Welcome to the fifth writing club update!
As I’m sure is the case with many of you, the news on my feed has been getting greyer along with the clouds outside, and so I find myself looking to solar punk as a glimpse through those clouds, at a better possible present.
I hope you are keeping safe and warm, and that your projects have been a source of strength and comfort for you.
Onward to our Participants!
- @JacobCoffinWrites - October goal
- @hazeebabee - October goal
- @grrgyle - October goal
- @okasen - October goal
As always, anyone and everyone is extremely welcome to comment or share their own work. And if you’d like to be included in the next writing club update, simply say what you’re working on this month.
Have a good November, folks. :)
I worked on the piece of microfiction I said I would, so while that isn’t a lot of content it’s still more actual polished output than I’ve managed for a while, so I’m happy about that. I just finished reading Fahrenheit 451, and something about Bradbury’s dreamy character driven style and crunchy concepts motivated me set my own snippet around a “fire” as well. This is a slice of the larger world from the rest of my project.
Here’s an Etherpad link to the short snippet I wrote. Any critique very welcome. Feel free to edit that document too, if you feel so moved. :)
Further inspo: Whale Snows Down by Kim Bo-Young, for choosing an unusual protagonist.
I love the snippet, it’s definetly and interesting introduction to the setting :) Is it a stylistic choice to not use quotations around speech? I’ve seen it done in a few books and it always give the writing a kind of mystical or folksy vibe.
I’m glad you were able to get something finished, it might not be alot of content but it is content lol
I hope November is productive for you as well. Do you have any specific goals, or just trying to keep writing for the month?
Oh and the short story you linked to is really interesting, thanks for sharing :)
Thanks for your feedback! I’m not sure why I went without quotations other than I’ve always wanted to try it. It feels a bit disorienting, which I like. If I end up having lots of back-and-forth dialogue, I might just add them back in though.
Thanks for the goal reminder! For my November goal (which is almost half over - eek!) I’m going to continue on my short story (set in the same world). I think I’ll continue with the seat-of-my-pants writing for now, since outlining seems to be a bit of a procrastination trap for me.
So yeah, I’m going to try to write more, and messier, haha
Outlining can be a real time suck. Sometimes it also takes away my energy to actually write, like i already figured out what happens so writing it doesnt feel as good.
I think figure it out as you go can produce some amazing stories and concepts-- so if it works for you then you should go for it :) Stephen King for example never outlines & it’s worked for his career lol
Good luck with the rest of this month! I look forward to reading more of your work :D
It was a pretty busy month! I did the research into solarpunk shipping that I talked about last time - I gathered up everything I could find on modern cargo shipping done primarily using sails, along with some of the alternative systems they bolt onto modern day freighters to save some fuel, and wrote it up here:
I aimed for a very broad introduction to sailing, how it’s done now, the new designs and technologies either already in use or still on the drawing board, viable old sail tech, and hopefully everything else you need to get started, no matter what kind of solarpunk sailing you’re hoping to depict. For depth, it’s full of links to more technical resources. Personally I find that the stuff intended for the public like press releases is too light on details for writers, and the industry resources are too focused and siloed to get a good intro to the whole picture, so I sort of aimed for in between. There’s also a bunch of stuff that’s hard to find (or know to look for) unless you read industry magazines. I hope it’s helpful.
I then finished up a photobash of a cargo ship at sea. This is my second one but it’s much brighter and happier than my previous cargo ship scene. It’s very much the brainchild of someone from the Naval Architecture subreddit, who was tremendously helpful in explaining design considerations. Their design is an oddball, with four folding, junk-rigged masts, all offset from the centerline in a zigzag pattern. They made some really convincing arguments and it was genuinely too weird not to make.
After that I got back to work on the campaign I’ve been writing for Fully Automated! I’ve been making character art for all the NPCs, filling in and editing sections of the document that just had notes before, and adding concepts I’ve learned about since I took a break, like rocket mass heaters, masonry heaters, and savonious wind turbines to the scene details here and there. I’m working on getting descriptions/backstories for more NPCs written, and stats assigned for everyone.
It’s looking like we’ll try a playthrough starting this Thursday! It’ll be my first time GMing anything, let alone a campaign I wrote. Though I’ve played a few TTRPGs and watched a lot of games so hopefully I’ve picked up some good habits. We’ll see soon enough!
Congratulations on all your progress this month! I’ll be studying your Nautical Solarpunk resource in detail, as the world I’m working on features a river and port somewhat prominently. I was going to gloss over the ship designs, but why not sprinkle a little extra haecceity into the story when one can. :)
I would love to hear your takeaways on your first experience GMing. It’s been decades since I’ve run a campaign, but I still remember the thrill and challenge of balancing the plot points you want to hit with that pesky gremlin, player agency, haha. (At one point I resorted to just forcing my players to be kidnapped to get them to another scene - not the best interactive storytelling on my part.)
Just a hunch but you strike me as a fairly detail oriented person ;) so I wonder how you’ll handle players missing some obvious detail or plot beat. Ah! So fun! I envy you.
So exciting youll be doing your first playthrough of the game! I hope everything goes smoothly & I bet seeing it get played will give you lots of ideas of new things you want to add on or change lol
I also took a look through your nautical slrpnk write up and its so useful! Detailed, accessible, and well organized.
One thing that popped into my head while reading through it is wondering if there’s the possibility for hybrid sail and solar ships. I know they’re working on making solar fabric & if the sails were made of that fabric maybe they could produce enough energy to support things like reefer ships and other things. It would also make folding masts more viable because the stored solar energy could power the boat as it enters port & needs to lower the masts in order to fit under bridges. It’s not a modern ship usage (which i know you were focusing on) more of a scifi concept that might make sense in a fictional setting.
Thanks! I hope running the game sessions will provide some good perspective and things I missed. I’m told the only thing you can count on as a GM is for your players to surprise you.
Solar sails are a cool idea - I think the feasibility would mostly depend on the fabric. How sturdy it is, whether it can stand up to the strain of pulling the ship along in a full wind, how well it handles being rolled up and unrolled again and again.
Yeah lol, other minds have a way of going a completely unexpected direction. It can be fun to see how an outside perspective views your world though :) ive definetly thrown off a few GMs with my unexpected game choices lol
& yeah the logistics are way beyond what we could do currently, more so a cool sci fi concept to daydream about
Update of the fun variety!!! I got accepted for my serial romance thing, so I’ve been publishing that twice a week for a few weeks. 3 weeks? Something. I’ve made like £0.50 so far, but what actually matters is that it’s kept me writing consistently. It’s been fun!
And i still have no clue what’s happening with my climate fiction, but I haven’t worked on it for a while. Maybe that’ll be this months goal; progress on that in some direction!
Congrats on having the serial romance accepted! Even half a pound is still making cash with your writing & i think something to be excited about :D
& good luck this month keeping up with the serialized work plus doing some progress on the climate fiction. Sounds like you’re doing great :)
Yoooo!! Congratulations, that is legitimately huge. I know external validation isn’t the thing that makes you a writer, but it sure must feel good to have a clear signal from the outside world that your words are wanted.
Good goal for next month. Would love to hear a bit more about your cli-fi. :)
So this past month i didn’t really keep on top of my writing. I did a few journal entries and quite a bit of work related writing, but nothing creative.
This month I think I’m going to make the goal of writing 3x per week for 15 min (sat, sun, and tues). It’d be great if some of those sessions end up being longer, but I think that’s enough to at least get me back in the swing of things.
It’d be nice to have something I can share in next months update, maybe the opening chapter of my book? That’s mostly done and just needs some polishing, so is hopefully a reasonable goal.
It’d be nice to have something I can share in next months update, maybe the opening chapter of my book?
Oooh!!! That would be so cool!
I have also had some luck with forcing myself to sit down for 10-15 min, like your goal. It’s actually oddly infuriating when it works - like I’ll sit down, completely resigned to failing to produce anything, but then sometimes just the act of trying is enough to trigger a flow of words. Now if only editing could “flow” like this… :p
Yeah, there are lots of times just getting started is that hardest part for me. Then once I sit down and am 10 min into the task I can just keep going. I’m hoping especially weekend days my 15min goal will turn into a sold couple of hours of work :)
Editing is often much harder to get into the flow though, I can empathize with that lol. I ended up over thinking everything & just stall out. Every once in a while though, I’m in an editing mood and can get through alot. It’s soooo mood dependent though lol
