#PennedPossibilities 642 — How old are some of your characters?

I'm glad this isn't just MCs or SCs. I'll go with the last written story point or idea that isn't written.

Devil-girl: ~19
Bolt/Streak: 27
Streak and Thorn: 18
Emeraline: 31
Marigold: 26
Triplets Cloud Dancer, Meadow Dancer, and Fire Dancer: 35
The Hawk: 26
Chrome: 31
Rainy Days: > 3,000

May Ri: 45
Mari: 22
Manette: 19
Twins Miriam and Maurine 17
Moria: 13
Reina Īto: 35
Randy: 55

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#WordWeavers 2504.13 — How dangerous is your MC? CW: Definite Background Spoilers.

The Reluctance Series stories MCs by danger score least to most:

• 0: Devil-girl — Give her a book and leave her alone.
• 1: Streak — He's a sweetie. He'll have your back if you are mobbed by bullies. His danger score is multiplied by Thorn's as he's protective of her. He did charm the pants off of Rainy Days, so there's that wild card.
• 2: Thorn Rose — She's capable, just not very antagonistic. Pushed into a corner, watch out. Her danger score is divided by Streak's because she realizes he has more common sense than she does and listens to him when he's around to advise her. She loves him.
• 3: Rainy Days — She's a lot less capable then most people think, but she has experience. Her inclination is to fight for others. First it was family, then it was for women. After millennia of bearing children, all of humanity is related to her—except the dragons. She's very sweet, caring, supportive, and she'll teach you lessons if she thinks you'll benefit from it. You don't want to cross her, however. She's lived through the fall of two civilizations, and ended up being rebuilt from parts at the end of the last fall. She's technologically immortal and always 24 years old.
• 4: Devil-girl — Told you to give her a book and leave her alone, didn't I? Nobody listens! She's very capable (unlike Rainy Days) and self-taught. People keep using her as their sharp tool. She'll try the dangerous, impossible, and taboo things anyway because, Well, that's Interesting! The character was conceived as a study in how evil isn't born but is created through interaction with others and their environment. Each story is, Which side of the knife edge will she tumble? Will she end up saving people or suddenly be so frustrated she ceases to give a damn? Recently she discovered love, and got that used against her—not by her lovers, thank goodness! Well, we'll see.

BTW: Streak and Thorn live 200 years before the Devil-girl. Roughly 1960 vs 2160.

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#PennedPossibilities #PennedPossibilities side prompt: Elevator quick pitch of your WIP, only the worst pitch ever.

A daemon and a day angel fly to the moon. The lunatics there believe they're really a demon and an angel. They're as right as they are wrong.

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#WordWeavers 2504.12 — MC POV: Name 3 dangers that exist in your world. How do you protect yourself from them?

[Thorn Rose speaks. She's a bit of an egghead.] The heat of day time is very dangerous, but nobody really thinks about this. Buildings big and small are designed to use convection to cool the interior. Since daemons, like me, are fairly common, you can pay for more efficient miraculous recirculation. Mostly, when the day shine is bright, most people sleep.

People are dangerous. Not just the prejudiced people who might gang up on you because they think you don't have a right to exist, or at least walk in their neighborhoods. I got the pleasure (NOT) to witness what the dragons did in their autonomous region; that type of thing skews your whole idea of humanity. Of course, there is also the armistice with the Wild, and even Rainy Day's does her best to tread quietly around them.

Last, the sky is falling. Literally.

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#WordWeavers 2504.11 — Could your SC do your job?

I'm retired. Pretty much any of them could do that. To the extent that the main series antagonist is also a secondary character, getting to be retired is the WHOLE POINT of her existence from her point of view!

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#PennedPossibilities 640 — MC POV: Tell us about the good habits you have.

[Devil-girl:] I'd been asked this question and it hadn't occur to me that habits could be good or bad. It was while I was training for my first prize fight, so I asked Rabbit, who was doing roadwork with me, running the pedestrian path between Northfork and downtown along the river.

He said, "You read."

"Doesn't everyone?" I asked.

"Well, if it were the newspaper, the funnies or the sports page—" He was a little winded. "—I might understand, but a book? The pavement is uneven, too!"

I was getting a twofer, levitating the tome three hand widths before my face. It allowed me to properly swing my arms and shadow box as I ran. "I've got good peripheral vision. You wanna look? It's on quantum thaumadynamics—"

"No thanks. I'm a muscle nerd not an egghead."

"But… is it a good habit?"

"Only if you don't trip and break your pretty neck."

"Don't worry." I giggled. "I won't."

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#WordWeavers 2504.10 — Antagonist POV: How do you feel about the government?

[Rainy Days gives Thorn Rose a big hug for asking such an insightful question! Even after the pressure Rainy Days put the young woman under to test her mettle and the hell she'd force her to deal with (20K words), she had hoped she'd finally ask, but hadn't been holding her breath…]

The government is a work in progress, pretty much like always. These days I keep the central population under tight regulation. Instead, I perform my social experiments in the autonomous regions. It rather irked me, however, when their leaders took their freedom to choose and chose to enslave people by criminalizing them. The dragon lords were unhappy when I told them to knock it off, then outraged when I started this war to assert my authority? In what way is an autonomous region actually sovereign? Come on!

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#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2504.09 — How much room for the fantastical is there in your work?

I write both SF and SF Fantasy.

In Mars Needed Women, it was all science. The only thing fantastical (if you can call it that) about it is how I chose the setting (already successful Mars colonization) and manipulated situation (bankruptcy, no contact with Earth, Men doing the dangerous jobs, Mars dust affecting fertility) to gradually reduce the percentage of men in the population, allowing the women to break the male dominance of the culture and over the society (entrenched patriarchy).

In the Reluctance Series, the one thing that is fantastical is the physics at the root of the science in the story. The people, the situation, the state of the Earth, and the technology used all grows from this. Were you or I to be transferred there, once you got the 411 on the special new laws of nature, you wouldn't feel like you were living in a fantasy world at all.

In Inklings, currently on hiatus, it is all fantasy. There's a lot of room for the fantastical, like an MC who through sacrificing herself can converse with animals.

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#WordWeavers 2504.09 — What’s the most prevalent form of communication in your world besides talking face-to-face?

Messengering and post. This is true in the moonshot era as it is in the Interstellar era. The people have no use for electricity, which begs the question as to how in the moonshot era the fastest method, telegraphy, works. In the interstellar era, it boils down to walking the post one direction and then walking it a different direction. It would be spoilers to explain that trick in more detail.

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#PennedPossibilities 639 — Does your MC have any pets?

None of the recent stories have pets. However, dogs and horses are mentioned, the latter for a needed referent. Think satyr. I will resist describing actual horses in a story until I need to shock the reader from their assumptions about what the reluctance world really looks like…

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#ScribesAndMakers 2504.08 — Share a song lyric you've written or heard that resonates with you. (Give credit if it's not your song.)

I'm not religious, but that doesn't mean that allegorical songs can't impress me. Allegory (incidentally as it were) by Murray Attaway is a strangely uplifting and mystical song that never fails to bring pictures to my mind and a sense of awe that brings me chills.

Coincidentally, or perchance not, the lyric snippet below inspired a chapter titled "Allegory" in Reluctant Moon. Thorn Rose takes her friend Streak outside the city to watch a meteor shower, knowing the precise time it will start. Seems the weather service had tracked the trajectory of a piece of the sky struck from the heavens.

I've included a listen link and a lyric link.

Lyrics: https://genius.com/Murray-attaway-allegory-lyrics
Listen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYVYSLS04Z0

Sudden move in the stars, whenever I look to the skies
I can get lost, stand in a mirror and know that I
Am a fragment of something greater than I
Specks of dust in a moonbeam gathering shape
And potent of greatness waiting to light

Even the wind in the trees is the allegory
Everything that is and ever will be is the allegory

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#WordWeavers 2504.08 — MC POV: What are the 3 most important things you always take with you when traveling (besides money, ID and keys if applicable)?

I don't care much for things. Oh, I'll use them, and properly value them, earn them when needs be, but only knowledge and people have real value. I wasn't born into wealth, but upon my parent's death, when I was five, the powerful decided I was somehow special. Wealth, training, and responsibility followed. I don't know exactly when I stopped being a kid who nerded out on magic† with her childhood friend, when I morphed into someone else's sharp tool. When I grew old enough to pass as an adult, with great precision, calculation, and planning, I ran away never to be found. My elite life wasn't what I wanted, what I needed.

Since then nothing, no thing, describes what I want or desire, other than simply my freedom to study and learn. When you don't have a place to return to, or a place to live, they call you homeless. I gave my former life up, and when I find a new situation that sours, I can give everything up again. Snap, like that. Being home-free is a freedom from being made to do what I dislike, or what's wrong. I've traveled across the continent on foot. I've lived in homeless encampments. The three things I take with me are a tarp, a bedroll, and my book of magic.

Those are things, of course. I take my skills, my common sense, and a sharp tongue, also. They keep me safe.

————
† Magic is a simplification of a physically quantifiable repeatable phenomenon.

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#WordWeavers 2504.07 — Does your MC have a secret? Can you give us a hint?

Yes. I wrote May Ri's story in 3rd person so her last few chapters present a mysterious secret. Hint: It's a high tech version of very low tech.

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Random #food sequence from the WIP:

We sat at a table with an umbrella beside a mesquite broiler stand, sometimes having the smoke blow over us. He ate skewered cubes of half burnt meat, which smelled a lot less "off" than Rainy Day's chicken soup had, while I ate skewers of buttered onions, squash, peppers, and sticky-grains conglomerate. Roast corn, some kernels burnt, dusted with chile powder was a rare seasonal treat. I asked, "Did the people like the prior government?"

#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2504.05 — Sum up your current WIP in five words.

Daemon astronaut angel's best lover.

Okay, it's a kick in the head, innit? Actually a fair summation of plot lines in Reluctant Moon. This one should go with it:

The moonshot novel is SF.

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#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…

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#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.

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#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: https://eldritch.cafe/@sfwrtr/114261812977623863

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#WordWeavers 2504.02 — Assuming it’s possible in your world, how does your MC react when their parents call?

They don't seem to use telephony in her world, but they do have something like newsreels and phonograph records, so I'm not sure. Certainly, she can receive messages or telegrams. In any case, the concept of the supernatural is nonsensical. The words "belief" and "faith" have no meaning, which makes it very difficult for the author!

The devil-girl's parents are dead, as far as she knows. There is probably only one personal attack in the entire world that would actually set the woman off, and this would be it. She was conceived to be an evil character, and I would feel very sorry for whomever pranked her. What she might do might send her down the path toward darkness.

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#PennedPossibilities 630 — Is your MC receptive to warnings and advice given by others?

It's not that Thorn Rose doesn't listen, it's that she gets SO excited with all the possibilities! If she THINKS she can impress her mentor, she's there. If that makes Streak start hitting his head against the wall due to her lack of common sense, or worse her seeming lack of fear of death and dismemberment… oh well!

She keeps her friend on his toes.

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