#PennedPossibilities 1084
In your universe, what happens to people when they die?
Commoners in the Permanence stay dead.
But nobles can legally have their brains scanned and mapped (destructively: it's the cause of death) and then their family may later imprint the scan—it's lossy and blurry—into a 5-6 year old noble child, giving them a "starter pack" of memories and the identity of an elder.
It's how the aristocracy maintain a death grip on power, and it's the plot motor of my WIP.
#PennedPossibilities 984 — Where does your MC feel the safest? Is there a particular person or object that helps them feel safe?
(Current duology): Jum feels the safest when he's robbing a bank, burgling a high noble's palace, or hijacking a starship. That's because these situations are dangerous, but predictably so: and he's a repeat offender.
The only *person* who makes him feel safe is Tabitha. Mainly because she's in love with him and should come with a sign saying THIS END TOWARDS ENEMY.
The grand finale is here!
The final two Chapters (43 and 44) of "A New Faith" are up on the website at https://tinjar.ghost.io/a-new-faith
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https://tinjar.ghost.io/anf/download-a-new-faith/
Ebook versions (EPUB and PDF) are available to download to your favorite ebook reader.
Both versions are DRM-free and should be usable with most ebook readers. DRM-free means that these are yours to keep and also share with friends/family just like a physical book.
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#PennedPossibilities 1016 — MC POV: Tell us about a time that you found a “skeleton in the closet,” but it doesn’t matter whose it was. It didn’t need to be yours.
Tabitha spent some years managing a rather scary hotel: speciality, providing safe accommodation for fugitives on the run. Very occasionally some of said rascals tried to double-cross her. They generally ended up defleshed, wired, and mounted on a plinth outside the local police station. Nobody saw *anything*.
986: Check-In! How are you enjoying working on the WIP?
Not much right now, I had eye surgery three weeks ago and need new prescription lenses so I can't read (or write on screen) clearly at present!
Otherwise it'd be going swimmingly and I'm expecting rebound productivity in 3-4 weeks when my eye has settled down and my opthalmologist sees me and prescribes new varifocals.
#PennedPossibilities 987: "Do any of your characters have an unusual or uncommon pet? What is it? How did they acquire it?"
Current WIP: Tabitha has a highly illegal terrier: a cloned descendant of one she originally paid millions for, grown from a smuggled blastocyte with the DRM hacked. Possession of a rebaser hound is a very serious crime, roughly on a par with owning an H-bomb, because they're biological weapon factories. But Tabitha dotes on hers because, when all's said and done: dog.
#PennedPossibilities 988: Tell us about your MC’s bravest moment.
Three published novels, a fourth complete one, a fifth in progress, and I honestly can’t answer this prompt without spoiling one of them. Is anyone else finding this difficulty? Surely it must be common for an MC’s bravest moment to form (or at least appear as part of) the climax of their book?
#PennedPossibilities 1085 — What is special about your world or universe?
(Current WIP): What if there's no singularity, no true AI, no brain upload afterlife … but everybody *believes* in these things?
(There are so many holy wars …)
Also: uploading kinda-sorta works, it's simulation that doesn't. You can dump an uploaded brain's memory weightings into a 5-6 year old's brain, giving you really crap, lossy reincarnation (and erasing the kid). And evil aristocrats use this to hang onto power.
#PennedPossibilities 991: Tell us about your WIP. What is the genre or genres?
Very loosely, space opera.
More specific: it's book 2 of an extended *Stainless Steel Rat* tribute, in which the Trickster King and the Murder Queen take up private investigations, as a life of crime now bores them (they stole a ton of money and retired).
Weirding it up: it's taking the piss out of TESCREAL/singularitarians by examining the televangelist-adjacent grifts they succumb to in a far future setting.
#PennedPossibilities 1092½ #PennedPossibilitiesImposterToot : Quality time, your MC/MCs has a day off tomorrow, what do they do?
Being the Trickster King and the Murder Queen, obviously Jum and Tabitha go on a crime spree. But because it's them, it has to be something theatrical and creative, not just a simple mugging or bank robbery. Stealing an unattended throne, perhaps, or doping dragons at the racetrack.
#PennedPossibilities 1017
Reveal a source of misery for your MC.
Jum: an uncracked safe, an un-scammed mark, a nobleman still suffering from the delusion of impunity.
Tabitha: Jum's reluctance to use enough high explosives. (High explosives make *everything* better.)
#PennedPossibilities 1030: What assumptions did you make about one of your characters when you first created them?
(Current WIP(s)): Jum and Tabitha are archetypes—I was originally riffing off Harry Harrison's "Stainless Steel Rat" stories, but they've narrowed down into the Trickster King and the Murder Queen. (Who do All The Crimes together—while sometimes taking on "honest" work as troubleshooters/private eyes.)
#PennedPossibilities 1004: If they have any, tell us about your MC’s philosophical beliefs.
Jum: What's mine is mine. Oh, and what's yours is also mine now. Enjoy!
Tabitha: (Smacks Jum on the head) we don't talk about the bezzle in public! Are you *trying* to get caught? Shut up and pick this lock, there's sure to be something in here that I need ...
#PennedPossibilities 1043 — How do you refuel your creativity?
Doing my annual accounts/tax return.
*Nothing* incentivizes me to write like the alternative being a boring spreadsheet!
Chapters 27 and 28 of "A New Faith" are up on the website at https://tinjar.ghost.io/a-new-faith
Parts 1 and 2 are available to #download (or read online) for #free in #DRMfree #PDF and #EPUB formats
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#PennedPossibilities 1031. Are you satisfied with the genre(s) that you write?
Genre is a marketing tool, not a rigid definition, and SF/F in particular are so flexible it's almost meaningless. What I write is easily marketed as SF/F, the pre-2000 literary establishment prejudice against specfic is dying along with its advocates, and I've got plenty of elbow room: so I'm okay here.
Part 3 begins!
Finally, the stakes come into focus.
How does it all end?
Chapter 29 of "A New Faith" is up on the website at https://tinjar.ghost.io/a-new-faith
Parts 1 and 2 are available to #download (or read online) for #free in #DRMfree #PDF and #EPUB formats
#solarpunk #hopepunk #books #bookstodon #novel #climatechange #adaptation #migration #mystery
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#climatefiction
#PennedPossibilities 1008¹⁵. One or more of your characters, of your choice, are about to sneak into 'something'. Why are they sneaking and what are they sneaking into, are they successful?
Jum and Tabitha are sneaking into a techné-embargoed orbital overrun by fundamentalist singularitarian fanatics to steal a priceless imperial memory repository from their former fence, the Abbot, who wants them to run a con on the princess, who has hired them to find who's stealing all her skulls—
(WIP)
#PennedPossibilities 1089 ~ MC POV: Write a diary entry that’s dated 10 years in the past.
Neither Jum nor Tabitha are crazy and reckless enough to keep a diary: that's how you get exposed as an imposter and executed.
(Also, ten years in the past of the present moment of the novel they're both eight years old and Jum has just been sent to an off-world boarding school: Tabitha is confined to a schoolroom controlled by her governesses. Neither of them has any expectation of privacy.)
#PennedPossibilities 996 — Share some of your favourite lines from your WIP.
"Praisebones was notorious for having his old bodies taxidermied and posed in the lobbies and boarding tubes of his ships, to welcome his passengers' mortal remains (and their mourners) aboard. And he had been absolutely livid when, two years earlier, someone had replaced eighteen of his crania with badly printed plastic replicas."
#PennedPossibilities 1007 — What is your SC’s earliest memory?
Waking up in an imprinting pod one morning, aged six, with memories of maybe dozens of previous instars jumbled up in my head, some of them going back nearly a thousand years, and the dead certainty that I'm not the ancestral reincarnation my parents wanted and if they find out who I am they'll erase me instantly.
Can't blame 'em: it'd be self-defense.
#PennedPossibilities 977 Have your characters ever travelled outside their country of birth? If so, when and where did they go, and why did they go there?
Neither Jum nor Tabitha remember their respective planets of origin, let alone their country of birth. But it seems likely they left home as soon as possible, one jump ahead of an arrest warrant. And every reincarnation, it's the same all over again!
#PennedPossibilities 980 Have you ever had your work plagiarized or stolen?
Yes: I'm a party to the Anthropic AI class action lawsuit. They'd plagiarized 28 out of 33 of my novels for AI training purposes, the fuckers. I'm looking forward to my payout (with the caveat that their out-of-court settlement is much lower than their maximum liability under US copyright law).
#PennedPossibilities 1002
Tell us a random fact (of any kind) about your WIP
It's a sequel, and began with an elevator pitch: "the Stainless Steel Rat returns from the dead and has to start by burgling his own tomb to reclaim his (stolen) identity". (The novel it's a sequel to began with another elevator pitch: "the Stainless Steel Rat gets Isekai'd".)
