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#flashfiction

38 posts31 participants4 posts today
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RS, Author, Novelist, Prosaist

#PennedPossibilities 634 — MC POV: How much do you value companionship? Do you always keep people around, or do you prefer to be alone?

[Devil-girl] An odd question. I've never really thought about it. Companionship is good, and I enjoy it when people are around, like when I train at the gym or am at work. What I do is all about teamwork, so I'm good with people. Yet, I don't always keep people around. I really do like to throw open all the windows and study a good book. I live in a converted dance studio, so two walls open to the outside and the other two are mirrored. Laying on a mat, with the breezes, and the quiet you get living in a university town. Hmm. I guess I'm finding more use for what people call friends. I've certainly found a lot of use for men…

[Author retains copyright (c)2025 R.S.]

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RS, Author, Novelist, Prosaist

#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2504.03 — How do you navigate scenes with many characters?

Carefully. I don't want to step on anyone's toes or disrupt them saying their lines.

In the Saying the Quiet Part Aloud department, I will admit that most of the advice I give is actually analysis of what I've written. I don't necessarily plan these things out, or have check lists. Sorry. What I do is simply write what I think sounds right, then go back and study whether it worked. I have plenty of experience (close to 2M words written), so I often get the sense of it right.

"Intuition!" you scoff, adding, "That's not helpful."

Here's a speed bump I navigated. Kyv is the current POV. I'm handing off to May Ri (the so-called princess).

...The book plate lit up. Kyv recognized the woman on vid[,saying]. "The Princess of Mars and her Five Daughters!"

May Ri, in her alighter outside, watched the growing crowd of men, wiry, lightly muscled, androgynous for that, all moonborne, adapted to 1/6th gravity. No weapons. She sighed. "You saw the vid of the nuking of Hershel?"

Handing off a POV is one way of navigating, I did that between those two paragraphs by transferring succinctly from the book plate (think cellphone doing FaceTime) Kyv is looking at to who he is looking at on said book plate. This is a 3rd person technique.

Beyond that, dialogue attribution is another technique I use. He said, she said. And you get to add a bit of visual or noise at the same time, which I call character tags. Indeed, you can avoid the said-ism in back and forths if the characters have an accent or manner of speech, but you have to be careful about that. While this seems like 3rd person also, keep in mind 1st POV characters often describe what's going on around them, and they do that in 3rd person, more so if they are telling a story of what happened to others.

[Author retains copyright (c)2025 R.S.]

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Continued thread
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🦋ShouldbeWriting🦋

Lady Gygax sighed.

"It irks me that you do not trust me to provide simple solutions to your problems that even a humbug such as Oscar Zoroaster Phadrig Isaac Norman Henkle Emmannuel Ambroise Diggs can provide."

"Who?" asked the Tin Man.

"The actual name of the so-called Wonderful Wizard of Oz," added Lady Gygax.

"If that was my name," said the raven, "then I'd pretend to be a green-haired lady with wings named Oz too."

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RS, Author, Novelist, Prosaist

#PennedPossibilities 632 — What originally inspired your WIP’s plot?

I just finished the WIP less than 20 hours ago, so I'm going with it.

  1. The #writever prompts for March. Thirty-one one word prompts with the theme Women's Rights. Remember, I'm a feminist writer. One of the prompts was "abortion." Challenging, as were others. I learned a lot by researching why the prompts were chosen.
  2. The prompts originally come out in Français. The word in Français for March is "Mars." As a SF writer at heart, do you think I originally misread that? Ya Betcha!
  3. Who is associated with Mars who is also the most misogynistic creep ever, who seems to be destroying a century of civil, women's, and LGBTQIA rights single handedly? Oh, noes! Did RS have ideas about writing thinly veiled satire? Ya Betcha!

Wanna read it? Mars Needed Women: eldritch.cafe/@sfwrtr/11426181

[Author retains copyright (c)2025 R.S.]

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The cover art for Mars Needed Women. The background is of the Mars surface with rover tracks, big rocks, sand, and a greenish sky. There is a triskelion image of Mars, which is a tattoo in the story. Credit NASA and ESA for the photos. The back cover reads as follows: Shanghaied May Ri struggled when the EM goon clamped an aromatic wet rag over her nose and mouth... Waking weightless and nauseated—stuffy head pounding, being floated somewhere—despite grogginess, she eyes-closed punched someone, spinning away to bounce off a wall. The click of cartilage, the thump off a bulkhead, the blare of a warning horn, and "Rig for ring spin!" rang in her ears. A tech clapped a bag over her mouth before she vomited up her last meal, while enduring the blonde's glare as blood beaded around her nose. May Ri glowered back. Sitting on the wall, dragged on her butt, her inner ear then her innards soon informed her the wall was becoming the floor. From the author: “A hopeful deeply-dystopian feminist SF story, with thinly veiled jabs at our current world's bad actors making for a bad future. Please note the past tense in the title: Mars Needed Women. The story's women are going to work to bring down the system, at least that part that's oppressing them, in a massive unscheduled disassembly.”
Eldritch CaféRS, Author, Novelist, Prosaist (@sfwrtr@eldritch.cafe)Attached: 2 images My feminist SF web-novel *Mars Needed Women* is complete! 23,300 words in 31 chapters, one chapter posted each day throughout March, the last posted 23 minutes ago as I write this. Check out the cover art. To read, either use the hashtag #RSMarsNeededWomen or this link to the first chapter: https://eldritch.cafe/@sfwrtr/114088945266387178 The full novel is in the thread. Just scroll to read. > “A hopeful deeply-dystopian feminist SF story, with thinly veiled jabs at our current world's bad actors making for a bad future. Please note the past tense in the title: Mars Needed Women. The story's women are going to work to bring down the system, at least that part that's oppressing them, in a massive unscheduled disassembly.” I'll leave it up for you to read for at least a week. After that, I'm revising it for later secondary publication. [Author retains copyright (c)2025 R.S.] #BoostingIsSharing #Writever #Mars #SpaceOpera #writer #author #sf #sciencefiction #scifi #feminism #gender fiction #writingCommunity #writersOfMastodon
Continued thread
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RS, Author, Novelist, Prosaist

2503.30 31/31 — Wave #Writever #Mars #SpaceOpera

Marisela, aged 10, wearing her little Mars green enviro suit, smiled and waved a rust-stained gauntleted hand. They'd traveled to Jezero Crater. Behind her lay a famous scene of twin dark red rover tracks gouged into orange soil, between hills strewn with dark boulders and rusty shingle rocks. Dust storms and dust devils over the years had softened them. A crater wall stretched like a mountain range to the greenish hazy horizon. May Ri had wanted to celebrate Mari having suit-trained 2,000 nisei. Mari asked for a trip to Jezero with Momie. Reina made it so.

The image looped every 10 seconds with a blink.

In that blink of darkness, in memory, the cargo doors of the decapitated warship flew open. Her two-second delayed reaction had cost her daughter's life.

The North American Decath States had killed her daughter. She'd failed to stop them. She pounded the table. On the moon, that action pushed her from her chair.

"There you are," a dark-haired teenager asked, climbing the stairs into the observatory. Domes were built fully or partially buried, to protect from radiation. Few had windows, but this one did. Thick. 360º, with a full black sky above and a sun always peaking over the horizon. A cloudy blue world opposite entered a full phase, sliced off by crater walls.

Distracted by Mau approaching, she looked for Mi.

"No Miriam?" Rare.

"We caused Kyv to pull a muscle, but Mi's better at massaging. Give me something to bolt together any day! So, I answered a ping." She handed over May Ri's intentionally-left-behind book plate, then swiped the memory cube faster than her mother could jump, and slept it.

May Ri tapped a priority from Reina.

"I trust you," the recorded Onēsanue said. Her red hair hung limp. Her grey eyes displayed dark circles below them, transforming her freckles to ashes. "Your intuition said shoot the Bonhomme Richard despite the mayday. I insisted on international norms, that we attempt a rescue. I was wrong. My intuition was wrong. 1,323 people and your precious daughter died because I'd never been abused or oppressed by Earthers. I did not understand. I still don't understand, so I will say this: If leveling cities is your decision, or standing by and letting them cower in fear at what we might do is your decision, I shan't second guess you. I trust you." The message ended.

"Pfft! That was helpful!"

Maurine hugged her mother from behind, squeezing tightly, head on her shoulder. May Ri smelled sweat and Mi's rose perfume.

"Mau—?"

"Not happening, Momie!" She tried to bite her ear.

May Ri shoved her, laughing.

"Seriously. Ten minutes to the astronomical new moon. Next month a partial solar eclipse; today, we're in the sun's glare. You picked now symbolically, but you need to choose a plan." Mau's book plate filled will warning messages. One stated, "Get May Ri's rear in gear!!!" with 3 exclaims.

What was she to do? A blue world with billions of people led astray by a belief in an all-powerful invisible friend, or two, and a belief only money made friends. When she closed her eyes, she saw the red face of Mars, a flash, then another, then a distorted mushroom of fire and debris rising, as her daughter—

—had ceased to exist.

She envied the Decath, envied their certainty that there was a "better place" the dead would populate, would "live" happily forever.

She hugged herself. No. Her daughter was gone. Half-a-year ago. Nothing would bring her back.

Reina's trust did nothing to help. May Ri needed to prevent a repeat of that day.

Today.

Men had a brutal history of conquest, of killing the husbands and the children so the subsequent babies were theirs. May Ri read the books, understood the patriarchy and theology supporting it, and the Game of War. Women were no more than a prize.

Would she play? Destroy the capital of the States like they destroyed Herschel?

What would Marisela think? The girl had taught the Nisei to wear spacesuits because it made her more friends. Mau and Mi always said to make friends. Very Nisei.

"Friends?" May Ri asked.

Maureen gave a thumbs up.

May Ri didn't know what she'd choose. Her fingers typed in a code and keys.

Thorium SMRs across the Moon responded to loads as newly built spinlaunchers powered up, soon casting ton-sized payloads skyward. Southhome vibrated as the south polar set of twenty launched with a faint whump, whump, whump.

She looked at her book plate. She read the first target sweeping east to west. Cape Canaveral not General Washington City. She sighed. In three days, Earth would cease to have launch capability, except for the KJC.

"Let's warn them to evacuate two hours before impact."

"Sounds good," Mau said. #RSMarsNeededWomen 31

—END—

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