Mastodawn

#EroticMusings 2026.01.18 — Week 34 (January 18-24) Characters: Are you especially fond of how any of your characters met? Share their meeting! CW: Wordplay.

I'm fond of how most of my characters met, but were those meetings meet-cutes or arguably erotic? No, except maybe in Mars Needed Women, which may be both. 22-year-old May Ri—a brainy engineer who is sexually experienced despite having lived in an oppressive religious society—has arrived on colonial Mars, having signed a contract promising that she will marry within a year. She's attending a meeting someone jokes is a "meat market" to choose a husband who is by contract also on the "market." Redacted for length.

The door monitor said, "Show confidence, girl, or he'll say 'No.'"

May Ri jumped, her heart bouncing off her sternum. [] She rushed in, another worry blooming: Men got to say no?

Auditorium was too grandiose a word.

Seven men in greenish formfitting EM Mars jumpsuits stood on a raised stage of artfully epoxied regolith inside a small up-lit shroom dome of pastel greens, reds, and black dusting.[]

People on Mars were different.

Since most Martians squatted thanks to the low gravity, the younger Earth women congregated together crosslegged on square pillows, talking lowly and pointing. The ethnicities of the contract colonist women confirmed what she knew: Oppressed women, or women with poor prospects, across the world, across Earth, had signed colonist contracts as they represented a fabulous opportunity for a better life. []Their accents sounded musical, even their laughter.[]

A movement; she looked left. Six men on stage talked quietly between themselves. Hispanic, African, Asian, northern European.

The seventh...

May Ri inhaled sharply, holding it, walking forward slowly, scanning the "meat" on sale. Very tasty. It wasn't entirely that she'd had little contact with men during the last months. Intra-dome meetings, vid-downlink, or watching across a field while weeding in a farm dome.

Focus! She needed to focus.

Look at each. Evaluate. Use logic!

But…

She looked at the seventh again. Stopping only when she barked her shins on the knee-high stage… Quietly, she said, "Ow?" and she might have sounded drunk had she been overheard.

Looked tasty. Definitely.

The seventh: He had coffee-color skin diluted with []delicious oat milk. Long fingers with well-manicured nails poked furiously at his book plate. Bedroom hands. While the other men looked preoccupied by the gaze of their audience, the sandy-haired guy with adorable cowlicks poked rapidly at his device, then touched his ear implant, turning away to talk lowly in a pleasant voice…

Providing her a view of his squared-off rear. That was a magnetic sight!

Warning herself of her long abstinence, she took a few moments to judge the rest of his exterior, up and down and midway, lingering… instantly noting his smile and happy nod when he finished. A glance at the competition confirmed the women had noticed, too.

May Ri said loudly, "I choose him," pointing.

A woman jumped to her feet, bowling over five others. []"Can she do that?"

A hand on May Ri's shoulder made her glance back to see red hair and freckles. Her half-pouting teenage tutor, Reina said, "I was going to choose him, too."

"I—" May Ri sputtered, flushing.

Reina shook her, giggling[]. "Take him. Please."

[]May Ri sensed a double entendre, then blurted, "Wait, What about Roger? You're married[]!"

Reina directed her grey eyes at the other group of men. ["Roger died a month ago in an airlock accident…,"] she whispered. "[]I get to choose again. [And…] I'm choosing Rodriguez!" A short swarthy man with short-cropped black hair stood bolt upright.

A shadow made May Ri look left. Her gaze met deep brown eyes and a tentative smile.

"I'm Randolf," he said in a West European Conglomerate accent. He offered one of his bedroom hands, and it was fine indeed. Like him. Not a day under 30 Earth, maybe 35. "What's your name?"

She blinked, but didn't turn away. She met his gaze. She couldn't interpret his nod. She tried warning herself, Lust at First Sight. She failed, for all the reasons.[]

Reina cut in. "May Ri is training to become an engineer. She never gives up. She's fun, too."

Fun? May Ri scoffed, looking at Reina. Randolf took her hand.[]

They locked gazes again. Her heart raced. Her face warmed.

Reina whispered in her ear, mischievously, "I hacked the showers and Rodriguez's cabin cam. His nickname, The Rod, is well deserved. As for Randolf, he's—"

"Randy?" May Ri returned reflexively, then giggled.

Randy answered, "Yes?" looking confused.

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RS, Author, Novelist, Prosaist Jan 5

#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2026.01.05 — How do you choose the point of view for a new story?

I was going to say I always write in 1st person and that settles that question. I love uncensored possibly snarky POVs telling their story. It feels natural and it's very flexible since I write heavily character-centric stories. But, in 2025, I wrote a Mars dystopian satire, Mars Needed Women, and quickly realized 1st person wouldn't cut it. Even though the story is primarily from one character's point of view, the issue was that I needed to insert information the MC could not know. One chapter, for example, is a "newspaper" article. Another tells the story of a character who dies in a disaster. The epilogue is in the POV of one of the supporting characters. Thus, I chose to write in 3rd person close POV, which both provided POV flexibility—when the narrative required it—and fewer visible narrative mechanations to tell the story. Since my schedule required me to write one chapter every day for 31 days, it made it easier to actually successfully complete my commitment to finish in that timeframe.

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RS, Author, Novelist, Prosaist Dec 9

#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2025.12.08 — How does your work compare to the earliest work in your genre?

There is little comparison I can draw between, for example, Mars Needed Women and H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds other than both rely heavily on satire to utterly demolish the respectability of the current world order and the religious hypocrisy at the time. Oh, right—Mars and Martians play a part. Beyond that? Nothing much. 🤷‍♀️🤷🤷‍♂️

[Author retains copyright (c)2025 R.S.]
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RS, Author, Novelist, Prosaist Nov 30

#WordWeavers 2025.11.30 — While writing, do you consider your topics to avoid book banning or fallout of any sort?

Considering my last completed book (this year, titled Mars Needed Women) has a woman POV who's aggressive about having sex, an abortion scene (pre-op), forced school prayer, a former USA that's a theocracy, a tyrannical fundamentalist leader who's a polygamist and a hypocrite, a military where major promotions are based on kissing the right politician's ass, another society that's thinks gender is silly and fully integrates trans and gay people (important SCs), a nation run by women fighting for independence, and plenty things more feminist and even more heretical?

No.

The opposite it would seem.

Satire likes to maximize the toes stepped on and broken.

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RS, Author, Novelist, Prosaist Nov 22

#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2025.11.22 —What has been the biggest change to your style since you started out?

Old Style:

Her palm touched [the glass]. The outline of her hand fogged around it. Cold. Amazing.

Even she understood the wealth necessary to have an actual window on the exterior of the arcology. Were the Decath really that wealthy? She shook her head at the nonsense of spending that amount of money when you could buy a cheap wallview and program it for substantially less.

New Style:

Expensive. She touched an actual window on the exterior of the arcology!

Were the Decath really that wealthy? She shook her head. What nonsense, spending that amount of money when their cheap home wallview was as high resolution—and programmable! Well, nearly, but the perspective shift nearing an actual window fascinated her. She found herself looking to see the blue reflective side of the pyramidal building, then old Chicago far below, or craning her head one way or the other to see the lakeshore and newly rained upon glittering exurbs to the west. With some sensors, maybe a wallview could be programmed to respond to her head position and pan…

The examples are a revision where I'd fallen into my old style and am now asserting my new style. My shift toward mostly writing 1st person (the samples were third) has accompanied my shift toward grammar B fluidity and describing what the character experiences not the reader if they there, watching.

In my reply to #PennedPossiblities 851, I write dynamically about the sensation and the aesthetics of flight from a winged human's POV. My new grammar B style helps me answer from the melancholy POV of Bolt (though slightly too eloquently to be in character) from Reluctant Courier (for the Mob), something I could not have done years ago.

https://eldritch.cafe/@sfwrtr/115592392330305513

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RS, Author, Novelist, Prosaist (@[email protected])

## #PennedPossibilities 851 — MC POV: Is there a secret spot you like to retreat to? If there is, why that spot? Funny thing about the sky. If you aren't a day angel, it's a starry canopy of dark by night or a luminous blue ceiling by day, sometimes dotted with clouds, sometimes filled with rain and storms reeking of ozone. It is not unlike other ceilings; you, not being a day angel, can't touch it. Me, I'm a day angel, and I can't touch it either but it invites me to try—and it is vast. *Vast.* In this modern age, day angels have city jobs like the rest of humanity. We take to the sky to occasionally flit from place to place, which means… what? Jumping off a building to fly five or ten stories high from any street, from any rooftop? Flapping a bit, then landing, congratulating ourselves for not getting blown astray by a sudden eddy, or misjudging it, stumbling, then shedding an errant molt while catching our balance? Is flight such a bother? Feather roads lie a leap above the city; though you can't see them, they are nevertheless streets, frequented by many because they are the easiest route, not unlike the pavements the non-angelic travel. We simply use our wings and don't buy metro tickets… except when it rains. Yet… Yet, *up* is unrestricted. When I fly halfway to the clouds, I traverse as much volume stacked up in the perimeter of a city block as exists in the entire metropolitan area on the flat skin of the Earth. So. Much. Space. If you have wings, there's no *need* to struggle shoulder to shoulder or fly around the city wing on wing, smelling their sweat, hearing their nattering chatter, treading or gliding that worn familiar path others have followed, and followed, and followed. Up *there,* people vanish if you look askance too long. You reach out but touch only air. How many day angels truly conquer the sky? Like we did when we were children and teens? These days, I either find the time to fly—or find myself perched on a lamppost screaming at street sweepers. I quickly catch a thermal, spiral toward the clouds, then glide into the purple dawn or orange and red dusk, leaving the city far behind. It feels like I've retreated to my secret spot, a place nobody will ever follow. Endlessly vast… The air gets cooler the higher you go, fresher… Best? I'm alone with my thoughts. With naught but the wind whistling through my feathers, I cease to care about even that. [Author retains copyright (c)2025 R.S.] #BoostingIsSharing #gender #fiction #writer #author #cozy #mystery #sf #sff #sciencefiction #writing #writingcommunity #writersOfMastodon #writers #RSdiscussion #RSstory #RSReluctanceStory #microfiction #flashfiction #tootfic #smallstory

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RS, Author, Novelist, Prosaist Nov 1

#ScribesAndMakers 2025.11.01: What creative project(s) do you hope to work on this month?

Get the beta edits done on Mars Needed Women.

Complete composing Reluctant Courier (for the Mob).

Go dancing in the street if I get both 1 and 2 done.

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RS, Author, Novelist, Prosaist Sep 30, 2025

@Priyajsridhar

4. Cat Rambo describes intense emotions that can power a story as “the big feels.” One of the problems is that it’s hard to write about big feels when you are still in the middle of feeling them. At there any big feels you’d like to put into a story? #Writephant

I hate bringing politics into a discussion, but I wrote a dystopian Mars colonization story in March based on and satirizing our current times projected 100 years into the future. I felt compelled to write this by the big feelings we were going through in the time. My outrage made it easier. The colonization company, EM Mars, had the initials of a famous billionaire because it was his legacy. It made this schadenfreude moment possible excerpted below. The Starship design is similar to the contemporary design. May Ri is our female engineer MC. Reina, later the first president of Mars, supposedly changed the flight software to strand the bad guy misogynists somewhere undeveloped on Mars, preventing them from taking over the Deimos space station.

The ship flared [brightly overhead in the Martian dawn.]

May Ri juggled the stopwatch, lost it over the edge [of the monorail trestle to puff in a red dust dune], and grabbed her binocs. "Did they bypass the timer—?"

"No," said Reina's voice over the frenzy of others, on a private comm.

May Ri realized the magnitude of the flare. Not separation. No benign peeling off of three tiny boosters. It brightened, quickly blinding. One flare, five, then twenty. A string of pearls in the heavens, snapped off a mythical deity's neck, strewn angrily across the sky. A swarm of fireballs, another flare, two, then red comets that looked that way due to the increasing friction of re-entry.

"Oops," said Reina. "Should've run more sims [on my software modifications]."

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RS, Author, Novelist, Prosaist Sep 20, 2025

#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2025.09.20 — How might your work be seen as a criticism of the present moment?

In Mars Needed Women, the reader visits a world that is endpoint of the death of democracy we seem to be witnessing now. The Chicago the protagonist lives in is the follow-on christian nationalist nation that is no longer the US (despite the rewritten history). May Ri is a woman when it doesn't mean much, who exploits the stupidity that results from money buying power at the expense of people capable of advancing society and technology. She eventually has to fight to save a new world, Mars, and a nation led by women, the Sorority, that she has helped found simply by doing what she does best, build things. The book is being beta read.

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RS, Author, Novelist, Prosaist Sep 13, 2025

#WebAuthorsCafe 5: Do you write in serial format? Why or why not?

There are two types of serial format (spelled with an s not a c): 1. Dickensian and 2. Safe.

1) By Dickensian, I am referring to good old Charles Dickens who published his stories in weekly installments in newspapers (think of it as a web page that refreshed weekly). He would write new chapters each week. They turned often verbose and flowery, but he got paid by installment and in the end his stories were well loved and he became an international celebrity.

The downside, he died and left a novel unfinished. Okay, I'm not going to look up if The Mystery of Edwin Drood was serialized, but that's the concept anyway: Writing a story chapter by chapter, not knowing if you'll ever finish it.

I did that twice, and for me it was crazy making, if fulfilling. Having to finish a chapter done on time and when promised was hard when I did it in fan fiction. I even had to add author notes because I had modify previous chapters to make the story work.

I did it again with Mars Needed Women, an original science fiction work inspired by current dystopian events. I initially serialized it in a different form on Mastodon†. That, however, was 31 chapters in 31 days based on 31 feminist #writever prompts, for an entire month, day by day, composition and revision and publication done each day, with barely a vague idea how it would end. Grueling. Doing and succeeding at such things builds writer muscles.

2) Safe serialization is where you've completed the story composition before you start serializing chapters, or better yet simply serialized a finished work, which is how it is done in magazines today. It is definitely safer than going the full Dickens. I did this for years while writing fan fiction, trailing the revisions, and rarely having to change published chapters to add foreshadowing or corrections. It had the advantage of not being so hectic. Mind you, I didn't publish them as regularly; it makes for better quality output. Better for the nerves, too!

=-=-=-=-=
† I have deleted the story posts, but the meta content still exists under #RSMarsNeededWomen. The revised story, with additional content and twice the word count, is currently being beta read. It has already interested a publisher enough that I was asked to submit before normal submissions. 🤞🏼

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RS, Author, Novelist, Prosaist Aug 2, 2025

#ScribesAndMakers 2025.08.01 — Alt: Word.

This word comes from Mars Needed Women, which is in beta. The Decath Crown, as it is referred to, is one of a number of antagonistic organizations the book's MC ends up dealing with, but it is also the most insidious. I don't expect anyone to read about this out-of-context, but I will admit that I invented the religion for a fascist state instead of using a real one to diffuse my fear of needlessly picking on one religion and likely upsetting part of my potential audience. After the fact, it feels a bit like I am picking on all religions, only kind of passive-aggressively. I'm okay with that. Everybody needs their nose tweaked now and again. What follows is a slightly [annotated] excerpt from the glossary in the book.

Decath - A religious organization which was a successor to the various Christian nationalist faiths that created NADS [North American Decath States] from its predecessor state [the United States], consolidated into a theocratic state-supported ministry. The religion is now world-wide, except where banned in five catholic countries. Adherents say it is not a successor to Catholicism, but a rejection of it. It comes from Dissenting Catholicism, and teaches that the liberal interpretations promulgated by the various orthodox and protestant churches regarding Christ's word was unfounded, and furthermore misrepresented God's will based on improper readings of both the new and old testaments. Their catholicism is a new orthodoxy that properly interprets an apostolic church structure while supporting a protestant ideal of a priesthood of believers that is guided by ministers. It is accurately spelled De-cath not Dis-cath. This because the members of the initial Synod of Alabama—which drew together the leaders or designates of various nationalistic churches, their largest corporate sponsors, and hundreds of US congressmen and sixty-nine senators—thought having the word sound like decaf would sell better amongst the disparate flocks they shepherded.

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