current WIP in the form of a newspaper front page showing a photo of this character triaging wounded people by firelight minutes after. The character appears as a supporting character.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Beirut_explosion
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgQ7jh9mrWs
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/aug/03/port-of-beirut-explosion-aftermath-scars-on-already-broken-lebanon
This pinned Mastodon post was a quick short scene that contains another echo of the event: https://eldritch.cafe/@sfwrtr/110136451462609798
[Author retains copyright (c)2025 R.S.]
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Aug 14. What causes distance between your characters?
They are still getting to know each other. They have very different backgrounds. I think the situations they find themselves in will close the gaps eventually.
#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2025.08.14 —What causes distance between your characters?
I'm far enough into my current WIP, and know the entire story in my head, so I can categorize distancing issues for the characters in that work. Pardon my being clinical, but I don't want to outline the beats of the story, either.
- The shoulds and should nots gender roles play in interpersonal relationships, for example and not limited to that infamous one where one gender must always wait for the other to ask.
- Master and slave roles, which are also boss and underling roles demand certain behaviors, but crystalize into reflexive ones.
- Authority vs criminality.
- Casual anonymous intimacy being shattered my learning the truth about one another.
- True genius and the awe that generates in those who think they are inadequate in the face of it.
- Depression and apathy that makes makes simple interactions sound awkward, or makes them off-putting.
[Author retains copyright (c)2025 R.S.]
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Client Info
Server: https://mastodon.social
Version: 2025.07
Repository: https://github.com/cyevgeniy/lmst