#writersCoffeeClub 13 May: 'if writing was not your "thing," what would your "thing" be?'
Probably TTRPG design. I was very much into that side of things from about 1979-1983. (Am even responsible for some of the classic D&D monsters.)
NB: I haven't gamed in 40+ years at this point.
#WritersCoffeeClub 13th Aug Do the arts appear often within the works you write? Which ones?
Rarely. I write SF/F that usually deals with "big issues"—politics, espionage, economics. So my protagonists aren't creative artists: they make take in a movie or play games in their spare time, but that's not the focus of the fic. Occasionally I use a culture's privileged arts as a way of indicating their biases, but it's background, not foreground.
#WritersCoffeeClub July 29, Is there something you want to write, but don't think you yet have the skill?
Romance. (Ducks and runs.) No, seriously, it's deceptively difficult!
More seriously, I'm about 35 novels into a publishing career, SF/F is a broad enough field to have given me opportunities to FAFO widely, and becoming more skilful isn't my biggest problem at this point.
#WritersCoffeeClub 30 July: End of the month roundup: How well did this month go for you?
July was mostly spent on vacation, doing museums and eating out around various bits of the Netherlands and Germany.
I got back to work (writing) in the last week, and am attacking the WIP one more time, to make requested edits.
#WritersCoffeeClub 10 Sep: What's something you believe about writing which can't really be proven?
I believe editor Teresa Nielsen Hayden was correct when she opined that in any written work of SF or fantasy, the author redefines the language they're writing in to accommodate the concepts in their story. (Kinda-sorta the inverse of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis.)
#WritersCoffeeClub 14 Sept. Have you ever read a work of fiction you felt was advertising something?
In my own field, a lot of American SF (in particular) is advertising for one strain of crank politics/economics or another—especially libertarianism: from Heinlein's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" to "The Unincorporated Man" it's a rich seam of bullshit running through the entire genre.
The product most widely advertised in fiction is the author's own ideological blinkers.
#WritersCoffeeClub Aug 14 - How often do you reread what you’ve written after it’s "done"?
I can't bear to re-read my work once it's done.
Because the process of *getting* it done requires so many re-reads that I'm sick of it by the time it sees print!
Current WIP is on its third draft, so probably its 5th-6th read-through. When it's sold it'll inevitably get editorial change requests, then copyedits, then I have to check the page proofs. I'll have gone over it 6-9 times before publication.
#WritersCoffeeClub 9/14. Have you ever read a work of fiction you felt was advertising something?
Not directly, but I can see how Animal Farm, Fahrenheit 451, 1984, etc. have become manuals for the fascists - "every hateful asshat should live this way and walk all over the rest" - most of them forgetting that "the rest" actually includes them...
#WritersCoffeeClub 31 July: End of the month roundup: What will you do differently next month?
Not go on holiday for 24 days, for starters!
(I'd like to be able to afford to, but instead I'm going to stay home and work.)
#WritersCoffeeClub Aug 15 - What’s something you recently learned about your own work?
Nothing recently, but that's because my last novel came out eight months ago and it was the finale of a long-running series: my new series won't be in print for at least a year or two.
Mind you, I did figure out how to encapsulate the theme of my WIP last week, which makes the rewriting easier: aristocracies cannot exist without child abuse.
#WritersCoffeeClub August 20: How easy is it for you to write characters outside of your age?
I'm over 60: physical age is less of an issue than emotional and intellectual maturity. I've been around long enough to see repeated patterns in the way human beings behave, and it's hard to think my way back to the novelty of naively seeing them for the first time, with no sense of historical context.
Just remember, embedded inside every 60 year old there's a 6 year old wondering what just happened.
#writersCoffeeClub 5 Oct: What haunts the narrative of your current work?
Institutionally-induced rolling amnesia deployed as a tool of repression to prevent the pernicious mind-virus of progressivism from taking root in the empire called The Permanence. (Our protags find it hard to remember who they are.)
(Narrative conceits do not necessarily reflect the preferences of the author. Ahem: if the question was "would you like to live in the setting of your WIP?" my answer would be "HELL no!")
#WritersCoffeeClub Aug 31 - How did this month go for you, writing-wise?
The interminable trudge through rewrite hell continues. Now about 75% of the way through the first pass. (The manuscript currently stands at 143,000 words, hence the interminable nature of the process: that's not a short book.)
#WritersCoffeeClub #WritingCommunity
18th Aug 2026. What are your limits for writing outside your lived experience?
I write SF: writing *within* my lived experience isn't really part of the job!
So I use this thing I call "my imagination" and feed it by reading and traveling and talking to people.
#WritersCoffeeClub What are your limits for writing outside your lived experience? (race, nation, gender, etc.)
Obviously none, because I also fly on airships and starships all the time.
#WritersCoffeeClub 02 What's the most challenging thing you've ever written?
A 100% fictional story about how the five 100% real people in my area (tech support) replaced all the 100% real network hardware of slightly more than 1000 100% real PCs, servers, etc., in one week, so the assistant systems manager could look good with his bosses, like he promised. We couldn't even do 50 PCs because people wouldn't let us work. So I had to write the report of how we did it. They believed it…=-|
#WritersCoffeeClub August 17: How do you tackle difficult issues in your writing? Or do you avoid them altogether?
This question is too vague to answer—what does "difficult issues" mean? Difficult for who, the reader or the writer? Difficult in what sense, hard to structure or describe or politically or emotionally problematic?
(Autism brain flails madly and gives u.)
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#WritersCoffeeClub July 12 Talk about an inspiration for an element in your current WIP.
It's very much a homage to Harry Harrison's classic "The Stainless Steel Rat ". (With, oh, about 60-70 years of updates.)
#WritersCoffeeClub 15 Sep: What expertise are you happy to offer to your fellow writers for their research?
I have no idea? Been doing this for a living for more than a quarter of a century so I've a lot of experiences, but most of them are very out of date in terms of understanding how publishing works today. As for writing processes and methods, as Larry Wall remarked, "there's more than one way to do it".
#WritersCoffeeClub Sept 17:
Do you try to have a regular writing goal? Why or why not?
Yes (when I'm working on first draft projects). It doesn't work so well when I'm editing. The main purpose is simply to ensure I have some idea of whether I'm putting in the hours and the story is progressing. If I start to miss the daily word count target it's probably time to take a break for a few days. (This is me at over 60; me at 15-55 was a lot more target-bound.)
RE: https://mastodon.art/@NickEast_IndieWriter/117273896524163336
For anyone interested after a number of suggestions my recommendation is...
Payhip 🎉 It seems to be a lot like having a writer page but without a lot of the hassle.
Personally, I don't like subscriptions and wouldn't buy anything from one, but if that's your jam I recommend Ko-Fi 😁
@galacticwriters @bookstodon @writingbooks
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#WritersCoffeeClub 9/26: How does your faith feature in your works?
You know what, after reading Charlie Stross's post about different kinds of atheism and reflecting a bit more, a sort of lack of faith DOES inform my works. I am deeply anti-capitalist (consider me a former-capitalist atheist) and I believe most of my fellow Americans treat our version of capitalism as religion. Dogma with no evidence or research drives everything from how businesses operate to how they treat people to how wealthy oligarchs are elevated as paragons.
Maybe this is what originally attracted me to old #cyberpunk works, and this is what continuously draws me back to writing in that genre. My protagonists all tend to be, in some way, anti-capitalist iconoclasts and my dystopian settings are all heavily governed by the future state of late late stage capitalism.
#WritersCoffeeClub Sep 27: How much time passes between sitting down to write and actually writing?
I have no idea, because I'm sitting down most of the time and the impulse to write is driven by boredom with anything else I might be doing while I'm sitting down.
#WritersCoffeeClub Aug 25 - Can a story be told from the point of view of something unconscious?
Yes, my novel "Rule 34" (published 2011) did this—the PoV behind the multiviewpoint second-person present-tense narrative is a non-conscious AI.
(Written over a decade before ChatGPT, natch.)
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