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#WritersCoffeeClub September 24: "How do you handle asides?

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  • #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 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
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    #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
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    Ooh I thought of another aspect of letters within fiction. A letter or any other text message is unlike dialog in that it persists to be re-read later, maybe not by the intended recipient, and can be loaded with hidden meanings that you wouldn't expect someone to pick up on or remember accurately if they heard the same words spoken.I used this twice in The Silk Mind, in a letter to the Badger Survey from Doctor Grey, and rather pointed diplomatic letters between him and Celandine.