this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2025
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✍️ Writing

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A community for writers, like poems, fiction, non-fiction, short stories, long books, all those sorts of things, to discuss writing approaches and what's new in the writing world, and to help each other with writing.

Rules for now:

1. Try to be constructive and nice. When discussing approaches or giving feedback to excerpts, please try to be constructive and to maintain a positive vibe. For example, don't just vaguely say something is bad but try to list and explain downsides, and if you can, also find some upsides. However, this is not to say that you need to pretend you liked something or that you need to hide or embellish what you disliked.

2. Mention own work for purpose and not mainly for promo: Feel free to post asking for feedback on excerpts or worldbuilding advice, but please don't make posts purely for self promo like a released book. If you offer professional services like editing, this is not the community to openly advertise them either. (Mentioning your occupation on the side is okay.) Don't link your excerpts via your website when asking for advice, but e.g. Google Docs or similar is okay. Don't post entire manuscripts, focus on more manageable excerpts for people to give feedback on.

3. What happens in feedback or critique requests posts stays in these posts: Basically, if you encounter someone you gave feedback to on their work in their post, try not to quote and argue against them based on their concrete writing elsewhere in other discussions unless invited. (As an example, if they discuss why they generally enjoy outlining novels, don't quote their excerpts to them to try to prove why their outlining is bad for them as a singled out person.) This is so that people aren't afraid to post things for critique.

4. All writing approaches are valid. If someone prefers outlining over pantsing for example, it's okay to discuss up- and downsides but don't tell someone that their approach is somehow objectively worse. All approaches are on some level subjective anyway.

5. Solarpunk rules still apply. The general rules of solarpunk of course still apply.

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ellie@slrpnk.net
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9
Writing Club - March 2025 (slrpnk.net)
submitted 2 weeks ago by grrgyle@slrpnk.net to c/writing@slrpnk.net
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Welcome to this ninth/IX/9th writing club update!

Happy mid-March to you all, my well lettered friends. I hope you've been graced with some nice weather as we in the northern hemisphere enter into the warmer time of the year. Today is delightfully dreary and overcast where I'm at, which I'm hoping to channel into some indoor creativity.

Okay! Here are the Writers:

Please see last month's post if you need to refresh your memory on what your goals were.

Just an FYI that while "membership" in the writing club is fluid and open, so too are the names above simply my best guess, without judgement, at who is participating on any particular month. So if you don't see your name up there and you'd like me to add it, just shoot me a DM or even better just share what you're working on and you'll be added right back to the roster the following month. :)

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[–] ellie@slrpnk.net 5 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (2 children)

I'm continuing work on my dystopian/contemporary setting cozy fantasy series. I started it in 2022 and it's a trilogy, so it's keeping me quite busy. There are contemporary elements in it that require quite some research, and I try to have representation that's somewhat progressive so I want to get those things right. But most of the work simply is due to the fact that I currently do most editing myself based on a bunch of test readers, letting it sit for a few weeks, working through it back to front once more, and repeat.

Recently, I decided to format a specific kind of non-verbal communication that occurs in the books differently. Such changes require my own sort of style guide decisions, and then I have to go through every single paragraph to adjust things. It's both meditative and a bit tiring, but at the end of the day I love that sort of busywork and it's always a good learning opportunity.

The third book draft still lacks an ending, but I'm not in a huge hurry to finish it. This year has been busy with some side job things, and I usually prefer to take my time and get it right rather than rush. Since I have multiple books to work on, I also like to jump to whatever motivates me the most, so no time is really lost even if I don't work on the final ending at any given point in time.

I used to track word count to motivate me, but it's always an on- and off thing. Currently I simply work based on enjoying sitting down and getting lost in the pages. But perhaps to push for the final ending I might start tracking words again for a short while. It can help me with drafting, the editing part I usually manage without much of a competitive pressure but for drafting I need it sometimes to keep going.

(If anybody's curious, I also switch between editing and drafting on often a weekly or even daily basis. It can be both risky and rewarding, kind of depends on whether that causes you to never get anything done or whether it keeps work fresh and interesting for you. I've been busy with this for years so I usually welcome any change from the usual boring flow, so I have found that it helps me more than it hurts.)

[–] grrgyle@slrpnk.net 3 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

There are contemporary elements in it that require quite some research, and I try to have representation that’s somewhat progressive so I want to get those things right.

This is a huge challenge, and one of the reasons I prefer the more far flung (as in from the messy contemporary) settings. But I imagine it's also very rewarding to do all that research and then package it up to into a story that you share with others.

I used to track word count to motivate me, but [...] currently I simply work based on enjoying sitting down and getting lost in the pages.

This is subjective ofc, but if you're writing for the joy of it, I feel you've "arrived" at the destination that these productivity games (tracking word counts, streaks, etc) are trying to stimulate. When did you notice that word count and other extrinsics were no longer required to motivate you?

I'm curious about your process at deciding to write a trilogy of novels. Did you start at a really high level outline and decide early on that 3 novels made sense, or maybe because you got the the end of one story and realised there was still more to tell?

[–] ellie@slrpnk.net 4 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

For drafting I need the word count to motivate me sometimes, weeks on weeks off, it's always been like that. For editing I don't. I think it's a brain chemistry thing. I use the word count motivation when I have issues making progress without it, otherwise I ignore it.

The research can be daunting for progressive topics since people can be slightly unforgiving. It feels like sometimes you get more anger for a not-fully-perfect representation than not attempting one at all. Test readers help but you can't always find the "perfect" test reader to find all parts somebody might find problematic.

I usually write series of a 2-3 books worth of length. I have found that a single book usually barely allows me to set up the setting and characters and a minor villain, and usually the 2nd one is where things really get started. The middle book(s) are the most fun to write for me, everything is established and I can toy around with things for fun chaos, while I don't need to think super hard about a perfectly conclusive satisfying ending yet.

[–] ManualOverride@slrpnk.net 1 points 1 week ago

I look forward to learning how you typeset your non-verbal communication, as well as discovering this form of communication in your story.

On another note, I hadn't given much thought to how switching everyday between editing and drafting, as opposed to seldomer, could slow one down. I recognize now that I systematically get bogged down by my habit.

[–] grrgyle@slrpnk.net 4 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (2 children)

For my own update, I've been actually been doing pretty well. I've managed to keep my "streak" going (write 100+ words a weekday, edit on weekends). I'm still working on finding my voice, and adding more life and sense of place to my stories, but the practice of setting aside unstructured writing time continues to work for me. I think I'll try to keep this up for a while longer, then maybe experiment with focusing it in a particular direction - like my attention starved short story.

I've started a rough website for my indie/smol/fedi/etc web presence, linked in my profile. There I post the unfiltered feed of whatever daily thing I came up with. The quality is all over the place, but the practice is the point, and also that it is -- at least nominally -- public.

Anyway, here's a really short one I just pulled out of me. A dark little paracosm I think many children share: a world run by animals.

Cat world

In my world, the cats run the show. and the show never ends. the show is a game where the audience (which is the cats), and the players (which is everyone else) put on plays of everything that ever happened. there are shows all about mail carriers running their routes, squirrels minding their secret paths, and of course murder for food. the cats howl and yowl so loud you can’t even make out the players whose own screams dance in the high dark top of the big big tent.

EDIT Oh right my goal. My goal for next month is to finish... at least a complete draft of my short story.

[–] ManualOverride@slrpnk.net 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I’ve started a rough website for my indie/smol/fedi/etc web presence, linked in my profile.

Cool! I'll check it out.

Thanks, @grrgyle@slrpnk.net, for taking the time to organize this club! I really appreciate it.

[–] ellie@slrpnk.net 1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Are you working on a mixture of short stories, like your post last month indicated? Or on something like a novel? What's your long term project goal, a short story collection, a novel, or are you still figuring that out? Sorry if that's all secret for now, I'm just curious. :-)

[–] grrgyle@slrpnk.net 3 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

I've currently got one short story on the back burner (theme of colonialism, empire in decline), and I'm working on a smaller one presently yeah (imperfect solarpunk midtopia from perspective of a loner addict). Although the more immediate like daily goal is just to workout that writing muscle. So most of my actual writing is on throwaway snippets or microfiction.

I have nebulous long term goals of tackling larger and larger projects (novel, Twine game, visual novel) set in various paracosms that sprout up from being an introvert with an overactive imagination lol. :)

And you questions are 1000% welcome! I'm trying to be less cagey about what I'm working on, so I find it useful to get this stuff out into the light - so I can tell if my ideas actually have legs, or if I just feel like they do because I'm looking at them from the wordless, internal eye of the mind.

EDIT paracosm is like my word of the week lol, I can't stop saying it

[–] ellie@slrpnk.net 3 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

So most of my actual writing is on throwaway snippets or microfiction.

That's super fascinating to me, since I don't really do throwaway writing. Either it's for one of the big projects, or I don't write at all.

[–] grrgyle@slrpnk.net 2 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Ah ha well you see I'm not big on ffffocus (imagine my making a chopping motion with my hands here). Not my forté. So the tiny stories let me switch between worlds before I get tired of writing one.

It is always fascinating to see how different folks are from each other.

[–] JacobCoffinWrites@slrpnk.net 4 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

We've been making progress on the campaign book - I've written a few new sections and rewritten a few based on finally getting to play them with the second group. They hitched a ride on a cargo airship and talked to a bunch of local old folks the first group never met. And playing those scenes helped me find ways to reorganize them to make them easier to run with no prep, and to add dialogue 'options' that came up which I hadn't expected.

Andrew has continued working on character profiles for all the NPCs so all I need to do now is combine them with my document and perhaps make some small edits.

My main project on the campaign lately has been researching phytoremediation for a handful of locations where it's underway. I start by identifying which contaminants make sense for that place based on its history, then I look for plants that hyperacumulate it or that come up in papers about phytoremediation targeting it. Then I check that they're native (or a reasonable addition based on climate change) to New England. That's the point where most fail since the Americas seem to have fewer hyperaccumulators etc than elsewhere. Then I write up what the process of using these plants/bacteria/fungus to remediate looks like.

I've also been working on some location artwork for introducing locations where the descriptions would otherwise take a long time:

[–] grrgyle@slrpnk.net 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

phytoremediation

Had to look this one up. Misread it as "meditation" and was really confused initially.

I like how grounded your worlds are. It's an interesting choice: where to fabricate, and where to research (and where to combine the two, I suppose). It would be easy to just make up a plant, a sort of Mass Effect or mutant Witch's Butter.

I'm curious where those kinda joints (by this I mean what are you OK bending, versus what you like to keep fixed/real) are for you in your creative process.

[–] JacobCoffinWrites@slrpnk.net 3 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

That's an interesting question - you're right, it would be easy to write it that way and this is an incredibly new field (the oldest stuff I've found dates back to the 90s and I've seen papers announcing the discovery of the first known hyperaccumulator of this or that contaminant dating as recently as 2023) so chances are good anything I write will end up with some 'obvious' gaps in a few years.

I guess I'm trying not to make up any technologies - most of the scifi elements in the campaign are from the Fully Automated lore rather than my imagination. I suppose I want this to be very grounded and practical, and educational. I'd like it to convey a lot of information about how these contaminants work, where they come from, how they spread, and how we remediate them. I'd also really like to emphasize the importance of watersheds, groundwater, and also to reintroduce a lot of old New England practices (spring houses, the ice harvest, etc) that I think are solarpunk but are also fading from living memory. I think solarpunk works best when it's practical, when you know as a reader or player that you could go outside and do some of this stuff.

I'm going to keep thinking on this - I know I have a few places where I merged FA lore with IRL remediation and detection practices (such as with the chemical detecting slime mold from the equipment table in the rulebook). I'll see if there are any other joints where real life stuff meets scifi.

[–] ManualOverride@slrpnk.net 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I'm a sucker for well-researched hard sci-fi!

Have you found it challenging to expound these concepts without detracting from the rest of the text? Additionally, have you discovered any differences in writing technically as opposed to narratively?

[–] JacobCoffinWrites@slrpnk.net 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

It hasn't been especially difficult but I think I've got a huge advantage this time in that I'm writing a premade campaign guide for a TTRPG rather than prose fiction. When I'm writing prose I definitely struggle with how much information to include and how to fit it in so it feels natural and doesn't mess up the pacing.

With writing this campaign, I know from the outset that the players are going to miss huge swaths of the content. But the upside is that because they're the ones driving the plot and deciding what to focus on, I'm free to provide as much information as I feel would be useful to the GM and if the players want to engage with it, they will (sort of like side quests and optional audio logs in video games).

I'm definitely a worldbuilding-first writer and I love the fiddley little details that make a place work so this has been an absolute blast. I keep the 'box text' narration stuff short and descriptive but I provide all kinds of information so if the GM has to play an expert on something like a farmer or deconstruction worker, or environmental restoration tech, they'll hopefully have enough to sound like an expert.

The other advantage I have is that the plot (a quest to find thousands of tons of illegally dumped industrial waste in rural New Hampshire) aligns well with my goals.

Basically I wanted to write out how I think rural New England might look in a solarpunk future (a lot like a modernized version of how it did a hundred years ago) and to introduce some practices like ice harvest, spring houses, etc that predate modern tech but align well with solarpunk ideals. I wanted to write some more grounded solarpunk with a lot of emphasis on reuse and salvage. And I wanted to talk about watersheds, groundwater, and how pollution moves through them, and various practices used to remediate different contaminats.

I stocked the game with locations and characters that address one or more of those themes, in various ways. The players' search for the waste is almost bound to bring them through a bunch of these places and to start conversations thatdevelop on those themes.

I hope some of this is useful, I think this is the biggest fiction project I've worked on, and I'm surprised to find that it's going much better logistically than previous attempts at writing prose novels. I think the worldbuilding-heavy structure and lack of a single set plotline just worked really well with how I write.

[–] ManualOverride@slrpnk.net 2 points 1 week ago

Of course! I overlooked the medium which, as you've well explained, lends itself nicely to exposition. I very much enjoyed reading your reply, learning about the advantages of writing for games. Thank you

[–] grrgyle@slrpnk.net 3 points 2 weeks ago

I think solarpunk works best when it’s practical, when you know as a reader or player that you could go outside and do some of this stuff.

Yeah I love that aspect of solarpunk, too. Like a better world is actually possible without waiting on some miraculous scientific breakthrough, or alien technology.

Not to put down the really out there fiction, because I love that too. Just for different reasons. :)

[–] Clockwork@slrpnk.net 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

VERY late post, but here we go.

What I've done this month (not much):

  • Ehh... halfway through editing Words of Tomorrow
  • Racked up a couple rejections from Italian spefi magazines
  • Planned another short story (fifth part of Meteorina) for a solarpunk contest in April
  • Read the newly published anthology by Lino Aldani, an Italian scifi writer from the 60s

Plans for April:

  • Finish that goddamn editing
  • Write the short story
  • Maybe send Simulacra Navigans to some Finnish publishers? Unlikely they will print it in English, but who knows...
[–] grrgyle@slrpnk.net 2 points 6 days ago

Haha considering I usually post the monthly update in the middle of the month, I'd say late posts is like the theme of this book club. :D

Racked up a couple rejections from Italian spefi magazines

I like this perspective. I look forward to racking up some rejections of my own one day.

Maybe send Simulacra Navigans to some Finnish publishers? Unlikely they will print it in English, but who knows…

You never know. And maybe they they could refer you to another publisher. Unless you're breaking their submission rules, I don't see the harm in trying.

Good luck with your editing. Probably the most painful part of writing 😣

[–] ManualOverride@slrpnk.net 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

This month I hardly began progress on my thesis before having my heart broken. I'm trying to get back into the habit of writing daily, but some days I can hardly focus on a single sentence for more than a few minutes.

Perhaps I can write about the breakup. Maybe that will help.

Edit: It's been relieving to read through everyone else's updates. I'm not going to set a goal for the next month, it seems to daunting to me right now. I'll write back soon.

[–] Clockwork@slrpnk.net 2 points 1 week ago

Jon Kalman Stefansson, an Icelandic writer, once said: "Writers are machines that turn grief into words". I personally don't get inspired by grief, but getting words down (to a diary, to a page that you will burn, etc) is definitely therapeutic!

[–] grrgyle@slrpnk.net 2 points 1 week ago

Ouch, I'm sorry to hear about your breakup. There might be something to your idea of writing about it, though. I'm sure that's been the catalyst to countless creative works.

If nothing else, I recommend writing about your feelings in a diary. Even if you end up throwing the pages away. I personally have found it useful to get these feelings out of my head and on to a page.