Welcome to the 17th writing club update!

Before launching into the writing club, I have a little preview of something @JacobCoffinWrites has spearheaded: a wiki resource for solarpunk writers who are looking for realistic visions of the hopeful world to be. You might have noticed a new link to the 🎉 this brand new writing wiki 🎉 in our community sidebar. Anyway, I’ll let the intro speak for itself here:

Writing aspirational fiction is hard. If you’re trying to write a better world, you need to build actual, workable, solutions into your setting and that requires so much knowledge to do well. Descriptions in a single solarpunk scene on a pedestrianized city street could involve a mix of civil engineering, history, cultural knowledge, plant knowledge, city planning, accessibility outreach, mass transit vehicle design/infrastructure, and more. A whole story might add in permaculture practices, modern airship design and operation, phytoremediation, or all kinds of other stuff! Compare that to cyberpunk where there’s both a sort of cultural familiarity to lean on, and a pass on bad ideas because you’re writing in a dystopian setting, and the differences are pretty clear.

It’s a lot for any one writer to try and take on. Luckily we don’t have to work alone. Any future worth building is going to be pretty collaborative and consensus-driven, so it makes sense to build our depictions of it the same way.

(On that final note, we’re still trying to figure out a way to let people contribute to this wiki.)

But back to the seventeenth writing club, in the sage words of chapter 17: Communicating with a PostScript Printer (page 571) of Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment, by Richard Stevens, /* don't want to write() to block */ – but isn’t that just the thing? Sometimes you have to write() in order to get through the block.

Speakering of writing(), here are our writer[]:

As is it ever has been and will eternally be, blessed randos should feel totally free to drop in with their updates, or comments on the goings ons of others. This little writing club thrives on our interactions, so go interact!

  • grrgyle@slrpnk.netOPMEnglish
    6·
    16 days ago

    My goal… remains unchanged 🙈 I did some thinking about my story, but no real work (despite a friend even reaching out to offer to brainstorm with me!). Just in other personal news, though, I’ve really picked up my job search again–trying to find something full-time before the end of the year, and it looks like I might have found something in eduTech. 🤩 🎓 So fingers crossed there.

    I’m hoping once I have a full-time income that I’ll be able to, like, really focus on relaxing / being creative during the evenings and weekends, rather than thinking about how I should be searching for a job. We’ll see!

    • hazeebabee@slrpnk.netEnglish
      2·
      11 days ago

      Having a job search looming in the back of your mind definetly sounds like it would dampen creative efforts! Good luck getting something sorted so that you can really focus on your creative energies :)

      Also I want to say you always do such a great job keeping the writing group going and encouraging everyone who posts. Such a kind and motivational energy