#WritersCoffeeClub Jan 1: What are your writing related New Year Resolutions?
I don't really do resolutions, but let's try this: I'll actually send my work out more this year. Get serious and make a list of agents, and just go through the list.
#WritersCoffeeClub Jan 2: Do you have other artistic leanings? How do they affect your writing?
Sure, yeah. I'm a theatre kid. I wasn't great at it, but there are a LOT of actors and theatre adjacent people in my family, plus film/TV tech training and film studies, means I conceive of my fiction in dramatic terms: sets, props, casting actors, vocal quality, etc. I don't think this is at all uncommon.
And it has real limits. If you think of your settings as sets, you get attached to them, as if you paid for them. Fiction isn't drama (or film!), so if you use drama as your way in, you'll find mismatches.
#WritersCoffeeClub Jan 3: What aspects of your current or former profession do you bring into your writing?
Oh you know, I'm an english prof who studies pup culture. No connection there!
The fun part is I'm using stuff I know from history and from Shakespeare as much as stuff I know from comics and pulp sf. There's so much good storytelling out there. You can learn from all of it.
#WritersCoffeeClub Day 7: Do you have an epilogue in any of your writing? How do you feel about them?
I haven't used them. I think I prefer to have my narratives end on their own terms instead of being wrapped up externally, but I see how they'd fit a certain kind of story. Like, Princess Irulan's epilogue to DUNE wraps up the story in a way that makes sense since she's been the narrator the whole time.
#WritersCoffeeClub 11 Jan - Do you use dream sequences in your work? How do you feel about them?
All my mains—and my antagonists, now that I think about it, huh—have violence nightmares every night, and then have intrusive hallucinations of those nightmares during the day. So yeah, I like using dreams. :)
#WritersCoffeeClub Jan 13. Do you like maps? If they feature in your work do you draw them by hand or use an application?
Oh hell no. If I drew a map, a reader could hold me to it. I avoid physical units of measurement as much as possible: no speeds, no sizes, no lengths. I have spent too much time in SF fandom and TTPRGs to get anywhere near that stuff.
#WritersCoffeeClub#Writing Jan 14 Regardless of the genre you write in, do you bring in ideas from other genres?
Loads and load. I have studied works of a lot of different genres—some more deeply than others—and it all bleeds in. I'm firmly rooted in SFF, but I borrow from poetry, early modern drama, epistolary novels, feminist short fiction, etc. I think/hope that I'm bringing all those sensibilities to, eg, a space opera story and give it some ideological twists. Fingers crossed...
If I were to self publish, I would get good cover art made. I work in SFF, so attractive covers are a big deal. (I'm sure they are another genres too.)
#WritersCoffeeClub Day 16: How do you feel about an ISBN? Is it important to have them?
If you want your book to be listed anywhere and therefore accessible to the people might want to read and/or buy it, then yeah, they're pretty damn important! I'm sure the system that underlies them is deeply F'd up in all kinds of ways—"there is no ethical consumption under capitalism"—but this is the system we have. Either work within it or work outside it. There aren't really any other options.
#WritersCoffeeClub Jan 18 Does your work feature on BookTok? How do you feel about the platform?
I am not even a little published, so no, I haven't been featured on there.
TikTok is a really insidious platform. They artificially boost basically random posters in order to create the illusion that "anyone can get rich, here," and that's all in the service of sucking up our data to sell to advertisers. It's all gross.
Btw, other social media do the same things and worse. I don't care that TikTok is Chinese. I care that's it's manipulative and intrusive.
Anyway, the fact that that incredibly biased platform is such a big park of book sales is really creepy. Not that we've ever had a truly accurate sense of what sells, what's popular, unbiased reviews, etc. Women of colour have never been treated fairly by reviewers.
For my novella, all my characters' names in Greek have symbolic meanings: bitter, clever, vengeful, angry, etc.
For my novel, I use names I know from my life, bc it's set in my city, and I occasionally look up lists of baby names from various cultures. Originally, my protagonist was "Grace" bc it's common for Chinese girls in Vancouver, but she's white now, so that connection is broken, but I kept it anyway.
(She's white now because I admitted to myself I can only maintain so many illusions at once, and it was the one party of her character that lifted out without affecting the plot... which also told me I wasn't responsibly representing her culturally, so there you go.)
Oh also, advice I saw in Twitter before I left: Google your characters' names!! One of mine was a geographical feature in multiple states and provinces, another was a popular science fiction author, and a third was unconsciously stolen from a 2000's comic book character I thought was hot. So. Worth checking, is my point.
#WritersCoffeeClub 20—Do you have a blog? Tell us about it and share a link.
I used to. I posted drafts of my work. It was an easy way to send people "copies" of my stories, but u stared writing longer, and I wanted to keep them private until they were ready. Then I found out some places won't publish your work if it's been online, and I thought, time to take that down...
#WritersCoffeeClub Day 22: Have you ever used storyboarding? When and how?
No, but I often flip, on my head, between conceiving my stories non-verbally (emotions, sensations, abstractions) to cinematically (people in motion, camera angles, cuts between scenes) to comics (still images, visual juxtapositions).
I can't draw worth a rat's ass, so I would never storyboard my own stuff, but I would love to work with an artist to adapt them into comics. I can half-see those in my head anyway.
#WritersCoffeeClub Jan 23. Who do you publish through or aim to publish with? How's it going?
I'd like to go traditional because I don't have the spare time in my life to be a one-man publishing house. I'd like to write and hand it off to someone else to do all that other stuff. I realize it's asking a lot, and there have been no takers so far. So.
#WritersCoffeeClub Jan 24: How often do you ignore your editor/proofreader?
My immediate reaction is "never," but I think that's not accurate. I always read feedback that I get (I don't have an editor, so I'm talking about feedback I get from my writing group). I would say I make a change based on that feedback 2/3 to 3/4 of the time, but it's pretty rare that I make structural changes. Most of the time, I try to add just a line, just a little bit of dialogue, just a little bit of description.
What I mean is, I suspect I'm not doing nearly as much as the person who made the comment meant for me to do, but I don't want to do an entire revision based on one comment. That's not "ignoring" feedback, but it's not fully committing to that feedback either.
#WritersCoffeeClub#Writing 25 How do you feel about writers who write outside of their gender/sexuality/race etc?
As a cis/het man, it's my responsibility to populate my stories with people who aren't all like me, and that means I have to do research, and listen to my writing group, and work really hard at not misrepresenting. I am extremely unlikely to capture femininity or queerness in a way that a woman/queer writer could, but I can at least not fuck it up.
There is zero responsibility for women or queer writers to rep cis/het men, to be clear. The oppression and misrepresentation goes one way, for the most part. People like me have been putting words into other people's mouths for a LONG time, so it'll be a while before there's any kind of mutuality, here.
That said, I'm fascinated when they do write cis/het men because I think they (you!) see us in ways we fail to see ourselves, so I'll take that insight.
The same responsibility applies, I think, but the thing I have learned is that I should take a big step back from trying to do that with my protagonists and instead do it through side characters bc there's less expectation of having access to their interiority, and thus fewer opportunities for me to fuck it up.
#WritersCoffeeClub Jan 26 How do you ensure that you don't infringe copyright in your work?
Don't use LLMs and image generators. I'm not sure what else to say. My ideas come from my brain, and where they're derivative, I'm certain the pass the "minimal innovation" test for copyright. My current project is a commentary on Star Wars--ie, child soldiers are bad--but I don't fear legal action from Disney.
#WritersCoffeeClub 27 Jan: Hollywood makes a movie of one of your works, who gets cast as the characters?
Unknowns, I think. That's my favourite kind of movie, a bunch of new faces, no obvious stars. The main characters are young teens, and half of them are kids of colour. For some for the adults, they could tap actors from Québec, the Philippines, Mexico, Australia, and Kenya.
#WritersCoffeeClub Jan. 28: How do you format a flashback so the reader knows what's going on?
I don't have flashbacks. Instead, my protagonist remembers things that happened previous to the "present" of the novel. I started doing it as a way to give readers information rather than depict scenes, though, which meant my protagonist's mom had to be a space nerd, which I think worked out beautifully.
#WritersCoffeeClub Jan 29: Describe the saddest moment you've ever written. Share an excerpt.
I have a dream sequence about a fat kid being abused and harassed by a fatphobic kid. I was a fat kid. I got that stuff all the time. I don't think we've collectively acknowledged yet how much that harassment causes trauma, how it's a deep cultural prejudice, how closely related it is to ableism, sexism, racism, homophobia, and transphobia. It's one of the "your body is wrong" prejudices.
I articulate complex ideas literally for a living, and I still don't have to words to express what it is like to be surrounded by communities and media culture and a multi-billion-dollar industry that are all telling you that you lack virtue because of the shape of your body. Women, disabled ppl, and trans ppl, and others I'm sure, can all read that and think: yuuuuuuup! Being a fat kid is like that. I will never not be too big, in my mind. My body will never not be incorrect.
So writing a scene where a kid who's not even all that fat gets harassed, and illustrating the degree of self-loathing that living in a fat body entails, or at least did for me, that was sad and gratifying in a way. "This is what it is like. This is how painful it is. This is what you are doing to people when you comment in their weight."
It's someone else's body. Just shut the fuck up and keep walking.
I probably will never write something that's not science fiction, fantasy, or comedy. We'll see. Maybe. But if it doesn't have dragons, space ships, or jokes, then thus far, I'm not interested.
William Gibson said "cyberspace" is where phone calls happen. We conceive of it as a space even though it isn't one.
That's where I write. Call it scriberspace? There's a "place" I go to. It's not (just) into my screen. It's not (just) at my desk. It's not (just) on airplanes or in waiting rooms. It's a place in my mind, and the stories meet me there. It's a specific place, not just anywhere.
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