iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Mary Holstege @mathling.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 6h

#WordWeavers Oct 7: Share a line of dialogue that tells us everything we need to know about a character's personality. From Cantata Deeps, Anselm explains his selling technique.

Text reads:
Anselm chuckled. "Ah, my lad, my lad. What is truth, hey?" In response to Cello's frown, he added in a more serious tone. "Something destroyed the freighter. Was it a gas leak? Maybe. Was the captain old and crusty and set in his ways? Most likely. Most of them are." A little smile directed towards Pettrie. "Did I ever claim my story had anything to do with those sensors? I did not. The young man asked and I raised my eyebrows and glanced towards them, and they all assumed that it did. People want to believe, lad. They want to think the universe is filled with tidy narratives, to feel the breath of the divine, and touch wonders inexplicable."

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Mary Holstege @mathling.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 04/10/2026

#WritersCoffeeClub Oct 4: How isolated are your characters in your current WIP? Physically: They're stuck half-way up a mountain in an electrical blackout zone in a storm. And the bodies are piling up. Mentally: Cantor Mason screwed up his last case very messily, very publicly, and in a […]

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Mary Holstege @mathling.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 03/10/2026

#WordWeavers Oct 3: Share a line from your WIP that foreshadows something important without giving it away. The monk had his hand on the man's chest and mumbled, apparently offering prayers for the departed. He stood, finally, re-straightening the boshiya to keep his face properly covered […]

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Mary Holstege @mathling.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 03/10/2026

#PennedPossibilities 1146: Does romance ever feature in your work? Sure, kinda. Cantata Deeps is one giant love story. But it is the love between Sonata and her brothers and between Pettrie and his partner Anselm that interests me more. Sonata feeding broth to her dying brother. Pettrie […]

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Mary Holstege @mathling.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 03/10/2026

#ScribesAndMakers Oct. 3: Is there a common thread throughout your creative work People broken in various ways, stumbling through it all, relationships carrying the day My fav scenes to write are moments of quiet intimacy, not in the romance/sex sense, just people interacting with care and […]

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Mary Holstege @mathling.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 02/10/2026

Oh joy, the bots have moved on from just repeatedly downloading every file they can to actively trying to attack my website. Joke's on you, bots, I write my HTML by hand, so hacking on wordpress APIs ain't gonna get you *jack*

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Mary Holstege @mathling.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 02/10/2026

#WritersCoffeeClub Oct 2: Do you have plans for your next work yet? How Deep the Light of Stolen Suns just came out a couple days ago Next up is a sci-fi murder mystery, first draft just about done I already know that we'll see more of investigator Cantor Mason After that? The back-story of […]

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Mary Holstege @mathling.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 02/10/2026

The modern dilemma: Without my adblock/VPN filtering, the modern web is unusably inundated with crap With my adblock/VPN filtering, the modern web is unusably inudated with anti-bot roadblocks *Old woman shakes fist at computer

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Mary Holstege @mathling.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 30/09/2026

Madness, poetry, love, and rage. Solae, constructed to be the Jade Emperor's spy, flies out on a secret extended mission. Between command directives that bind them, assassins, traitors, and the mind- and body-stealing Thanarchs, they struggle to control […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

The cover of the novel "How Deep the Light of Stolen Suns" by Mary Holstege. The image is dominated by a bright halo of golden light. Clumps of stars fall towards it, made dark by its brightness. Just coming into frame on the left is the silhouette of a spaceship. It has a large bulb at the front and a long thin tail. There are a series of delicate petals perpendicular to the shaft, fanned out into a flower or star.

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Mary Holstege @mathling.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 26/09/2026

Taps sign, again. Sighs. It doesn't matter how eye-popping the fine (or points-docking) is, it is never close to the amount of the ill-gotten gains. This is a post about Man City

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Mary Holstege @mathling.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 26/09/2026

#PennedPossibilities 1139: Do you have a ritual before you sit down to write? Yeah, I listen to my brain yammer at me for half the night, grab a cub of coffee and say ALL RIGHT, I'LL TYPE, YOU MONSTER

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Mary Holstege @mathling.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 26/09/2026

#GenerativeArt interlude WIP: so not the vibe I was aiming at I set a parameter hilariously wrong, but I kinda like it, so I rolled with it #SVG #XQuery #CreativeCoding #HumanArt

Spidery looping clusters of writing. Is it writing? Lines of text? They almost look like lines of text, but with large gaps. There are looping strokes, and dots and little marks. Arabic? No. Not Arabic. Something stranger. Eerie. Alien. Green and yellow. Does the colour signify?

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Mary Holstege @mathling.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 25/09/2026

#PennedPossibilities 1138: Tell us about a time your MC forged their own path In Keeper of Maps, Jali literally (yes literally literally) forges her own paths several times It's kind of a Map Maker's whole thing

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Mary Holstege @mathling.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 25/09/2026

#WordWeavers 9/25 Do illicit drugs or alcohol play a role in your story? Belle Epoch series, certainly Dust is a kind of meta-addictor, that addicts you to some specific sensation related to your initial experience of it Pinkie is an addict, and the Atraxians dose Renny with Dust when they […]

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Mary Holstege @mathling.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 23/09/2026

#GenerativeArt interlude Mountains of madness A quick sketch, using simple geometry and bold colours #XQuery #SVG #CreativeCoding #HumanArt

A teal sky and and orange plain covered with sharp peaks, brilliantly lit (white, pale yellow) on the right face, cross-hatched red shadows on the back face. A pale sun shines high in the sky.

It is very simplistic, childish even, and yet even so there is something evocative about it. We're in the desert southwest, facing a long hot day of hiking.

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Mary Holstege @mathling.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 22/09/2026

#ScribesAndMakers 9/22 Promotion day Releasing in a week: How Deep the Light of Stolen Suns Madness, poetry, love, and rage. It's a bit of an insane ride. Adventure. Love. Clones. Artificial people. Mind-and body- stealing space pirates. Poems. Lots and […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

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Reposted by Mary Holstege

Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

The future of the human mathematician anakedrhymejam.substack.com/p/the-future-o… #AI #math (No easy answers. An interesting read)

While some of the work is tedious and exhausting, a lot of the work is fun. It's fun to sit with a stack of paper and stare off into the distance trying to solve a problem.
To scribble some notes, day after day, until the pieces start to come together. To meet with a colleague and hash out our ideas and approaches and fill a blackboard with pictures and formulas and sometimes even a theorem and proof. Even the writing and proofreading is its own kind of Type II fun: the rhythm of the detail-oriented work, the realization of a missing step that has to be filled in, the satisfaction of a paper brought to near perfection.
Now there is ChatGPT and Gemini and Claude (and Kimi and Grok) and we're eyeing them uncomfortably, wondering if we want to bring them into the fun, and whether there will be any fun left for us if

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Mary Holstege @mathling.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 19/09/2026

How bad is Levi Stadium as a soccer venue? Bad enough that even though I have the fancy ass tickets and the fancy ass parking pass to go with it as part of my Quakes season ticket package, I sold them at a loss and will watch today's game from my couch. I regret nothing.

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Mary Holstege @mathling.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 17/09/2026

#WordWeavers Sept 17: By the end of your story, how many injuries has your MC had? Cantata Deeps: Sonata has been stunned (several times), whacked with a baton across the head, and the knee, partially strangled, had her shoulder kicked in, and been smashed about in a tumbling escape pod. All […]

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Mary Holstege @mathling.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 12/09/2026

RE: hachyderm.io/@mekkaokereke/11725903… This, entirely. Truth. Said the woman who was in those CS programs, those companies, those pitch meetings

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Mary Holstege @mathling.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 12/09/2026

#WordWeavers 11. What does your MC believe about themselves at the beginning of the story that turns out to be completely wrong? Cantor is convinced he's washed up and useless as an investigator Four murders later...?

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Mary Holstege @mathling.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 09/09/2026

#WritersCoffeeClub 9/9: What's your standard operating font, size, format? Or do you not have a standard? For writing, FIRA Code 13pt. Plain old text. One paragraph per wrapped line. For review/editing Atkinson Hyperlegible Mono or Liberation Serif 12pt, or if I want to shake things up a bit […]

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Mary Holstege @mathling.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 07/09/2026

#WordWeavers Sept 7: Describe a moment when one of your characters realizes they’ve made a terrible mistake. From How Deep the Light of Stolen Suns. Solae learns the hard way that they should have been more careful about their opsec with the Thanarchs around: "What's that?" There was a small […]

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Mary Holstege @mathling.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 07/09/2026

#PennedPossibilities 1121: What would your MC say their personal strengths are? Would other characters agree? Cantor Mason "Nothing, absolutely nothing. Leave me alone, Zee." "Observation, perseverance, empathy, organizing a mess of facts. You know, investigating. Don't let one little setback […]

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Mary Holstege @mathling.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 06/09/2026

I accidentally typed #SilentSinday instead of #SilentSunday and now I want to make that I thing How are you spending your #SilentSinday, eh? Me, I'm murdering another immortal in my WIP #writing

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Mary Holstege @mathling.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 04/09/2026

#WritersCoffeeCLub 4th of September: If you work digitally, what application do you use? Writing: Emacs on my Linux desktop. I author to markdown and use pandoc to generate DOCX, PDF, and EPUB. Editing: I use the formatted PDF on my Android tablet, using FoxIt PDF editor to scribble red pen […]

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Mary Holstege @mathling.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 03/09/2026

Is it just me? I'm to do an update (#fedora #linux FWIW) and I'm getting curl error after curl error from a series of mirrors, but only after I'm a substantial way through the download for that package. Go away and try another day? Give up, no updates for you? Something else?

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Mary Holstege @mathling.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 30/08/2026

Available for pre-order now! books2read.com/u/ba7oNv Madness, poetry, love, and rage. Solae, an artificial person created as a spy for the Jade Emperor, is sent on a secret extended mission throughout the Empire. Between command directives that bind […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Cover of the book "How Deep the Light of Stolen Suns" by "Mary Holstege"

The background is a golden halo with rays coming from it. Clumps of stars converge on the central light. To the left, tiny at this scale, is the silhouette of a space ship, with a bulbous front and a long tail with a florette of spikes coming from it. We can't see the end of the spaceship.

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Reposted by Mary Holstege

Glyph @glyph.im · 30/08/2026

the social contract that allows the web to exist at all is literally collapsing in real time people.kernel.org/monsieuricon/cree…

Mary Holstege @mathling.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 29/08/2026

#Caturday #Photography "What?! There's a magic wall between me and that rodent?!" -- Halki, probably

Little flame point cat paws at the image of some little rodent on the TV. Someone helpfully moved a table up close so she could reach.

Photographer: me
CatTV chooser: The Cat Whisperer

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Mary Holstege @mathling.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 29/08/2026

#WritersCoffeeClub Aug 29: Share some of the last things you looked up for what you’re working on now. For How Deep the Light of Stolen Stars (coming soon) The fencing term "prise de fer" The first line of the Illiad Poems. So many many poems.

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Mary Holstege @mathling.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 27/08/2026

#WritersCoffeeClub Aug 27: Does ‘humanity’ as a concept figure often in your works? How so? As framing, perhaps, and a contrast In the Belle Epoch series, the Gate Minds have a dim sense of what they call fireflies. In How Deep the Light of Stolen Stars, Solae puts all humanity in opposition […]

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Mary Holstege @mathling.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 27/08/2026

#WordWeavers Aug 27: Which character would win a trivia contest? Solae. Slam dunk. They can over-clock their cognition and find answers in their vaults. Or ask one of their ghosts. It's all happening inside their head, so it isn't cheating, right?

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Matt Henderson @matthen.com · 26/08/2026

To tell if a maze is solvable, just hang it by its corners If it tears into pieces, you’ve found a solution

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Mary Holstege @mathling.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 26/08/2026

Taps sign. The settlement is always for less than the ill-gotten gains. I don't care how eye-popping the number is.

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Mary Holstege @mathling.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 23/08/2026

#WritersCoffeeClub Aug 23: If no one read what you write, would you still choose to write? So it would seem. The number of people who read what I write is statistically indistinguishable from zero. My brain insists on creative outlets. Writing is one of 'em.

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