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Check out Joshua Dyer

Fantasy, Horror

Joshua Dyer writes in several different genres and styles including fantasy, science fiction, horror, and mainstream fiction. Several of his works have won awards in L. Ron Hubbard's Writers of the Future competition. Previously, he wrote for the Los Angeles Times where his fiction won their "Reader's Choice Award" for best story of the year. When he's not writing, Dyer ...

limfic.com/mbm-book-author/jos

#AuthorSpotlight #Bookstodon @bookstodon #author

Welcome to my weekly Author Spotlight. Today: Jon McGoran is the author of eleven novels for adults and young adults, including his latest science fiction thriller, The Price of Everything, coming April 2025 from Solaris Books. His other books include the YA science fiction thrillers Spliced,Splintered, and Spiked and the science thrillers Drift, Deadout, and Dust Up. ...

jscottcoatsworth.com/author-sp

#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.

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

#BoostingIsSharing

#gender #fiction #writer #author
#mystery #thriller #romance #sf #sff #sciencefiction
#writing #writingcommunity #writersOfMastodon #writers
#RSdiscussion
#RSstory #RSReluctanceStory

#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2504.13 — When is it best to be terse? Flowery?

Two answers:

  1. If I have a word limit, I make it terse. When I wrote Mars Needed Women, each chapter was limited to a maximum of 4,700ish characters (hashtags were necessary). That forces me to practice concision and ellipsis. By concision, I mean making each word necessary to carry an idea or an emotion, double-duty being better, or to complete a grammar construct. Sometimes I had to choose words by length, when I hit my toot-limit. By ellipsis, I mean grouping meaning such that it also implies what was necessarily left out. As an example of the latter, neither giving birth nor OB-GYN doctors are mentioned, not even midwives, but I'm sure the reader knows they exist, they have to. When I expand the story for publication, this topic might be a good target for an additional sentence, maybe even a chapter.
  2. If I have a time limit, I work to compose sparser prose. To be clear, by this I mean both a deadline or "I can only write so much before I become exhausted." Charles Dickens and I could easily have a prose style in common, but I neither (re)read his works anymore (because I can't help emulating him) nor let myself get carried away (much) writing things that don't carry to story along (but are nonetheless glorious). I've come to learn that if I practice concision and ellipsis whilst composing, what I will have written is a fertile framework upon which I can plant flowers during revision.

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

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Replied in thread

@Uair

poloniousmonk.substack.com/p/h

I just read Slipstick. It is an amazing flowing compilation of ideas and philosophy, and I'm not sure if the author contributed more than finding and giving the chaos order, but that's okay! Seriously, half-way through reading it, I opened a document to copy out the best parts to contemplate later. Definitely requires a bookmark!

Indeed, this master work is

Not for the faint of heart

—you won't like some of it—but if you don't learn something to focus your existential thoughts upon, that's probably because you closed the document (and virtually turned the book over), because something you read frightened some truth into you…

Highly recommended.

slipstick · Here lies one whose name was writ in electronsBy poloniousmonk

#ScribesAndMakers 2504.12 — Shameless self-promotion day. Show us what you're proud of. Let's boost away.

Mars Need Women is a hopeful yet deeply dystopian feminist SF web-novel that leans heavily into Women's right's issues thanks to a set of writing prompts on the subject. It is a woman-centric adventure story of overcoming adversity while being female, with all the warts and frustrations, not as a man in disguise.

Our wannabe engineer heroine May Ri escapes a disheartening life, faced with becoming little more than a housewife because she lacks "blessings," to help colonize Mars—if you can call being shanghaied escaping and being contracted to have children a benefit. (She does get to choose the gorgeous supportive guy, though, so that's a positive.) As she learns to make martian machines, she keeps putting herself at the center of a global martian dust storm with her children as power shifts from being male-dominated. As the daughters of the Martian immigrants increasingly control Mars' future (how is spoilers), May Ri together with her five daughters shape a world (Mars) the way unfettered women might imagine it.

When the men of Earth take affront—of course they do—they learn that women don't fight like men, especially when their children's lives are threatened, and their wellbeing is at stake. #RSMarsNeededWomen

It remains free-to-read on Mastodon for a few more days:

eldritch.cafe/@sfwrtr/11408894.

If you start reading it now, a comment or a private mention will tell me not to delete the posts until the end of next week. I consider it a beta read. I'm already revising an augmenting the original story, tying up loose ends, and might add more chapters along the path to publishing it as a book. Meanwhile, I'm going to start boosting chapters for a last hurrah.

See #alttext for book cover description.

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

#BoostingIsSharing and #CommentingIsCool

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#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2504.12 —How would you write a story with a cast of one? Could you?

As I would any other, I suppose. Since I write in 1st person, the character would essentially be having a conversation with the reader, and I might emphasize that. Actual dialogue would be the MC talking to themselves. Could I right such a thing? I see no issues other than situations where there would be a cast of one seem prone to being depressing, and I avoid such stories.

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

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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.

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

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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!

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

#BoostingIsSharing

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Replied in thread

@Heliograph Thanks for posting that; I feel better about some literary choices. When I wrote my Mars novel I decided to use a single universal time for the entire planet. People can't live on the surface and most development is underground for radiation reasons. No windows. Some population is on spaceships or a station. One zone gives the same diurnal schedule to everyone everywhere. When they rarely need to use the surface, they use offset and solar terms, "like local dusk is just before lunch."

#Writer#SF#Author

Author, gynecologist Jen Gunter says she's moving back to Canada as reproductive rights erode in U.S.
Jen Gunter, a Winnipeg-born gynecologist and bestselling author, says she's had enough with the United States, but she’s also prescribing a stark warning for Canadian voters concerned about the future of their own reproductive health care.
#politics #reproductiverights #healthcare #author #Canada #UnitedStates
cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/je

Author, gynecologist Jen Gunter says she's moving back to Canada as reproductive rights erode in U.S.
Jen Gunter, a Winnipeg-born gynecologist and bestselling author, says she's had enough with the United States, but she’s also prescribing a stark warning for Canadian voters concerned about the future of their own reproductive health care.
#politics #reproductiverights #healthcare #author #Canada #UnitedStates
cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/je