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[]:
- @Clockwork
- @Ellie
- @grrgyle
- @hazeebabee
- @JacobCoffinWrites
- @johnny_deadeyes
- @ManualOverride
- @shamousk
- @solbear
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!
I actually got back into writing, and did a huge revision with multiple medium importance fixes to the second book of the trilogy. They weren’t really plotholes, but sections where the characters didn’t have as much of a clear goal as I like, causing the pacing to feel somewhat meandering. And I added some fun change that doesn’t really objectively improve the writing, but which I love. The third book is still not fully drafted and I think I’ll return to that soon, either around christmas or early next year. The hope is still to release the trilogy some time next year, although I might be running slightly late on that. Which wouldn’t be a big deal, but I do wanna finish the drafting soon since I’m better at revising a really long running project than I am at keeping drafting more for it, and I could e.g. already start a new project once the trilogy is at the revisions-only stage. That might be fun to spice things up.
This is something I notice in a lot of fiction (books, movies, shows, etc; stories, in short). That “meandering” sense, which I dunno maybe it can work for really character-driver works, but either way it’s harder to the reader to hold their attention if things don’t seem to be happening in a cause-and-effect way that they can follow.
RE starting a new project, are you at the point with this one where you are getting lots of ideas for different projects? I get that a lot, anyway.
So exciting that your trilogy is well underway!