Wandering Adventure Party

#WritersCoffeeClub 15: How do your immediate surroundings influence your work?If I am traveling (including traveling on the train), I will only have my e-ink tablets with me, and under these circumstances I will only do first draft translations and proofreading. All the editing and typesetting is done on my desktop PC.

@ZDL Yeah, I'm encountering the same thing in old German folk tale collections. Some folk tale collectors took their roles as researchers and scholars seriously, while others... did not.

#WritersCoffeeClub 13th of September: Talk about the joy writing has brought you.- Feedback from my readers, especially reviews (hint, hint)- Seeing others use the folk tales I have translated for their own purposes (such as reading them in streams and podcasts, or integrating them into their #ttrpg campaigns)- Visiting the places where those folk tales (allegedly) took place

#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2025.09.12 — What kinds of love appear in your writing?Well, so far I have:- Doomed love- Love between two hostile families- Love overcoming impossible challenges- Human-spirit love (human-nixie, human-dwarf, and human-"other")- Pope-sanctioned bigamyAlas, German folk tales tend to be _aggressively_ heteronormative, so there hasn't been much in the way of LGTB content. I am never quite sure whether this was because of the cultural biases of the storyteller or the prejudices of the people who wrote them down, but I suspect both played a role.(That shouldn't stop people from rewriting these tales into new forms, though - after all, retelling folk tales for new audience is what folk storytelling is all about!)

#writerscoffeeclub - 11 Sept. If you could banish one trope for a century, which would you choose?Probably the abusive variety of "enemies to lovers" where one's a jerk and the other's forced to submit to them anyway and then find they can "better" the abusive one, and in the end there are violins and unicorn puke.

@geoffl As it happens, _another_ book on German folklore I want to write has the working title:"Reckless Child Endangerment"

#writerscoffeeclub 11 If you could banish one trope for a century, which would you choose?Person who has found success and built a life in the city throws it all away to return to the toxic small community they escaped from.

#WritersCoffeeClub 10.What encouragement would you give younger writers?Folk tale translation is an underserved field! If you are fluent in a language other than English, check out if there are a lot of folk tale collections in the public domain for that language!Just be aware that machine translation will not be particularly useful. For one thing the language in the text will be rather archaic, and for another you will need to explain the context of these tales to your readers - and AI won't help you with that.

@ljwrites Alas, translating folk tales does not pay all the bills.Yet. Though I have high hopes for the future!

@Ullilust Ideas are easy - it's the execution that is hard to pull off.

#WritersCoffeeClub 6.Do you write daily? Why or why not?Not. I have a busy day job and a few other hobby interests, so I cannot dedicate as much time as I would like.However, I have still managed to deliver at least 1,000 words of translations and commentary to my Patreon supporters every Monday, for more than six years - so it's not as if I take a lot of breaks as such.https://www.patreon.com/sunkencastles

#WritersCoffeeClub 5 September. How much should a writer read?I generally recommend reading as much as you are able - on any conceivable subject, and certainly outside of your genre. Inspiration can be gained from _anywhere_, and the more you read - the more you know - the more will you be able to develop your own style and your own unique ideas and plots.One of my major regrets in life is that I do no longer have as much time to read as I did in my youth, but I nevertheless try to keep at it.

#WritersCoffeeClub Sep 4. How do you handle nudity or sex in your writing? Subtly, graphically, not at all?I handle it exactly as in the German folk tales I translate.Which is to say, normally they don't dwell on the details, but when the story explicitly says that a dwarf is copulating with the castle cook on the wedding carpet, then I will translate this as literally as possible too.

#WritersCoffeeClub 2 September. Describe your aesthetic.Opinionated textbook with lengthy citations of primary sources.

@oblomov @fishidwardrobe Yes. In 2014-ish I got about 30K words into an experimental novel, showed it to my agent, and she said, "this wants to be two different books". She was right, so I abandoned it, but 5-7 years later I dusted off the subplots and they're now part of "Dead Lies Dreaming" and "Quantum of Nightmares".

#WritersCoffeeClub  1: What’s the most number of revisions you’ve gone through for a work?Six:1: First draft2: First round of self-editing3: Incorporating alpha reader feedback4: Second round of self-editing5: Incorporating beta reader feedback6: Incorporating copywriter feedbackSince I don't have deadlines, and I want my books to be used as reference works for decades, there is no reason not to make them as polished as possible.

#WritersCoffeeClub 8/31. How was this month for you, writing-wise?Not too bad, although it could have been better. I didn't nearly get as many translations done as I hoped I would, although I did plot my next translations out until the end of the year. I also didn't do any work on my current manuscript-in-limbo although I managed to nearly finish reading the book that was strongly recommended to me as research material by an alpha reader:https://bookrastinating.com/book/531192/s/cloven-country

#WritersCoffeeClub 30 August. Have you ever written as a commission? If not, would you?Not commissions as such, but I _have_ been asked to write blog essays on folkloric topics. Which I am amenable to, since I see them as advertising for my folklore topic.I also have once been asked to write an article including translations for a scholarly book, but unfortunately had to decline - publishers usually want pesky things like "exclusive publishing rights", while I want to release by translations under a #CreativeCommons license so that they can never go out of print.

#WritersCoffeeClub day 29: Talk about an experience you've had with plagiarism.I always cite my sources (my books have a massive bibliography), and I release my translations under a #CreativeCommons Zero licence, so there has been no cause for plagiarism in my recent work.That being said, I did learn that #Meta used some very old snippets I wrote for "Teralogos News" - that is, in-setting news for the #GURPS #TranshumanSpace line - to train their #AI , which counts.If you want to check if your own work was used to train Meta's AI without permission, and want to know how to check the class action lawsuit, check this post by @Richard_Littler :https://mastodon.social/@Richard_Littler/115105862107138339

#WritersCoffeeClub 8/28 What's the highest praise you've received as a writer?Hard to say, but the time I got reviewed by an actual folklore journal might qualify.It was in Russian, but still.https://folklore.elpub.ru/jour/article/view/345/303