#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2504.20 — What rôle does religion play in your writing?

Religiosity is important in many of my stories, even when it is as prominent as vacuum by its absence. Usually, I don't write in the point of view of the religious, but I did write an SF novel in the point of view of a shaman. I'd lived in Bali for awhile, and having studied the culture and theatre of the island during college, felt I had a feel for animism. At university, I studied religions and non-western cultures as part of my degree, as well as folklore and mythology. I find it fascinating. At least as far as my writing goes my degree has proved useful.

More often I write about how people wield religion to abuse society. My latest novel (now in revision) pits a fictional religion and a theocratic plutocracy (where our world is headed) against one woman's quest for freedom. It is the background main antagonist. For the people in the other WIP, the concept of a supernatural or the divine is absurd; they don't even have words for it in their vocabulary. Nevertheless, the MCs are destined to face people who bear unusual ideas about how reality actually functions, who might react badly when upon meeting a woman with bull horns and a man with ruby-edged white feathered wings.

[Author retains copyright (c)2025 R.S.]

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"Let's win, before we're dancing at the end of a rope, without music." ~ The Cisco Kid

Tracy Hayes, Licensed to P.I. has been out for two weeks now, and readers seem to like it. You can find first two chapters and purchase links at:
http://www.susannashore.com/licensedtopi.html

Sanxingdui archaelogical museum
#china #sanxingdui #archaeology #photography #alien #mystery #sichuan #museum

'Wow. Couldn't put it down. Had me guessing what the outcome would be until the very end. Great characters and storyline.'

Amazon - http://mybook.to/MyNameIsRachel

Other Retailers - https://books2read.com/MyNameIsRachel

#MyNameIsRachelByLornaPeel #BooksByLornaPeel #Mystery #Suspense #Romance #MysteryRomance #KindleUnlimited #Genealogy @bookstodon

#PennedPossibilities 648 — MC POV: Tell us about your home.

[Streak:] I live in an apartment building near the edge of the better part of town. It's remarkable for being in a neighborhood populated by day angels because it's not a village tree nor built into a hill, but a conventional building. I live there with my sisters and my mother, and I'm the middle child. My room is little better than a small pantry or a large closet, but I'm happy for it. My sisters hate me because I had to raise them and set rules (long story), so I'm thankful for a window I can fly in and out of, a black lacquer floor desk, where I keep my books, and a place to unroll a sleeping mat. Baskets and hampers hold my things. You would call the place a boarding house where you live. The apartment is only three bed rooms and a kitchen. The rain room (showers) are on the shared entry floor at the end of the hall, opposite the entry with the post boxes, next to the squats. Both utility rooms are unisex, so you'd better knock before entering.

[Thorn:] I'm a daemon, but live in what many consider a bad neighborhood populated by day angels. It's a village tree house my mother bought because she feels safer there than amongst people who look like us but refuse to accept us as their equals. Our entire nest is called an aerie, and it once belonged to a famous day angel who rebelled against the government a century and a half ago. It requires us to climb ladders to enter it and to levitate provisions to stock it.

My room is a chamber grown from a flattened lateral branch, in a crotch between an auxiliary trunk and uprights. The floor slopes upward and my bedstead is in a hammock across what amounts to a raised dias. I've a nightstand that is a cut-off stump. It's opposite from the casement windows installed at the lower end of the space. I'm thankful for the door like crank windows because they're convenient for when Streak comes to visit—when Mother isn't home, obviously! They provide light despite the tree's heavy canopy, and are enough that foliage forms an interior ceiling and I can culture moss and lichen as carpeting so I don't have to wear slippers to protect my feet from the bark. Smaller windows with rainbow-stained wedged rock glass also provide light to fill in shadowy corners during day light, and can be tilted to encourage convective circulation.

My desk is a form of wood ear mushroom, the top of which is polished to a glassy sheen. The shelves scattered up and down the walls for my hundreds of books are a combination of the same myco-archeculture and woven smaller branches.

I've hung posters by red ribbons, so as not to hurt the living tree, including a grand one Mother bought me of an exploded diagram of the structure of the crystal spheres. After our adventures with Rainy Days, I've also hung enlargements of pictures the woman gave us of her and Streak, though I know he finds them embarrassing. I can't help but admire my boyfriend's best attributes.

[Author retains copyright (c)2025 R.S.]

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The Mysterious Mr. Miller https://www.bikingjp.com/675499/ ##adventure #bookreview #ClassicLiterature #classicmystery #CyclingGifu #detective #dramatic #espionage #GifuCycling #Intrigue #Mysterious #Mystery #mysterybook #narrative #spooky #storytelling #storytime #Suspense #suspenseful #Thriller #Vintage #williamlequeux #yt:cc=on #岐阜サイクリング #岐阜自転車に乗る #川辺町自転車

https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-mysterious-flow-of-fluid-in-the-brain-20250326/ The brain has one of the highest metabolisms of any organ in the body, and that process must yield by-products that need to be removed. But what about that blood brain barrier that likes to micro manage everything. #science #medicine #biology #mystery

https://www.cyclingeu.com/581718/the-mysterious-mr-miller-%f0%9f%95%b5%ef%b8%8f%e2%99%82%ef%b8%8f%f0%9f%94%8d/ The Mysterious Mr. Miller #adventure #Bicycling #BicyclingUK #BicyclingUnitedKingdom #Biking #BikingUK #BikingUnitedKingdom #bookreview #ClassicLiterature #ClassicMystery #Cycling #CyclingAylesburyUK #CyclingUk #CyclingUnitedKingdom #detective #dramatic #espionage #Intrigue #mysterious #mystery #mysterybook #Narrative #spooky #storytelling #storytime #Suspense #suspenseful #thriller #UK #UnitedKingdom #Vintage #WilliamLeQueux #yt:cc=on

I read a news item about Amazon's TV adaptation of William Gibson's novel THE PERIPHERAL, and thought the idea sounded intriguing. The show got cancelled after a single season, so there's no point in watching it now -- I read the book instead.

In the book, protagonist Flynne Fisher lives in an economically-depressed rural area in a near-future US, with her mom Ella and her ex-military brother Burton. Burton is doing odd jobs, one of which is supposedly beta-testing a new VR game.

He lets Flynne sub for him in the game, where she's operating a drone in a futuristic city and during this, she witnesses an apparent murder. But it's not actually a game: the people of 70 years in the future, who live in a world of bioengineering and 3D-printed bodies, are using an unspecified mechanism to communicate with the past and outsource some tasks, like drone operation, to people in the past.

Now someone in the future would like to eliminate Flynne as a potential witness, and it turns into a proxy battle as the future people, with publicist Wilf Netherton as our POV character, begin manipulating the global economy of Flynne's time. To help with the investigation, Flynne dials into the future in a teleoperated body that's called a peripheral, giving the book its title.

Lots of clever ideas here, and Gibson's prose is excellent. Each chapter alternates between Flynne's familiar and increasingly risky world, and Wilf's exotic and unfamiliar one. Somewhere between Flynne and Wilf, there was a polycrisis event called the Jackpot that's an unspecified mix of climate change, technological disaster and political crisis that killed off 80% of humanity.

(Ha ha, those sci-fi writers with their whimsical escapist fantasies!)

Overall I liked the book, but it left me unsatisfied. Spoilers in the next post... (1/2)

"Already there was a blur where his chin had been" #Reading Catherine Aird's "The Stately Home Murder" and enjoying her low key humour #ebooks #bookstodon #Mystery @bookstodon

Which black bear came out from their slumber first? Read it now when you subscribe to patreon.com/amberunmasked
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https://www.wacoca.com/life/243686/ The Lost Million by William Le Queux: A Thrilling Mystery Unveiled! #Adventure #BookReview #ClassicLiterature #ClassicStory #CrimeFiction #curiosity #HandCream #HistoricFiction #Legend #literature #LostMillion #Mysterious #Mystery #NovelReview #Storytelling #Suspense #suspenseful #thriller #TOCCA（トッカ）ハンドクリームクレオパトラの香り #twists #VintageNovel #WilliamLeQueux #yt:cc=on

Reading more than one non-fiction book this weekend, so decided to go with something lighter to alternate when my brain hits max on information-to-remember.
Just finished Robert Thorogood's Death Comes to Marlow. It checked all the boxes of easy reading mystery. I like that the person who leads the investigation is a woman in her 70s. The all too typical grizzled, hard drinking 40 something male has been overused for decades, and boring.

#RecipesForLoveAndMurder season 2 #review. Love this beautiful series with Maria Doyle Kennedy. A charmer. #TV #mystery #food

https://oldaintdead.com/recipes-for-love-and-murder-season-2-review/