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!

  • solbear@slrpnk.netEnglish
    3·
    8 days ago

    I’ve been on a “hiatus” for some time, if you can call taking time off something I hadn’t spent too much time on to begin with a hiatus. Much going on on the work front, which has pretty much drained all my energy and creative energies, and what I’ve had left have gone towards off-screen activities like music. But I’m starting to feel some motivation seeping back, and as a weird run-up to what I hope will be some writing over the holidays, I’m trying to set up Neovim on my laptop and getting used to the keybindings, and besides coding use that for writing (Markdown and LaTeX).

    Speaking of, how are you all setup for writing?

    • Clockwork@slrpnk.netEnglish
      3·
      6 days ago

      Obsidian for notes and plans, worldbuilding on my personal site and LibreOffice for the actual text.

      Sometimes I’m on the move and I have to sketch something down, so I send it to myself on Telegram and then move it to Obsidian once I can use the PC again.

      • solbear@slrpnk.netEnglish
        1·
        3 days ago

        You don’t like using Obsidian on mobile?

        Also, are you using LibreOffice because you use it for typesetting that final product, or because you prefer to write the actual text there vs. in Obsidian?

        • Clockwork@slrpnk.netEnglish
          1·
          3 days ago

          I haven’t tried Obsidian on mobile actually, so I’ll give it a shot maybe!

          As for LibreOffice, both reasons! Typesetting, more options, and partially comfort too

    • grrgyle@slrpnk.netOPMEnglish
      2·
      6 days ago

      I think that counts as a “hiatus” if only because if it doesn’t then I have a lot to answer for. :P

      Speaking of, how are you all setup for writing?

      I use neovim as well! I’ve been using vim for a long time, and I find the keybinding great for navigating prose ({} for jumping over paragraphs, () for sentences, etc). I’m experimenting with the following plugins: vim-pencil, limelight, goyo, as well as some others, unrelated to writing. Although personally I would recommend you be judicious about adding plugins to your .vimrc, because they can quickly get out of hand. I also use the kitty terminal for easy splitting of the view, as well as for the animated cursor_trail, which makes it easier to visually track the cursor jumping all over when you’re using vim motions. :)

      Good luck with your writing. It’s great feeling the creative energies coming on, and then choosing how to direct them! :)

      • solbear@slrpnk.netEnglish
        1·
        3 days ago

        Nice to hear it is serving you well! I will take a look at those plugins as well, but yes, I can imagine it can quickly get out of hand. Currently I am just patiently going through the Neovim Tutor whenever I have the time, and have set it up using the kickstart configuration (which comes with a handful of plugins) and will go through the init.lua file later. I will also prioritize setting it up for coding as I want to switch at work but can’t really do it before I have a somewhat functional workflow going.

        Currently using LaTeX through VS Code, but having tasted the power of the vim keybindings, it keeps calling me to switch! (I know there are some vim-extensions for VS Code, but I anyway want to move away from it)