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#WritersCoffeeClub 1 OctHave you written in an epistolary format

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    #WritersCoffeeClub Nov 16, How much work goes into naming your characters?I'm generally shit at naming characters, although they can serve as useful world-building reference points.Current WIP is set in a crapsack Ruritanian space empire. The noble houses are all named after various species of parasite. (My MCs family is named for the Hippo arse leech, Placobdelloides jaegerskioeldi, which drinks blood from the soft lining of the hippo's rectum and can only mate and spawn there.)
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    #WritersCoffeeClub Nov 13: Name the oldest work to have inspired youAs a kid I read the Odyssey in translation, and binged on for-kids-retellings of Ancient Egyptian mythology—mostly the later dynastic versions (some of the translations were old and hazy on the actual chronology), but with roots going back to c. 3000BCE.Nothing much got written down before then because writing either hadn't been invented or wasn't widely used for purposes other than temple accounting, AIUI.
  • #WritersCoffeeClub Nov 12th.

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    @SteveClough @cstross I write nothing more creative than documentation for the software I produce, but people misunderstand that, too.The experience of people misunderstanding my docs, or simply failing to read them, was one of the things that turned me away from evangelicalism. (I bet you didn't see that coming.) I wasn't using parables to hint at ineffable spiritual truths in the face of religious persecution: I was just explaining how software worked, how to see its current state, and how to configure and maintain systems. People who were paid to read and understand this material would not or could not do so: their repeated questions made it obvious. Within a very few years, instead of reading TFM, people developed folk stories of commands they could type that usually did something that could be mistaken for success. They veered constantly off-course, and I kept having to drag them back. They consulted each other, rather than the docs, and developed their own mythology about how the software worked. They intuitively felt they knew the software better than I did, because my approach to problem-solving was careful and methodical but they knew a golden shortcut.If concrete, human-level explanations, written out literally, landed so badly, there's no chance that people will have remembered the figurative and unfathomable teachings of Jesus seventy years after his death, written them down accurately and fully, and built from them a useful picture of worlds seen and unseen and the will of God. I'm sorry; it just doesn't ring true.
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    #WritersCoffeeClub Have you ever included real-world disproven science in a work?For sure!I write SF/F and try to make the ideas crunchy. So I probably have written stuff that relied on subsequently-disproven science, *or* used the disproven stuff anyway because I like to play what-if games with the implications of ideas: "yes, but WHAT IF phlogiston theory was true? What would be the implications for stochiometry? Or steam engines and heavier-than-air flight?"