Elyse M Grasso

The recommended trick for writing a character who is smarter than you or has more expertise in a specific area, is time compression. You can report them doing in minutes something that took you a long time to research or figure out. Poof! Instant genius.
My characters benefit a lot from L'esprit de l'escalier: I write a scene and the next morning I wake up going Oh! what that scene needs is X, so I update it. After a couple of rounds of that, my characters look very clever.

2026-06-12 18:28:28 UTC

#ScribesAndMakers 12 Say something kind about yourself and your creativity.
I enjoy the stories that turn up in my head and (most of) the characters. Other people seem to enjoy the ones I've managed to get out of my head.
My taste in physical crafts runs to those that require meticulous attention to detail,, and I seem to be fairly good at them, once I've had a bit of practice.

2026-05-27 22:56:59 UTC

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Yup. Archival collections, especially if they were established before climate control was a thing, can be pretty bad. The floods sped up the problems but are not really required for general ickiness in books and papers that are decades old.
Even before you get into things like Victorian bindings that used arsenic dyes. Never handle a really old book with green binding with your bare hands...

2026-05-27 22:09:30 UTC

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When I was in library school we were warned that some archival work can be a short career because people get sensitized to some of the stuff that people rave about as 'the smell of old books'. Precautions were advised, especially if you were going to be dealing with something like 200 year old municipal records that had been through a couple of floods.

2026-05-17 03:59:08 UTC

#WordWeavers 17. How would your MC react to being handed a kitten?
He would cuddle it and might try to find it some treats.
(Whenever Franz-Karl is described waking up in an actual bed, there are cats there. I don''t believe that there are any mentions of cats being present when he goes to sleep.).

2026-05-15 22:04:05 UTC

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#ScribesAndMakers 15 progress
Ooh. I think I may know the first sentence of the marketing/back-cover blurb for volume 3. This is good because the lack of a concise description (and a cover image) so late in development had begun to worry me a little.
But Volumes 1 & 2 were worked on in parallel with the house rebuilding project, while volume 3 has mostly been worked on by itself, so I suppose the project dynamics are different.

2026-05-15 02:33:40 UTC

#ScribesAndMakers 15 What's going well with your creative work so far this month?
The WIP has passed 135K words - several times - as I pull rough sections inherited from the NaNo projects, then add dialogue and action that fits the current storyline better.
The sections that need to be reworked are getting small enough that I may be able to hand the result off to my beta reader at the end of this month or in early June. I think I know what needs to be added, except a few antag scene details.

2026-04-19 13:06:06 UTC

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That's fortunate. There are ways of handling the hundreds? thousands? of US sales tax jurisdictions online which had not yet been created during my retail days, but it is not practical to try to run an online shop without going through some kind of aggregator who can manage the sales tax insanity. Aside from the need to track changes in the tax rates that need to be collected, there are fees for being allowed to collect sales tax in many of the taxing jurisdictions.

2026-04-18 23:08:04 UTC

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What sales tax/VAT jurisdiction do you sell in? I did some retail at science fiction conventions years ago and found that dealing with sales taxes made was almost more trouble than it was worth.(This was before E-Bay and other online sales platforms so there was no support in those days...)

2026-04-16 14:07:37 UTC

#ScribesAndMakers 16 How do you feel about illustrations in (non-comic) books?
I think ereader apps need to handle the ones in epubs better. (They also need better footnote handling, but that is a separate rant.) There is a reason almost all of the physical books I have bought (or re-bought) since the fire have illustrations of one sort or another.
PDF reader apps also manage to muck things up, but differently. Recent versions of pdf readers seem to have settled on a common level of mediocrity.

2026-03-11 02:20:03 UTC

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When in doubt it is generaly reasonable to suspect that temperate zone non-citrus fruits are in the rose family and veggies are mutated brassicas.

2026-03-11 01:41:06 UTC

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What I really want(and did not exist the last time I looked) is a way to apply a different template to an existing document in LibreOffice. So that with appropriately named styles I can easily switch from a manuscript format to a publishing format. (It was trivial to do it in Borland Sprint 35 years ago, but modern software seems to have lost this basic capability.)

2026-03-05 21:01:02 UTC

#WritersCoffeeClub Sometimes plot holes are where you plant the cuttings that will grow into the next volume.

2026-02-18 19:47:22 UTC

#ScribesAndMakers 18 Our next featured creator has done her own book covers. Have you ever or would you ever do your own cover?
I did the cover design and art for the covers of vols 1 & 2 of Elderkin Chronicles. The art was tourist souvenirs that I photographed and then did things to in Krita.
I have done a preliminary layout for vol 3 but have not entirely figured out what the art should be or how to create it. I may hire someone for that part.
https://www.books2read.com/HeirOfTheBindings https://books2read.com/BrokenOathsBoundaries
https://stockroom.wandering.shop/media_attachments/files/116/093/270/773/143/224/original/01b11c6ff02e48d6.png
https://stockroom.wandering.shop/media_attachments/files/116/093/272/213/032/269/original/1c039a0a29dcbb22.png
https://stockroom.wandering.shop/media_attachments/files/116/093/282/363/112/386/original/c2fd0cbeb714a37b.png

2026-01-21 19:17:37 UTC

#ScribesAndMakers 21 An author quote you find meaningful
If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it — Toni Morrison

2026-01-20 00:48:03 UTC

#WritersCoffeeClub 20. Figuratively speaking, do you travel with the caravan or solo over the hills?
When I was younger, I traveled solo. Now I sit in my web and wait...

2026-01-15 20:08:13 UTC

#ISS #NASA I'm glad to see that the astronauts returned to Earth safely. But I keep wondering what medical emergency required all four of them to return instead of whoever is having the problem?
Is it something contagious they all caught? A problem with the rations that means they all need to be detoxed?
Is there anyone still on the ISS? Or has it become uninhabitable for some reason?

2026-01-09 03:19:28 UTC

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LibreOffice can even handle Word doc types (along with the international standard odt, pdf and it can export rough epubs).

2025-12-28 04:19:54 UTC

#WritersCoffeeClub 27 How can we as writers support one another?
Abjure AI and all its devices.
Buy each other's books, boost each other's announcement and comments.
If you do reviews on any of the review platforms, cast a wide net.

2025-12-21 04:49:27 UTC

#WritersCoffeeClub 21 Do your stories come to you fully formed? Or do they only develop along the way?
The stories come to me as seeds of worlds and both stories and worlds develop fractally and recursively during the writing. (I do NOT write short forms: my current 'story' is going to be at least 4 volumes and roughly half a million words before I even reach the original seeds, much less their aftermath.)

2025-12-09 06:18:40 UTC

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what is CNF?

2025-12-05 04:17:26 UTC

#WritersCoffeeClub 5. What's a no-longer popular trend in writing you'd like to see make a comeback?
Payscales for authors, editors (of various sorts) and artists that provide a living wage.
That in turn requires a reorganization of distribution and discoverability, which have basically been ripped to shreds along with the 20th century channels.

2025-12-01 23:17:52 UTC

Ubuntu just announced their targets for 26.04 LTS. Not going in directions I approve.
I'm currently using Kubuntu, and I've got it down to only one snap package (thunderbird)
Is there a moderately stable distro out there using KDE, apt packaging, and NO SNAP stupidity? (The snap installation of krita is effectively useless) I would not mind losing flatpack, either.
I realize that the anti-UNIX abomination that is systemd is probably unavoidable in these benighted times.
#ubuntu #linux

2025-11-22 19:05:12 UTC

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Yes, but did Leonardo know anything about cover art?

2025-11-10 05:32:15 UTC

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I was registered Independent for years... until the year it was clear the meaningful election for an important position was going to happen in the primaries, not the general. This area is deep enough blue that the party machine had gotten complacent and needed a spanking, which was not going to happen if people waited for the the general election. There were shenanigans during the nominations.
I think the eventual candidate was a write-in during the primary...

2025-10-27 01:58:53 UTC

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Based on the illos that have been published, they are not planning to have accordion doors to separate it into Epstein A, Epstein B and Epstein C. Or if they are, the doors are unusually well hidden.

2025-10-27 01:53:28 UTC

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Big meetings and convention session in hotels take place in rooms that are called ballrooms.
Usually they are equipped with accordion dividers, so a particular panel or event can take place in the Lincoln Ballroom or Lincoln A, Lincoln B, or Lincoln C.
And if you are in Lincoln B, you had better hope that neither A nor C are noisy sessions, since there is no soundproofing to speak of.
There may be dancing in the Lincoln Ballroom if it gets rented for a wedding reception or something.

2025-09-23 21:48:48 UTC

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There are reportedly 1200 people who were known to be in Alligator Alcatraz whose records have gone missing and whose locations are unknown by their families and lawyers.
What makes you think the 15 deaths admitted by the feds is a remotely accurate number? You may need to multiply it by a few orders of magnitude to approach reality.

2025-09-11 05:28:24 UTC

#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.

2025-09-04 03:04:57 UTC

My house burned to the ground in the 12/30/2021 Marshall Fire and Wind Event.
I moved into the (mostly complete) new house on June 25, 2024.
I'm very proud of it: the house was shortlisted for the Colorado Green Building Guilds' Annual award, but was beaten by a much more elaborate public building.
https://stockroom.wandering.shop/media_attachments/files/115/143/779/572/254/144/original/93b354243299fbbb.jpg