#Tag · bonfire.cafe

#Writing #Writers #WritingCommunity #WritersOfMastodon #AmWriting #Scriberspace

@orionkidder@writing.exchange · 5 hours ago

#WritersCoffeeClub Dec 31: Happy New Year! Take pride in what you’ve written and share the progress you've made!

I finished a whole first draft of a novel. It is just under 72,000 words. It's a short novel, but it's mine.

Jess Mahler

@JessMahler@indiepocalypse.social · 4 hours ago

#WritersCoffeeClub Dec 31: Happy New Year! Take pride in what you’ve written and share the progress you've made!

It's been a busy year! Five stories published and another one finished and ready to publish mid January!

6 book covers:
1) Book cover - On the left, the face of a fae, whose skin tones and hair are a mix of red and blue. Top right text "by Jess Mahler" Bottom right text "Fire and Ice"

2) Left cover is image of a man with dark hair and goatee wearing glasses. On the right is text, "Jess Mahler" in the top cover and "His New Master” in bottom corner. Background is orange gradient.

3) Everything in shades of yellow-orange. A smiling face with beard look out at the viewer from the left side of the image. Text "Dracula and the Wolfman?" and "Jess Mahler"

4) (Mostly) white text on dark blue background. “The Last Lady of Lună” with “Lună” in red overlaying the image of a crescent moon. “Jess Mahler” at the bottom. Image is framed on two sides by decorative scrollwork.

5) Book cover. Central image is a seedling growing out of a small pile of dirt, surrounded by a golden oval. Text: “Planting Life in a Dying City” “Jess Mahler”. Background is a faded image of an ancient city.

6) Central image is a sleek, almost triangular spaceship flying in a starry void. Image is surrounded by a black oval on a brick red background. Text: ‘Meadowsweet’ above and ‘Jess Mahler’ below the central image — 6 book covers: 1) Book cover - On the left, the face of a fae, whose skin tones and hair are a mix of red and blue. Top right text "by Jess Mahler" Bottom right text "Fire and Ice" 2) Left cover is image of a man with dark hair and goatee wearing glasses. On the right is text, "Jess Mahler" in the top cover and "His New Master” in bottom corner. Background is orange gradient. 3) Everything in shades of yellow-orange. A smiling face with beard look out at the viewer from the left side of the image. Text "Dracula and the Wolfman?" and "Jess Mahler" 4) (Mostly) white text on dark blue background. “The Last Lady of Lună” with “Lună” in red overlaying the image of a crescent moon. “Jess Mahler” at the bottom. Image is framed on two sides by decorative scrollwork. 5) Book cover. Central image is a seedling growing out of a small pile of dirt, surrounded by a golden oval. Text: “Planting Life in a Dying City” “Jess Mahler”. Background is a faded image of an ancient city. 6) Central image is a sleek, almost triangular spaceship flying in a starry void. Image is surrounded by a black oval on a brick red background. Text: ‘Meadowsweet’ above and ‘Jess Mahler’ below the central image

Jess Mahler boosted

Sophia Jane Hayden, Author

@sophiajanehayden_author@indieauthors.social · 8 hours ago

Wishing everyone a very Happy New Year! I capped off 2025 as a paid writer by sellig a one-paragraph short to a publication for one dollar. Follow your dreams. Any resolutions? Not me. I wouldn't keep them. #newyear #newyear2026 #resolution #resolutions #notme #fun #bookstodon #mastodon #writingCommunity #socialnetwork #social #socialweb #writersCoffeeClub #writer #followyourdreams #publishing #scribesAndMakers #work #words #writing #writers #writersLife #humor #funny #holiday #dollar #world

#Writing #Writers #WritingCommunity #WritersOfMastodon #AmWriting #Scriberspace

@orionkidder@writing.exchange · 5 hours ago

#WritersCoffeeClub Dec 31: Happy New Year! Take pride in what you’ve written and share the progress you've made!

I finished a whole first draft of a novel. It is just under 72,000 words. It's a short novel, but it's mine.

@kagan@wandering.shop · 6 hours ago

#WritersCoffeeClub day 31: Happy New Year! Take pride in what you’ve written and share the progress you've made!

Sophia Jane Hayden, Author

@sophiajanehayden_author@indieauthors.social · 8 hours ago

@cstross@wandering.shop · 12 hours ago

#WritersCoffeeClub 31st December 2025 Happy New Year! Take pride in what you’ve written and share the progress you've made!

2025 was a lousy year due to medical shit: had surgery on one eye, awaiting surgery on the other (it's bad enough to make reading tiring, but needs to get worse before they operate).

Got 80% of the way into a third draft of "Ghost Engine" before I got distracted by an attack novel, "Starter Pack", which is now 117K words long and in redraft pending sale. Fingers crossed!

Jess Mahler

@JessMahler@indiepocalypse.social · yesterday

#WritersCoffeeClub Day 30: How much would writing by another means (by hand, digitally, audio transcription) change your prose?

Writing by hand wouldn't change anything significantly. Except that with my fine motor problems I'd probably make a lot more 'typos'.

Audio would be interesting. I did audio transcription for on e f my nonfic books one summer and it went really well. I don't know how it would change my fiction, but would love to try.

#Writing #Writers #WritingCommunity #WritersOfMastodon #AmWriting #Scriberspace

@orionkidder@writing.exchange · yesterday

#WritersCoffeeClub Dec 29: What would I like to see future writer generations discard?

There's no device or conceit or tool that's inherently bad. I don't want anything "thrown away." What I want is for those tools to be used selectively, to fit the task at hand, rather than habitually: over and over again, always the same way.

#Writing #Writers #WritingCommunity #WritersOfMastodon #AmWriting #Scriberspace

@orionkidder@writing.exchange · yesterday

#WritersCoffeeClub Dec 30: How much would writing by another means (by hand, digitally, audio transcription) change your prose?

It would be very very different. Transcription will feel dead bc it doesn't have all my inflection. Writing by hand would be more circuitous because I can't rearrange text nearly as easily. I do write digitally, so that's my default.

#Writing #Writers #WritingCommunity #WritersOfMastodon #AmWriting #Scriberspace

@orionkidder@writing.exchange · yesterday

#WritersCoffeeClub Dec 28: How does your prose create and maintain tension?

I honestly have no idea how or even whether I'm doing that, so I'll be reading this prompt for tips.

@kagan@wandering.shop · yesterday

...can only be done alone, whereas I currently get a lot of really good work done in bars. So no, sticking with my current system.

(Although on further thought, doing it by voice would mean I wouldn't have typos anymore! My own constant typos drive me nuts. But I have a macro to fix most of them as I go, and it's not worth sacrificing the ability to write in noisy environments.) 3/3

#WritersCoffeeClub

@kagan@wandering.shop · yesterday

...to see what I've just "said") would alter the amounts and the ways that I go back and tweak stuff as I'm writing.

Also, this assumes automatic, *high quality* transcription after I've dictated. Ain't no way I'm retyping all that stuff after dictating.

Except, hmmm, that could be the phase where I do the kind of "initial cleanup" that I currently do while typing. It might work for me. But I'm quite happy with just typing. And also, dictation... 2/3

#WritersCoffeeClub

#writing #histfic #writersofmastodon

@kagan@wandering.shop · yesterday

#WritersCoffeeClub day 30: How much would writing by another means (by hand, digitally, audio transcription) change your prose?

I could not write by hand. It would stop me in my tracks.

I'm not sure what doing it by audio would do. I don't think it would change the final, resulting words all that much; I think of them in my head as spoken words anyway, and then write them out. But I do think having to speak them (and then have them vanish) rather than typing them (and still being able... 1/3

Howard Aiken

@technorow@mastodon.scot · yesterday

#writerscoffeeclub Dec 30. How much would writing by another means (by hand, digitally, audio transcription) change your prose?

All my full length novel manuscripts have been written using MS Word. I probably wouldn't be able to write without the ability to move text around and delete/insert text as required.

@cstross@wandering.shop · yesterday

#WritersCoffeeClub 30: How much would writing by another means (by hand, digitally, audio transcription) change your prose?

Significantly!

I started out writing on a manual typewriter, then an electric one, before graduating to a word processor. Each change lowered the barrier to composition, at word/sentence level then structural level.

Audio transcription is impossible for prose fiction—it's entirely incompatible with the way I compose text, and suffers from a highly restricted vocabulary.

@cstross@wandering.shop replied · yesterday

(contd.) Speech transcription software is not designed for prose fiction, it's designed for business correspondence. Can't recognize dialog tags, is bad at punctuation, and caters only to the most frequently used words.

Imagine trying to dictate a paragraph like this (see alt-text):

#WritersCoffeeClub

A paragraph from my current literary chew-toy. Spot the words that text-to-speech will get wrong!

Transcript:

The truth was that history in the Permanence was a thing of whispers and rumor, routinely obnubilated by those who might otherwise record it clearly, because if an ascendant house felt themselves traduced they might demonstrate their displeasure with the gossip-mongers by plucking out tongues and administering hydrofluoric acid enemas. — A paragraph from my current literary chew-toy. Spot the words that text-to-speech will get wrong! Transcript: The truth was that history in the Permanence was a thing of whispers and rumor, routinely obnubilated by those who might otherwise record it clearly, because if an ascendant house felt themselves traduced they might demonstrate their displeasure with the gossip-mongers by plucking out tongues and administering hydrofluoric acid enemas.