Nobody calls me doctor worm anymore and it's sad

#SFFChat Q4: Snippet time! Here we see an early interaction between Ayo and authority figure, namely Hill, the guy nominally in charge of keeping the refugee camp from being attacked by, y'know, the people who are responsible for there being a refugee camp. Also, something's...off...with Hill.

#SFFCHat Q3: SFF that critiques the powerful It doesn't get more "critiques the powerful" than The Locked Tomb by Tamsyn Muir. Just ask the cows.

#SFFChat Q2: MC and power Ayo is a journalist and a refugee with a tenuous understanding of things like "laws." The fact that they are both enamored with the downtrodden Veiled and constantly battling the eldritch horrors they're running from means they're primed to question EVERY authority.

#SFFChat Q1: gov't good? A running theme in "Homebound" is how reality gets in the way of good intentions, which is particularly paralyzing for institutions. Fitting that, there's no clean answer here. Many governments are broadly trying to do right, but their hands are tied. Others are evil.

#SFFChat intro Hey there! I'm M. Nyx (they/them), and I write a blend of sff/horror. A fav fictional monarch of mine is Queen Tsiora from Evan Winter's The Burning. She's an excellent mixture of good leadership, youthful idealism, and terrifying ruthlessness when the situation calls for it.

boy oh boy i hate how relevant this one is becoming

#SFFChat Q2: Why this snippet (see last skeet for it)? A lot of "Homebound" so far focuses on characters interacting with one another, and this scene, after Ayo (they/them) is prescribed house rest by their doctor, is a rare opportunity to see Ayo alone with their thoughts.

#SFFChat Q1: Snippet Time?

#SFFChat Intro! Hiya! I'm M. Nyx (they/them) and I'm really good at character work. A rough 80% of my writing is Putting Guys* in Situations or having them Talk About Those Situations. The other 20% is enough worldbuilding to scaffold those Situations and I guess The PlotTM. *gender not included

#SFFChat Q4: One Line Only One was enough because the children were right and the adults were wrong. There WERE heroes in Cahokia.

#SFFChat Q3: Growth as a writer Oh boy. Better to ask how I haven't grown. Mostly though I'm really much better at PLANNING. I used to just sit and GO, but now I sit and go, but with an idea of where I'm heading.

#SFFChat Q3: the unique power of SFF Bouncing back to my honorable mention from the intro post, SFF is really, really good at commentary. By taking ideas, tech, or personalities out of our zeitgeist and placing them in other circumstances, we can more clearly see the cracks.

#SFFChat Q1: Dream inspiration So I mentioned in the monthly chat that the "haunted house" portion of "Homebound" was the last part of the book to click into place, and that's BECAUSE both the layout of the mundane portion of the haunted house and a core interaction about it came from a dream!

#SFFChat Intro! Hello all, I'm M. Nyx (they/them), and I adore space operas. Spaceships! Pew pew lasers! Politics on a galactic scale! Never has a (sub)genre sold me more on its vibes than space opera has. Oh also honorable mention: KAIJU. Gimme giant monsters that are also giant metaphors.

#SFFChat September Monthly Thread! Q1: What are you working on? My main project is called "Homebound," a near-ish future SF/Horror story. It's superheros x eldritch horror x haunted house. Ever wonder what would happen if Clark Kent were a monsterfucker with no superpowers of his own?

maybe if we sang “Free Palestine” to the tune of “Sweet Caroline” we could get more white people on board

Charles Dickens only managed to tell a tale of two cities. What I'm proposing, is a tale about three cities

My Neighbor Demon-Tiger

I wish I was a more functional human being

"moby dick" is how fans shorten the title it's actualy mobile suit richard

Chattel slavery was so bad that when we tell you how bad it in fact was most of y'all shut down and tell us we're making it up and pass laws against us ever telling you how bad it was again because your brains literally cannot handle how bad it in fact was.

may james dobson's name be erased and his bones be eaten by local carnivores

james dobson is dead and cannot wish anything but eternal pain on that mother fucker. that guy destroyed so many lives

I know we've gotten inured to this kind of thing, but hey the president called the news to say he's scared he won't get into heaven

The targeted killing of Anas al-Sharif and five other journalists on Sunday means at least 242 Palestinian journalists have been killed by Israeli forces since the beginning of October 2023. No conflict in modern history has seen a higher number of journalists killed.

is it a crime to do a wheelie? while being a youth?

We’re just normal men

In case any of y'all need to know the level of unhinged I am, I have spent the last week agonizing over writing lyrics for a song by a fictional band I created for my character in an RPG that we HAVE NOT STARTED. I have not even remotely attempted to write lyrics in almost 15 years. song fucks tho.

When you’re fighting a woman wielding two swords, and the guy behind her says, “Go loud,”:

reading heinlein as a young girl turned me off sci fi for like... decades. it was just so viscerally sex-creepy

#SFFChat Q4: Setting snippet. OOOOH BOY this house is HAUNTED. Wanna watch my protagonists realize that the light is coming from the WALLS? And then realizing that means the walls could be hiding OTHER things?

Step 1: make it clear you're wrapping up. Step 2: summarize the most critical aspects of your point. Step 3: end w/ memorable, evocative statement, or a call to action. "As we've seen, [creator] makes it clear that [main point] through [core argument]. What should we do with this? Well, why not..."

#SFFChat Q3: setting of the last one. This belongs to The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses by Malka Older, which is set on Jupiter (called "Giant") after Earth suffered total ecological collapse, more specifically at a pretty stuffy university. They use special scarves to keep the worst gases away.

#SFFChat Q2: setting preferences (reader edition) I love space. Terrible at writing it, but I adore READING it. The best authors can capture both the terrifying vastness and the absolute awe-inspiring wonder of it all. And, on account of use talking about space here, I really do mean "IT ALL."

#SFFChat Q1: my setting v. My SettingTM. Obligatory anthropologist "you can't NOT be affected by your surroundings" answer. Moving rapidly along, I based the layout of Ayo's apartment on that of the house I lived in for the first three years of my life (both happen to be in Tornado Alley).

#SFFChat Intro: Hey there! I'm M. Nyx (they/them), and Ayo (also they/them) probably had a homemade baked potato-and-eggs situation for breakfast, got too deep on a project and forgot to eat lunch, then ordered pizza from a local place who refused to let them pay because of "the alligator incident."

Just making sure that everyone is aware of this crab that NOAA scientists found

‘Man-made’ mass starvation in Gaza, WHO chief says - www.theguardian.com/world/2025/j... "Ghebreyesus issues warning, as more than 100 aid groups urge Israel to ease blockade" how many times does it need saying? #israel #gazagenocide

Gaza is now single deadliest conflict for journalists in history. This is not only an attempt to extinguish a whole people, it is also an attempt to extinguish the story of their genocide. “One day, everyone will have always been against this.” - Egyptian-Canadian writer, Omar El Akkad. #Gaza

It is truly wild how accustomed we've become to death and cruelty in this country. How is this not on every front page? Have all these newspapers really just accepted that we're a country that tortures people now? www.hrw.org/report/2025/...

BBC host: ".. how long can people survive.. obviously people are appalled by the images we are seeing" Juliette Touma from UNRWA "We should be more than appalled. We've passed the threshold of being appalled many months ago... the people of Gaza are being deliberately starved"

#SFFChat Q4: a moment of conflict Here's a recent bit of terror from Homebound, now that our intrepid heroes are actually inside the haunted house, it's their first encounter with the monstrous hidden within. For context, the ceiling of this room looked like "popcorn ceiling" at first glance.

#SFFChat Q3: higlight an author! This is a great time to mention Evan Winter, author The Burning, who is a masterclass in getting in the head of not just his main character Tau, but also ancillary characters who bring their own perspectives to the scenes we watch from their PoV.

SFFChat Q2: non-traditional conflict. I'm a big fan of the format: "that sucked and it's kinda not anyones fault so how are we gonna deal with it?" Act I of Homebound ends with Ayo and their childhood flame Dromak breaking up due to something like this.

#SFFChat Q1: internal v external conflict. I virtually always write both types, compounding one another. Ayo, the MC for Homebound, is very concerned about doing the right thing, often to their own detriment. In a situation like, say, rescuing a man from the haunting he caused, that question hits

Hello #SFFChat I'm M Nyx (they/them). Because I tend to write very narrowly focused narratives, I often have trouble writing small jumps in time smoothly (full timeskips I'm happy to let be jarring, that's usually part of the point).