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#ScribesAndMakers Mar 13: Shameless self-promotion day.
My debut novel, a space-western called Gas Giant Gambit: A Tall Tale From Beyond the Cygnus Rift is coming out in September, and we just revealed the amazing cover!
#ScribesAndMakers 2503.13 — Shameless Self-Promotion Day. Let's boost away.
Here's the newly minted cover art† for Mars Need Women. Check it out!
It's a web-novel, described in the blurb below. I have been posting it in a single free-to-read Mastodon thread. Here is the story link: https://eldritch.cafe/@sfwrtr/114088945266387178
“A hopeful deeply-dystopian feminist SF story, with thinly veiled jabs at our current world's bad actors making for a bad future. Please note the past tense in the title: Mars Needed Women. The story's women are going to work to bring down the system, at least that part that's oppressing them, in a massive unscheduled disassembly.”
So far I've posted 12 chapters of 31, which I will do more or less daily through the end of this month. The first installment is an inside jacket blurb. The main story starts with a clang in the second installment. Chapter 11 may leave you in tears. #RSMarsNeededWomen
More in the #altText
=-=-=-=
† I designed and created the cover, wrote the blurbs, and did the titles. The images are courtesy of ESA and NASA. The spine is a strip of a Mariner 7 image. This is becoming a hobby of mine, and I am open to requests.
[Author retains copyright (c)2025 R.S.]
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#RSstory
I was recently interviewed for The Hagstone Podcast, and the episode goes live tomorrow. In it, I talk about the intersections of folklore, witchcraft, art, and resistance with my mentor and friend Andreas Kornevall of Northern Spirit House. I've been looking forward to sharing this with everyone.
Ah, technology...Do I care that the AI overview of my ridiculously spicy, erotic romance Flicka's LOVERS pictures Mary O'Hara's sweet, G-rated book My Friend Flicka? NAH! #AI #noAI #Books #Bookstodon #google #writer #Writers #WritersCoffeeClub #Publishing #Authors #author
THE SLOG.
When you're not inspired—you're just stubborn.
I wrote something on what no one told me about writing a book. But really, it’s about anything worth doing.
https://kristie-de-garis.ghost.io/the-slog-what-no-one-told-me-about-writing-a-book/
By Hand · The Slog - What No One Told Me About Writing A Book.There’s still so much prestige and status attached to a book deal. I'm not sure that’s how it should be—but just 0.1% of the global population have been traditionally published, and even when you include self-publishing (and you should), it only jumps to 0.15%.
But
The continuation of my folkloric creeper tale, which will now extend to 3 chapters.
https://medium.com/first-line-fiction/bogles-and-caves-bairns-staves-77e57a70b087
#firstlinefiction #writingprompts #WritingCommunity #fiction #folklore #horror #writer #readingcommunity #writerslift #shortstory #mythology #cryptid
First Line Fiction · Bogles and Caves, Bairns & Staves - First Line Fiction - Medium
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@adriabailton For my #Writephant #selfpromo, I'm going to link to my WIP web novel. I've described it as a hopeful deeply-dystopian feminist SF story, with thinly veiled jabs at our current world's bad actors making for a bad future. Please note the past tense in the title: Mars Needed Women. The story's characters are going to work to bring down the system, at least that part that's oppressing them, in a massive unscheduled disassembly. I've so far published nine chapters. The tenth of 31 is half-written and should go out tonight.
The first installment reads like a jacket blurb, but we get into the main character (May Ri) and her life in subsequent chapters.
I've imagined the cover art, but not had time to draw it. It would be the black ink outline of a horizontal arm with red finger nails on a white background. On the forearm there would be a triskelion tattoo, the outline of which would contain a cutout of a full color image of Mars. This corresponds to the tattoo all the colonists have.
First installment: https://eldritch.cafe/@sfwrtr/114088945266387178
Latest installment: https://eldritch.cafe/@sfwrtr/114140417097319679)
Now it's time for self-promo! Feel free to post whatever fits in the character count.
Eldritch CaféRS, Author, Novelist, Prosaist (@sfwrtr@eldritch.cafe)> 2503.01 — Women #Writever #Mars #SpaceOpera
## Mars needed women.
May Ri bought into the hype and the spiel, not realizing it was the last gasp of a long dead oligarch's dream. When the money dried up, nobody would finance the supply missions. Who cared about the ten thousand up there when you could outrage the millions down here with something less expensive? Earthers returned to their petty games of slavery—that wasn't called as such—and empire that ate nations.
On Mars, colonists were pushed to their limits: The terraforming mission, the domes, the spinlauncher and Deimosbase, the raising the first and second generation martians. Men died disproportionately. In the end, a few strongmen attempted to corner the growing "female resource" to their benefit and to the benefit their sons, working to crush the whisper of the half-forgotten promise of democracy that had followed May Ri to the planet of war.
She and her daughters led the way, fighting. Together with "sisters" and with "aunts," they redefined *which* gender would be considered a "resource."
They found that the blood of the ever-absent fathers spilled on the rusty regolith of Mars blended in nicely.
Earthers were outraged. #RSMarsNeededWomen 01
[Author retains copyright (c)2025 R.S.]
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@adriabailton #writephant A4: At times poorly. I'm easily distracted. My stories want to write themselves in the middle of the night when I need to sleep. I find myself writing on my iPad while the spouse drives, using a computer on the treadmill, or thumb typing stuff whenever I can squeeze in time and have a functioning brain cell left, and even when I don't! Choosing to write a web novel in 31 days, serializing like a crazy Charles Dickens (something I'd done once before and vowed never again, but here I am), it only exacerbates the situation. Really, I need to get the next chapter done, now....
Q4. How do you manage your writing time?
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@adriabailton
#writephant A3: Likely not answering in the sense asked, I am currently writing the Mars story in a very non-linear manner. Some events toward the end of the story precede those in the beginning. Because I'm working with a set of 31 daily prompts that give me ideas for the chapter I am writing, I would like to stick to the order of the list. That's not entirely happening. I hope I don't give the readers jet lag.
One battle scene may benefit from the jet lag bit as the characters' day night cycle won't correspond to what they encounter as they fly between domes spaced in different Martian hemispheres.
Q3. Do you ever manipulate time in the stories you write?
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@adriabailton #writephant A2: I'm writing a story taking place on Mars right now. If it comes up, they are only going to have one global time zone with alphabetical hours. Since most people live inside domes, daylight hours are not a problem!
As for other stories, over decades, I've a few stories that likely mentioned it in passing.
Q2. Have you ever written DST (Daylight Saving Time) or jet lag for a character in a story?
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@adriabailton #writephant A1: I've been experiencing sleep disruption, and losing an hour hasn't helped at all. New stories aways wake me in the middle of the night! Sometimes I have perpetual jet lag. At least I have an extra hour when I wake up late morning!
Q1. In the US, Daylight Saving Time started yesterday where we “lost” an hour and sprang forward. If you live somewhere that participates in Daylight Saving Time, or if you lose time due to flying, how does it affect you? Do you get jet lag?
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2503.15 — Freely (Ch/March 9) #Writever #Mars #SpaceOpera, Fictional #journalism
Dispatches from Mars: 16 Psyche Disaster a Software Lock Problem?
When critical mechanical parts on the Robinson Crusoe's NTPU (Nuclear Thermal Propulsion Unit) broke, a crew of 73 that included machinists, metallurgists, mining specialists, three maker specialists, and one mechanical engineer should have been able to fix it.
Not having achieved circular orbit yet, the men of the fourth Martian mission to the massive asteroid had five days to prevent an intercept on the ambitious orbital plan that would prove too trusting of equipment thirty years in service. The intrepid self-reliant men, later tarred as stupid and arrogant by the Green Tractors Corporation, felt they didn't need to contact the Earth for assistance. Following safety regulations and allowing a proper cooldown period, they proceeded with disassembly and isolation of a part for which GTC has never provided schematics, and allegedly didn't even provide the emergency repairability cache required by most national laws. That search despite high radioactivity for the presumably misplaced cache ate up six hours of the crew's time. When their maker machines refused to make the scanned parts, or parts that could be refined in time by lathe work or manual labor to necessary tolerances, the ship's engineer reported it through approved channels.
The lunar deep space network promptly experienced an outage.
Let's unpack what looks like a conspiracy and a subsequent cover-up...
...Because corporations still design without repairability in mind for "cost" reasons, and even make it impossible to fix bugs in logic, or add enhancement that could have served as a lifesaving workaround in the Robinson Crusoe's case, disaster can and will happen. Not being able to freely use and repair equipment that the now bankrupt EM Mars Colonizations Corporation purchased, is a travesty of ethics. For a corporation that resides in a deeply Decath nation, it's a moral failure.
And, for what? Profit from costly maintenance and repair services only available in Earth Space? Are the 7,983 Martians, now less 73, not human? Does is their ability to only pay upon achieving profitability in a future decade strip them of their humanity? Why isn't there at least one tech available for Mars Space?
As you know from other coverage, the Robinson Crusoe went down in Panthia crater, hitting 100 meters below the rim ridge. In the end, despite applying boosts from both their landing vehicles and jury-rigged satellite boosters, all their sims had to tell them an hour before that it was hopeless. Worse, even with the cobbled-together low-bandwidth network the Martians got up, none of the all male crew got to send their families a proper goodbye.
All 73 sailors went down with their ship. They leave behind 73 wives on Mars, together with their 125 first generation (Nisei) Martian children, 24 boys and 101 girls, none over 17 Earth years of age.
[Author retains copyright (c)2025 R.S.]
Image credit: By NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU - https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/how-nasa-s-psyche-mission-will-explore-an-unexplored-world, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=117564734
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Welcome to my weekly Author Spotlight. I’ve asked a bunch of my author friends to answer a set of interview questions, and to share their latest work.
Today: As a bestselling author, Wren Valentino writes in multiple genres, primarily romance, thriller, young adult, and horror. Wren is the author of twenty novels including Accidents Never Happen ...
https://www.jscottcoatsworth.com/author-spotlight-wren-valentino/
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2503.19 (March 8) — Mental Load #Writever #Mars #SpaceOpera
[To prevent front-loading huge plot points, I'm writing prompts out of order.—R.S.]
On the occasions when first-wave male colonists, or too many husbands, took up residence in the connected domes usually reserved for women, May Ri worked (hid) in the crèche. Her cheek still burned with the memory of a slap-down two Mars years ago; her subconscious still feared retaliation for the revenge she'd exacted on the Director. Her "vacation" didn't mean she was excused from her design review, which was also a final engineering exam.
Her book plate bounced on her chest on a lanyard. She'd steal any unwary moment that presented itself. "Steal," being the keyword.
Marisela was 1½ Mars. May Ri's eldest nisei was keenly aware when her mother was Dome-Ma. The little one not only tagged around her mother—a little fist in the belt of her mother's hip huggers, nearly pulling down what May Ri would have called underwear, and had on arrival on Mars—but the savvy girl marshaled the other nisei toddlers (7 girls and 1 boy) such that they—and their shroom-blocks, communal red ride-on tunnel digger, flex sheets colored with charcoal and said charcoals, and pastel pony dolls (a new yet ancient girl-toy craze)—seemingly mag-levved around the room, always within May Ri's reach.
Good and bad points to that. Not being able to steal a moment. Bad. Being able to grab and catch an errant frog hopper. Good. With Mars-gravity-tuned tendons, squatting Nisei did hop like frogs.
Fahad, the boy, knocked over his sipper bottle, causing the lid to pop off. May Ri sighed and let go of her book plate. She stood as the boy started sniffing as a girl pointed. "He spilled!"
Carla, one Mars year older than May Ri, gave her a sympathetic smile. The tiny woman in the corral cared for May Ri's recently weened Manette; also her own crawling daughter, and four infants. May Ri was glad to avoid communal wet nurse duties. Not as glad while mopping up the spill, then judging fidgeters for rapid response loo visits or inspecting bottoms in case she missed an indicator. She did like sneak-hugging the two squabbling youngsters on the floor, getting squeals, and having Marisela join hugging her shoulders.
"What if the axles were shorter," she said to herself, a brainwave hitting. As little ones piled on, the best she could do was repeat "Axles" to remember her idea. Tapping her ear, calling it in, would disrupt the workstations as well as the crèche, and she wasn't sure yet it was a good idea—
"I have such a cute daughter!"
"Randy?"
"She really wants to help Mama, doesn't she?" Her husband finished, swinging their squealing daughter through the air. Too soon she quieted, making him set her down. Their little nisei, with toasty skin like her father and dark hair like her mother, swiftly hid in the crowd of children. "What's your schedule?"
Randolf visited, as did all the men, on honeymoons. May Ri doubted Marisela really knew her father as more than a recurring scary stranger. In an Earther sense, he was one to May Ri, too. She mentally scheduled that talk between the three of them.
"Can you help me?" May Ri asked.
"I don't know how to take care of kids."
"You say that a lot," she said, handing off a pony toy, three hands grabbing for it, to which she said, "Play nice," at them, then at him, "You do fine when we're alone."
It was hard to get a sitter when all other women were enjoying their husbands being local and real time. Him managing the girls well meant fun time later. They had lots of fun.
"Do I?" he asked, stepping away from the toy melée. "I've got what I'm good at. You've got yours. Never received the instruction manual for Marisela."
A joke?
The one thing she'd learned running the crèche, other than the extreme sport of multitasking, was anger had its place; here wasn't it.
"I'll send you the book," she joked back darkly, standing. She held out her hand. His eyes went to her chest, larger now than when they met. It had been three months. When he took her hand, she directed him closer as she would a little boy. Instead of kissing, she applied downward pressure. "Sit!"
He sat. Unlike many men, he was good natured even when contradicted. She liked that.
Little hands and little hugs mobbed him; he got peppered with giggling requests to play. She added, "Learning by doing works."
Carla snorted. When May Ri looked, she got an A-ok gesture.
Marisela belatedly realized her status change. Two parents, not one! Plowing through her competition for affection, she squealed, "Daddy!"
May Ri got time to make the axle revision before the next kid-tastrophe. #RSMarsNeededWomen 08
[Author retains copyright (c)2025 R.S.]
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Continued thread
2503.07 — Consent #Writever #Mars #SpaceOpera
"I'm going to choose," May Ri told herself, building her courage, to get it over with. Her heart beat too fast; she hyperventilated. Her hands felt damp.
Anticipation.
Anticipation of disappointment!
Having lived four months on Mars, if May Ri knew anything, she knew that people lived differently here than on Earth. Today was no exception. Since the cut-off of transits (supplies and new colonists) from Earth, situations like men doing only the dangerous space work polarized male-female interactions further.
As for women...
May Ri knew when signing up that the underlying reason she was here was to expand the gene pool, thus the auditorium she entered. Chicago held similar expectations for her: Under the Decath regime, what was a housewife? Here, she worked to expand the habitat, farmed, and trained in Mars machinery design while living segregated in the women's connected domes. Men visited during scheduled Honeymoons. The contract she'd signed detailed her responsibilities: She'd consented to marry within a (Mars) year.
That Reina called today's meet and greet the "Meat Market" drew recollections of pre-penthouse level Zocalo butcher shops only the most wealthy could visit back home—her previous home. May Ri's body kept its own count of time, way more than the 73 day transit and 120 days on Mars—Men looked really good, today. Within the year time limit, she got to choose a husband, not her parents or a Decath minister.
But...
Considering her bad luck at barely 22—no, 11 Mars—deeper worries stopped her with a hand on the doorframe at the entrance. Her hand shook.
The door monitor said, "Show some confidence, girl, or he'll say No."
May Ri had completely missed the older woman. She rushed in...
Auditorium was too grandiose a word. Seven men in greenish EM Mars jumpsuits stood on a raised stage of epoxied regolith inside a small up-lit shroom dome of pastel greens, reds, and black dusting. Since most Martians squatted or sat crosslegged, the younger women congregated together on square pillows, talking lowly and pointing. Six men talked quietly between themselves.
The seventh...
May Ri inhaled sharply, holding it, walking slowly, scanning the meat for sale. She'd seen few men during the last months; only in intradome meetings or by vid.
She needed to focus.
Look at each.
But, she looked at the seventh again. Stopping when she barked her shins on the knee-high stage.
The seventh had coffee-color skin diluted with a lot of oat milk. Long fingers poked furiously at his book plate. While the others seemed preoccupied by their audience, the sandy-haired guy with cowlicks poked, then touched his ear implant, turning away to talk lowly in a pleasant voice.
That was a magnetic sight.
She warned herself it might be her abstinence, so she judged the rest of the exterior, up and down, and his smile and happy nod when he finished. A glance at the other women confirmed they'd noticed, too.
May Ri said loudly, "I choose him," pointing.
One of the other women jumped to her feet, bowling over five others. In the chatter, May Ri heard, "Can she do that?"
A hand on May Ri's shoulder made her glance back to see red hair and freckles. Her half-pouting teenage tutor, Reina said, "I was going to choose him, too."
"I—" May Ri sputtered.
Reina shook her, giggling. "Take him."
"Wait, Roger? You're married. Via Vid-downlink!"
Does that mean... Two...? Wait, what?
Reina directed her grey eyes at the other group of men. She whispered, "Roger died a month ago in an airlock accident. Didn't want to depress you. I get to choose again." The men heard it and looked worried when she pointed. "I'm choosing Rodriguez." A short swarthy man with short-cropped black hair stood bolt upright.
A shadow made her look up. Her gaze met deep brown eyes and an apprehensive smile. "I'm Randolf," he said in a West European Conglomerate accent. He offered a hand. Professional, doubtless. Not a day under 30 Earth, maybe 35. "What's your name?"
She blinked, hand rising, but didn't turn away; forced herself. She couldn't interpret his nod. She forced herself to think Lust at first sight.
And failed. What came instead was the hope of someone who might treat her as an equal.
Stupid.
Reina cut in. "May Ri's training as an engineer. She never gives up. She's fun, too."
"Fun?" May Ri thought, scoffing, looking at Reina. Then Randolf took her hand. They locked gazes again.
Reina whispered into her ear, mischievously, "I hacked the showers and Rodriguez's cabin cam. His nickname, The Rod, is well deserved. As for Randolf, he's—"
"Randy?"
Reina laughed. Randy answered, "Yes?" looking confused. #RSMarsNeededWomen 07
[Author retains copyright (c)2025 R.S.]
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@GossiTheDog This is what a rocket looks like when it blows up near where you're flying. I think I'll have a chapter I'm writing where I can use this. It'll be an EM Mars corp ship somewhere on Mars. Guess what the EM stands for...
Continued thread
2503.06 — Equality #Writever #Mars #SpaceOpera
Free fall and zero gee felt equally like floating, May Ri thought. She liked floating. She liked flying. Through the sky, and on rare occasions in bed.
An hour after the EM Mars plane last dove from a high altitude to give them 30 seconds of nograv, she still felt the sensation of all her flesh not buoyant but lazily filling the space around her body. No weight on any tendon. Her racing heart pumping her up like a balloon and her inner ear telling her she was falling, though that was the point! She scooted across the tubular padded room, screaming in glee. Her attitude didn't earn her points with the other five applicants, one of whom had vomited.
Now, walking out to the concourse at O'Hare, she looked out multistory metal-framed windows at a blue sky of fluffy clouds and the Chicago arcologies in the distance. She thought of the L line she needed to catch to Lakeshore. A swarthy short man with a mop of black hair wildly waved his arms, dark eyes and lips smiling as she veered his way. Chip put his arm around her shoulders and guided her under the sign that read,
Transportation 
Baggage 
"I got pinged. You passed the cert like you passed last week's spin test."
The centrifuge hadn't been half as much fun, but she'd easily imagined flying catapulted to hypersonic in a suborbital needle, or on a lit candle riding in a silvery starship.
"Earned a Plus Plus," Chip continued. He was a T.A. in Space Engineering 201, affiliated with EM Mars. "You're nearly ranked up!"
He handed her papers, made of real wood fiber not plastic—clearly embossed with an EM Mars triskelion logo—then patted his chest, adding a stylus that emitted ink. EM was archaic about some things.
"What is it?"
"Your space-ops contract. Your ticket to the High Ground— Oops!"* He glanced at his book plate. "Gotta another arrival. See you at dinner? Sign, now. Ciao!"
She realized she felt more than fondness as he jogged off. Besides looking delicious in tight pants, he listened to her talk about adjusting to uni out of JC, and about everyday life. He was helping her with her dreams of a EM Mars contract job (with childcare!) that meant she'd not be a housewife because a husband could never prevent her from taking a government-favored corporation job.
He also touched her without hesitation. She felt his equal.
Few were the women in her uni cohort, and those were there for MRS degrees. Most guys worried about graduating a girl and what the Decath propriety police might think. She was graduated, and over Raymond and the mistakes she'd made. She wasn't over her hormones, however, and had a black market connection to make sex safer, if no less illegal.
She wasn't sure Chip got her ESP. Doubly so when she waited an hour alone in an intimate part of the floor 106 cafeteria. He arrived breathless, landing in his chair and almost tilting it over, then forking a piece of her cold truBoeuf ™ stew.
"Hey!"
Chewing, he glanced at the contract on the table. "You haven't signed! If it's the Mars colony option, check that." He was sweating.
"I've been thinking—"
"Don't do that," he snapped.
She froze taking back her fork. His privileged male tone chilled her. She jerked the utensil from his grip.
"It's standard boilerplate. You earned this." His smile didn't reach the rest of his worried face. "Sign it while you—" He swore and rushed off, knocking over the chair, catching the eyes of other patrons.
A black suit with black-tinted glasses walked up, motioning a coworker in Chip's direction, glancing at her, the contract, and her average body. "Huh. Latest socket he's been trying to pry a commission out of?"
"Get's a commission if I sign?"
He nodded.
Her flush wasn't embarrassment, so much as growing anger... at herself and at her earlier thoughts. "Let me guess? Third Floor Casino?"
He chuckled. "Ponyville on 60th." Not the infamous cartoon reboot when she was 11—which got banned by the propriety police as explicit—either. "Do you know where we can meet the nopay?"
May Ri grinned. "Actually, I do..."
It earned her twenty silver—folded plastic green bills not E—as she wasn't going to let her sweet innocent book plate anywhere near his book plate; might catch an ETD.
She bought condoms from her black market guy on the 73 Zocalo, ones the seller admitted he gave his daughter, and bought a lead on contraceptives with the change.
After lots of thought, she went to the EM Mars office and checked off the Mars Colonization box—on a contract that bypassed Chip completely. The hefty commission would pay for her books and dorm.
Having the green, red, and black EM Mars triskelion tattooed on her right forearm proved rather painful, though. #RSMarsNeededWomen 06
[Author retains copyright (c)2025 R.S.]
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We are currently open submissions for our fourth issue and would love to hear from you 
Submission guidelines here: http://hearthstories.org/submissions.html
For those that do not know: we publish cozy/comforting fantasy and literary fiction in non-modern settings (generally pre-1850s european style settings, but there is some flexibility).
Reach out and say hi/submit a story!
hearthstories.orgHearth Stories: SubmissionsSubmission guidelines for Hearth Stories magazine. What to send, what not to send, when to send, where to send.