#writerscoffeeclub 31/5: What other hashtags inspire you on Mastodon' or similar?
As a regular thing, just this one and #wordweavers. I get a lot of fun and food for thought both writing my own responses to daily prompts and reading those of others.
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#wordweavers 31/5: Do your MCs enjoy games?
Jerya never had much access to games growing up. Her recreations were reading & walking, both solitary pursuits.
In later life she has very little free time and her main way to relax is by riding (horses; bicycles haven’t been invented yet). She still reads, too, but a lot of it is work-related in one way or another.
What she needs is for someone to invent Sudoku.
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#wordweavers 30/5: Are you comfortable writing from the POV of a child? Written any?
I haven’t published anything with POV younger than about 19, but I have unpublished work that takes in considerably younger characters. One who is about ten, for example. It doesn’t feel too hard. I used to be ten, after all.
The risk, I think, is making the character too ‘childish’, not too grown up.
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#WritersCoffeeClub 30/5: How do you achieve a sense of wonder in your stories?
Like everything else, it happens (if it does!) because I feel it myself first. There is no recipe or formula.
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#WritersCoffeeClub 29/5: Average time to complete a writing project?
There must be an average (mean, median, or mode) but ask around among writers and you’ll find the standard deviation is pretty wide.
I used to do camera guides in six weeks, because we didn’t get the cameras until official release and the publisher wanted them out ASAP. On the other hand, #ThreeKindsofNorth took probably 20 years from idea to publication.
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#WordWeavers 29/5: How would your MC handle finding a spider in their home?
Jerya grew up living in caves. She wouldn’t have a problem in the slightest. (Fortunately the biology of the Known Lands is more like Britain than Australia, so there aren’t any venomous spiders to worry about.)
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#wordweavers 28/5: Did your MCs have comfort objects they carried as a child?
Jerya grew up in a remote village with very few personal possessions, and nothing inessential. Her comfort as she grew older came in walking the forests and the moors and teaching herself to swim in a secret tarn.
Now (aged 33 in Book 4, due out in August) her main source of comfort is around horses and going for solitary rides.
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#WritersCoffeeClub 28/5: Do you have advice for other writers you have yet to hear from different sources?
Every piece of writing advice I’ve ever seen is contradicted by someone else. Of the two writers I regard as my biggest influences, one was a plotter and one wasn’t.
The only advice I would give is this:
‘Someone told me’ is no basis for anything.
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#WritersCoffeeClub 27/5: What's the ideal story length?
Isn’t this the ultimate beginner question? To which the only answer is:
Not too long, not too short. Probably somewhere between five words and half a million.
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#WordWeavers 27/5: What would your ideal writing group be like?
I am a Life Member of the Outdoor Writers and Photographers Guild and have benefitted greatly from that, but I have never come across anything even remotely equivalent in the world of fiction.
https://www.owpg.org.uk
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