#boostingissharing — Public Fediverse posts

#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2026.08.22 — Have you ever used a sensitivity reader? How did it go?

Not per se, but I did have a beta reader balk at a woman being crass and too sexual. Reverse those gender roles and I think he would have given the MC a pass. Knew I was on the right path then and there, and not because it was an explicitly feminist novel, either.

I expect my stories to challenge readers. What I care about is not whether the story is insensitive but whether I got cultural details wrong. Writing SF and fantasy goes a long way to avoiding such issues, but gender is still gender, and surprisingly people expect current gender roles, or those they grew up with, to stay stable in the future, in other cultures, or on other worlds. I try to write about the issues that interest me subtly, not necessarily to be sensitive to biases people have.

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#WordWeavers 2026.08.22 — Which character would make the worst roommate?

It isn't the primary antagonist who would make the worst roommate, as one might expect. Bolt (the MC) and Boss Mead spend a chapter-worthy night at his place, watched by his bodyguards (and take that as you will), though she hates his guts. That doesn't mean it wasn't fun, or wouldn't be fun if more permanent. A dodecade ago, she tried to make that arrangement, but failed for inexperience.

Actually, it is Pigeon the Pilferer who wins the prize as worst. Not only does the punk gangster have a bad attitude and a chip on his shoulder, that shoulder (and the rest of him) smells. Bromhidrosis, as diagnosed by another SC. It is a pretty harsh judgement when you consider their world is very hot and nothing like A/C exists. Everybody sweats. Every body has a unique smell, and I don't mean perfume. Worse, Pigeon prefers men—not that Bolt cares what preferences a person has. It seems like a waste to her, though. Another reason she wouldn't have him as a roommate.

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#ScribesAndMakers »2026.08.22 — Fantasy stories are frequently inspired by medieval societies. Why do you think people are fascinated by that time period?

My opinion? Literary inertia. Plenty of classics written in the English language going back to middle English and during the democratization of the novel ( Don Quixote thru Ivanhoe) have made it continually familiar, studied, and analyzed as literature. Then the milieu got cemented into the modern literary consciousness with works like Tolkien's and C.S. Lewis'. A medieval milieu offers simplicity that strips away modernity combined with the romance of lawless power and unfathomable evil; it makes for a compelling genre. It is fun. Its familiarity means there are so many acceptable tropes that it becomes easy to write. Authors are all but guaranteed readers will understand their settings and accept the rules they might otherwise balk at without critical thought or resistance.

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#PennedPossibilities 1106 2/2: SC POV: When was a time where you had to make an impossible choice.

Does it change anything that Blue is a man?

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#PennedPossibilities 1106 1/2: SC POV: When was a time where you had to make an impossible choice.

Still making that choice. On what was originally a lark, nothing serious just me stretching my wings, I have been hired to perform an unfathomably important job my gender is not usually allowed, protecting the most important woman in the world—thanks to my friend Bolt teaching me an unfathomably difficult skill she actually taught herself. This, disastrously, means I'm in a position where I have to choose between a job people would kill to even have a chance to compete for—let alone be chosen for!—and raising a family, something I was brought up always wanting to do, training to do, and always thinking I would do, such that it's how I think of myself.

I can't do both.

Continued…

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RE: https://eldritch.cafe/@sfwrtr/117130116756058541

#ScribesAndMakers »2026.08.21 — Link to or summarize yesterday's poll and reveal the answer.

The telepath spy led almost to the end and was the correct choice; she never appeared in a story. The DJ was the most disbelieved, but I wrote four novelettes and one short-story about her. She lost the ability to properly fear for her life if other lives were at stake. So, yes, essentially suicidal. Except for in her last story, she gets mauled worse in each story whilst saving thousands anonymously. Most readers recognized my prizefighter character; thanks for paying attention to my posts, y'all! The prizefighter fooled almost no one.

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#WordWeavers 2026.08.21 — What's a trope you enjoy writing, even if it's unpopular?

A woman or girl in an unlikely, normally male, or powerful role as a protagonist. Plenty of people think it hackneyed. Until people won't look at the role as unlikely, normally male, or too powerful for a female, I'm writing stories with that trope.

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#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2026.08.21 — What's a mistake you see a lot of writers make when writing about people with your lived experience?

Maybe more for screenwriters than for print writers: No. Emphatically. You can't walk up to a random terminal/computer to hack into a computer system or gain entry to a facility, especially inside a government agency or reasonably competent company. There's guards, keycards, biometrics, expiring passwords, multfactor authentication, surrendering your cellphone, usb keys, and laptops, and jumping through lotso other hoops, as well as trying to get information stored in isolated machines and isolated networks inside secured computer rooms. Heck, the data and computers may be off-site in a five+ 9s data center. You ain't dropping a bot. You're either going to be working in IT for an inside job, doing social engineering, or resort to wares and be working externally looking to take advantage of stupid or highly technical vulnerabilities anywhere on the net. You will almost never be able to hack a specific target, and if that's your goal, it may take months. You may have to develop software. The job is HARD and requires experience and expertise. Don't base a story on this working easily or quickly. Even decades ago when I got into systems as a student and security was rudimentary, it wasn't easy. Access through vulnerabilities happens mostly through social engineering, laziness or overwork of key personnel, or through undiscovered equipment issues in routers and other external network connections. Try lampshading these factors and your story will seem more believable.

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#PennedPossibilities 1105: What secret does one of your characters keep that is dangerous to them? Does anyone else know about it?

There are two characters with secrets much more dangerous to them than Bolt's secret is to her. However—because spoilers are, well… you know, right?—like @floofpaldi said…

I’ll go with the safe option for this answer.

The MC's secret is known to the reader as it is in the title: Reluctant Courier (for the Mob). "Reluctant" has multiple meanings in this context, but what matters is that when Bolt's street photography gets discovered, celebrity, plenty of coin, and new friends follow, as does partial relief from an apathy that has left her having blacked out parts of her life. Being a mob courier has its moments—few of them, mostly scary. While she worries discovery will drive away her new friends, and will likely draw the attention of the constabulary, she's also afraid what the mob will do to her friends—whom she's grown to feel are more important than her own blackmailed life.

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#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2026.08.20 — How easy is it for you to write characters outside of your age?

Whew! Thank goodness you didn't ask about writing characters my age. I haven't! Note that I write in 1st person with the protagonist as the narrator.

It's all about believability.

The youngest I've written was 7. The oldest was millennia old. Most are late teens early twenties. None are particularly difficult. Were they difficult, it wouldn't have been fun and I'd not have done it.

Narrating is a matter of voice and vocabulary, presenting experience and maturity levels appropriate for the character and their age, little more. I'm very proud of my 7 year old narrator, her constrained vocabulary, how she differentiates reality, magic, and "in-pretend," and what in the end really pisses her off. As for the ancient woman, she has an average person's memory and knows full well she can't remember everything about her life. She's forgotten children she has given birth to and raised. She leaves diaries hidden—time capsules, really—so her artificial recollection can survive the fall of civilizations, and has. I get to mix timeless experience and knowledge with the exuberance of a 24-year-old who always looks 24 and has no compunction about taking advantage of being "young" and attractive to men. Oh, right: she's an antagonist in many stories. Pretty fun to write.

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#WordWeavers 2026.08.20 — If your story had a tagline, what would it be?

Inklings

Befriending animals never made a girl this dangerous.

This fox bat image (not my artwork) is roughly what the Red Dragon that Wintereyes befriends looks like. Gotta be a mammal to catch a cold and sneeze fire, right? I'd like something like her on the cover.

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#ScribesAndMakers »2026.08.19 — If paper books stopped being produced, how much would you miss them?

I would be sad, but in a big way, I'd also be relieved. Ebooks don't take up space in book shelves and aren't covered in dust, and can be magnified for old eyes to read, unlike my books. I know we have to fix a system where we don't really own all our eBooks and eMusic, but it's not a total failure. I have ePub saved in the cloud and on backups. I hope this ridiculousness will be fixed, and many of the indies I've encountered here on Mastodon are making inroads to making this more universally true. When it comes to permanence, nothing really is forever. I've books back to the 1800s that are yellowed (a Lesser Key of Solomon) but smell great, and the late 1990s that are crumbling. I can't read floppies and some CDs are flaking. Coffee table books I'll miss, more. But. It's nice seeing those on a big OLED screen…

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#ScribesAndMakers »2026.08.20 — Create a poll describing two characters that feature in your stories and one who doesn't. Ask people to guess the one that isn't in your work.

One of these three characters IS NOT in my stories.

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#WordWeavers 2026.08.19 — Which character has changed the most since your first draft?

I write stories and create characters iteratively, which is to say I write, discover stuff, go back and update what I wrote to foreshadow or make what I discovered had happened happen, then continue forward. (Look up "pantser.") For me, composition of a story becomes a continuous succession of first drafts and second drafts, etc., heading for a known ending for the story. I can honestly say, though I haven't completed the novel yet, all my characters have changed through successive "drafts." The one who changed the most is a supporting character, Shugh, short for Steamed Milk and Sugar. When I started writing, I didn't even know his name, let alone why he had it. He wasn't planned to be a trans woman. Going through the numbers of what I discovered gives away much of the plot, the dangers the MC faces, and how they resolve—so I won't. Shugh goes through more unplanned changes than any other character, including the MC, especially considering he was practically a McGuffin when I started writing. He certainly didn't exist in the precursor story or the follow-on sequel.

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#PennedPossibilities 1104: Where has your MC lived the longest? What kept them there for so long?

Bolt lived in a hot very humid place tentatively called Cloud City (because of condensing humidity). The locale is roughly like the rocky forested coast off of Oregon. Day angels make their homes there in natural seaside groves of Home trees, which very much resemble Ficus benjamina trees the size of city blocks, as well as in cave-like neighborhood grottos bored centuries ago into the cliffside rock. She lived there until almost 18, at which time she ran away having vandalized a guild office and rolled a van down a hill. She lived there 17 years because that's where she was born and where she grew up with her family (her mother, uncle, and baby brother). She has since lived in Home City, where the WIP starts with her about to turn 30 (actually a very insignificant number in a dodecimal numbering system). Which means she's been languishing in Home City a dozen years, which is a very significant number because it's a been dodecade since she got blackmailed and lost her freedom.

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#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2026.08.19 — How do you write characters with expertise outside your own?

I avoid making the expertise important beyond verisimilitude! When not writing in the voice of the narrator, I learn enough about the essentials that I can present the minimum to be convincing. When it's the narrator, they note what they're talking about is technical and point out they are simplifying. They may talk about quantum entanglement, but they ain't explaining it. Whenever possible, I bring in experts, like your car mechanic who never explains the theory of spark advance or fuel injection, but may mention having done the work and why. I keep in mind that fiction is not a textbook for a class in an expertise. I am not there to teach the reader a profession, or to convince them as an author of my depth. I always have a message, but I understand I'm primarily there to entertain the reader. Depending on the genre, how much I need to present may vary but, from personal experience, I'm into action or the feels (aka drama), not the lectures. I hope my reader is the same.

Example: In one story, an SC can create a quantum blackhole and uses in the narrative as a missile. I don't explain the theory, but I do show a pretty ionospheric blast aurora.

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RE: https://masto.deoan.org/@neurovagrant/117114138846395799

There's a frisson between AI writing together with AI summary, and earlier generations' using Cliff notes, re the quoted meme. Makes me feel autobiographical. Don't know how I feel about this as I didn't back then and wouldn't now. Mama didn't necessarily raise me right; I just noted the consequences of her mistakes. Me, I took the minimum English lit in HS, read the couple of books (Ivanhoe & Finagan's Wake), and got my bad grade. C- English student, except my SF lit class that I got an A in, because, reasons, duh. (Prenatal SF author.) Didn't start writing seriously until senior in HS when I wrote my first novella, and then only SF. By 1st year in college, I was helping engineering and science nerds do essays—as I slowly turned into a troll, which then was a science nerd who was also a liberal arts student. (North and South campus denizen at UCLA for any alumnae reading this.) Folklore and art history is 100% essay tests, and don't discount the term papers (aka a junior thesis.) I did the reading in any case, and the writing assigned. Did I ever confess I was a square who followed the rules? This meme confuses me. Writing is fun!

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Regardless of whether you are pro-AI or anti-AI, the quoted post is worth a read, maybe giving you a view into the other side of the argument. Please read it. Honor their bravery. I praise them for making a living at this.

I feel sorry for this former journalist, but I am not replying directly to the post because I'll be classified as a hater, based on the article. Better to be flamed as a coward for not replying; I expect to be blocked, so I'm including a link (https://elizabethtai.com/2026/08/19/life-as-a-techwriter-in-the-ai-age/) because you shouldn't be. Yes, I'm one of the "those" fiction writers (mimes holding their nose in a snooty fashion) for whom learning AI to create continuous streams of content isn't theoretically yet absolutely necessary, according to the author, "to keep from being left behind." The post neither answers the "why" they think their unassisted writing (i.e., not AI generated writing) will get them "left behind" nor what it is about the content they are creating that it is better than what their unassisted work would be. It would have been instructive for making their argument.

Yes. When I find a search is too complex to surface meaningful references, I'll resort to AI—but I'll read all the output links and the generated answer to search and verify what was presented, before abstracting what I need from what the AI generates. I'm not against AI tools to assist in editing and revision, unless the tools are adding content or mangling my words. Surfacing grammar issues is great, unless the tool can't understand my style, or the nuances of the words I choose, or doesn't understand jargon, context (like the difference between sheer and shear), colloquialisms, dialect, and dialogue (for example). Data noise is never helpful. I don't want my work dumbed down or made average and standard—what others would write, or worse, what an AI would validate. I certainly don't want a generated probabilistic facsimile of what I might write. I wonder if the post I quoted was AI assisted in a major or minor way. The writing seems… average.

That said, if the author believes they are being "left behind," which is always valid, I wonder if it is sheer generated quantity of completed content? My question becomes then, compared to their earlier work, is what they are being generated objectively better or simply more? What have they learned about the craft of writing and having an appealing voice? About being clear? About making a good argument? About coming up with a new idea? Not about how they've learned to make their AI do their work for them—the actual composing, you know, the fun part of writing—only to find themselves being relegated to being an editor for a team of writers that are not actually writing what they would have written given the time, only producing a facsimile.

P.S. Please don't hound the referenced post's author. They seem to know that many object to how they write, and with what tools. That's understood. I am convinced they honestly are trying to make a case for writing with AI and to justify their means to an end.

And.

Remember.

They do sound like they are making a living doing it.

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#PennedPossibilities 1103: Have you ever had a plot idea that you were excited to write but had to scrap because it just didn’t work?

That I mulled around in my head and decided it didn't work? Yes.

That I didn't write down and subsequently lost? Yes. 😭

That I went ahead and pantsed a chapter or two before realizing it didn't work? Yes. Enough times to be traumatized.

That I didn't save and deleted the file? NO! I have a scraps folder for separate works and a scraps repository in each project for paragraphs and chapters that didn't work. 😁

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#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2026.08.18 — What are your limits for writing outside your lived experience? (race, nation, gender, etc.)

My limits? Can I do this and be believable? That is, not throw somebody from the story by my ignorance?

I don't write mainstream fiction or fiction that is set in our society. I'm not mainstream. I have not lived a mainstream life. Mainstream people bore me. This doesn't mean I have no lived experience; I bring it in bushels to my stories. I've worked. I've traveled to and lived in other countries. I studied non-western societies, their art, music, and theatre, as well as folklore and mythology. A trans man lived with us when I grew up. I have gay and lesbian relatives. My ultra-feminist mother was a bailbondswoman. Discovering the true patriarchal nature of society when I was old enough to understand shocked me. I disbelieved. I disbelieve; I have no religion, but I've studied it intensely. The mass fantasy fascinates me. Oh, the point about bailbonds? I grew knowing criminals. Called some uncle (an honorific a child uses.)

I don't write mystery, historical, or military for reasons of verisimilitude. I don't think I can write what most people consider normal society. I write SF and fantasy because, to use a reference that's outdated and dates me too boot, I control the horizontal, I control the vertical. Race I sidestep usually by never describing certain details and never making it part of the story, except when I do. Rather than nations, I'll cite language: I rarely use other than English, and then advisedly, consulting. Gender? I write about that all the time. I have gender and preferences though I never state them of myself, and other's conceptions of gender fascinate me. I wish they'd be more happy about theirs, and I write about that, too.

I have an SFF story based on my study of shamanism in Europe and the Americas. The woman is Native American and so far that's stifled me, but I'm thinking that she's also been assimilated, knows her roots from reading, soul travel from her mother, but was never raised in-culture, parents divorced. That I can write. With enough respect not to anger any but appropriationist trolls. Linked find a not very refined crack at a start for that story, a bit of a proof of concept, too concise needing fleshing out because I wrote it in 2023 to fit in a toot with 7 characters to spare!

https://eldritch.cafe/@sfwrtr/111359427361655491

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#WordWeavers 2026.08.17 — Which scene made you laugh while writing it?`

There are plenty of snide and droll things that my narrators have thought or said, which are funny or outrageous when I read them, and likely made me laugh writing them. Can't say I remember for sure. But if I'm allowed put on my essayist hat for a moment, I used the same part of my brain I'd use to write the devil-girl's thoughts to write this reply to one of my anti-AI posts. I definitely was laughing writing it. English is such a great language to write insult in. Enjoy!

I forgot to add that if you are an #AI writer using #genAI to create your drafts, you've ceased doing the fun part, creating fictional whimsical worlds and captivating people other people wish to know, or synthesizing original ideas and bringing your original world-changing thought to readers. You're forfeiting being admired for your mind or your argument, instead you're bringing to others random fossilized thought scrounged from average ideas thrown together in an insipid soup of meaningless tokens masquerading as words mimicking thought. You've fed your ego a sugary breakfast cereal that's really only sawdust. You are sad.

—https://eldritch.cafe/@sfwrtr/117117740491840657

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My morning coffee with style and oat.

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I forgot to add that if you are an #AI writer using #genAI to create your drafts, you've ceased doing the fun part, creating fictional whimsical worlds and captivating people other people wish to know, or synthesizing original ideas and bringing your original world-changing thought to readers. You're forfeiting being admired for your mind or your argument, instead you're bringing to others random fossilized thought scrounged from average ideas thrown together in a soup of meaningless tokens masquerading as words mimicking thought. You've fed your ego a sugary breakfast cereal that's really only sawdust. You are sad.

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Good morning sunshine!

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If you write with #AI, you are accepting autocomplete text that a frequency-of-use search generated by a matching a machine-parsed request you made. You've turned yourself into an editor and a proofreader, the shit-jobs that go with writing; you aren't an author. Full stop. You don't learn more about the nuance of language by picking your words, you don't improve your style or delivery to talk more clearly or entertainingly to your reader, you don't grow. You atrophy. You deliver the lowest mean average of all the people's writing (as well as their opinions, misinformation, and bigotry) that the AI tool was trained† upon, and, increasingly, the average of #genAI text delivered by AI users the AI tool is also trained upon.

Guess what? Goes for all AI augmented professions where users abdicate using their creativity and experience to easily create mediocre content, choosing instead to become agents of quality control. Read this great article for a good synthesis of what I've been saying.

https://hackernoon.com/the-great-forgetting-how-ai-is-quietly-erasing-the-human-archiveand-what-comes-after

=.=.=.=.=.=
† Stolen is a better choice in context, though a much more loaded term than "trained upon." Many AI tools are trained on scraped data without royalties or asking permission. This includes your work in all likelihood.

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#WordWeavers 2026.08.16 — If one of your characters could ask you a question, what would they ask?

What's that three-eyed metallic orange slab you keep on taking out of your pocket to look at the glowy side?

How do you explain an iPhone to someone from an advanced culture that doesn't have or need electricity?

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#PennedPossibilities 1102: Do you have a strategy for how you approach worldbuilding in your WIP(s)?

I often start with only a vague idea of how the environment works, as predicated by what the prototyped character has to go through to achieve the ending of the story. I then start writing. As background, history, locale, science, characters, society, amusements, education, antagonists, and friends become obvious, I put in whatever is needed, then backfill it to substantiate their existence. After a while I get a world that feels very lived in. The Reluctance Series already had a cognate world defined. I'd accumulated details of the "magic" system I'd need to create, so that series has world-building by revision, also, but it started as a few givens as discussed above.

My world-building is substantially by living the lives of the characters and reporting what I find. I like adventuring.

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#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2026.08.16 — How do you keep a character from becoming unsympathetic?

I don't. I like my characters to fail and do things they realize they shouldn't have. Sets up a mini redemption arc under the scrutiny of the reader, lets characters earn the reader's sympathy. Makes them more like you or I, more real life.

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#PennedPossibilities 1101: What creature or monster would your MC or SC love to keep as an unconventional pet? Why is that?

The only monsters in the Reluctance Series are human. Cats, dogs, chickens, horses, &tc. exist, but so far we've only seen horses and they have tiny cute stegosaur plates on their backs, but are still ridden. Cats? Dogs? [shrugs] No monsters, or unconventional pets, though. The people in these stories don't keep human monsters as pets, either, and attempts at slavery have ended poorly for societies that embraced the idea.

Stepping back to the incomplete Inklings in my Wands Universe, there are "monsters." The Red Dragon looks more like a house sized bat with a very ugly face, but when Wintereyes befriends animals, she makes them more human. Not a pet. She'd never have a pet.

It's interesting to realize my characters don't do the pet thing let alone want one that's unconventional.

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Why we can't remember things from before the age of five or so has been something I speculate about. As an author, I think that as we mature and our facility with language improves to the point that we think symbolically with words (e.g. we talk to ourselves), we simply lose track of our ad hoc likely purely visual indexing of our oldest memories. This article speculates our indexing fades as we age out of infancy, but for those ages where we are learning mavens does that make sense? Interesting article, regardless. Worth a read.

https://scienceblog.com/t-infantile-amnesia-hippocampus-memory-encoding-retrieval

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