Hi folks, and welcome to writing club update number 14 (fourteen!). Opening up to page 14 of Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles we find this paradoxically stark and effusive description of a coming storm. Or perhaps all coming storms:
It was like those days when you heard a thunderstorm coming and there was the waiting silence and then the faintest pressure of the atmosphere as the climate blew over the land in shifts and shadows and vapors. And the change pressed at your ears and you were suspended in the waiting time of the coming storm.
[…]
And then the storm. The electric illumination, the engulfments of dark wash and sounding black fell down, shutting in, forever.
Being as much of my bioregion is currently in the middle of a month-long drought, we could do with a “dark wash” right now. I hope you’ve had a decent amount of rain wherever you are, and if you’re also in a drought, I wish for both of us a big beautiful storm soon!
Speaking of welcome deluges, here are our wonderful writers:
Hopefully your writing has felt more like a deluge than a drought, but even the latter can be constructive in its own way. This also goes to any visitors not on this list (welcome!): please feel welcome to reply and comment with your own thoughts and projects!
Even one of these would make for an impressive month! And as always, rooted in real and practical education, as I’ve come to see as characteristic of your creative projects. :)
Thanks! The education bit is really important to me! I want this thing to teach about the region but also a lot about the kind of work we’ll need to do to fix all the types of damage our society has caused.
My next step is a map the players might receive if they talk to the right person, intended to show the flow of groundwater.
It’s kinda hard to parse but it’s based on some real maps showing this kind of thing. Ideally that kinda turns the challenge of figuring out a science/industry specific convention as a layperson into a game puzzle. My favorite game mechanics are stuff like this, sort of funhouse mirror versions of real life tools and processes, where you’re getting something useful even if you don’t know it.
Andrew made this one through some arcane process I don’t really understand: he “wrote 27,004 angles and 27,004 magnitudes in two separate csv files one-by-one and had Python plot them with matplotlib.” I’m just going to use GIMP to select and rotate a few to match a few changes we made.