Since 'renewed' attacks on #Gaza, 100 plus children have been martyred or injured every day.

But, yeah, let there be outrage towards #actors, #students, #faculty, #immigrant #proPalestinian protesters, #artists, #writers, good politicians, #antiZionistJews, #musicians, #filmmakers, #athletes, etc. for being decent human beings by standing up for #Palestine! Right...

#FreePalestineNOW

#PennedPossibilities 635 — Are there any specific cultural influences that shaped the world or characters in your story

Two major cultural influences, one not so good and one good. Contrast.

The main character comes from an end-stage religio-fascist oligarchy. She live's in Chicago. She's also an atheist and bristles under restrictions put on women. I work to give an impression of an Anglo-Saxon culture suffused with religion and hypocrisy, but I never describe the main character other than at least one of her children have dark hair like her. With a name like May Ri, you wonder about her heritage. Constricted by patriarchy, she chooses Mars hoping for opportunity.

On Mars, the first child born on the planet was borne by a Japanese refugee. She learns Japanese from her mother and teaches it to the other Nisei (first generation Martians in Japanese), and the cultural aesthetic plays a part in the plot, as do some specific Japanese words.

Beyond that, I drop hints all over that the colonists are culturally diverse and are from across the planet—and poor because who signs what's essentially a slave contract to work on Mars and bear children? The Nisei with absent fathers and overworked mothers (who build the colony) are raised communally and increasing develop their own society free of gender roles and constrained sexuality. A trans character plays a role, and skin color is seen a beautiful.

The people back on earth don't like this. Mars Needed Women is a story of cultural and planetary conflict.

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

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#RSstory #RSMarsNeededWomen

What was the Staggering Development that Gus and Oliver faced in their investigation of the vultures' behavior? Read it now when you subscribe to patreon.com/amberunmasked
#cats #writers #authors #wildlife

#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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#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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#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2504.04 — What are some tips and tricks you use to convey strong emotions?

I think this is where my use of Grammar B helps me. Strong emotions, even things like anger, I think are associated with confusion and levels of self-doubt, which leads to cycles of justification or re-evaluation on the fly, quickly, immediately, erratically. or it just might conceivably—or very possibly since MURPHY in all things, right?—get worse, far worse; that type of thing.

The last sentence is a short example of a Grammar B run-on. It is non-grammatical; your high school English teacher would grade it a Fail. What it does is breathlessly fire off thought after thought in a continuing sequence, no sequence dependent on the sequence before. It flows. Like a speech. The reader never needs to backtrack to deduce meaning. Such a construct could be cut into individual sentences, standardized. But. Why? Rhythm of any sort drives the reader forward. It creates tension. All useful when writing emotion. A flood of description to overwhelm the senses, like the emotion itself.

Another construction I think works, usually mixed carefully with the run-on to break repeating rhythms, is telegraphy. I used that in the previous paragraph. Did you. Notice? Short, non-grammatical sentences. Missing a verb, a noun, or what not. It works like a drumbeat, focusing the reader on individual word or unsupported phrase meanings—and you get extra credit if you use a word with multiple meanings that could conceivably apply in context; emotion is confusion, innit?

In a sense, Grammar B is like finding poetry in prose. Used right, it uniquely depicts emotion. This is why I call myself a "prosaist."

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

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WRITER FUEL: 'ELIZA,' the world's 1st chatbot, was just resurrected from 60-year-old computer code.

https://www.limfic.com/2025/04/04/writer-fuel-worlds-first-chatbot-resurrected-from-60-year-old-code/

Now Unlocked: The Grumpy Old Man had no idea what he had. Gus knew. And then I came along and let it escape! Read Gus & Oliver's #mystery, "The Dark Corner" https://www.catdetectivecases.com/year8-casefile46/
#cats #writers #wildlife

I like how journalists will still find a way to smuggle in a pun or two, no matter how dire the situation.

Vonnegut's one rule: more important than ever!

#writers #IntellectualProperty #Facebook #AI #protests #activism

' Around 100 authors on Thursday protested outside the London headquarters of Meta, accusing the U.S. tech giant of "stealing" content to train its Artificial Intelligence models.'

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2025/04/04/entertainment-news/authors-protest-meta-ai/

AFP: Authors hold London protest against Meta for ‘stealing’ work to train AI. “Around 100 authors on Thursday protested outside the London headquarters of Meta, accusing the U.S. tech giant of ‘stealing’ content to train its Artificial Intelligence models.”

https://rbfirehose.com/2025/04/04/afp-authors-hold-london-protest-against-meta-for-stealing-work-to-train-ai/

Patreon backers get early access to the story behind a disturbing piece of evidence Gus and I found while hiking in the neighborhood.
Become a subscriber! patreon.com/amberunmasked #cats #writers #authors #wildlife

Managed to do a little more work on building up my book today! Figured I'd work a little on my characters, so I wrote out what I have for my main guy and fleshed a couple things out. Need to get religion and local place names settled at some point.

Gus & Ollie have been working hard on fighting off the intruders invading all the buildings. Then I accidentally screwed up a big case!
https://www.catdetectivecases.com/year8-casefile46/
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