#PennedPossibilities 882 — How could someone locate your SC(s) in a crowd?

🎄Ok. Fun. Fun to write in a sipping a hot Irish coffee made with melted chocolate and cognac sitting in front of a fireplace -type fun. 🤶🧑‍🎄🌲🎁

Blue

He's the hunky guy walking around wearing 50 pounds of gold-plated praetorian armor like it were a tank top. He's got the wholesome sexy look of the guy who'd play Superman in a movie. Oh, don't get me started about his gorgeous blue-feathered wings. Every woman notices Mr. Oblivious. He likes Bolt, though.

Pigeon the Pilferer

Bad body odor. The punk gangster lives on a diet heavy with fried food, onions, garlic, and stinky fish like kippers and sardines. Might have something to do with why you know he's in that crowd without seeing him?

Molt

Well, the day angel guy is in molt, but besides the an askew occasional down feather, he's lanky and tall and rather nerdy. It's hard to relate in words but he has a sexy smile when he sees Bolt; otherwise he looks like a college student.

The devil-girl

If you see a young woman who looks somewhere between 15 and 30 (depending on whether she's in pigtails or has her hair up in a frumpy bun) with a textbook levitating reading-distance from her face, walking down the street, the crowd parting for her, it's probably her. Oh, the daemon also has a tiny horn sticking out from each temple that resembles a sharpened length of rusty rebar.

Night on Fire

Easy: She's a night angel. Rare. Think of a classic good-looking vampire but instead of a cape she has velvety bat wings that can wrap around her. She's as dark as nightfall (deep blue) but with reddish dark fuzz on the underside of her wings. She. Turns. Heads. Despite being under five feet tall. And she wears dark wraparound glasses that hide her amber cat eyes. She be SEXY, mucho. You will do what she says because you want to impress her.

Steamed Milk and Sugar

He's a pretty average guy, slightly chubby and rounded, a bit pale, very much looking like office help who doesn't want to be thought of as competition or date-material. He's the most likely to be missed of the group of SCs, but he's also the most intense of the group, always working to succeed as a reporter, so he's very observant; he'd be called shifty-eyed if he were the least bit sneaky. He'll note Bolt from his place in the crowd, no fears. He'll wave and shout and smile. He's very supportive of her; she helped him make his first big break. No way Bolt will miss him! She wants to jump his bones even though she wants to keep him in the friend zone (Night on Fire is his roommate). He's definitely not her physical type (she's a jock into physical fitness and prefers her men with wings; he's a saint and has none), but he's giving her tons of reasons to stop being superficial! I hope the hot situation makes the readers want to tear their hair out.

@floofpaldi: Happy Holidays to you and your Nana!

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#WordWeavers 2025.12.24 — What is the gift your antagonist brings to the world?

Three antagonists, three brief answers.

Pigeon the Pilfer:

Nothing really, he's a punk gangster. Fast food sellers maybe consider him a gift because he eats their food at every meal. He's partial to fried breaded fish sandwiches with a side of fried onions. Sometimes, and only at breakfast, he has kippers and onions. He always adds extra garlic.

Boss Mead:

His gift really waits for a sequel as the current WIP is an inciting incident for him. He does keep the Home City underworld mostly under control, lowering the violence level and upping the organizational level, and he takes some pride in that. He likes profit since he is a mob boss, and likes it when people voluntarily pay rather than having to be roughed up. He'd rather be accepted into high society, but that's not happening as he's also nouveau riche.

Director Rain Days:

Literally the gift she brings to the world is the world. When she was a teenager, she realized she could do one thing spectacularly well. The fact that there were wars because of her, and civilizations perished, is incidental to the fact that without her, the world would have become uninhabitable within decades. Neither she nor the author know how long ago that was, but it was more than a millennium ago.

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#PennedPossibilities 881 — Reveal a fact about your MC that only a few people know.

Over the last months, I've shared a lot of Bolt's backstory that will probably not even make it into the novel. It is a 1st person story and while she does look into a mirror to fix her hair or adjust her bling in the story, she is not in the habit of describing herself any more than we are, so I've no chance of knowing her facial features. So here's a fact about her few people know: her eye color.

Not even me. I haven't a clue what her eye color is! Maybe one of her various male friends will complement them one day. Maybe it'll be the devil-girl when she… 😋

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#ScribesAndMakers 2025.12.23 — Would you let the pigeon drive the bus?

I suspect there is a cultural or literary reference that just flew over my head at cruising altitude, but what came into my head reading the question is funny enough that I'm not going to look up the reference.

Pigeon the Pilferer is a minor antagonist in my current novel WIP. He is a day angel, which means he is a man who has wings and can fly. (Incidentally, he's is human, though from his behavior, you wonder.) Unlike the main character, Bolt—also a day angel but a woman and a very skilled flier—Pigeon does not have the skill to be able to pull things behind him through the air. He can barely lift a bag of groceries with his arms, let alone pull a granny cart behind him—were he so inclined—but he is a gangster, as you might have guessed by the Pilferer in his name, and eats fast food morning, noon, and night, because his mother kicked him out of the aerie and he refuses to learn to cook. Back to the issue of pulling things through the air. Day Angels pull air taxis, receiving premium fares from the non-angelic unlucky to have been born without wings but who are flush with coin. Buses exist, but require a team of multiple angels. For his lack of skill, he would definitely not be allowed to pull. Nobody would trust him to pull, or team up with them, even if he were capable!

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#WordWeavers 2025.12.23 — What’s the first and last line of dialogue for your MC?

In one novel:

First:

"Charmed. Sit, sit. I'm the opposite of formality. I don't bite," unless my teeth were all I had to fight with, anyway.

Last:

"She is really is his biological aunt!"

In a novella, same MC:

First:

I hissed. "Keep calm!"

Last:

"Anybody? Really?"

In yet another of the MC's novels, I found something far better:

First:

"I'm too young for you," I muttered, then added loud enough to be understood in the shocked silence of the rest of his gang, "and far too much for you to handle." I kept eye contact as I continued through the intersection.

Last:

"Congratulations, Champ!" I told him. I craned my neck forward and kissed him.

What I learned from this exercise? When you write 1st person narrative, which is basically the POV character thinking a stream of consciousness, the bits of dialogue are pretty inconsequential. Out of context, even more so. I even found one story where the POV doesn't speak at all during the first chapter, though that was a different MC, so I didn't report that one.

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#PennedPossibilities 880⅞ #substitoot Is your MC the type who prepares for parties, gathering treats and decorating elaborately days ahead, or calls together their besties at the spur of the moment, usually making it a pot luck? Why?

The devil-girl was trained to host state dinners. Of course, after running away the only thing she plans is hosting her team of bodyguards at a restaurant! Usually after work. She pays for drinks even though she's too young to drink herself.

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#WordWeavers 2025.12.22 — If the inciting incident never happened, what would happen to your MC?

Reluctant Courier is a single story in an arc of intersecting stories, so it's complicated.

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#PennedPossibilities 880 — MC POV: Did you have a childhood sweetheart? Who were they?

[This is the devil-girl in a follow-on novella from her prizefighter novella. She's somewhat autistic like her author. —RS]

I took a deep breath, then another, calming myself before I looked at the giant women beside me with her curly brown hair that fluffed as the humidity rose. Brown eyes looked at me expectantly. An eyebrow raised. She still couldn't read me, and she was ten years my senior, a graduate student at a prestigious university, the closest thing I had to a friend. Suddenly. A tutor. A sought-after mentor. Or more precisely a confidante since little things like this question called into question what friendship was in the first place, and why I didn't understand it, and suspected anyone that called me one of the words that asserted I was one. Was. A…friend.

I didn't wrinkle my nose. I felt positive of that. I hoped.

"Sweet​heart?" I repeated. "I told you who I am. You researched me?"

"I— No. I just figured, I mean, everyone had one. I know it's a secret and if others noticed who I was looking for it might get out. I wouldn't—!"

I eyed her narrowly. I didn't read people well, and I couldn't tell a lie well unless she wouldn't meet my eyes and this was the opposite; I could at least read nerves; I'd defo done that to her. I sighed. "Whatevs. I—"

"I'd like to understand you better," she blurted, causing curls to fall across her face, which she swatted away. "But I understand you have secrets."

"I didn't mean to snap." I knew to look away in situations like this, but maybe I did that automatically. Hard to tell. "I-I don't care what people think, but I keep getting used by them and I care about being put back on a leash again, which is why I do appreciate you keeping my unsolved disappearance unsolved.

"And yes, I had a childhood sweet​heart whom I got along with famously. Toddlers bathing together in a tub with yellow duckies was my first memory of him, and we were like siblings, even had a tin-cans telephone between our houses, and together we could do anything, solve any mystery. I remember thinking once about the handsome man he would become and hoped we'd be together always."

"What happened to him?"

"He betrayed me."

"B-B-Betray—"

"I was eight. He abandoned me without a word. It hurt, okay? I needed a friend after my parents died." I turned away from those eyes this time because I had to. Maturity. Certain understanding that I still had trouble fathoming. I ought ask, but I knew I'd just confuse her asking her to explain her expressions. "I've begun to suspect I don't understand friendship in the first place." Can't trust what you don't understand, right? "What he was a genius at was why I need you as a tutor."

"Um, thanks, I think," she murmured.

"You're coming as close as anyone to explaining the things he could in a few words to me back then. One day, I hope to find him all grownup, to learn what really happened. I suspect I have been missing something all along. If he's just a selfish guy, I'm smacking him upside the head."

"Remind me not to get on your bad side."

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#WordWeavers 2025.12.21 — Does your antagonist treasure people or objects more?

Three for the price of one! From Reluctant Courier (for the Mob)—

Rainy Days: People. She's incredibly altruistic even if she sometimes comes off as hedonistic. People's wellbeing is her focus. The entire human population. If she wasn't so ruthless in her methods, she might be considered a hero.

Boss Mead: He's confused about this. Becoming a mob boss was somewhat accidental and not exactly what he wanted, though frankly he's pretty good at keeping his "mob" of employees acting mostly in concert. The people who manage his syndicate would say the answer is things—he stewards quite a bit of wealth—but in the end it's that he wanted to be liked and looked up to, and would settle for simple human companionship. The author knows this, but that's something for a sequel. He is a bad guy. Violence happens around him, because of him. He will learn what he did wrong soon enough.

Pigeon the Pilferer: He's a punk gangster as it's the only way he knows how to make a living. People? Things? Whatever is fun and he can get away with without getting hurt, bring it on! However, he does prefer men on the people side of the equation. If it's the right guy (which he does find in the story) he does become all melty and goofy, so maybe he veers toward the people side of this answer.

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#PennedPossibilities 879 — How would your antagonist locate someone in a crowd?

Boss Mead wouldn't do it himself. He has plenty of people working for him, in addition to bodyguards that might march someone right over, because under his direction his employees prosper. He doesn't need to lift a finger. He simply states how nice it would be if so-and-so were there, and people make it so. If he thinks it would be nice if a so-and-so ought have an accident because of reneging on a deal, that type of thing also always seems to happen. Really, whatever rosy reality he talks about remarkably usually happens, poof, like that—without him actually ordering anything, because, if anyone asks, like the constabulary, he's never responsible nor has he ever ordered anything. Imagine that!

One of the major mysteries is what happens when he finds someone uncooperative to his suggestions, but spoilers!

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