pennedpossibilities

#PennedPossibilities 1001 — Is your MC confident or not? Tell us why.

Jum is a confidence trickster: you can't be a successful con man and *not* exude unshakable confidence whenever necessary.

Tabitha ... works with Jum sometimes, but isn't primarily a con artist: on the other hand, she's led an organized crime family, and you can't *do* that unless you exude confidence—your business rivals will scent weakness and move in for the kill.

#PennedPossibilities 985
How long have you been writing or when did you start?

Around age 9/10, school english teacher set my class a term-long project: to write a story that filled an entire exercise book. (I was part of the 10% of my class who filled two.)

#PennedPossibilities⁩ 1008 — Have you ever had someone translate a story of yours (into another language)?

Yes.

My books and stories are written in English and have been translated into:

French
German
Spanish
Romanian
Bulgarian
Czech
Hebrew
Japanese
Chinese
Russian
Ukrainian
Estonian

... I've probably forgotten one or two? EDIT: Polish, Finnish!

(I have a bookcase where I try to keep a copy of every edition: annoyingly I have zero Russian/Romanian/Bulgarian/Chinese copies.)

#PennedPossibilities 1010: What are any of your characters hiding? Why are they hiding it?

(Starter Pack): Jum and Tabitha are both hiding the same thing: they're imposters.

They're supposed to be the memory scans of long dead aristocrats, imprinted on their 6 year old descendants. But they're actually a pair of thieves who tried to rob a booby-trapped tomb and made a hail Mary escape into the uploading pods. Jum erased their metadata: now if they're exposed as fakes they'll be wiped.

#PennedPossibilities 1043: How do you refuel your creativity?

I used to write on 2 litre bottles of Diet Coke, 1/day, because I find aspartame mildly psychoactive; but after I got Type II I laid off it. Today I just drink four litre pots of organic breakfast tea a day, brewed strong for the caffeine, with milk. Irish breakfast for pref, Scottish or English will do at a pinch.

#PennedPossibilities 1047: What can you tell us about the conflict in your WIP?

*Which* conflict, would be the question? Jum and Tabitha are trapped in the Permanence and trying to escape. The Permanence is the kind of kyriarchy that emerges in an interstellar pirate kingdom where cruelty is the whole point, as far as the rulers are concerned. There's at least one gruesome death in every chapter! (But only a handful of genocides in the entire novel.)

#PennedPossibilities 1025 — Would you or have you ever killed off a member of the main cast? How would or how did you feel afterward?

Sure!

In book 6 of the Merchant Princes series I threw an entire nuclear war to kill off more than half of the cast. And in book 5 of the Laundry files, The Rhesus Chart*, I killed off our main protagonist's mentor and a few of his friends. Hell, in *Glasshouse*, a first-person present-tense narrative, I killed the viewpoint protagonist two thirds of the way in!

#PennedPossibilities 1061.5 - imposter prompt! Is your MC the kind of person you'd want to be friends with? How would they feel about you?

Good grief no!!

Jum is charming but if you shake his hand and count your fingers afterwards you'll come up short (or it's misdirection because he picked your pocket with his other hand). Tabitha is frankly terrifying, and you don't want Agrippina to even suspect you exist—she might order your home planet sterilised because you looked at her apprehensively.

#PennedPossibilities 1052 What source do you feel is the most reliable for getting truthful news in your WIP’s world? Why is that?

"News" implies novelty, that things change, and in the Permanence change is not permitted. Stuff *happens*, noble houses rise and fall, but the Permanence aspires to eternity and "News" implies *im*permanence, so it tends to be suppressed. The nearest thing there is to reliable sources are the internal records of the noble houses: and even those are mainly hearsay.

#PennedPossibilities 1053 How far would your characters go to get what they want?

Jum and Tabitha are the Trickster King and the Murder Queen, barely staying one jump ahead of the law in a viciously repressive empire where the punishments would make Vlad the Impaler blanch and death is not a guaranteed escape.

So of course they'll do anything: Jum runs the confidence tricks and Tabitha quietly silences the witnesses.

#PennedPossibilities 1059 — Antagonist POV: What object would you like to own someday? What makes it appeal to you?

Agrippina: I want the Celestial Throne back. It was mine until those traitors couped me, and I shall take it back even if it takes me a thousand years and a dozen reincarnations. Then I'll crucify the lot of them, and their families and servants and pets.

#PennedPossibilities 1066: "How do people travel long distances in your WIP?"

Oh, the usual: starships, electric unicycles, space elevators, streetcars, unicorn-drawn carriages, zeppelins, and hovercraft.

(Internal combustion engines and automobiles are unheard-of.)

#PennedPossibilities 1060 — Tell us about a WIP that you want to finish but doubt you ever will.

The final New Management novel (on hold at 24K words since mid-2024). In which Imp and his crew take the dream roads to Narnia to film amateur action talking animal porn to sell at a furry convention, but wind up in the version of Narnia written by William S. Burroughs instead of C. S. Lewis. There are mugwumps, and Jadis the White Witch is a strict lesbian domme.

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Common shorts of writing prompts explained:

Anta - Antagonist

BC - Background Character (rarely used)

LI - Love Interest

MC - Main Character also Prota - Protagonist.

MMC/FMC see MC but m for male, f for female.

POV - Point of View

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#PhantastikPrompts #WordWeavers #PennedPossibilities #ScribesAndMakers #WritersCoffeeClub #TimeTravelAuthors #EroticMusings #writing #fiction

#PennedPossibilities 1063 — How do the skies in your WIP’s world look different from the sky that we know?

As it's set fractional megayears hence and Earth—indeed our original galaxy—is long forgotten (and the setting is multistellar) nothing is familiar. Except blue skies due to scattering of longer wavelengths.

This week's #PennedPossibilities-inspired #EroticMusingsQ makes me realise that even though I have a settings category, I seldom ask questions about props or even scenes.

#EroticMusings 59. PoV (any character) Name three erotic things that you have in your bedroom.

ALT

#PennedPossibilities 1092: Do others get frightened when your SC is angry?

Not sure who the SC is in *Starter Pack* but if it's Tabitha then no, people don't get frightened, they see no sign of her anger until they die.

If it's Agrippina, her anger looks a lot like amusement. (Followed by screaming and wailing from the onlookers at the resulting executions.)

#PennedPossibilities 1071: What is something you wish existed in the real world that exists in your WIP?

Space elevators! Because fuck Elon Musk.

#PennedPossibilities 1080: "Do any unseen forces have power within your universe?"

WIP is a space opera, with interstellar transport mediated via wormholes. There is a wormhole generator, but while it's active it prevents similar devices from working throughout the visible universe. So it's infinitely valuable—it grants its owners a monopoly on FTL transport, which they profit from. And this secretive Authority guards its location jealously—because slower-than-light thieves are a threat ...

#PennedPossibilities 1098
What is a relatively recent invention that dramatically changed the world in your WIP

The Permanence doesn't tolerate change that undermines the celestial throne and the aristocracy: it's a permanent despotism—the name is its manifesto. If anyone invented something that could lead to change they'd be executed: if it got out, no suppressive response would be off the table, up to and including planetary bombardment and genocide.

The Permanence is serious about this.

#PennedPossibilities 1087: In honor of a friend (thatwriterellie[at]mastoart[dot]social), we’re using a word once per week. Write or share something from your WIP pertaining to: “struggle.”

My quote is too long for a toot, so the readable text is in the alt-text of the screencap below. (Needless to say, it's from a space opera in progress. The purchaser of a vacant planet has just discovered that the southern continent has squatters ...)

ALT

#PennedPossibilities 1101
What creature or monster would your MC or SC love to keep as an unconventional pet? Why is that?

Current WIP: Tabitha had to crack the DRM on her pet dog before she could clone her, but it was well worth the money: the dog's a self-propelled biological weapons factory and as Tabitha is a crime lord and arms dealer …

(Besides, who's a GOOD dog? You! Yes, you! /dies )

#PennedPossibilities 1088

Name something that is considered rare and valuable in your WIP? What is common and essential?

Rare and valuable: brain scanning (destructive) and memory imprinting (onto a 5-6 year old child, whose personality is overwritten): in The Permanence it's a capital offense for commoners to do it, but nearly universal among the nobility because lossy tech-mediated reincarnation is how the aristocracy maintains its grip on power.

Common and essential: conservative tyranny.

#PennedPossibilities 1103: Have you ever had a plot idea that you were excited to write but had to scrap because it just didn’t work?

This happens to me at least once a week.

(Ideas are cheap: execution is 99% of the job.)

#PennedPossibilities 1102: Do you have a strategy for how you approach worldbuilding in your WIP(s)?

Interrogate all stock elements mercilessly.

Refuse to over-simplify the structure of your setting.

When you look more closely the bland-looking foreground is turns out to be composed of stacked second-order consequences, piled so high they're collapsing under their own freight of history.

There's a time for 'show, don't tell', but there's *also* a time to go maximum infodump.

&c.