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So I had just read MINISTRY FOR THE FUTURE, and I started thinking about what the world would look like if we'd avoided environmental collapse (fingers crossed), so that became the place my protagonist lives when she's abducted, and then I just started riffing, and 10,000 words/five weeks later, I ended up creating an allegory for how fucked up high school is, a critique on policing and mental health, and a scathing rebuke of STAR WARS.

No big.

#WritersCoffeeClub Mar 2. How accurately does the first line represent your style and voice?

Very accurately. "Grace Langley had slept with her dad's kitchen knife under her pillow for months, and she didn't know why." That's the book.

#WritersCoffeeClub Mar 3: How can your current writing routine be improved?

Oh, by actually *writing*. That would help immensely.

#WritersCoffeeClub Mar 5: What writing-related tools or resources have your found most effective?

Time, space, and Scrivener.

#WritersCoffeeclub March 6: How do you feel you can further develop as a writer?

Keep trying new things. Keep challenging myself. I learn by doing, so I have "do" more.

#WritersCoffeeClub Mar 7: What’s the first thing you do when you sit down with a new project?

For a longer project, I write a very quick outline, just bullet points that would take up half a page. They're waypoints in a journey, and then I have to find my way from one to the next (which is the fun part).

For a short project, I write an opening line and *go*.

#WritersCoffeeClub March 8: Happy International Women’s Day! What female author has inspired you the most?

Recently, Catherynne M. Valente. The fact she constructs a whole new narrator voice for every project is astounding. I aspire to, and will never achieve, her skill at writing. She's stunningly good at novels.

Extraordinarily close second is Martha Wells. My god.

#WritersCoffeeClub Mar 9: Does caffeine intake influence your writing?

It used to. I used to write with pop, but I find it makes me jittery now. #aging

#writersCoffeeClub Mar 10: How do you handle the physical strain of writing?

Not well, lately. I have arthritis in my hip, so sitting can be tough. It's a big reason why I'm not making progress the way I'd like to.

#WritersCoffeeClub 11 Mar: Do writing challenges spur on your progress?

Sure, if it's right for me.

#WritersCoffeeClub March 12: Happy Plant A Flower Day! What role does nature take in your stories?

Nature is a contrast. Most of the story takes place either in a megalopolis or in space stations. Nature is the thing that's out there, somewhere. It's a refuge, and it's what all of society is organized around protecting so that we don't have another environmental crisis, but it's not where most people live, although lots do, especially Indigenous peoples on their traditional territories.

#WritersCoffeeClub 13 Mar: Are you mindful of your readers’ expectations? How so?

Yes, possibly too much so. I've had to stop arguing with the belligerent bigot reader that I imagine in my head--no really, the character named "Huang" is indeed Chinese-Canadian, just deal with it--but I do like thinking about their expectations as SFF readers: which conventions I'm messing with, which ones I'm embracing, that kind of thing.

#WritersCoffeeClub Day 14: What are new themes you are currently exploring?

Compulsive behaviour. Learning to control anger. Learning to live with the times when you failed to control your anger. When violence is justified and when it's rationalized. Exploitation of children by adults who've formed institutional "missions" to rationalize that exploitation. It's all but anarchist.

#WritersCoffeeClub Mar 16: What word or phrase do you tend to overuse?

My POV character is empathic/telepathic, so "she sensed..." comes up WAY too much.

#WritersCoffeeClub Mar 17: Does alcohol intake influence your writing?

Nah. I basically stopped drinking. I started getting hangovers for the first time in my life by my early 40s, and it's just not worth it any more.

#WritersCoffeeClub Mar 18: Happy Awkward Moments Day! What's the most awkward moment you've ever written?

I'm not much for social awkwardness. I don't find it entertaining, one way or the other, but I do have a scene where one of my characters tries desperately to find somewhere else to sit in the cafeteria, realizes no one will have him, and then slumps back to the first friends he made and *kinda* tried to ditch.

#WritersCoffeeClub Mar 19: What’s your narrator’s sense of humor like?

In my current project, the narration has little to no humour at all. It's a dry, quiet style of writing... until the fight scenes.

#WritersCoffeeClub Mar 20: What was the most writing related fun you've had?

My writer's group, once every two weeks. I love those people. I really *need* those meetings!

#WritersCoffeeClub Mar 21: Share your most poetic line.

"He drew her down the alley with the promise of a kiss."

It's literally iambic.

#WritersCoffeeClub Mar 22: What distracts you the most from writing? How do you deal?

Literally, for real, the pain in my hip from my arthritis, which is the *oldest* thing that's ever happened to me.

#WritersCoffeeClub Mar 23: What’s the most memorable encounter you’ve had with a reader?

When one person in my new writing group announced she'd been reading my stuff all week. It was really encouraging.

#WritersCoffeeClub Mar 24: Is there a particular reader you keep in mind when you write?

I'm trying to resist that urge because there are two: the SFF/genre reader who's three steps ahead of me bc they know all the tropes, and the BIGOT sff/genre reader who's deliberately misreading everything I do in order to avoid all the "woke."

@sfwrtr @orionkidder

One of the platforms I publish on doesn't support italics so I end up with too many "I thought" bits.

@NaraMoore @orionkidder Not even bbcode? Wow, that's almost like a typewriter. Harsh. Almost makes you want to try something like indenting, but that's probably not supported either. Uggh!

@sfwrtr @orionkidder

Nope, no indent. They wrote their own formatting code and tokens instead of using HTML. It's very limited.

@NaraMoore @sfwrtr Yikes. That's hard. I'm curious what other solutions you might have thought of before settling on an in-text attribution? I'm wondering if ~squiggles~ would do it, like little thought waves. :)

@orionkidder @NaraMoore We do make a big deal about saidisms but it comes down to one thing, ensuring the reader doesn't get lost in dialogue as transparently as possible. If you need em, use em, I say. Just keep word attributions with a quote comma and motion/sound/touch attributions as a separate sentence. If heard or sensed works better, then use them. Consistently. They then disappear. For me, when I did telepathy, I simply didn't use quotes and staged sentences to be unambiguously attributable. It really becomes transparent, though a few helpers like "said telepathically" to set the context may help. Then just let fly:

"I'm very sorry I said that."

Are you? Are you really, she shouted. The vein on her forehead pulsed. Do you know how it made me... feel?

"I really don't. Tell me."

For an instants he thought he stood knee high in a cesspool. Warm mud that wasn't. Flies buzzing. He caught his nose against as stench not there. "Elena! Stop!"

I didn't have the luxury to stop! Sorry doesn't heal wounds—

@sfwrtr @NaraMoore I like that a lot. That's a great effect. I might steal that!

@orionkidder @sfwrtr

I applied Occan's Razer. The simplest solution is most likely the best. I tag them with thought, wondered, and occationally mused. Then treat them like any other dialog.

Really the biggest issue is to insure they are in present tense not past tense, while the characters narrative remains past tense.

@sfwrtr The way I read it, that would not fit the meter. Maybe I'm doing something in my head that's different than what's strictly on the page?

The funny thing about iambic is English speakers do it without realizing all the time. I saw a linguist do a video about it where you can find it "in the wild" all over the place. I wrote that line without any poetic designs at all.