#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2026.06.22 —How effectively do you convey tone in your writing?

Pretty well. The 1st person narrator in the current story sets the tone as she reacts to situations, conveys her undiplomatic opinions in the narration, and occasionally makes herself look sexist and uneducated. I control this by moderating her vocabulary and grammar to fit her education level, and revising it if the draft veers out of control. Bolt is a high school dropout and a jock. She runs the gamut of being apathetic (she's been blackmailed) to desirous to fearful, and often spirals into strange paroxysms of logic to justify her feelings or what she wants to do that she shouldn't. Through her ups and down, I work to keep her unschooled eloquence from becoming grandiloquent and sophisticated. I think her hopeful tone comes through despite all she goes through.

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#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2026.06.01 What sense is easiest for you to describe?

Nonsense of course. It pours down like a river of words.

#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2026.06.01 What sense is easiest for you to describe?

All of the senses present their challenges, but smell, which is an extremely important sense to my 1st person narrator MC, Bolt, is particularly challenging. She not only talks about intimate human scents, but the ambient scents—food, plants, buildings, magic—in her overheated sweaty world.

I want this quote to apply for the reader: "Toto, I have a feeling we're not in Kansas any more."

There are a limited set of adjectives that aren't analogies to choose from, without repetition. For example acrid or fetid as compared to vinegary or like camembert. If I write vanilla, I have to think whether such a thing as vanilla could exist in her climate-disaster world. It can quickly become a show don't tell disaster! As for something cheesy, do they even have dairy? Sometimes I settle for a word to mislead so that I can surprise the reader later to demonstrate how alien the environment is. For example, horses are mentioned and we later learn that the animal has a row of stegosaur plates for cooling purposes down its spine, which renders it rather difficult to saddle. Some things totally don't exist as when Bolt describes them; the reader will have absolutely no reference other than the narrator liking them or being disgusted.

Don't get me started about the difference between what I rush to paper in the first draft, and the metaphorical stuff that arrives during revision!

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#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2026.05.21 — What targets do you set for yourself? To what frequency?

None. Maybe I should consider it…?

No! When I did that crap, imposing goals, writing daily do or die, setting quotas I could never meet, I burnt out.

For over a decade.

Better I should think about writing, think about stories, even happily daydream… but write when the story wants out.

YMMV 😓

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#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2026.05.29 — What (in terms of writing) do you fear?

My work never finding an audience.

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#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2026.05.22 — How well would your current WIP work as a play?

No.

But there is a theatre play in it where the MC gets to watch "back stage" as the play is staged (including magical lighting and staging of backgrounds and props), and later takes photos while the celebrity actor is interviewed. Does that count?

No? [pouts]

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#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2026.05.20 — If not your current genre, what genre would you write?

Fantasy. Not epic fantasy. No fan of Tolkien adjacent stories. Nothing with Norse or similar mythological roots. Something urban or hugely reality warping.

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#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2026.05.19 — How would changing genre change your current WIP's plot?

The genre is essentially SF, but not hard SF. Yes, the story does discuss the effects of science and technology on people (David Brin's definition of SF), but the story is not about science and technology any more than a story set in modern times is about computers, cars, airplanes, electricity, and climate. You can't entirely remove references to them, but science and technology themselves aren't the heart of story. I called it social SF when I started writing YA in the 80s.

That said, the science and technology in the WIP could be crudely (and peripherally to the story) binned together as genetics and applied physics. I could change the genre to fantasy, where the genetics could be simply be presented as beastmen cultures and the physics as magic. The genre switch wouldn't largely change the WIP's plot, but it could make it seem more whimsical (I prefer gritty and realistic seeming) and less firmly constrained by rules. Good SF is all about ensuring the rules of the universe, like the laws of physics, are knowable, so that the plot and the constraints on the characters are knowable—and crucially, predicable.

Not so much with fantasy.

Since one of the factors in the Reluctance Series is an additional force of nature, it's inescapable that "violation physics" might be lumped into a bin with magic. Fantasy is an acceptable alternative genre.

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#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2026.05.18 — With whom do you wish you could share your work but can't?

Mom. She passed away six years ago.

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