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5 results for “eggmont”

1. 

   Eggmont 🐘 @eggmont

   2026-10-09

   #WritersCoffeeClub Oct 9: How does your own sense of mortality influence what you write?

   I have a clear understanding of right and wrong and the fascinating grey zones in between.

   My sense of morality influences everything I write…

   Oh.

   I became pretty Zen about mortality when in a five-month period of time my mentor, my grandmother, and my girlfriend all expired.

   The only things I wrote for months were letters of condolence and eulogies.

   We're all mortal. It is what it is. If one dwells on it too much or too often one can find oneself embroiled in constant Historical Society lawsuits over trying to put one's name on other people's memorials or obsessed with building obscene monuments to one's imagined glory. Or both.

   Thank goodness nobody has shown the man a pyramid. There's still time to tear up the Reflecting Pool. Keep this one under your hat.

   Characters in my writing die, but usually not of lingering maladies like Hallmark Trope Cancer while surrounded by their loved ones and the aunt who covets the family silver.

   As a general rule in my writing people die unexpectedly as the result of being fed into the grinding clanking smoke belching machinery of the gods dedicated to moving the plot forward no matter what.

   In "The Wine and Cheese Pirates" the matriarch of a vast dangerous children's toy company dies under mysterious circumstances by means of consuming a fatal cucumber sandwich.

   The poison was Happy Dance Organic 100% Peanut Butter.

   Who the poisoner was is still a mystery.

   This is why Henry Babbington, the heir to the Waffle Ball Fortune, was kidnapped for his own protection while in the midst of taking his Thinking Skills Assessment.

   Henry may wind up in graduate school in Grenada as the result of his thinking skills.

   In a short vignette, deadly assassin Zita Redacto informs Vice President Scrounge (pronounced Skron-jay) of his demise in an airplane crash while sitting in his office with him.

   People die. It is seldom tragic. It just happens.

   #writerscoffeeclub
2. 

   Eggmont 🐘 @eggmont

   2026-10-08

   #WritersCoffeeClub Oct 8: Tell us about someone who supports you on the sidelines.

   I suspect everyone on the sidelines of not really paying attention to the game on the field at all while trying to survive the ever shifting quicksand posed by living in a kakistocracy run by an increasingly unstable madman and a personality cult drawn from the land of misanthropic toys.

   My girlfriend is more into poetry than prose, but she is an excellent writer in her own right and provides useful feedback when she isn't completely overwhelmed by life.

   One of my oldest friends and former business partners lives for global political, strategic, and economic analysis.

   Many of my posts here about AI and the antics of Der Drumpfsterfeuer and the sycophantic sociopathic sadistic criminal carnival clown circus recruited straight out of Central Casting to waylay democracy to empty pockets and extract gold fillings to glue in the tiny not yet bedazzled spots on the walls of the Offal Orifice are in answer to her questions and observations about global politics and whether the latest YouTube video of Stephen Miller getting flattened by a steamroller is wishcasting AI slop.

   Another friend is quite interested in some of the technological innovations I experiment with in my writing and in real life. He is a former consulting client and has just agreed to do some alpha 0.x testing on his Windows box to test Godot game engine cross-platform compatibility as I learn how to develop a cozy computer game on my Linux platform.

   One of my regular readers is in the midst of a year-long journey to retirement from a very politically fraught position as a college system president and is preoccupied with dodging the slings and arrows of outrageous Magastanis to exit stage left with his hide and pension intact.

   As a rule I write very silly things and few can be expected to take them seriously until I publish a novel and gloat about it from a beach somewhere.

   I will not write a revolution. Don't ask.

   #writerscoffeeclub
3. 

   Eggmont 🐘 @[email protected]

   2026-10-07

   #WritersCoffeeClub Oct 7: Does your editing process tend towards addition or reduction?

   There's a process? Nobody told me.

   Some people assume I know everything. However, there is a significant difference between knowing everything and almost knowing everything as demonstrated every day by AI.

   I had absolutely no idea this stuff was supposed to be processed. I thought that was the reader’s remit.

   Editing is mechanical requiring precision torque wrenches, micrometers, really big hammers, and quite a bit of colorful language.

   It is usually a reductive process involving streamlining and cutting a large hole in the sheet metal of the bonnet to provide more air to the supercharger.

   Sometimes editing uncovers the need for revisions to add four-point harnesses, along with fire suppression systems, and a nitrous oxide hose and mask to sedate squeamish passengers.

   Whether the process is additive, reductive, multiplicative, or raised to a ridiculous power is dictated very much by whimsy rather than the kind of universal hard-and-fast rules required by bodice rippers and the like.

   If a piece has gotten too fat I cut out the pizza. If its ribs and ulterior motives are showing I feed it a whole Marie Antoinette seven-layer cake with oodles of ice cream, chocolate sauce, and flaming brandy.

   Editing is a bit like baking. It looks done. It smells done. Then you pull it out of the oven and stick a toothpick in it and the toothpick comes out all gummed up with flying monkeys and angry pixies.

   You suddenly realize you weren't editing at all. You were preparing to admit Devil's Food Defeat by dashing over to the neighborhood bakery to pick up a discount abandoned 82nd birthday cake for someone named Millicent at the last grim minute before the party.

   Writing fiction is an art. Not a science.

   Except science fiction involving extrapolating real science into plausible pseudo-science without recourse to magic wands, eye-of-newt, or lightning bolts.

   There’s a process? Go figure.

   #writerscoffeeclub
4. 

   Eggmont 🐘 @[email protected]

   2026-10-07

   The Associated Press Shade Casting Award of the week for using Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders photo on this thumbnail on the Internet. Somebody got free beer.

   https://apnews.com/article/welfare-queen-medicaid-arkansas-huckabee-sanders-c458e5fb258ecc36aa635e13890473a0

   #USpolitics

   #uspolitics
5. 

   Eggmont 🐘 @eggmont

   2026-10-07

   #WritersCoffeeClub Oct 6: What might an inattentive reader miss in your work?

   The serious subtext and research behind the humor.

   "The Wine and Cheese Pirates" is a romp, but it also explains the economics of grey markets in the presence of unreasonable tariffs.

   There are unintended consequences when one chooses to implement economics that went out of favor in the 1800s with good reason.

   If one irrationally sets tariffs too high it creates an incentive for smuggling otherwise legal goods to profit on the arbitrary profit margin created by the tariff.

   I would be astounded if this isn't going on all over the world right now. The inherent danger is that once the grey market logistics are in place it becomes easy to use off the books supply chains to ship black market goods, as well. That too is probably happening right now.

   In "The Adventures of [Unfortunate Panda-Face] Wilson in the First Dimension**" I look into the differences between logographic symbolic languages and alphabetic languages using Emojuese, a language consisting of symbols with culturally agreed upon idiomatic meanings, Emojis, and Angstlish as it was spoken before the advent of the cerebral cortex InnerNet allowing people to communicate directly in most cases without text or vocal intermediation.

   This of course results in a pidgin language that attempts to combine both languages in ways that often impeded communication.

   The difference in the level of terror associated with Emojuese:🗡️ 🥷 ❔[Dagger][Ninja][Question Mark] and the alphabetic Angstlish: "Nobody Knows, Inc., LLC of the Isle of Man" is orders of magnitude greater for Emojuese users in part because rather than being spoken or written the symbols just appear inside their heads.

   There is a lot of comparative linguistics going on in the background that has little to do with the plot, but is there just because I find it interesting.

   The clown car has a lot of very sophisticated moving parts under the hood in most of my writing.

   #writerscoffeeclub