#ScribesAndMakers #TTMD 16 Mar 25 @saposcat CW: Seriously out there

I'll admit being at first thrown by the present tense of Blivy, thinking it an excerpt not a blurb, but the language caught me up. Refocusing, I've reread it a few times. The blurb seems like an interesting concept, bringing two different people together in separate narrative threads and, if I get this right, a third person/thread by a narratively unnamed author who might be telling another story through margin notes. Not sure whether to think that's creepy, a leak from a parallel fantasy world, a monk escaped from a monastery who can't help himself, or a pesky student willing to deface a former library book to get a report done. Maybe not the later... you did say "not published." Maybe the author is kid, or someone locked away crying for help? Sorry. Ahem!

Could you clarify how you're going to handle this making the resulting book feel written in? What's the philosophy of your choice versus straightforward narrative? Is it maybe a mystery to find where Waldo is hiding? More background would be interesting. What about presenting a few paragraph excerpt?

In any case, I can relate. While I find myself completely unable to write in a paper book, and barely in workbooks meant to be filled it, I have a character who's always writing in them. She has a rainbow of gel pens and highlighters, will fill margins, writing around corners, even drawing sketches or little flowers. She's first caught writing in books writing in a 500 year old thaumaturgy book, with someone later remarking what she wrote was more useful. I'm intrigued what you're up to.

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#ScribesAndMakers 2503.15 — How's your goal going? Is there anything you would like help with?

I have written and posted a chapter on Mastodon each day for 15 days, so I'm really surprising myself. Seventeen days, seventeen installments to go. I wonder if Charles Dickens felt this way? A few were late, so I did two the next day. Today's installment (https://eldritch.cafe/@sfwrtr/114168750649288414) has the MC taking her 8-year-old on her first Mars walk, wearing the spacesuit she'd crafted for her daughter. The slice-of-life interlude with her monkey-like girl climbing a solar array is heart warming, as is her greeting her father who'd been away three months, saying rather precocious things. My goal is to write good gender fiction, and the main character suggesting her daughter be trained for men's work comes naturally in the situation I've built up to with foreshadowing over past chapters. #RSMarsNeedWomen

About all I can ask for as help is that the writing challenge prompts keep coming! They've helped me keep focused and disciplined. They act as carrots for completing a day's work. It takes 1-2 hours to write the 800 words, and 4-5 hours to revise it. Feels like a full time job...

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#PennedPossibilities 613 — How do you feel about the world or universe you’ve created within your WIP? Are you satisfied with it thus far?

Remember. You asked...

How do I feel about the world itself? Like I stepped in a cesspool up to my knees!

Most nations are theocracies, with oligarchs ascendant fighting one another. It's a full extrapolation of post Jan 20th 2025, stabilized with the needle at religio-fascist, by those who preferred stable to bat-shit crazy, and taken 50 to 150 years into the future. (I haven't decided the timeline, yet.) The initials E.M. in EM Mars Colonizations Corp stand for what you think it does, complete with very cute silvery Heinlein spaceships misnomered as Starships. The main character is shanghaied to Mars as a colonist (one added to a population of 10,000) on the last ship making the passage as EM goes bankrupt. All her life, May Ri struggled not to be completely nothing, destined by her gender to barely have agency, valued mostly because she could bare sons. Now she must master living on Mars, with its corporate frontier rules.

There's a reason Mars Needed Women (the title), but the story I'm telling has "Need" in the past tense. Men die disproportionately more often than the women in Mars Space, and when the corporate power structure begins to crumble, May Ri has to fight harder for survival. She, however, isn't interested in keeping the status quo. Neither is all her sister colonists, nor all the first generation (nisei) Martians who have all been raised by only their mothers.

I'm really satisfied with how the story I'm writing works within this universe. It's feminist to the core. It questions gender roles. It tars patriarchy as ruining the lives of women AND men.

It's coming together, gonzo pantser style. Just wrote the 14th installment of 31. I've 8 of the remaining 17 planned. The reader should be starting to see that May Ri is as ruthless as those in power (the men, of course), but with a female twist. She hates being used, but she likes men (finds them fun) and wishes they'd quit with the power-dominance-shit. She hates seeing other women being hurt, and she's the type of person, given the chance, ceases opportunities and makes solutions. When she has four daughters to protect against the Earthers, it becomes very real.

I'm posting all installments on Mastodon thru the month of March on a single thread. To keep up with the story, follow this hashtag: #RSMarsNeededWomen.

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#ScribesAndMakers 13 March: Shameless self promotion day. Boost away.

My local writers group, Hawaii Fiction Writers, has its newest anthology out. It's a fundraiser for the Aina Haina Public Library on Oahu, Hawaii. I have three stories in it. So please help support our library!

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B0DVY3FTDR/

Sorry it's on The Bozo's platform, but that's what the publisher uses.

#ScribesAndMakers 2503.13 — Shameless Self-Promotion Day. Let's boost away.

Here's the newly minted cover art† for Mars Need Women. Check it out!

It's a web-novel, described in the blurb below. I have been posting it in a single free-to-read Mastodon thread. The link is below.

“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.”

So far I've posted 12 chapters of 31, which I will do more or less daily through the end of this month. The first installment is an inside jacket blurb. The main story starts with a clang in the second installment. Chapter 11 may leave you in tears. #RSMarsNeededWomen

More in the #altText

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https://eldritch.cafe/@sfwrtr/114088945266387178

=-=-=-=
† I designed and created the cover, wrote the blurbs, and did the titles. The images are courtesy of ESA and NASA. The spine is a strip of a Mariner 7 image. This is becoming a hobby of mine, and I am open to requests.

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

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#PennedPossibilities 612 — Has your SC ever snooped in a friend or partner’s house?

For the current crop of SCs, either there isn't enough depth of character revealed to know, or they've never had the opportunity—that is, either a friend or partner they'd want to know more about.

This question for the MCs would be far more interesting.

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Sir Terry Pratchett was one of two people who I quoted directly in my dissertation. This line from Feet of Clay was the motto for my introductory chapter:

"This is where we’ve filled ourselves up with so many questions that they’re starting to overflow and become answers."

It resonated with me, because this is what doing research often feels like for me.

Dennis Fischman's review of The Space Between Worlds (The Space Between Worlds, #1) https://buff.ly/FnSoHfD #books #fiction #ScienceFiction

What media have you read/seen/heard that acknowledges polyamory exists, especially portrayed in a positive way? Fiction and music particularly?

"Oh no, my long time romantic partner has feelings for another person, it's all over" is such a pervasive trope, you'd think it as much a law of nature as "objects fall toward Earth when dropped"

Sinister Minutes 26: How far would you go to help a friend discover the true meaning of life? Find out on "Going Home."

Then, if the story doesn't leave you unsettled, the music just might. Eldritch, from Tim Parker.

https://shows.acast.com/sinister-minutes or wherever you grab your podcasts.

Fiction and narration by Kurt Hohmann (me), music by Tim Parker

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WAYNE'S 2025 BOOKS: BOOK 5

Picks and Shovels
by Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic)

Huzzah! A new Martin Hench book! I was a proud backer of Cory Doctorow's Kickstarter to publish this work without the anti-consumer and anti-writer practises of the usual purveyor of the written word: our old frenemy Amazon. I chose the epub version (which I read using Calibre on my Android phone), and the only reason I didn't buy a physical copy is that I'd like to get all the Hench novels in paperback, and this book isn't in that format yet.

Anyway, Picks and Shovels takes Martin Hench wayback to the late 80s, when computers had to be programmed without monitors (the horror), when mobile phones were something seen only on Star Trek, and when Martin - sorry, Marty - is a boo-boo baby proto-accountant feeling his way into the big bad world of finance by way of the silicon highway introduced by personal computing.

It's an origin story both for Hench and Silicon Valley, and a great read. With a company whose founders read like the opening to a bad joke (a rabbi, a priest and a Mormon elder) and a rival company locked in a battle for dominance, Picks and Shovels shows us that consumer capture, enshittification, and hostile design has always been around, even when computers were beige and bulky.

As with all of Cory's works, you read and you learn and you have fun, all at the same time. He has a way of distilling some bigbrain ideas into smaller morsels for the rest of us to understand, and be entertaining at the same time. I smashed this book in a few days as it was eminently readable, and I just wanted to see what happened!

You don't have to read the first two Hench books (Red Team Blue and The Bezzle) to enjoy this one, but you really should anyway as they're all neat and Cory is the kind of writer that we should all be supporting in these uncertain pre-technofeudal times.