DAY 10 - Book Challenge : 20 books that have had an impact on who you are. One book a day for 20 days. No explanations, no reviews, just #BookCovers. #20books #20books20days #BookCover #Gormenghast #BritishWriter #BritishLiterature #CoverIllustration #Cover_Art #Book #Books #Art #Mystery #TitusGroan #MervynPeake #Gothic #GothicLiterature #Literature #AlternativeReality #FantasyLiterature
#PaperbackCovers #Paperbacks #PaperbackBooks #PenguinBooks
Yeah I was disappointed to the ending of True Detective: Night Country 
They just tired to do way too much in 6 episodes with not enough detail in the sub plots. And the ending? Way too open ended for me. #crime #thriller #mystery #detective
#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2504.16 — How present is music in your work?
Mars Needed Women: There's muzak playing in the scene in O'Hare airport in 2133 (time approximate). In another, there's ambient seashore music, with gulls, which May Ri misinterprets a white noise track of the seashore.
Elsewhere: The devil-girl's deceased mother was an international opera and "Broadway" theatre star. Her records are everywhere. Sometimes she hears them playing in restaurants, and leaves immediately. In the story, she only sings the song in the shower. Folks remark she's pretty good (but they don't know she's the daughter of a celebrity because she hides that identity).
[Author retains copyright (c)2025 R.S.]
#gender #fiction #writer #author
#mystery #thriller #romance #sf #sff #sciencefiction
#writing #writingcommunity #writersOfMastodon #writers
#RSdiscussion
#RSstory #RSReluctanceStory #RSMarsNeededWomen
#WordWeavers 2504.16 — If your MC wasn’t involved with the story, what would they do with their life?
Wow! That's a very interesting question. This character is well-storied, so let's unwrap.
Current story: It was a turning point. In the previous story she'd learned something very essential about how people work, something she thinks she can fix. If she never gets to be in the current story—where she learns she can trust friends and then finds love—she turns the path toward evil.
-1 Story: She attends a school like Princeton with her saved prizefighting money. She becomes a professsor in thaumology and a spinster. Because she doesn't intervene in mob family politics, the main series antagonist may be assassinated. Whether that kills her is another matter.
-2 Story: She works as a grocery clerk and doing other odd jobs, possibly even performing "magic" tricks, eventually ending up in a lessor college. In this path she becomes an eccentric because she doesn't really trust people (she's autistic and can't really read them), something like Nikola Tesla. She likely invents something evil.
-3 Story: Having never run away, she grows up an increasingly angry and dissatisfied elite, with power she feels she has not earned. She governs a small but prosperous prefecture well enough that she is well loved, which confuses her. She marries someone suggested to her and has children who end up squabbling over accession. Being as they are her children, one will be evil. The author will ensure she's female and has to fight her brothers, which sours her.
-4 Story (unwritten, hinted at in backstory): The immortal main series antagonist has been practicing eugenics, amongst her other sins. In her case, it's encouraging the migration of peoples between towns and prefectures, also doing some careful matchmaking. The MC's mother was one such highly "magical" methodically bred endpoint, and one of the main antagonist's lessor students. Had the woman not encouraged the MC's future mother's thaumaturgy and singing talent, the woman would not have met (read: been strategically introduced to) the MC's father.
The MC would not have been born, and neither would the MC's mother died an untimely death having being caught on a spy mission. (Of course, that death is assumed. The author gets to retcon that fact in a later story, as has already been done but not confirmed for the simultaneous death of the MC's father.)
[Author retains copyright (c)2025 R.S.]
#gender #fiction #writer #author
#mystery #thriller #romance #sf #sff #sciencefiction
#writing #writingcommunity #writersOfMastodon #writers
#RSdiscussion
#RSstory #RSReluctanceStory
Mr. Melas, however, still lived, and in less than an hour, with the aid of ammonia and brandy I had the satisfaction of seeing him open his eyes, and of knowing that my hand had drawn him back from that dark valley in which all paths meet.
— Watson, in “The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter”
A Brush With Shadows, Anna Lee Huber #Books #Mystery #BlogFiredrakeOrg https://blog.firedrake.org/archive/2025/04/A_Brush_With_Shadows__Anna_Lee_Huber.html
DAY 9 - Book Challenge : 20 books that have had an impact on who you are. One book a day for 20 days. No explanations, no reviews, just #BookCovers. #20books #20books20days #BookCover #CoverIllustration #Cover_Art #Book #Books #Art #Mystery #JudeTheObscure #ThomasHardy #Victorian #VictorianLiterature #Literature
#PaperbackCovers #Paperbacks #PaperbackBooks #MertonCollegeOxford_Painting1771 by #Michael_Angelo_Rooker
Advance reviews! “A Stone Cold Murder is exactly the kind of book I crave—tightly plotted, emotionally rich, and impossible to put down. Kris Bock blends murder, mystery, and psychic suspense seamlessly, and I’m obsessed.”
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/223633761-a-stone-cold-murder
#books #mystery #CozyMystery @bookstodon
already almost 10 mystery bags sold! thank you so much! you guys do love some mystery don't you 
Book 15 was Holy Island by LJ Ross
After a string of fantastic reads, I was due for one that wasn’t the right fit. Not every book is for every reader … and that’s okay.
Full review: https://app.thestorygraph.com/reviews/1f254e59-bc21-4822-8648-4c1e92c8398e?redirect=true
Book View Cafe is delighted to announce THE VILLAIN'S FATAL PLOT.
@patricia_rice starts another great Regency mystery series. Gravesyde Village lives!
"He’s looking for a future … she must escape the past … if only they can survive the present."
@bookstodon #bookstodon #ebooks #books #HistoricalFiction #Mystery
https://bookviewcafe.com/bvc-announces-the-villains-fatal-plot-by-patricia-rice/
“Hence the cocaine. I cannot live without brain-work. What else is there to live for? Stand at the window here. Was ever such a dreary, dismal, unprofitable world? See how the yellow fog swirls down the street and drifts across the dun-colored houses. What could be more hopelessly prosaic and material? What is the use of having powers, doctor, when one has no field upon which to exert them? Crime is commonplace, existence is commonplace, and no qualities save those which are commonplace have any function upon earth.”
— Sherlock Holmes, in “The Sign of the Four”
#PennedPossibilities 643 — How does your SC respond to the quiet? Do they take comfort in silence, or seek to fill the void with noise?
Bolt, from the Reluctance Series during the Interstellar era, was blackmailed (framed for a murder) by the mob into being a messenger for a decade. She has wings. She had to be silent, sometimes a detective. It's not like she hung around mobsters, or wanted to be pulled in deeper. Nor could she confide in anyone, lest they get targeted by association. Worse, she never got paid much.
Eventually, she found a camera that fell off the back of a wagon. She got into street photography. One time, when she happened to be where news happened (too often in her profession), she had taken a few photos when a reporter's camera got slammed into a wall.
He asked if she'd sell him photos. Turned out she's pretty good.
She often gets her photos into her world's version of The New Yorker and The New York Times and is also a part time stringer. As you can guess, she wanders the cold dank unfriendly streets when she can be free (makes it harder to be given "assignments"), and dispels the dangerous depressing quiet that might otherwise seep in.
Her love affair with B&W street photography does not wane when she is freed from the mob, pardoned, and begins train to become a praetorian. Sure her subjects are different, and her wandering happens between trainings and bodyguard duties, but she has the knack of using a rangefinder without being noticed (think Leica).
[Author retains copyright (c)2025 R.S.]
#gender #fiction #writer #author
#mystery #thriller #romance #sf #sff #sciencefiction
#writing #writingcommunity #writersOfMastodon #writers
#RSdiscussion
#RSstory #RSReluctanceStory
#WordWeavers 2504.14 — Who is your kindest character and how do they show it?
Of my recent works, Wintereyes from Inklings (now on composition hiatus) is likely my kindest. She lives in my Townships and Wands universe, which is full of various magicks. I've a few sample stories posted in my pinned samples post. Her magic is… well, it's rather peculiar.
She's is a very naïve girl when it comes to humans, and as a result is suddenly shy (like her author). She wants to be helpful and she likes to listen, and not be seen (like her author). She's quite kind; her demeanor. She wants to be friends, but raised on a farm at the edge of the Fell Forest, her opportunities for friends were… well, rather peculiar.
But not limited!
She befriends wolves, is adopted by them, and lives with the pack, running with them, hunting with them, and healing them. This did not make her cruel, even when she also befriends prey animals, too. Her ethics are… interesting.
Oh, about befriending. Befriending is her sacrificing part of herself to become more like her new friend. For example, her most recent mess started when she befriended a wyvern (bat-dragon) because it had a cold and was burning up the forest sneezing. She wanted to find out how to treat its cold! How did she become more like the creature? Besides learning how to converse with it, when she concentrates on its language, she can breathe fire. (It's like a glottal stop.)
But she'd never hurt anybody with it!
The Warlord of the closest Township (actually a woman) takes a serious interest in Wintereyes, and her story begins.
See image: This is how I imagine the wyvern. A face only a mother, or Wintereyes, could love.
https://de.pinterest.com/pin/342344009165649564/
[Author retains copyright (c)2025 R.S.]
#gender #fiction #writer #author
#mystery #erotic #romance #fantasy
#writing #writingcommunity #writersOfMastodon #writers
#RSdiscussion
#RSstory #RSInklingsStory
Now Unlocked: There were skeletons deep in this tiny innocent-looking mouse's closet. Plus, real ones left in his wake. No one knows how many. Oliver got the details after Gus captured him. https://www.catdetectivecases.com/year8-casefile48/
#cats #writers #wildlife #mystery
DECLASSIFIED! Who did Gus capture? Was this mouse innocent or part of the urban legend of one of America's Most Wanted felons? You won't believe what Ollie found out! https://www.catdetectivecases.com/year8-casefile48/
#cats #writers #wildlife #mystery
