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Ray Ingles

@ringles.bsky.social

930 followers 210 following 2K posts

I’m a software developer with a lifelong taste for science fiction.

My first novel, SECONDARY, is now available! Andy Weir's THE MARTIAN meets Naomi Alderman's THE POWER.

https://secondary.blog

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Ray Ingles

@ringles.bsky.social

#WIPSnips 14: week

Sure, it's exciting, exchanging information across millennia-diverged timelines. But you can't do that forever.

#ScienceFiction #SciFi

Those 'taideh,' ten-day weeks, were broken up in a strange way from my perspective. The sixth day of the week was always a religious day off, and the tenth day was a secular day off. I found out I had ‘arrived’ on the last day of a month. And my first day in solitary had been the religious day off. Today had been the last day of the first taideh of another month.

I looked up at the two of them, watching me. All the time, watching me. I mean, I understood why, but…

It was time for more than a break. “This taideh has… busy been, for me. Busiest.”

Atosho laughed raggedly, involuntarily; when she cut it off, she looked uncertain… and tired. Manayka blinked at her, at me… then smiled. “Chay. Very busy.” We didn’t so much put away our notes as make piles that we could look through in the morning.

November 14, 2025 at 12:14 PM

Ray Ingles

@ringles.bsky.social

#TimeTravelAuthors 13: Desserts?

Alternate histories do have alternate desserts. Jim doesn't get to sample many of them, of course. Homeless beggars and sanitarium inmates don't dine too fancy. 🙄

#TimeTravelAuthors
November 2025

1. Introduce your story (optional: include the word "thank")
3. What would your characters do if they could travel forward in time?
5. Wednesday POST-SIZED snippet (optional word: meal/food)
7. Sports in your story
9. Strangest research you did for your story
11. Does time ever fly?
13. Desserts?
15. Saturday excerpt (optional phrase: what if)
17. Does anyone read in your story?
19. Wednesday POST-SIZED snippet (optional word: thank)
21. Something you're thankful for in your writing process
23. Do any of your characters act like turkeys?
25. Shopping in your story
27. A sentence from page 11
29. Author's choice/promo

All time-travel authors and published works, WIPs, etc. welcome!
To join, just answer the prompts on odd days, using the hashtag #TimeTravelAuthors
On even days, post what you like!

November 13, 2025 at 12:11 PM

Ray Ingles

@ringles.bsky.social

#WIPSnips 13: build

Anthropologists from different histories compare notes.

#SciFi #ScienceFiction

“You fight, with bow?” Manayka asked.

“No. Kill animal, for food.” I waved in Atosho’s direction. “When go study other people.” I smiled. “Mostly, fun.” Then I *almost* shrugged, but remembered to jaygo instead. “My people not fight with bow. Use ‘guns.’” I sketched a rifle, made ‘bang’ noises, mimed something moving fast.

“You have ‘guh’n-suh-doh’?” Atosho asked, clearly unsure.

“Chay.” I felt a little defensive. My people had built a fucking *time machine*. We weren’t *barbarians*.

November 13, 2025 at 12:09 PM

Ray Ingles

@ringles.bsky.social

#WIPSnips 12: shirt

When you don't even *know* what you don't know... at least you get endless surprises. 🤷

#SciFi #ScienceFiction

I called Manayka in. He looked me over, smiled and nodded. He was carrying a short baton(?) in one hand, and a bag in the other. “Kaylay, zoma.”
I turned around, as he’d asked. Something passed along the back of my shirt; I yelped when the fabric began to contract around me, and jumped away. “What the fuck?”
Manayka’s eyes were wide, his mouth in a little ‘o’ of astonishment. Then he looked at the baton in his hand, and sighed. “Is… ‘oh-kay.’” He struggled to remember some English. “For clothes only.”

November 12, 2025 at 12:22 PM

Ray Ingles

@ringles.bsky.social

I'll play along!

Convincing you to read my novel by the first sentence. Share yours if you want.

Three people on the planet are fluent in English, and I taught the other two. Not more than forty have learned to recognize an alphabet. Nobody can read cursive–especially

November 11, 2025 at 3:13 PM

Ray Ingles

@ringles.bsky.social

#TimeTravelAuthors 11: Does time ever fly?

Not generally. Jim spends pretty much the whole first book in crisis mode, intensely aware of what's going on around him. (Mostly so as to not die.)

#SciFi

November 11, 2025 at 1:56 PM

Ray Ingles

@ringles.bsky.social

#WIPSnips 11: burger

In a history that split off just a little after the city of Ur was founded, burgers don't seem to have developed. They have different ways of cooking food, even.

#ScienceFiction #SciFi

We got a snack in that plaza across from the park. A breaded seafood sandwich for me. T’ramoi paid–cloth money and metal coins, both square. She quoted some kind of aphorism: “ziDoiseemay ray doilo ray doisapi, seeda doikicho tamu.”[1] Roughly, ‘Hunger, thirst, and weariness give poor advice.’
The coating on the fish was weird; like whole-wheat, mildly-spiced panko. After a couple bites, I noticed the fish was cooked very oddly–like a microwave that left warm and cool spots. Uneven. Not raw, yet some parts were definitely more done than others.
I finally realized what was going on. It had been electrocuted. That put a damper on my appetite; especially in concert with the unfamiliar, bitter spicing.

[1] Where English has ‘and,’ they have two separate words. ‘Gawa’ means ‘and’ in general; ‘ray’ is specifically for sequences and lists. Note that the nominative prefix ‘zi-’ is used only on the first item in the list.

November 11, 2025 at 1:46 PM

Ray Ingles

@ringles.bsky.social

#WIPSnips 11: local

Finding a bathroom in a foreign country is difficult enough. Try finding one in an alternate "timeline*...

#SciFi #ScienceFiction

At the next plaza I came across, I hung around for a while, despite the risks–and my swelling bladder. Food and drink were being served here. There had to be a place for people to get rid of them, ‘post-processing.’
I strained mightily to keep the concept of pay toilets off my mind. Not like I had any local currency…
Suddenly I realized that there were similar banners on opposite sides of the space. One had a triangle pointing down; the other a kind of rounded teardrop. Each symbol had a line of smaller symbols descending below them. Same colors and ‘font’…

November 10, 2025 at 12:19 PM

Ray Ingles

@ringles.bsky.social

#TimeTravelAuthors 9: Strangest research?

Probably finding out what animals and plants were around 5,700 years ago, and which ones *hadn't* emerged yet. I hadn't realized how many fruits and flowers had been bred by humans just in the last few millennia.

#SciFi #ScienceFiction #TimeTravel

November 10, 2025 at 1:44 AM

Ray Ingles

@ringles.bsky.social

#WIPSnios 9: picture

Jim is not negotiating from a position of strength.

#SciFi #ScienceFiction

Note, I was conscious of the impression I was trying to make. I had violated customs here, to the level of murder. I didn’t–could not possibly–have a full picture of how things worked here. But if this was an honor-based culture, then claiming I was acting honorably would be important. If they rejected that claim… well, it wasn’t like that would make my situation worse. And if it were accepted… that would vastly help in negotiating my eventual status in this world.

November 9, 2025 at 2:29 PM

Ray Ingles

@ringles.bsky.social

#WIPSnips 8: little

Even a basic checkup is weird in the new timeline.

#SciFi #ScienceFiction

A lot of the procedures were familiar enough; listening to the lungs and heart, blood pressure, and so forth. But in addition to a saliva sample, she handed me a little rounded swab. After an awkward pause, Manayka had to explain that I was supposed to put it up my ass. After a beat, I did, frowning, and handed it back to the doctor carefully. Then she produced a weird device that she placed at certain points on my skin, which caused a tingling sensation. When I asked, she explained through Manayka that it measured nerve function.

November 9, 2025 at 1:34 AM

Ray Ingles

@ringles.bsky.social

The door closed behind me with a solid-seeming thunk. The light was dim, the shapes unfamiliar. On either side of the room, low to the ground, were rectangles about a meter wide and two and a half meters long. Sudden movement on one made me flinch.
A man sat up. I couldn’t make out much of his features, but he was smaller than average. He spoke to me. Obviously I didn’t understand the words, but the tone was… not unfriendly.
“Hey, man, I wish I understood you. Anybody speak English here?”
He blinked. Then he muttered something. But he smiled in the dimness, and indicated himself. “Dovee.”
“Jim,” I said, imitating his motion. It was some sort of relief to know the name of at least one person in this world. Even if they were probably a mental patient.

November 7, 2025 at 6:26 PM

Ray Ingles

@ringles.bsky.social

#WIPSnips 6: penultimate

Even sesquipedalian me doesn't have that word. 😂

But Jim appreciates Nusuku *trying* to say his name correctly. Stopping at the penultimate syllable, before the closing vowel people habitually append.

Nusuku gave a glance at Atosho, then bowed to me formally. “Restful slumber to thee, Jeem.” I still treasured that cut-off final vowel. She never got much better at pronunciation, but she made the effort.

November 6, 2025 at 12:56 PM

Ray Ingles

@ringles.bsky.social

#TimeTravelAuthors 5: 'meal' snippet

Humans *always* make slang. 😀
---
She made our ‘point granted’ gesture–right hand scooping something from the air, then placing it on an imaginary surface in front of her. (Kind of a slang usage of ‘accepting #food.’ ‘Okay, I’ll eat it.’)

#ScienceFiction #SciFi

November 5, 2025 at 12:15 PM

Ray Ingles

@ringles.bsky.social

#WIPSnips 5: trail

They're just as confused by him, of course. 😀

#SciFi #ScienceFiction

I whirled. A young man and a girl stood at a turn of the trail. They were gawking at me with scandalized expressions. My first, split-second impression was: An Indigenous American hair metal rock star… and a Black, makeupless Scotswoman.

Then my brain gave up, and admitted it didn’t know what the fuck it was looking at. It stopped trying to fit things into preconceived categories and I began to at least see individual elements, start to find new patterns.

November 5, 2025 at 12:04 PM

Ray Ingles

@ringles.bsky.social

#WIPSnips 4: steel

Even for familiar-ish musical instruments, unusual materials give them a different sound.

#SciFi #ScienceFiction

Manayka insisted on doing all the cleanup. I hesitated, but… the ‘harachunee,’ the mandolin, called. I undid the extra string–it looked like nylon yet twanged like steel–and spent a difficult hour trying to retune it from ‘just intonation’ to a tempered scale… purely by ear, without any of the usual tools.[1] Luckily, the frets were somewhat adjustable, like a sitar. It was still painful.

[1] I have a decent ear, but not perfect pitch or anything like that. I guessed at an ‘A’ and worked relative to that. So long as you don’t need to accompany another instrument, that’s usually fine.

November 4, 2025 at 11:58 AM

Ray Ingles

@ringles.bsky.social

#TimeTravelAuthors 3: What would your characters do if they could travel forward in time?

There was hope the Time Eye might do that - or at least, help the future bridge contact back to us. Didn't work out... but it's not clear that it *couldn't* have, I suppose.

November 3, 2025 at 11:59 AM

Ray Ingles

@ringles.bsky.social

#WIPSnips 3: nice

'Nice' is culturally relative, a lot of the time.

#SciFi #ScienceFiction

I think they were most surprised at my boxers, so radically unlike male underwear here.
“I don’t believe a nice petosee[1] would run around wearing such a thing!” Igocha was prissy, I had concluded. Baiyokee clearly agreed, shaking his head vigorously. He seemed appalled, in fact.
“Was this… normal?” Evaba asked.

[1] English just doesn’t have a word that corresponds to ‘petosee.’ Essentially, it means ‘an unmarried young man of good virtue.’ There’s no single-word male equivalent of the term ‘maiden’ in English. The best I can do is a French term: ‘demoiseau,’ the masculine equivalent of ‘demoiselle,’ which ‘Mademoiselle’ came from.

November 3, 2025 at 11:57 AM

Ray Ingles

@ringles.bsky.social

#WIPSnips 2: cobweb

Definitely vibes on this one. The new timeline's version of a floor-cleaning robot is a *touch* more impressive than the ones from our world.

#ScienceFiction #SciFi

The casing was not rigid metal or hard plastic; the ‘skin’ was flexible. When it scuttled past me I flinched. Manayka reached out and laid his hand on it. The critter froze. He motioned me to join him. I stepped close and squatted down.

A cluster of eyes in the front, kind of like a spider. I gathered my courage and touched its ‘skin.’ An odd texture that reminded me of a thin layer of rubber over something harder.

I gave the humans a look, and went back to my seat. The doozai kept going, searching for unclean floor.

November 2, 2025 at 2:45 PM

Ray Ingles

@ringles.bsky.social

#WIPSnips 1: ancestor

Time travel shenanigans can leave traces. Sometimes, very large ones.

#SciFi #ScienceFiction #SFF

They had official names, but their nickname was ‘nahtofehkeh tiRoygu,” the ‘Ryogu complexes,’ after a famous theologian.

They were very similar, all over the world. A few minor mutations, but they could not be older than seven thousand years, or younger than four thousand. The correspondence to the start of the First Bronze Age was obvious. What made it worse was they knew about the ‘mitochondrial Eve’–‘mitochondrial Levaro’ they called her here–and she had existed more than 120,000 years ago.[1] The complexes had obviously been *inserted* into the human genome, somehow.

[1] They were positive about that 120K figure. I am 98% sure “mitochondrial Eve” had lived 150K years ago in my world. Maybe the different demographics and migration at work, eliminating some ancestral branches? Or a consequence of the virus modifying X chromosomes? Or both?

November 1, 2025 at 2:09 PM

Ray Ingles

@ringles.bsky.social

#WIPSnips 31: monster

How a culture perceives what's 'normal' informs what they consider 'monstrous.'

#ScienceFiction #SciFi #SFF

"She was never more than a tahweesay."[1]

[1] A word for those few animals in nature that pose a genuine threat to a woman. Divided into two classes: the 'venomous ones,' 'gauvahkeh,' and the large carnivores ('doinahgookeh,' lit. 'overgrown ones'). Philosophically, they are considered... unfair. A rebellious portion of [nature] that's broken some restriction or another for undeserved advantage.
Venomous things are regarded as clever tricksters, gaming the rules. Technically allowed, but squarely against the plain intent of Goddess.
Large carnivores like bears, lions, and (effectively, sometimes) a pack of wolves/hyenas... they're considered overgrown. So big and strong they can just muscle past the natural order of things.

October 31, 2025 at 11:14 AM

Ray Ingles

@ringles.bsky.social

#WIPSnips 30: spell

English's history works against Jim. And even his allies. 😀

#SciFi #ScienceFiction

The first time she wrote that word down, long after that day, she spelled it 'omition'. When I gave her the correct spelling, she made some very rude comments about the rules of the English language.

October 30, 2025 at 11:17 AM

Ray Ingles

@ringles.bsky.social

#TimeTravelAuthors 29: 'now' snippet

I locked eyes with ‘Atosho’ for a second. She had “asked to care for me.” Was she my guardian #now? Parent?

Owner?

#ScienceFiction #SciFi #TimeTravel

#TimeTravelAuthors
October 2025
Answer as a character!

1. Introduce yourself and the story
3. Your first appearance and/or line of dialogue in the story
5. Why are you important to the story?
7. Something odd/weird you've experienced
9. Favorite person
11. Saturday excerpt (optional word: most)
13. What does someone else in the story think of you?
15. Wednesday POST-SIZED snippet (optional word: give/gave)
17. What life advice would you give?
19. Proudest moment
21. If you got to write the story, what would you change?
23. Tell us about your enemies
25. Saturday excerpt (optional word: back)
27. How do you feel about time travel?
29. Wednesday POST-SIZED snippet (optional word: now)
31. Character's choice/promo

All time-travel authors and published works, WIPs, etc. welcome!
To join, just answer the prompts on odd days, using the hashtag #TimeTravelAuthors
On even days, post what you like!
Questions? @juliebihn@bsky.social

October 30, 2025 at 12:39 AM

Ray Ingles

@ringles.bsky.social

#WIPSnips 29: broomstick

Will a mop handle do?

#ScienceFiction #SciFi

Next steps of the plan. *Out, silently close the cell door, sneak to the cleaning supply closet.* That door opened–the congealed sauce had prevented it from locking. I slipped in and left the door cracked so there would be some light, avoiding the robot curled in one corner on that rack. The stuffed pants and slippers landed on the floor. Taking a weird ribboned ‘mop,’ I set it on the edge of the ‘sink ridge’ and stepped down hard. The handle cracked and split, breaking off the head.
I listened, holding it with the sharp end out, like a spear. No movement. I had been terrified it would be stronger than regular wood, or make a lot of noise when it broke.

October 29, 2025 at 11:14 AM

Ray Ingles

@ringles.bsky.social

#WIPSnips 28: costume

What *would* a stranger from an alternate timeline look like, anyway?

#SciFi #ScienceFiction

“I still do not know if I should do this. If you were not my friend… at least I know that after you laugh at me, you will not tell anyone.” Her lips pressed together, then she admitted, “I think my ropes would snap, to take this to anyone else.”
At that, Atosho’s eyebrows flew up. She had never met a woman with more confidence and sure-headedness than Nusuku. She wouldn’t be intimidated by the Empress herself. “What level of current are you connecting me to?” she asked, only partially joking.
“I hope that I am simply wasting my time, and yours. But… I want you to listen to this. And while it plays, I shall show you some things.” Nusuku chewed her lip for a second; Atosho was unsettled at seeing her nervous. “I suppose that first I should give you some background.” She pulled out the photo from a detainee record. A disheveled boy with absurd facial hair, in a ridiculous costume, glaring defiantly at the camera. Unusually pale skin, unclear ancestry…

October 28, 2025 at 12:10 PM

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