#ScribesAndMakers Feb. 1: What's one creative thing you'd like to get done this month?
I'd like to make progress with the revision to First Fire, my YA fantasy story set in Ancient Greece.
#WritersCoffeeClub Feb. 1: How satisfied are you with your current writerly ‘voice’?
I'm generally okay with it. It evolves with every book I write because I learn something new each time I write a book.
#WritersCoffeeClub 1 Feb: How satisfied are you with your current writerly ‘voice’?
It is what it is. I'm currently writing #histfic and I think it suits that genre. In my #writing group I've tried alternative voices for different genres, and people have liked them. I'll stick with the one I have for now.
#WritersCoffeeClub 2/1. How satisfied are you with your current writerly ‘voice’?
I think my voice is well established; if I worry about anything it’s whether it always gets sufficiently inflected to fit different characters.
#books #writing #writersofmastodon
#ScribesAndMakers Feb. 1: What's one creative thing you'd like to get done this month?
I'd like to make progress with the revision to First Fire, my YA fantasy story set in Ancient Greece.
#WritersCoffeeClub Feb. 1: How satisfied are you with your current writerly ‘voice’?
I'm generally okay with it. It evolves with every book I write because I learn something new each time I write a book.
#WritersCoffeeClub 1 Feb: How satisfied are you with your current writerly ‘voice’?
It is what it is. I'm currently writing #histfic and I think it suits that genre. In my #writing group I've tried alternative voices for different genres, and people have liked them. I'll stick with the one I have for now.
#WritersCoffeeClub 2/1. How satisfied are you with your current writerly ‘voice’?
I think my voice is well established; if I worry about anything it’s whether it always gets sufficiently inflected to fit different characters.
#books #writing #writersofmastodon
She eats it and enjoys it when it is good. Her income is restricted, so she's often eatting "crusts," multiple days old food including bread crusts, to conserve enough to supplement her diet. She's a day angel, and is pescatarian because to grow those beautiful blue feathers, and to fly which requires extra musculature than other humans need, requires a lot of protein to maintain. She loves fried kippers and onions, the greasier and peppery the better, when she can afford it. Most of humanity (those that lack wings) are ovolacto-vegetarian. For Bolt, this means fish when she can get it, usually canned, or fish byproducts or sect paste when she can't. I'm not going to state in the story unless necessary to the plot that sect paste, whilst grown under sanitary conditions, is essentially ground maggots.
[Author retains copyright (c)2026 R.S.]
#gender #fiction #writer #author
#Cozy #mystery #sf #sff #sciencefiction
#writing #writingcommunity #writersOfMastodon #writers
#RSdiscussion
#RSstory #RSReluctanceStory
I learned more about the characters and settings in my stories by completing writing challenge prompts this month than ever before, more so than writing actual copy. I'm doing my best to accept that writing answers questions while not writing story ensures I am writing and thinking about a story rather than not being productive at all. I am, nonetheless, looking forward to changing this ratio next month.
[Author retains copyright (c)2026 R.S.]
#gender #fiction #writer #author
photographer chef cooking
#cozy #mystery #sf #sff #sciencefiction
#writing #writingcommunity #writersOfMastodon #writers
#RSdiscussion
#RSstory #RSReluctanceStory
]
I learned more about the characters and settings in my stories by completing writing challenge prompts this month than ever before, more so than writing actual copy. I'm doing my best to accept that writing answers questions while not writing story ensures I am writing and thinking about a story rather than not being productive at all. I am, nonetheless, looking forward to changing this ratio next month.
[Author retains copyright (c)2026 R.S.]
#gender #fiction #writer #author
photographer chef cooking
#cozy #mystery #sf #sff #sciencefiction
#writing #writingcommunity #writersOfMastodon #writers
#RSdiscussion
#RSstory #RSReluctanceStory
]
#ScribesAndMakers Jan 29. What's the most rewarding thing about your creativity?
When I give to someone and they have a reaction. They don't have to love it, although that ROCKS. What I want is *engagement*.
#Writing #Writers #WritingCommunity #WritersOfMastodon #AmWriting #Scriberspace
#ScribesAndMakers Jan 28: What's the most stressful thing about your creativity?
The first draft of my novels SUUUUUCKS.
#Writing #Writers #WritingCommunity #WritersOfMastodon #AmWriting #Scriberspace
She eats it and enjoys it when it is good. Her income is restricted, so she's often eatting "crusts," multiple days old food including bread crusts, to conserve enough to supplement her diet. She's a day angel, and is pescatarian because to grow those beautiful blue feathers, and to fly which requires extra musculature than other humans need, requires a lot of protein to maintain. She loves fried kippers and onions, the greasier and peppery the better, when she can afford it. Most of humanity (those that lack wings) are ovolacto-vegetarian. For Bolt, this means fish when she can get it, usually canned, or fish byproducts or sect paste when she can't. I'm not going to state in the story unless necessary to the plot that sect paste, whilst grown under sanitary conditions, is essentially ground maggots.
[Author retains copyright (c)2026 R.S.]
#gender #fiction #writer #author
#Cozy #mystery #sf #sff #sciencefiction
#writing #writingcommunity #writersOfMastodon #writers
#RSdiscussion
#RSstory #RSReluctanceStory
#WritersCoffeeClub 31/1: What did you learn this month about your writing process or habits that you want to carry forward?
I’ve been writing a long time. I don’t expect to learn big things every month that I can turn into soundbites. Just a steady progress of trying to write as well as I can, and keep on learning and improving in whatever incremental ways I can find.
#books #writing #writersofmastodon
#WritersCoffeeClub 30/1: This month, how did you successfully navigate a challenge or a sticky point in your writing?
I promised my beta readers I'd have a full manuscript for them by February.
#WritersCoffeeClub 30/1: This month, how did you successfully navigate a challenge or a sticky point in your writing?
Nothing particularly springs to mind. The challenges in life have been from other directions.
#books #writing #writersofmastodon
#WritersCoffeeClub 30/1: This month, how did you successfully navigate a challenge or a sticky point in your writing?
I probably didn't. I'm struggling since days now, to divide my story into chapters. I keep editing, changing, deleting and re-doing it. I'm wasting a lot of time!
In a literary sense, symbolism is inputing additional or extraordinary meaning or emotion into an otherwise prosaic object, person, or event. I don't create symbols as a rule, but I recognize them when they appear. In one story, the MC fights off a man who tries to murder her and discovers that not only can she fight, that she likes fighting. "The Monster" becomes an important symbol thence forward of her internal struggle between principled aggression and evil, which she employs in stressful or unwontedly successful moments.
As for the second question, thinking it through made me realize that the current WIP does indeed use symbolism for romantic and erotic purposes. True to the way I write these things, the narrator (in 1st person POV) goes to great pains not to describe a particular "scientific" tool she is buying to share with her male friend (a 19-year-old university student and she's 30) as a dildo, but there should be no doubt in the reader's mind. A recent passionate scene demonstrates she's throughly enjoying the guy's ingenuity and initiative, but her gift to him to "measure her" might never be delivered and reappears in a few scenes. Her gift, wrapped in pink with a blue string, becomes a tragic symbol of the cruelty of the mob-controlled world in which the MC and her boyfriends are entangled, as well as a reminder that, to quote Dorothy, "Toto, I've A Feeling We're Not In Kansas Anymore."
Indubitably.
[Author retains copyright (c)2026 R.S.]
#gender #fiction #writer #author
#cozy #mystery #sf #sff #sciencefiction
#writing #writingcommunity #writersOfMastodon #writers
#RSdiscussion
#RSstory #RSReluctanceStory
This page. A lot being unwrapped here and explaining it would take the entire earlier part of the book. I hope it isn't too confusing! Suffice it to say that it appears to be a magical world where day angels, like the POV, fly. The narrator is sharing some things the reader is barely familiar with as she buys a gift for a student boyfriend.
The clerk I'd spoken with had spotted me and fast walked to the counter to meet me, immediately ducking into the display case to find the passion tools I'd considered, the expensive ones since the cheap ones had sold.
"Which?" she asked, grinning.
I wanted to surprise Molt, who'd been a fun and informative companion, and I really wanted to see him smile. If I didn't spend my coin, eventually Boss Mead would claim it to keep me dependent. So… "The one with the—" Human stuck in my throat. "—remnant."
"You'll have to register it."
Which meant the civil ID I hadn't used since running from the constables and from home. I looked around. Students. Respectable professors. Nobody likely tied to the mob. "Can I give you the number? I don't have the card on me…" I said, patting my pockets for what I'd burnt a dozen years ago.
"Sure. I'll need to record your eye and primary feather color, and describe your idi—not that anyone checks, considering the sanctions the Bureau of Human Trafficking levies if it's fraudulent." She gave me a tilt-headed grin saying she didn't think I was stupid.
I was stupid. The number, were Boss Mead to get it, would allow him to trace former-me to my family. Him terrorizing them or using them against me would be catastrophic.
Unlikely. Not a zero chance, though.
I turned around and lifted my wings causing my primaries to brush the ceiling. It revealed my harnesses-and-leather-traces idioglyph. I flexed and flaunted the muscles below my wing joints because I could, and I was feeling good, powerful even—or telling myself I was—so why not? I knew from looking in a mirror that it made the black pigmented lines and circles wiggle.
"Guy move." The clerk snorted as she sketched it using a pen.
I blithely gave her the number with a return chuckle. I'd always been more comfortable with men, acting masculine, sometimes wondering why I'd not been born a man—until I rode one again and understood my privilege being born a woman.
The clerk wrapped the rectangular box in a swatch of appropriately dark pink satin, tying it with blue string she had to get from another department.
—From Reluctant Courier (for the Mob)
This earlier post is related, though only slightly more NSFW: https://eldritch.cafe/@sfwrtr/115981082493477428
[Author retains copyright (c)2026 R.S.]
#BoostingIsSharing
#gender #fiction #writer #author
#cozy #mystery #sf #sff #sciencefiction
#writing #writingcommunity #writersOfMastodon #writers
#RSdiscussion
#RSstory #RSReluctanceStory
#WordWeavers 31/1: What’s your MC’s relationship with food like?
Jerya’s more an ‘eat to live’ person than a ‘live to eat’ one, but she enjoys food well enough, and enjoys cooking too, when she has time.
And beer. Not to excess, always quality over quantity.
#books #writing #writersofmastodon
