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Sax Brightwell 🇨🇦
@saxbrightwell.neocities.org
170 followers 30 following 670 posts
(they/them)

Writer of romantic science fiction series "Secrets of Sleipnir."

Buy direct: https://payhip.com/SaxBrightwell

Buy in stores: https://books2read.com/ap/RD62br/Sax-Brightwell

Blog: https://saxbrightwell.dreamwidth.org/
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November 10, 2025 at 11:46 PM
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November 10, 2025 at 9:22 PM
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The irony of this article in particular being paywalled is incredible.

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November 10, 2025 at 5:13 PM
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November 6, 2025 at 3:30 PM
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November 1, 2025 at 6:55 PM
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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.
August 12, 2025 at 6:22 PM
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This looks like an exciting initiative!

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August 2, 2025 at 12:31 PM
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July 31, 2025 at 6:23 PM
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July 31, 2025 at 6:21 PM
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#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.
July 28, 2025 at 12:49 AM
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#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...
July 23, 2025 at 4:05 AM
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#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
June 21, 2025 at 2:28 AM
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#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.
May 6, 2025 at 12:00 AM
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#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.
May 4, 2025 at 12:54 AM
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May 1, 2025 at 1:23 AM
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May 1, 2025 at 1:23 AM
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April 3, 2025 at 4:07 PM
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April 2, 2025 at 2:51 PM
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#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."
March 28, 2025 at 1:01 AM
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#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.'
March 24, 2025 at 1:38 AM
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#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.
March 24, 2025 at 1:34 AM
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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.
March 20, 2025 at 6:39 PM
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#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.
March 14, 2025 at 4:34 PM
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Post your favourite Pokémon, wrong answers only.
Screaming opossum
March 10, 2025 at 3:22 PM
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#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.
March 10, 2025 at 3:11 PM