The county arts council just awarded me a little grant to support the current novel! Thanks, Montgomery County — I'll try to do you proud. I wrote a little bit about the whole grant thing in a public Patreon post:
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#PennedPossibilities #PennedPossibilities 638 — Is your SC more introverted or extroverted? Or do they fall somewhere in the middle?
Reina Īto is extraverted to the max. She was the first child born on Mars by over a year and was pampered by her mother (a chief scientist on the Mars colonization mission), and later looked up to as the big sis for the entire generation of Nisei born on Mars. She's sparkly and full of TMI situations, but also incredibly brilliant because she was never told she couldn't do stuff the way girls on Earth often were. She takes her big sis role seriously, and values friendship and closeness above most everything else, and protects her generation from reactionary ideas of gender and sexuality that would constrain women.
Marisela is the girl who could. She's May Ri's eldest daughter, and was shy when young, but you get the idea she's more extroverted when at 4 years old she scolds other adults waggling a finger when they don't treat her mother right, then a few years later announces, when her father returns home (he's gone 4/5th of the year), that her mommy is going to be making funny noises again that night. She takes up challenges, especially when it lets her do things, and more so when it makes her friends. She's very Nisei in the Martian sense, and becomes a symbol of the new Mars by her 22nd birthday.
[Author retains copyright (c)2025 R.S.]
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#RSstory #RSMarsNeededWomen
Self-promo time! What links, publications or media would you like to share? #Writephant
I recently finished writing a feminist SF web-novel that I published on Mastodon. Mars Needed Women is a woman-centric adventure story of overcoming adversity while being female, with all the warts and frustrations, not as a man in disguise. It starts with ugliness of today's world having become the dystopian norm a hundred years from now. It takes thinly veiled jabs at a prominent bad actor. Our heroine, May Ri escapes becoming little more than a housewife to help colonize Mars, if you can call being shanghaied escaping, and being required to have children. (She does get to choose the gorgeous supportive guy, though, so that's a positive.) She's there with her children as power slowly shifts from being male-dominated. As the mothers and daughters increasingly control Mars' future (how is spoilers), May Ri with the support of her daughters gets to help create a world (Mars) the way unfettered women would image it. The men of Earth will take affront, of course. They will learn that women don't fight like men, especially when their children's lives are threatened, and their wellbeing is at stake. #RSMarsNeededWomen
I will keep the web-novel available free-to-read at this link at least until April 10th: https://eldritch.cafe/@sfwrtr/114088945266387178. I am currently revising and expanding it, and plan to republish as a book later.
Here is posted a revised book jacket.
I've been formatting books for seven years now and have done hundreds of titles. Have a new book you want to self-publish, but just don't quite know how to prep your book files? We use Vellum for the Mac, and provide formatting for ePub (all formats) and pdf/print.
Best of all? It's just $85, changes included. Try it now:
I've been formatting books for seven years now and have done hundreds of titles. Have a new book you want to self-publish, but just don't quite know how to prep your book files? We use Vellum for the Mac, and provide formatting for ePub (all formats) and pdf/print.
Best of all? It's just $85, changes included. Try it now:
I've been formatting books for seven years now and have done hundreds of titles. Have a new book you want to self-publish, but just don't quite know how to prep your book files? We use Vellum for the Mac, and provide formatting for ePub (all formats) and pdf/print.
Best of all? It's just $85, changes included. Try it now:
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A5. Last question before self-promo! Then there's burnout, which I feel will be the subject of another chat. How do you handle it, when your writing is only fumes? #Writephant
I burnt out from my first career as a published author in 2001. I handled it by one day simply STOPPING. Cold turkey. No, I did not erase all my work and throw out the computer! I walked away. At the dawn of the digital age, I took up photography. I called it my short form because, as my I say in my title line, I was a novelist and did not write anything short. Every investment I made as an author was costly in time and lifespan.
Obviously, I am on the other side now. I found I could not NOT write and by 2015 I found a writing-lite solution to not being able to communicate my ideas about the world through my stories (the cause of the burnout being I was writing but nobody was buying). My solution was fan fiction, stuff that was meaningless as far as making money, because I couldn't, but I did get read and did get feedback, which was the coin I really needed at the time. I used it to address my writing issues, which by that time I could see more fully.
Now I'm writing commercially. My own SFF and fantasy worlds. More in my pinned introduction.
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A4. If you were writing a story focusing on a character's injury, sickness or chronic condition, what tone would you take? Have you written such stories before? #Writephant
This question makes me chuckle. Yes, I have written such stories! It's not that the devil-girl stories are specifically about injury or mental issues that could use a bit of therapy, or about autism which they don't have a word for in her society because they see it as on the spectrum of being human, but it ends up being that way. She's a fighter, in attitude and in practice, so she gets hurt A LOT. She even becomes disabled and it's only with daily therapy that she can appear fully functional. She pushes on through, noting and discussing how she feels in her first person narrative, and when she's a prizefighter it is more of the same but a lot more often. To reach her goals, she sees trade-offs; it's a negotiation with reality. She makes sure her pain is a down payment on success, or that she learns something from experiencing it. That's her attitude: I win or I learn something about it.
The PTSD, however, infuriates and embarrasses her, and badly gets in the way. When she gets an episode, it is completely on screen. It turns her into a marionette with a few cut strings and we see her waking nightmares and horror replays I shan't detail here. In the end, it's her friends that help her find her balance again, and help her discover and overcome her triggers.
I take the tone of being intense.
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A3. Does your physical or mental state affect your writing? If so, do you take frequent breaks or engage in self-care, especially if you're physically injured? Mind you don't have to disclose specifics since this question is very personal. #Writephant
Yes. I was once had a depressive personality. I learned for me it was that I had an illusion that I could control "things," and when I realized it was an illusion and I couldn't control "things," my depression pretty much went away. It doesn't mean I don't have "phases" when I just don't wanna. I heed that message. If I'm physically unwell, like when fibromyalgia sets in, I've learned to do only what I capable of—when that means ignoring my condition, I write anyway. Sometimes, amazingly, I can single thread (verses multi-tasking) in a Zen way and get a lot written so long as I don't expand my awareness.
WRITER FUEL: What's Inside the Earth? There’s a lot more to Earth than meets the eye. Far from being just a roundish rock barreling through space, our planet is composed of several layers held together by intense forces of gravity.
https://www.limfic.com/2025/04/07/writer-fuel-whats-inside-the-earth/
A2. Which of your characters would you consider healthy? Or unhealthy? And yes, if they have mental illness you can decide based on that factor. #writephant
May Ri has a bit of an anger issue, but it keeps her focused on getting ahead. It's not good for Earth's health when they attack Mars and kill one of her daughters.
Both Thorn Rose and Streak Carryingaton are quite healthy, but their society has mandatory health and mental services, so that's to be expected. When Thorn is dragged into a war zone, she may develop some PTSD.
The devil-girl has PTSD, which gets triggered when she loses control of situations where she's prevented from helping, because she knows what will happen if she doesn't. She is also autistic, but for her it is a superpower.
The main series antagonist is incapable of being unhealthy due to technological reasons. She's always 24 years old. It even rebuilt her in a Frankenstein monster fashion once to keep her alive, and though it rendered her healthy, versus dead, people can tell.
Replied in thread
@Priyajsridhar
I'm Elektra Hammond. Find me at untilmidnight.com
See me talk about SF/F, writing, comics, TV, and Supernatural at Con-Tinual (the Con that Never Ends) on Facebook and Youtube.
My next convention will be Balticon on Memorial Day weekend, where Permutations, an anthology based on Jack Chalker's Well World will launch.
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@Priyajsridhar
A1. To you, what does good health mean? And it doesn't have to be the conventional, stereotypical definition of "skinny, muscular and attractive" or parameters like BMI. #Writephant
For me, it means being capable to do what I want and think without being foggy without pain.
For the women in my stories, it is definitely not skinny, and most consider themselves average. Their men seem to prefer that. Those that are strong don't consider it an attribute of good health so much as a means towards their goals.
I went to two public libraries last weekend and enjoyed some really amazing public programs: Night of Ideas at the SF Public Library and the Foster Youth Museum - Lost Childhoods Exhibit at the Redwood City Library. Then I sat down and wrote a piece about the right to read, because I wanted to talk about that today, Right To Read day. I put the piece up on Medium--I'm not a part of the partnership program, so it should be accessible to both members and nonmembers. Please take a look, and happy National Library Week!
https://kma500.medium.com/our-right-to-read-684f6cc639b3
#righttoread #libraries #books #writing #writersofmastodon #WritingCommunity #bookstodon @bookstodon@a.gup.pe @bookstodon@fedigroups.social
Medium · Our Right To Read - Kirsten Menger-Anderson - Medium
Continued thread
#PennedPossibilities 637. Does your MC have a past that haunts them?
By three-quarters into the book, she does something that haunts her, yes, but it's not pre-textual (if that's a word).
#WritersCoffeeClub April 7: World Health Day! What’s your take on the “suffer for art” argument?
It's BS. I don't know where it started but assume it shares a similar origin with "artists should be poor”
Fuck all that. If it hurts stop doing it.
If you love it, you should have the opportunity to make a living from it.
We (society and some creatives) need to stop pushing creatives down so we can celebrate the 1 that makes it out of every 10000. We need to hold all us up
:EA DATA. SF: Here is a story based on a dream I had at the beginning of last month. It's not good enough to try to get published anywhere, so here it is.
It's called
and here is an introductory paragraph that doesn't appear in the story itself. You can skip this part if you'd rather go in blind.
A "haunting" isn't what you think it is, not usually.
When someone dies, sure they might leave behind an echo or some part of their soul might have unfinished business. But those energies are weak, barely able to influence the physical world. Dreams? Maybe.
But what most people think of as a haunting doesn't involve a human mind at all.
No, it's normally… something else.
Look, humans can't see X-rays, right?
We can't see infrared or ultraviolet.
There are whole ranges of sounds too high or too low for us to hear.
You seen that movie "The Man with X-Ray Eyes"? At the end of the movie, he sees further and deeper than any man ever has and what he sees terrifies him so much he plucks his eyes out.
It's like that.
There are vistas of reality that are right here, right now, and they are invisible and intangible to us.
Vibrations. Some very bright folks say they vibrate differently and that's why they are right here, but also nowhere, nowhere we have a name for, anyway.
A haunting is often caused by those "vibrations" finding resonance with something in our world.
It's like how a tuning fork can make another tuning fork vibrate or how an opera singer can shatter a glass.
When these different realities resonate, they become a bit more tangible to each other.
So the two sides can interact and what was once impossible is not only possible, but likely.
Floating furniture, walking through walls, weird smells, disembodied voices, cold spots, teleportation, shadow beings, missing time, nightmares, all of it because two incompatible realities are churning into each other.
It can last seconds or years, depending on how badly they get tangled up.
I'm just a cleanup tech. Not that that doesn't take its own set of skills and requirements, but I can't tell you how we find them or track them.
J. R. DePriest · HauntingI was sent to a psychiatric hospital experiencing a "haunting". It was one of those old school places that looks like a mansion out of a ...
#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2504.07 — World Health Day! What’s your take on the “suffer for art” argument?
I can relate. In my first writing career, I suffered a lot of procrastination and displacement activity, you know, finding yourself sweeping instead of typing on the computer. When my agent and I had disagreements about my work, exacerbated by a publisher almost buying and then not, calling one of my sensitive male characters too wimpy, I entered a zone where I was producing novel after novel nobody was reading
It was suffering. I burnt out.
I've a handle on what went wrong and my attitude being about forcing appreciation from others to feel validated. Better I enjoy my work, and like my stories first and foremost, and find outlets even if not remunerative (e.g. fan fiction). Keep it fun.
I don't plan to suffer again.
[Author retains copyright (c)2025 R.S.]
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#RSdiscussion
#PennedPossibilities 637 — Does your MC have a past that haunts them?
May Ri watched from Mars orbit as Herschel Crater got nuked, having failed to knock out all the missiles with her railgun. Her eldest daughter worked in the capitol, in the domed city situated in that crater. Had. She has nightmares of the flash and a mushroom cloud rising. Sort of like in the attached vid.
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/38985/sarychev-peak-eruption-kuril-islands
[Author retains copyright (c)2025 R.S.]
#gender #fiction #writer #author
#sf #sff #sciencefiction
#writing #writingcommunity #writersOfMastodon #writers
#RSdiscussion
#RSstory #RSMarsNeededWomen
Credit: NASA Johnson
GIF
#WritersCoffeeClub 7/4: World Health Day! What’s your take on the “suffer for art” argument?
Argument? There’s no argument, just wildly unsupported assertion.
Of course you can say that all lives contain some measure of suffering, but then the ‘argument’ just becomes circular. Perhaps that’s all it ever was.
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