A Writer Named Gwen

Writer, coffee lover, fearer of death, secretly a dragon in a trench coat. I will be posting a lot about my own work, including story intros, character intros, excerpts, and random thoughts. Follow at your own risk. Website: www.gwendolynkress.org

[gwenkress]

"Say hi when you see me next."

I scoffed. "You got it."

With that, she stood and retreated to her pile of cushions.

----

"Dawnbird!" she exclaimed. "I've seen both your days already."

"Lucky number three," I agreed. "I have a message for you. Hi."

Marty snorted a laugh. "Thank you for keeping your promise."

[gwenkress]

She shrugged. "No reason to be a sourpuss about it. It happened. Sucks. Now what?" "You know, I don't think Ms. Horn intended for you to give me pep talks when she assigned you to watch me."

[theartofmadeline]

the price of life, and all that

[appendingfic]

Love Leverage not saying "killing as revenge makes you just as bad as them" but "killing changes you. Even for a good reason. I don't think you want to be the man it would make you"

[gwenkress]

Shroud of Dawn

A bounty hunter chasing down his own murderer teams up with a scholarly, buglike alien who’s trying to find his way home. Peppered with questions he doesn’t want to answer, the bounty hunter finds himself at the crux of a mystery that concerns his entire species. 🤠❤️🪲

Death! Rebirth! Revenge! Queer romance! Unlearning the internal toxicity of common cowboy stereotypes! This book is DONE (ish) and out querying agents right now! DM me if you're interested in beta reading. :)

Pinterest board (contains spoilers!)

Writing aesthetic Spotify playlist (the instrumental music I had on while I was writing)

Major characters under the cut! :)

Meet the blorbos from Shroud of Dawn!

Glicht Aarvam

"Sure, I recognize that whatever on Khala’s shell Dawn actually is, it saved my life. More than that, it brought me back from the dead. But that don’t mean I’m obligated to enjoy what it’s done to me, and by sight it don’t mean I’m obligated to think highly of it. The thing is more stupid than it is smart, and its sparing my life more than anything foretells that.”

A bounty hunter by trade, Glicht has led a long life of emotional ups and downs, getting better at his profession with every bullet dodged. Recently, he's fallen into an apathetic rut that he can't name the source of; so when he discovers within himself a deep hatred for murderer and gang leader Tek Slonden, he leaps on the feeling and devotes his life to hunting Slonden down.

When that devotion results in the deaths of hundreds, however, Glicht needs to face what he's become. But Slonden is still out there, so that will have to wait; in the meantime, he'll just lie to himself until his gun hand stops shaking.

Spotify playlist (contains spoilers!)

Lohak

“Oh, no, it’s very straightforward for me. There’s simply nothing I could have been other than a scholar. Nothing. I’m always asking questions—my mother likes to say that my first word was a question. I grew up reading books and getting thrown out of classrooms for challenging the teacher. Of course I would latch onto the world’s biggest mystery, wouldn’t I? Where else would I be?”

A member of the zhel species, which is the dominant species on the planet Khala where our story takes place, Lohak has a leaf-green carapace, four arms, and an unmatched zest for knowledge. So, as soon as he found out that no one really knew where humans came from five hundred years ago, he dove straight into the deep end of the mystery and started digging.

When hundreds of people are killed in a disaster during his excavation, Lohak gets separated from the rest of his team and winds up tagging along with a human bounty hunter for safety. His new partner is terse, interesting, and alluringly actionable rather than calculative, and it isn't long before Lohak falls completely in love.

There are a lot of things he doesn't know about Glicht, however; and despite considering himself clearheaded and logical, Lohak is determined to believe that his team all made it home safely. All he needs to do is catch up with them.

Spotify playlist (contains spoilers! though not as bad as the others)

Dawn

"I do not want. My purpose is to keep [humans] healthy. You were the first to come within my sight since I lost memory."

Dawn is a 'doctor machine' buried beneath the place where Lohak's team was digging. When Glicht gets himself killed along with hundreds, he happens to cross paths with it, which enables it to resuscitate him.

Although it has lost contact with its main store of memories, Dawn is clearly a link between the present and the ancient past--the target of Lohak's research. And, now that Glicht is dependent on Dawn for survival, so is he.

Spotify playlist (MAJOR spoilers)

[academia-lucifer]

Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.

— William Faulkner.

[gwenkress]

The old man narrowed his eyes, this time studying my face, and he said, “Can I see one of the shillings?”

I handed one over, as well as a threepence, for his perusal. He scrutinized the coins with the same intensity with which he had the watches, with a magnifying glass and a carefully-applied light.

“I’m going to assume,” said the pawnbroker, still studying the coins, “that you don’t have a bank account, let alone a phone or credit card. Am I right?”

“You are,” I admitted, filing the words away for the time being.

“Well, I don’t carry this kind of cash anymore. If you have five of these shillings, I can give you three hundred pounds for them and the threepenny. If you’re mindful, that should be enough for a room and a couple meals, maybe a change of clothes for the both of you. If that’s the kind of thing you’re looking for.”

“That’s precisely what we are looking for.” Three hundred pounds! Three hundred! And such a dizzying sum could only afford a room and a few meals? How far was this distant future?

“Then you can come back tomorrow and we can discuss... the rest.” His eyes flicked between the two of us.

Whether we should return tomorrow is something I would need to consider later on. It was enough at the moment not to flinch when I provided five shillings and three pence and received in return three hundred pounds.

[raayllum]

i love it when characters are unfair, actually. i love it when they’re uncouth and cranky and hypocritical, i love it when they have cognitive dissonances, i love it when they make good and bad choices for the wrong reasons. i love when they’re short to anger and hard to understand. i love it when they’ve destroyed themselves for nothing but can’t even see either part of it yet. i love it when they’re messy and selfish and bad at communicating. i love it when they get convinced of their own ego and stuck in a feedback loop regarding their own warped paranoia. i love it when characters actively make their lives unknowingly harder for themselves. i love it when characters don’t know they’re in a story. i love it when characters are like real people

[gwenkress]

Just went to convert 10 earth years to years in my book and literally was just about to Google “year to visiting conversion”. A visiting is a length of time that I Made Up

[gwenkress]

@amielbjacobs tagged me to search my WIP for four words! Here are the resulting excerpts from Shroud of Dawn:

Struggle

Glicht tried to bring himself present again, but it was a struggle merely to breathe through the fresh wound in his back—aching with every heartbeat—and the older ones, miraculously healed as though by a full Visiting, but still sore and stiff.

Harsh

When Lohak remained silent, Glicht let out a harsh laugh. “It ain’t like you didn’t know I was a mask.”

Quite

Lohak looked over in surprise to see Thack chin-to-chest, dead asleep sitting up on his stool. Looked quite a trick; Glicht wondered if it came from a long history of doing the same on noleback.

Page

“Next time you form a party to get a job done, you best check they’re all on the same page. Laxh tried to kill me.”

I’m tagging @mostly-lostpleiad, @ashekirk, @featherwriter, and @archaeopter-ace to find the words particular, empty, craft, and hope.

[dduane]

Found in the ask box this AM

”I've been playing with [a major AI-driven chat bot] and I asked it to write a young wizards fanfic that contains dialogue. ...I wish i could paste it here, but the character limit won't let me.”

(hiding eyes)

(a) Once more, the reminder: please, please don't send me story ideas or fics set in my universes. Reading them would expose me legally in ways I can't permit. If such things turn up in my ask box, I delete them unread. If through a lapse of concentration or some similar error I find myself mistakenly reading a story idea or fic, I am required to make a note of it for legal purposes, and then can never use those ideas in my own writing, ever, anywhere.

So please understand that sending me a story idea or a fic set in my universes (or others where I write) will guarantee that the idea never happens in my work. It may seem paradoxical and/or counterintuitive, but if you have an idea that you wish I'd do something with, the odds of that happening are significantly increased by you making sure that I never see it.

(This, BTW, is one of the reasons I had to close my ask box to anon asks; some repeat offenders were making it impossible for me to protect myself... as when people refuse to stop sending me such things, I block them. My apologies to all the well-intentioned would-be nonnies out there—but the actions of some of you have destroyed an avenue of access for everybody else.)

(b) Please do not purposefully expose my IPs to the attention of any AI/LLM-based chat platform, anywhere. Unscrupulous whole-book AI-oriented scraping has stolen enough of my stuff already this year. (As my search of the Books3 pirated books database, widely used for AI training, shows here.) It's infuriating enough that bad actors have taken my writing and will be using the expertise inherent in it to put other living, breathing writers out of work. Please don't help them do more of that.

(sigh) Thanks.

[petermorwood]

Signal boost.

@neil-gaiman has said this lots of times; so has DD; so has every professional writer I know.

Do NOT send them stuff.

[gwenkress]

everyone says to "rubber duck" your writing problems at something. "that's so silly," I thought to myself, "if I can solve the problems alone, I don't see why a rubber duck needs to be involved." Fast forward to 20 minutes ago when I spent approx. 20 seconds explaining the situation to my sleeping dog and immediately knew what I had to fix

[gwenkress]

As good a time as any to share my writing playlist for my scifi-western

(If anyone knows of a free alternative to Spotify that I can export these playlists to that doesn't require shuffling, that'd be super)

[ripplefactor]

“It all matters. That someone turns out the lamp, picks up the windblown wrapper, says hello to the invalid, pays at the unattended lot, listens to the repeated tale, folds the abandoned laundry, plays the game fairly, tells the story honestly, acknowledges help, gives credit, says good night, resists temptation, wipes the counter, waits at the yellow, makes the bed, tips the maid, remembers the illness, congratulates the victor, accepts the consequences, takes a stand, steps up, offers a hand, goes first, goes last, chooses the small portion, teaches the child, tends to the dying, comforts the grieving, removes the splinter, wipes the tear, directs the lost, touches the lonely, is the whole thing. What is most beautiful is least acknowledged. What is worth dying for is barely noticed.”

— Laura McBride, We Are Called to Rise (via quoted-books)

[james-armijo]

Name meaning meme

@winterandwords tagged me! Thanks for the tag, Winter - I love doing things like this. To everyone else, feel free to tag me and I'll try to tag you back!

I'm gonna do this for the protagonists of Spymaster. I'll give the literal meanings of their names as well as a few notes about what their names mean historically/sociologically.

📝 Eugene James Wallace:

From Wikipedia: 'Eugene is a common male given name that comes from the Greek εὐγενής (eugenēs), "noble", literally "well-born", from εὖ (eu), "well" and γένος (genos), "race, stock, kin".' Damn that is . . . so eugenics-y sounding. Especially on a white guy from the 1950s.

From Ancestry.com: '[Wallace is an] Americanized form of various like-sounding Jewish (Ashkenazic) surnames e.g. Wallach.' Wallace and Wallach both mean 'Foreigner.' So, together: 'well-born foreigner.'

Wallace's family is German-American on both sides, with his mother being a recent immigrant and his father being the child or descendant of immigrants. 'James' is his father's name. The surname was, yes, Americanized after immigration, and both 'Eugene' and 'James' were probably picked for being very WASP-y names. Eugene and his family are big believers in assimilation - although I think he might get less enthusiastic about it later in life.

Mirsky calls him 'Zhenya,' after the Russian version of 'Eugene,' 'Evgeniy.'

📝 Vyacheslav Halidovich Mirsky:

From Wikipedia: 'Vyacheslav is a Russian and Ukrainian masculine given name. It is a Slavic dithematic name (that is, composed of two lexemes) derived from the Slavic words vyache, "great(er)", and slava, "glory, fame". A common short form is Slava.'

From Ancestry.com: 'Mirsky is a Jewish (eastern Ashkenazic) habitational name for someone from Mir a place in Belarus.'

Of course, Vyacheslav Mirsky is not Jewish - as far as I know, it's not an exclusively Jewish name within Russia, but it probably doesn't matter because it's just a random Russian name that Mirsky's parents picked when they got off the boat from Azerbaijan. Their original surname was Aslanov.

Mirsky doesn't much like his first name or its nicknames; he's very protective of his patronymic, though. Halidovich comes from his father's name, Halid - the same Muslim name as DJ Khaled, just in a different form.

Wallace calls him 'Vee' as a nickname.

Tagging @acertainmoshke, @fitz-higgins, @meerawrites, @dragoninatrenchcoat, and an open tag to anyone who wants to do it! If you steal this and tag me, I will also try to tag you in the future.

[dragoninatrenchcoat]

I don't know who to tag, so I'll reblog instead to promote your book! hehe. Sorry for the long post this creates!

Names in Shroud of Dawn follow this rough pattern:

'Mudder' (human) names sound more liquidy and tend to feature Vs and Fs (possibly because zhels can't pronounce them), and potentially are based on Shieliv root words. For example: Haavra, Jeneto, Kervo.

'Zhel' (bug alien) names are rougher and tend to utilize the teeth & back of the mouth. For example: Galetka, Thackaliot, Clotkath.

One name (usually 2-4 syllables) is given to a clutch, or a group of siblings born at the same time, and at some point they get single names (usually 1-2 syllables). A person's full name is spoken as 'single name' 'clutch name', but most people refer to you as your clutch name unless further differentiation is required.

That out of the way, here are my protagonists!

Glicht Aarvam (Mudder):

It's common for city mudders to go by zhel names in order to assimilate into zhel society, so the fact that 'Glicht' is a zhel single name isn't very odd. His earliest memories are of an orphanage, so it's not difficult to assume that he was given a run-of-the-mill name by its proprietors. The "kht" sound in 'Glicht' is common to a certain race of zhels that founded Daketch, where he's from.

At a young age, Glicht left the orphanage and joined a gang of kids. They called themselves "the Aarvam clutch", though technically they were a thand (a clutch not biologically related to each other). They claim 'aarvam' is a Shieliv word, but it's actually a misremembered city name that they liked the sound of.

Fun fact! Glicht refuses to go by his clutch name due to a fallout with the Aarvams. He introduces himself as Glicht and lets people assume that's his clutch name.

Lohak (Zhel):

'Lohak' is a name from a race of zhels to the far north. (No, I haven't named any of these nations yet.) He himself was born in Qazek, which is more full of that race of zhels than the ones that founded Daketch.

Lohak is clutchlock, meaning that for whatever reason, he has no clutchmates. The fact that he doesn't have a clutch name means that he became clutchlock when he was very young (most likely, no other eggs survived to hatching).

Thank you for the tag! This wound up being longer than I expected oops

[tragedykery]

I ❤️ self-loathing characters, characters who struggle with monstrosity (either fearing or embracing it), characters who are so lonely, who have a gaping hole in their chest, who bottle up & repress their feelings, who claw their way up & have ambitions, who fall down & lose everything, who search for identity & purpose yet can’t see themselves outside of what others want from or expect of them, who are hurt & hurt others, who long & grieve, who lie & pretend. characters who are messy & flawed & human

[majestictortoise]

characters who are absolutely convinced down to their bones that they are unlovable being subjected to the mortifying ideal of being wholly and unconditionally loved. that’s the good stuff. never get tired of it.