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  • cstross@wandering.shopundefined

    #WritersCoffeeClub 11th Dec 2025. - How do you keep track of plots and subplots?

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    cstross@wandering.shopundefined
    #WritersCoffeeClub 11th Dec 2025. - How do you keep track of plots and subplots?Mostly by writing in @scrivenerapp these days (since 2008) which makes it ridiculously easy to edit individual scenes in a subplot as a continuous scrolling text—and to resequence scenes and edit the deep structure of a book.Seriously, Scrivener is as revolutionary a tool for writing books as the first word processors were for writing any kind of unstructured document.
  • cstross@wandering.shopundefined

    #WritersCoffeeClub Dec 2: What do you dislike as reader and thus avoid in your own work?

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    oddhack@mstdn.socialundefined
    @cstross Poul Anderson was pretty good about astrogeology issues, especially given his timeframe.Re "You can keep a starship crew healthy and sane indefinitely using a life support system running on blue-green algae, tilapia, and maybe the odd soy bean plant", I wonder if a natural limiter on fascist space programs will be the lack of Manly Beef and Coffee.
  • cstross@wandering.shopundefined

    #WritersCoffeeClub Nov 29. What do you need to simplify in your work?

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    cstross@wandering.shopundefined
    #WritersCoffeeClub Nov 29. What do you need to simplify in your work?Looks blankly at camera: why would I *WANT* to simplify my work?!?("Accessibility" is not "simplicity". There are things I can do to make any given work more accessible, and I usually try to do them in edit/redraft: but simplicity itself is boring, and I abhor it.)
  • cstross@wandering.shopundefined

    #WritersCoffeeClub 25 NovWhat are some tips you can share to avoid 'clunky' phrasing?

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    cstross@wandering.shopundefined
    #WritersCoffeeClub 25 NovWhat are some tips you can share to avoid 'clunky' phrasing?Everybody's suggesting reading your work aloud, but I disagree: prose fiction should not focus on replicating speech, but on conveying meaning. It's a separate art form from the spoken word and should be treated as such. Splitting long sentences so that they're readable aloud is a shibboleth of modern editorial fashion that focuses on accessibility and market share, meeting the needs of "young adult" readers.
  • patcharcana@furry.engineerundefined

    #WritersCoffeeClub for November 21:

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    patcharcana@furry.engineerundefined
    #WritersCoffeeClub for November 21:What are some preconceptions about writers you'd like to see challenged?There's a riptide in the public that we're largely obsolete, and that even if we weren't, we're complaining about not getting paid enough to "waste time".I'd like those to go away.
  • cstross@wandering.shopundefined

    #WritersCoffeeClub 11/21.

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    henryk@chaos.socialundefined
    @cstross I mean, that's quite obvious: knowing how to do hello world in basic really doesn't qualify you to be a software engineer at Airbus.Boeing on the other hand ...
  • youseeatortoise@wandering.shopundefined

    #writersCoffeeClub 11/20: How did you find your writerly voice?

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    youseeatortoise@wandering.shopundefined
    #writersCoffeeClub 11/20: How did you find your writerly voice?Scavenged from under a rock in a swamp and purchased from the entity that lurks there for the cost of three teeth (not mine) and five years of my life.
  • cstross@wandering.shopundefined

    #WritersCoffeeClub 17 Nov. What role does race play in your work?

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    cstross@wandering.shopundefined
    #WritersCoffeeClub 17 Nov. What role does race play in your work?The concept of "race" is a vile 19th century shibboleth invented to support colonialism and to justify so-called "scientific racism". Human races are far less distinct than cultivars of broccoli or breeds of dog: we're all one hominin species.So I generally only use it in my fiction as a handy tag for "the character talking about this shit is misguided and/or has an evil agenda".
  • cstross@wandering.shopundefined

    #WritersCoffeeClub Nov 16, How much work goes into naming your characters?

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    cstross@wandering.shopundefined
    #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.)
  • cstross@wandering.shopundefined

    #WritersCoffeeClub Nov 13: Name the oldest work to have inspired you

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    cstross@wandering.shopundefined
    #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.
  • cstross@wandering.shopundefined

    #WritersCoffeeClub Nov 12th.

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    cppguy@infosec.spaceundefined
    @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.
  • emmacox@writing.exchangeundefined

    #WritersCoffeeClub Motivation

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    emmacox@writing.exchangeundefined
    #WritersCoffeeClub MotivationThis question has come at a good time because a lovely writer friend of mine is struggling to get back into writing after a long absence and mental health problems are heightening the issue. I’ve given them suggestions to rekindle their writing practice. But if you have any suggestions, please share them.
  • cstross@wandering.shopundefined

    #writersCoffeeClub 4 Nov 'What's the funniest thing you've ever written?'

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    cstross@wandering.shopundefined
    #writersCoffeeClub 4 Nov 'What's the funniest thing you've ever written?'The dinner party in "The Nightmare Stacks". Alex, a CS nerd (turned vampire) is visiting his very conventional middle-class parents: he takes his new girlfriend Cassie (an elven spy who is helping to pave the way for an invasion) on the back of his borrowed ... conveyance. Then they discover his sister has brought her girlfriend too, and the misconceptions start to spiral ...
  • cstross@wandering.shopundefined

    #WritersCoffeeClub Oct 28 - Have you ever edited another's work?

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    cstross@wandering.shopundefined
    #WritersCoffeeClub Oct 28 - Have you ever edited another's work? Was it harder than editing your own? Not in an editorial role, only when working as a collaborator on a multi-author text. In which case it feels like rewriting/redrafting.
  • cstross@wandering.shopundefined

    #WritersCoffeeClub 26. How culturally diverse do your casts tend to be?

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    cstross@wandering.shopundefined
    #WritersCoffeeClubFootnote: the space opera duology I'm currently writing is set so far in the future that humanity has speciated, and there's been a LOT of time for deliberate genetic modification.One consequence is that non-UV catalyzed Vitamin D synthesis is normal: everyone is dark, for UV protection. (Also, many hominins have a vacuum-exposure reflex that opens the ductus arteriosis and bypasses the lungs, maintaining blood oxygen levels for a few minutes—time to get to safety.)
  • cstross@wandering.shopundefined

    #WritersCoffeeClub Oct 25 - Does 'destiny' have a role in modern fiction?

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    cstross@wandering.shopundefined
    #WritersCoffeeClub Footnote: "Destiny" tends to show up more in fantasy than SF. On my to-do list is a hard-SF Chosen One narrative—our protag knows from an early age they're not like the other kids in the hive. Only as they near adulthood do they learn that they're a member of a rival eusocial hominin subspecies, and they've been created to infiltrate a neighbouring hive and kill and replace the queen ... Like, "Hellstrom's Hive" meets this whackiness in ants: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09425-w
  • cstross@wandering.shopundefined

    #WritersCoffeeClub Oct 22: What inspiration have you taken from historical figures or events?

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    cstross@wandering.shopundefined
    #WritersCoffeeClub Oct 22: What inspiration have you taken from historical figures or events?Tons! As Ken Macleod observed, "history is the SF author's secret weapon".I'm currently grappling with a space opera where the adversary is based on Ignaz Trebitsch-Lincoln, only I'm having to tone him down a bit to make him more plausible!https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Ignaz_Trebitsch_Lincoln
  • cstross@wandering.shopundefined

    #WritersCoffeeClub Oct 20 - What role does death (or undeath!) play in your work?

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    cstross@wandering.shopundefined
    #WritersCoffeeClub Oct 20 - What role does death (or undeath!) play in your work?I write genre fiction and it is *surprisingly hard* to write a novel in which nobody dies; death tends to be trivialized or used to advance the plot and seldom traumatizes the survivors.To which I say, to hell with that!(Current WIP massacres with gleeful abandon, but it's SF set in a future with lossy mind uploading and replay, so they've effectively got mechanised reincarnation. Societal whackiness ensues.)
  • cstross@wandering.shopundefined

    #writerscoffeeclub Oct 16. How much does your working vocabulary change between works?

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    cstross@wandering.shopundefined
    #writerscoffeeclub Oct 16. How much does your working vocabulary change between works? One of my editors once observed, "every SF or fantasy author redefines the English language from scratch in every novel". It's about more than just calling a rabbit a smeerp: we assign new meanings to existing vocabulary.(The working language may be standardized within a series, but between stand-alones and series works I have to purge my autocorrect and spelling checker dictionaries!)
  • cstross@wandering.shopundefined

    #writersCoffeeClub 10/7: Have you ever gone away somewhere special expressly to write?'nMy office!

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    cstross@wandering.shopundefined
    #writersCoffeeClub 10/7: Have you ever gone away somewhere special expressly to write?My office! With the door shut.(I actually *can't* write when I'm away from home; it feels like I'm wasting the opportunity to enrich myself through travel.)

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