✍️ Writing

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.

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:

https://jacobcoffinwrites.wordpress.com/2024/10/15/nautical-solarpunk-a-resource-for-solarpunk-writers-and-artists/

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!

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!

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.