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#WordWeavers 2025.11.18 — What do your MC and SC disagree on?

Lots of SCs, lots of situations (it's a novel), but I'll pick this situation:

The MC (Bolt) tries to be invisible because she's forced to work for the mob, but street photography is her hobby. Through chance and coincidence, to her chagrin, she's discovered. Her work is on the level of Henri Cartier-Bresson. She'd rather crawl back under her rock where it's safe for her. Safer for anyone who knows her.

1. Shugh is a reporter and he convinced her to share pictures of a dramatic event he found her at, which made the front page on three editions. He wants to team up with her for interviews and to take news photos. Bolt's response: Yikes!
2. Night on Fire is a photo editor on their version of The New Yorker and she sees a successful future for them both, already buying earlier photos. Looking at some of these, she proposes a beefcake calendar to someone else. Bolt's response: Yikes!
3. Blue is a guy she pals around with occasionally and, well, you know. He sees a photo taken of him at the event Shugh met her that Blue was policing. It makes him look masculine, handsome (okay gorgeous and hunky), and super attractive in his praetorian uniform, what little he's wearing. He likes the calendar idea. Bolt's response: Yikes!
4. Director Rain Days sort of an antagonist, but not in this part of the story arc. It's her praetorian the MC took a photo of. It was to her that Night on Fire proposed the calendar. Think of the project as a hot fireman calendar photoshoot if that works better for you. The Director likes the idea, a lot, thinking it helps with PR—and she wants a copy. She insists that Bolt take a picture of her, too. Bolt's response: Yikes!

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https://www.ft.com/content/15a6d3b9-81c0-46c6-a4b7-f881b5eeadad

Why Maria - Alia's (the main character in "A New Faith") partner - could become a world-famous creator of immersive concerts.

Read the chapter about Maria's creation here -https://tinjar.ghost.io/anf/a-new-faith-part-3-chapter-32/

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#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2025.11.17 —What rôle does race play in your work?

The people in my current work are all very human, but like belief and concepts like the supernatural, things like discrimination based on something as fuzzy as race or skin color would be nonsensical to them. That doesn't mean discrimination and prejudice don't exist. They are human, as I said. These evils split down other lines. I do have a lot of fun playing with the reader's preconceptions around skin color though. Thorn Rose† is black as tar and Streak is chalk white (literally), and are lovers, but when colors like blue and green are common, also, it does scramble one's preconceptions! This is what we call allegory.

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† Should I mention that Thorn is a daemon and Streak is a day angel?

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It's time for my annual post bemoaning the fact that I wish Becky Chambers was on the fediverse
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#WordWeavers 2025.11.17 — How athletic are your characters?

The simple answer is as athletic as they need be. They range from couch potatoes to athletes in the current story, and the reluctance series. Since athleticism has become important in my own life, synergistically with developing my stories, I like to include it.

Bolt, in the current story, was a "high school" athlete and Coach's favorite headache because she was a typical vain jock, getting into trouble and pursing the opposite sex. She's a day angel, so she excelled in flying fast and air gymnastics (often with boys). Fast forward to her current life, she still trains her wings for strength, endurance, and flexiblity and flies wicked fast (she's a courier for the mob). Since she uses her gymnastic athleticism when interacting with the opposite sex, she even trains the men in her life. In one such case, her training lets him land an elite job in what could loosely be called the military. Flying and keeping all her friends in shape is important to her, perhaps (though she wouldn't analyze it that way) the most important thing in her life.

I won't start with the prizefighter character…

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#WordWeavers 2025.11.16 — If your antagonist(s) magically appeared in your home, would you two get along?

Boss Mead? The crime boss can distort reality to conform to his will using only his words in the manner that Trump does and is plenty more erudite. I'm running.

Pigeon the Pilfer? A punk gangster with really bad BO appears in your living room. What do you do?

Rainy Days? She's very nice (despite looking rather strange). Most everyone would accepting having tea with her and sitting down for conversation. Most people would get along famously with her if she were interested in knowing them. However, since I know her, and though she's the most reasonable, interesting, and funny person you might ever meet, she's an absolute ruler. You DO NOT want to get mixed up with one of those. "I've got an appointment, bye!"

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#ScribesAndMakers 2025.11.14 — If you could hang one of your pictures anywhere in the world, where would you hang it?

While I do think my fine art photography is rather unique and a noteworthy, I've never had the ego nor the confidence to even imagine it being in a museum or on public display. I've done candid ambient light candid wedding and children's party photography, and I do hope some of it is treasured.

My writing, however… I am hoping some of it might list for the Otherwise Award.

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#WordWeavers 2025.11.14 — Does your SC have any insecurities?

Arrow Flies True has plenty of insecurities. He's Bolt's riding partner—she's the MC—and is known to her as Blue. Like Bolt, he's a day angel with feathered wings a perfect shade of medium blue, almost like the sea. He works hard on his body and appearance, but it's the sweet spot between handsome and intimidating that worries him. He deals with women constantly and, because of his proficiency doing that, his life is taking an odd turn. Thanks to Bolt's purely selfishly motivated flight training, his skill flying has landed him a job working for the most powerful woman—strike that, the most powerful person—alive. He's nominally a bodyguard, but praetorians have plenty of other responsibilities, some life and death, that people don't think about. It's not the type of job he can give up to deal with family and children, which he expected to do soon; his future is changing at the speed of sound. With Bolt being recognized for her photography, he's now also going to star in a pinup calendar. Worse, his employer has informed him, as of the previous chapter, that because of how well he deals with people and situations he's now training for a command position in her guard, something that in his world is a rare honor for a man. Can he do it? Part of him wants to quit, to return to being a nobody. Safer being a nobody, not having to conform to the expectations he was neither raised for nor educated to deal with. He's sweating it badly, though you'd never know from his hunky apparently self-assured exterior. And, then, there's his kid sister…

But that's craziness for a possible sequel.

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#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2025.11.14 —How objective or authoritative do you strive for your narration to be?

Think about experiencing an adventure yourself, maybe going on a hike (though you don't do that very much); in the forest you encounter a truck illegally dumping trash. You see big burly guys, so you don't confront them, but you take pictures, think one of them saw you. You run, get lost, end up being found by a park ranger the next day dehydrated and cold with a dead cellphone battery. You get up your courage and call the police.

Tell that story in 1st person.

Is what you say about hiking, forestry, illegal dumping, surviving overnight without the proper equipment, etc. authoritative? Is what you say about the men you can identify objective? How much is it opinion and how much is prejudice?

I strive for my narration, which is solidly only in the protagonist's 1st person point-of-view, to be authentic to that character. It means they may not understand anything and still run their mouth off about it, doing that while thinking they are being objective, are explaining facts, and making correct deductions. Furthermore, things that make them look bad, or contradict their narrative they might omit without malice. In fairness to the reader and the story, I do allow the narrator's reporting to contradict earlier information. That's especially easy when the protagonist doesn't understand things and their continuing observations don't match the reality the reader understands.

In my current wip, the narrator (Bolt) is confessional, and doesn't like herself sometimes. She doesn't spin facts or lie because her reveals are intimate and ofttimes embarrassing, though the reader can tell she prevaricates and equivocates, mostly to protect others. Since she's essentially a high school dropout nearing 30 living in a criminal bubble, trusting how authoritative her explanation of "scientific" or "historical" facts would be ill advised. It protects against her revealing truths I want to reserve as an author about her world that, for an example, a science nerd might naturally comment about. However, her discussions about self-powered flight and physical training are quite accurate, because that's a major part of her life, and her story, and she's actually studied that stuff.

Of course, one of the reasons I abandoned 3rd person is that it seems that there is a convention that the narrator understands and clarifies things the protagonist(s) don't, and furthermore can't lie or spin the facts. Something something reliable narrator?

Boring.

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