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Sax Brightwell 🇨🇦 @saxbrightwell.neocities.org · 18/02/2026

#FantasyIndiesFebruary 17. Book spice level preference Drive the spice over in a cement mixer and open it over my plate. My hometown is FANFIC. But while I'm bobbing around in the sauce I *will* be judging its flavour profile: plot, characterization, emotional connection, actual hotness, etc.

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Sax Brightwell 🇨🇦 @saxbrightwell.neocities.org · 08/01/2026

Carnyx! The most badass horn! Original post: mastodon.online/@globalmuseu...

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Sax Brightwell 🇨🇦 @saxbrightwell.neocities.org · 04/01/2026

#WritersCoffeeClub 4/1: Share a tool of your trade. Box! The cheap and universally-compatible choice for lifting (small) screens to neck-friendly heights! This is an old shipping box that I decorated by glueing part of an old bedsheet around it. Laptop who? We don't know her.

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Sax Brightwell 🇨🇦 @saxbrightwell.neocities.org · 02/01/2026

Original post: wandering.shop/@AlinaLeonov...

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Sax Brightwell 🇨🇦 @saxbrightwell.neocities.org · 28/12/2025

Original post: tech.lgbt/@Natasha_Jay...

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Sax Brightwell 🇨🇦 @saxbrightwell.neocities.org · 11/12/2025

Original post: chaos.social/@gsuberland/...

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Sax Brightwell 🇨🇦 @saxbrightwell.neocities.org · 08/12/2025

All single volumes in my Secrets of Sleipnir series are FREE until Jan 1 at Smashwords! (The 1-3 omnibus is 50% off 😉) It's a huge sale, so check out the rest of the site too! #bookstodon #booksky #booksale #freebooks #EOYSale25 #indiebooks 🌶️📚🪐 💕📚💙 www.smashwords.com/books/byseri...

Banner for the Smashwords 2025 End of Year sale.

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Sax Brightwell 🇨🇦 @saxbrightwell.neocities.org · 06/12/2025

Original post: mastodon.art/@hannahcomb/...

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Sax Brightwell 🇨🇦 @saxbrightwell.neocities.org · 24/11/2025

Original post: bsky.brid.gy/r/https://bs...

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Sax Brightwell 🇨🇦 @saxbrightwell.neocities.org · 23/11/2025

Original post: mastodon.social/@indivisible...

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Sax Brightwell 🇨🇦 @saxbrightwell.neocities.org · 21/11/2025

Original post: mastodon.scot/@raymierusse...

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Sax Brightwell 🇨🇦 @saxbrightwell.neocities.org · 20/11/2025

Original post: defcon.social/@fl0und3r/11...

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Sax Brightwell 🇨🇦 @saxbrightwell.neocities.org · 16/11/2025

With new original work, however you have them acting rapidly *becomes* their character. With fanfic, or work revisiting established characters, you better have a good reason for OOC or it starts *feeling* OOC and readers start dropping out. Original post: writing.exchange/@Emmacox/115...

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Sax Brightwell 🇨🇦 @saxbrightwell.neocities.org · 15/11/2025

"Animals are the ones to initiate the domestication process by self-selecting" is crunchy. "AND it makes them cuter as a side effect" is so wild it sounds fake. And yet! Original post: lemmy.ml/post/38995688

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Sax Brightwell 🇨🇦 @saxbrightwell.neocities.org · 14/11/2025

Original post: mastodon.social/@wonderofsci...

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Sax Brightwell 🇨🇦 @saxbrightwell.neocities.org · 10/11/2025

Original post: mastodon.social/@appassionat...

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Sax Brightwell 🇨🇦 @saxbrightwell.neocities.org · 10/11/2025

Original post: tech.lgbt/@Natasha_Jay...

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Sax Brightwell 🇨🇦 @saxbrightwell.neocities.org · 10/11/2025

The irony of this article in particular being paywalled is incredible. Original post: indieauthors.social/@indieauthor...

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Sax Brightwell 🇨🇦 @saxbrightwell.neocities.org · 06/11/2025

Original post: tech.lgbt/@mxkrane/115...

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Sax Brightwell 🇨🇦 @saxbrightwell.neocities.org · 01/11/2025

Original post: chaos.social/@dpk/1154734...

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Sax Brightwell 🇨🇦 @saxbrightwell.neocities.org · 12/08/2025

It's magpie fledgling time! They look like they were pulled backwards out of a toilet They are eating the shit out of empty peanut shells and cigarette butts They are too dumb to flee before I take their picture They are *everywhere* and so are their parents screaming anxiously from the trees BIRBS

A scruffy magpie fledgling proudly carrying an empty peanut shell with no nutritional value. You're doing amazing sweetie.

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Sax Brightwell 🇨🇦 @saxbrightwell.neocities.org · 02/08/2025

This looks like an exciting initiative! Original post: wandering.shop/@ElisesWriti...

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Sax Brightwell 🇨🇦 @saxbrightwell.neocities.org · 31/07/2025

Original post: wandering.shop/@AlinaLeonov...

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Sax Brightwell 🇨🇦 @saxbrightwell.neocities.org · 31/07/2025

Original post: wandering.shop/@paris/11494...

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Sax Brightwell 🇨🇦 @saxbrightwell.neocities.org · 28/07/2025

#WritersCoffeeClub 28. How do you write sensory experiences that fall beyond the usual five? Give an example. Touch-telepathy and touch-empathy abound in SoS:

She pressed her hand flat to Urara’s chin, and received a tangle of strange place/no mud/want eat glowing bugs/ Maunat mate with stranger?/Maunat Eggs???

Ountavaun, the biggest and oldest, came forward and wiggled its feelers in Bhimmi’s hands. Mountains of Jade didn’t commune in anything so coherent as thoughts, not like what Maunat had hesitantly described getting from Urara. It couldn’t be described as feelings, either; it was more like knowledge, appearing like something floating up to the surface of a still lake. This time, what Bhimmi knew was ...?... and ...absence... and more ...?...

He felt strangely soft, looking down at him, but the feeling came with a distinct sense of looking up, and he finally got a clue. “Shit,” he said as he stepped away, sticking his hand in his robe pocket, “of all the things I could turn out to have communion with, it had to be Celestials.” He turned and started walking back down the corridor, wishing he dared stomp or kick something to vent his embarrassment at being so slow to figure it out.

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Sax Brightwell 🇨🇦 @saxbrightwell.neocities.org · 23/07/2025

#WritersCoffeeClub 23. Share a description you're proud of. From book 2, High Dusk: the first time I got deeply emotional about a vista that doesn't exist outside my head.

... brine coral pillars grew where they could just breach the surface at low tide, and they grew tall. The water where they were swimming was deep enough that even in bright sunlight, when Fiyeli looked down with his head out of the water, he couldn’t make out the bottom - what there was to make out, the few spots that weren’t obscured by a miniature forest of seaweed which shrouded its roots in its own shadows. The seaweed grew tallest around the pillars and lost height rapidly away from them, creating an illusion of green domes dotting the seafloor in a ragged north-south line as far as the eye could see...

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Sax Brightwell 🇨🇦 @saxbrightwell.neocities.org · 21/06/2025

#ScribesAndMakers 20: What fictional character do you most closely identify with and why? Without question, that is my pseudonymsake, Saxifrage Russell from the Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson, because of this speech in Red Mars:

Sax Russell rose to his feet. He looked the same as ever, perhaps a bit more flushed than usual, but mild, small, blinking owlishly, his voice calm and dry, as if lecturing on some textbook point of thermodynamics, or enumerating the periodic table.

“The beauty of Mars exists in the human mind,” he said in that dry factual tone, and everyone stared at him amazed. “Without the human presence it is just a collection of atoms, no different than any other random speck of matter in the universe. It’s we who understand it, and we who give it meaning. All our centuries of looking up at the night sky and watching it wander through the stars. All

those nights of watching it through the telescopes, looking at a tiny disk trying to see canals in the albedo changes. All those dumb sci-fi novels with their monsters and maidens and dying civilizations. And all the scientists who studied the data, or got us here. That’s what makes Mars beautiful. Not the basalt and the oxides.”

He paused to look around at them all. Nadia gulped; it was strange in the extreme to hear those words come out of the mouth of Sax Russell, in the same dry tone that he would use to analyze a graph. Too strange!

“Now that we are here,” he went on, “it isn’t enough to just hide under ten meters of soil and study the rock. That’s science, yes, and needed science too. But science is more than that. Science is part of a larger human enterprise, and that enterprise includes going to the stars, adapting to other planets, adapting them to us. Science is creation. The lack of life here, and the lack of any finding in fifty years of the SETI program, indicates that life is rare, and intelligent life even rarer.

And yet the whole meaning of the universe, its beauty, is contained in the consciousness of intelligent life. We are the consciousness of the universe, and our job is to spread that around, to go look at things, to live everywhere we can. It’s too dangerous to keep the consciousness of the universe on only one planet, it could be wiped out. And so now we’re on two, three if you count the moon. And we can change this one to make it safer to live on. Changing it won’t destroy it. Reading its past might get harder, but the beauty of it won’t go away. If there are lakes, or forests, or glaciers, how does that diminish Mars’s beauty? I don’t think it does. I think it only enhances it. It adds life, the most beautiful system of all. But nothing life can do will bring Tharsis down, or fill Marineris. Mars will always remain Mars, different from Earth, colder and wilder. But it can be Mars and ours at the same time. And it will be. There is this about the human mind: if it can be done, it will be done. We can transform Mars and build it like you would build a cathedral, as a monument to humanity and the universe both. We can do it, so we will do it. So—” he held up a palm, as if satisfied that the analysis had been supported by the data in the graph—as if he had examined the periodic table, and found that it still held true—”we might as well start.”

-Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

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Sax Brightwell 🇨🇦 @saxbrightwell.neocities.org · 06/05/2025

#WritersCoffeeClub 6. What does your usual workspace look like? Share a picture.

A corner set up for writing with a tablet and keyboard on a small desk, a wheeled office chair, and several Stardew Valley decorations.

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Sax Brightwell 🇨🇦 @saxbrightwell.neocities.org · 04/05/2025

#WritersCoffeeClub 4. How do you take notes? Share a (redacted?) screenshot or photo. I type some notes in Obsidian, and I also have a coil notebook full of scribbling and clipped-in sketches and such.

A coil notebook open to a pair of pages in the middle, one page with a written colour wheel (Secrets of Sleipnir's main arc is cycling through tertiary pastels for its cover themes) and one with editing notes from a readthrough of a late draft of book 3.

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Sax Brightwell 🇨🇦 @saxbrightwell.neocities.org · 01/05/2025

Original post: wandering.shop/@paris/11442...

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Sax Brightwell 🇨🇦 @saxbrightwell.neocities.org · 01/05/2025

Original post: wandering.shop/@AlinaLeonov...

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Sax Brightwell 🇨🇦 @saxbrightwell.neocities.org · 03/04/2025

Original post: blacktwitter.io/@JayJustice/...

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Sax Brightwell 🇨🇦 @saxbrightwell.neocities.org · 02/04/2025

Original post: noc.social/@todayilearn...

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Sax Brightwell 🇨🇦 @saxbrightwell.neocities.org · 28/03/2025

#WritersCoffeeClub 28. Happy Respect Your Cat Day! Who or what accompanies you when you write? My dog downstairs, my Stardew Valley creature art upstairs.

A scruffy white-and-brindle mutt, probably shih tzu and some kind of terrier, looking up at the camera with huge dark eyes. He's 16 years old and the bestest little old man.

Perler beads of a Stardew Valley duck and blue chicken, and a cross-stitch of a reskinned purple opossum (I didn't have enough greys and browns) with the caption, "The horrors persist, but so do I."

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Sax Brightwell 🇨🇦 @saxbrightwell.neocities.org · 24/03/2025

#WordWeavers 24. Share the worldbuilding fact you’re most proud of. I fully worked out the rotational/orbital patterns for a moon with a 30-hour day and a 20-hour month:

A hand-drawn pair of diagrams for a moon that orbits its parent planet 3 times in 2 days, all represented as the relative position of a tiny figure on the moon's surface labeled 'a gay little man.'

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Sax Brightwell 🇨🇦 @saxbrightwell.neocities.org · 24/03/2025

#WritersCoffeeClub 24. Is there a particular reader you keep in mind when you write? My fandom friends whose encouragement midwifed this whole endeavour and who continue to read and comment. They’re my '30 sickos.'

twitter post by saikohistory: The concept of the "mass audience" has had a largely deleterious effect on art. Create art for at most 30 sickos at a time.

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Sax Brightwell 🇨🇦 @saxbrightwell.neocities.org · 20/03/2025

I write steamy, queer, romantic science fiction set on a far-future alien world. 🌶️📚🪐 💕📚💙 You can buy my books directly at payhip.com/SaxBrightwell or on all major platforms at books2read.com/ap/RD62br/Sa... You can also find me blogging at saxbrightwell.dreamwidth.org

Book covers of Secrets of Sleipnir series by Sax Brightwell.

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Sax Brightwell 🇨🇦 @saxbrightwell.neocities.org · 14/03/2025

#FantasyIndiesMarch 14 Free Friday or Where and When do you prefer to write? When: -ever I can. At home: in my writing nook, or down in the den to hang out with my kids (and use my massage seat). Away from home: anywhere I can sit down - and with the lap desk I do mean *anywhere.*

A corner of a room with a small desk and a chair. Two notebooks are visible inside the desk. On the desk is a wrist rest, keyboard, tablet propped up on a floral box beside 2 polished rocks, and 2 lamps. On the wall are handmade Stardew Valley decorations and a landscape photo. On the ground is a bathroom scale and a power bar.

An Ikea poang chair and ottoman photographed from above, with a massage seat on the chair and a lap desk and folding keyboard on the ottoman. Also visible are part of a lamp and a couch with a rumpled cushion.

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Sax Brightwell 🇨🇦 @saxbrightwell.neocities.org · 10/03/2025

Post your favourite Pokémon, wrong answers only.

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Sax Brightwell 🇨🇦 @saxbrightwell.neocities.org · 10/03/2025

#ScribesAndMakers Day 10: What's your preferred format for reading (hardcopy, e-book, audio)? Is it the same for publishing? Ebooks all the way, baby! (That said, the first thing I bought when I had enough royalties was a print-on-demand author proof of my first omnibus. Just to have it.)

Print edition of the first Secrets of Sleipnir omnibus, propped up on my writing desk. Also visible are my tablet (elevated on a box covered in floral fabric) and keyboard, lamps, a couple of polished rocks, and a perler bead blue Stardew Valley chicken.

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Sax Brightwell 🇨🇦 @saxbrightwell.neocities.org · 08/03/2025

#WordWeavers 8. Which one of your characters is in the least safe situation? Fiyeli would say it’s any of the plains Nanshul riding around on Sleipnirian horses:

A crudely drawn comic: The 'Domestication' of Horses on Sleipnir (according to Abenetson Fiyeli) ((who hates horses))
PANEL 1
-an 8-legged horse with jagged teeth and glaring eyes, labeled 'dangerous'
-plains Nanshul ancestor, pointing: Horse!
-literally everyone else: NO!!!!
PANEL 2
-plains Nanshul ancestor, frowning with fists on hips: H O R S E ...
PANEL 3
1000 YEARS LATER
-horse, labeled 'exactly the same'
-being ridden by 4 cheering plains Nanshul, labeled 'in great danger'
-by Sax Brightwell

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Sax Brightwell 🇨🇦 @saxbrightwell.neocities.org · 01/03/2025

#PretendPanel Prose is my most-practiced form, and while I've written more short stories than novels, novels have been the better choice for my original work, to make room for worldbuilding and be 'episodes' in a much longer story.

#PretendPanel 1. How do you decide on the form of work you produce?

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Sax Brightwell 🇨🇦 @saxbrightwell.neocities.org · 01/03/2025

Tell me what's going on in your WIP right now using only a gif.

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Sax Brightwell 🇨🇦 @saxbrightwell.neocities.org · 28/02/2025

#ScribesAndMakers 2/28. Shameless self-promotion day. Let's boost away. I write queer, steamy, romantic sci-fi on a far-future alien world. Book 4 just came out, so I'm sinking my teeth into the 5th! books2read.com/ap/RD62br/Sax-Bright…

Covers of the Secrets of Sleipnir series by Sax Brightwell.

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Sax Brightwell 🇨🇦 @saxbrightwell.neocities.org · 27/02/2025

#WritersCoffeeClub 27. Post an image which reflects the tone of your WIP.

Tumblr screencap: user powerfulwizard: 'Reach WITH IN to your LOCAL bog and you may find A Friend And Boy...' with a photo of a frowning toad dangling from someone's hand.

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Sax Brightwell 🇨🇦 @saxbrightwell.neocities.org · 26/02/2025

A mailman and his jailbroken anchorite boyfriend guide a cavalry of giant alien animals (including the kids whose betrothal quest started the whole mess) onto a glass desert to wipe out a slaver movement. This somewhat interferes with their sex life. #WSPitP #A #R #SF #LGBT books2read.com/b/4D0qDr

Cover of Low Dusk, book 4 of Secrets of Sleipnir, by Sax Brightwell. Fiyeli and Evret are silhouetted against a glass quarry at sunset (known locally as "low dusk" as opposed to "high dusk" when the sun disappears in eclipse behind Sleipnir's parent planet, Mama Loki). The western slope of Sleipnir's rings is visible beyond some clouds. Figures of other people are small and blurry in the distance.

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Sax Brightwell 🇨🇦 @saxbrightwell.neocities.org · 18/02/2025

Updating my pinned post: I'm writing steamy queer romance on a far-future alien world. Book 4 just came out today! books2read.com/ap/RD62br/Sa... 🌶📚💙 🪐📚

Cover images for all 4 Secrets of Sleipnir novels and the omnibus of books 1-3.

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