Notices by Kagan MacTane (kagan@wandering.shop), page 3

#WritersCoffeeClub Day 4: Do you/will you write under your own name? Do you share a name with another writer?

Yes, I'll be writing under my own name. And no, I don't share it with anyone else; I'm quite sure there is nobody else in the world with my name.

#WritersCoffeeClub Day 6: Is it the reader's/critic's interpretation of a work or the author's? Would you fight an author's opinion?

I'm of two minds (or maybe more) on the Death of the Author. A few thoughts: 🧵 1/5

#WritersCoffeeClub Day 5: What genre is your WIP?

Urban fantasy.

(Technically I suppose I could or should specify _modern_ urban fantasy, since urban fantasy can be set in earlier eras.)

* A work needs to, or at least really *should*, be able to stand on its own. It shouldn't need some external "artist's statement" to make it comprehensible. (For example, Félix González-Torres' "Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.)" seems to be nothing but a pile of candy unless and until you hear about how it represents his partner, who was dying of AIDS at the time the artwork debuted. Knowing that, it becomes powerful and painful, but without it? It's practically meaningless.) 2/5

* OTOH, context is important and can add a lot. Picasso's "Guernica", on its own, is obviously a representation of something very chaotic and traumatic, and that's clear without any outside knowledge. But knowing that it depicts an actual bombing of an actual town gives it greater weight. 3/5

* Buuuuuttt... sometimes artists just plain *deceive themselves*. Sometimes someone'll write something, and claim until they're blue in the face that "Really, it's about X! It's not Y, I promise!", and the rest of us can all see, "Sorry, pal, but it's obviously actually Y."

I haven't got any examples at hand right now, though, and I think that's fairly rare. 5/5

* What an author was trying to say, what they "meant", is important. If an author says "Look, my work was really intended to do/say X, that's what I was going for the whole time", I usually take that pretty seriously.

* OTOH, if nobody got that, then the author kind of failed. I mean, an artist or author's job is to *communicate something*. If a few people miss it, that's par for the course, but if most of them do? Then the artist's attempt to communicate was a failure. 4/5

#WritersCoffeeClub Day 8: Do you write in the active voice, passive voice or a mixture? Does it matter?

I think passive voice would be a really weird choice for a novel. It's great for scientific papers and other academic work, but it has fairly limited use in fiction. (An exception that comes to mind is Kafka's use of the passive voice in describing how Gregor Samsa became a cockroach: it serves effectively to obscure the agency behind that, because it's Not The Point of the story.)

#WritersCoffeeClub Day 7: What's your favourite book? Why?

I couldn't possibly pick just one. A few that come to mind as "ones I've loved", though, include:

* The Dark is Rising, by Susan Cooper
* Earth, by David Brin
* The Last Hot Time, by John M. Ford

I feel like I'm missing something here, and it'll hit me two weeks from now and I'll wonder how I could possibly have left it out.

#WritersCoffeeClub Day 9: How would you write an online chat or text message conversation in your novel?

In fact, I'm going to need to put at least one group-text convo into my very first chapter. I guess I'll probably indent (both right and left), and precede each message with the person's name.

Later chapters may need instances of "[name] is typing..." and so on. (My MCs are Millennials. Yes, of course they text each other a bunch!) Hmmm, that'll be interesting to run into/play around with.

#WritersCoffeeClub Day 10: What aspect of your work are you most proud of? Don't be shy.

The fact that my sweetheart really loved the one scene I've written.

I'll have more to be proud of when I have more written.

#WritersCoffeeClub Day 12: A game developer wants to base a game on your book. How do you feel about it?

I think my book might actually be a fairly good basis for a TTRPG, actually. I'd be cautiously in favor, depending on the developer/company.

I'd be more lukewarm or "meh" about a video game, but could be convinced.

#WritersCoffeeClub Day 11: How close is your final manuscript to your first draft?

Hell, I don't even have a first draft yet! I can hardly guess how close the final version will be to it (or how far away from it).

#WritersCoffeeClub Day 13: Do you write to a specific word count, or do you let the story dictate the length?

I'm just shooting to try to be in good "first-time urban fantasy novel" length. That has some range to it, thank goodness... but for the first draft, I'm planning to just see how long it comes it out, and then see if I need to do anything to expand or pare it down.

#WritersCoffeeClub Day 14: What's the biggest edit you've ever needed to make to your work?

It's too early for me to have nearly anything to respond to this with. I guess there's this one case of a setting description, where I wrote it just to see how well I could describe a place that will figure prominently in the plot, and then later I realized I wanted to start my story earlier in the year, so I needed to change the trees from leafy and green to bare branches, just beginning to bud.

#WritersCoffeeClub Day 17: What aspects of your life do you bring into your writing?

My love of cities, my belief that the future is what we make it, and hopefully a little of my sense of wonder and love of heroism.

On a smaller level: fairly little of David's job and workplace are likely to show up on-page, but if any do, I'll certainly be pulling in my own career web-dev knowledge to provide verisimilitude.

#WritersCoffeeClub Day 16: Are there any writing tropes you dislike, without insulting other club members?

Writing tropes or story tropes? (What's the difference?) Anyway, loads! One quick example is that any kind of forced pregnancy situation will infuriate me. I hate when creators do that to their characters. (Yes, that includes Steven Moffat.) Also mystical/alien/whatever children who grow up abnormally fast (ST:TNG *and* V, I'm looking at youse.)

#WritersCoffeeClub Day 18: Do you intend to read a book over the holidays? What will you choose?

I'm still working on finishing Cassandra Clare's _City of Lost Souls_ (the 5th in the Shadowhunters series). Not sure when I'll finish it; I don't exactly have a "holiday break", more just a pair of three-day weekends back-to-back.

#WritersCoffeeClub Day 19: If you could remove one rule of grammar, which would you choose?

Hell, I'd rather *add* one. Like, given how often my partner and I bemoan the lack of #clusivity in English, that might be what I'd go for.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clusivity TL;DR: It's the ability when saying "we" to indicate whether the person you're talking to is or isn't included. (Frex, "We're going to the store, do you want anything?" (excl.) vs. "We're going to the park, grab your coat!" (incl.))

#WritersCoffeeClub Day 22: Change one word in the title of a famous novel to change its meaning.

Fahrenheit 212 (The temperature at which water boils — maybe it'd be a novel about making tea?)