Welcome to the 16th (5+5+5+1) writing club update. Looking at the intro to the 16th chapter of Procedural Generation in Game Design: Generative Art Toys by Kate Compton, we find the somewhat quaint observation:
Everyone loves being creative. And everyone likes discovering that they’re more creative than they thought they were. For many years, people have enjoyed crafts like pottery wheels, Spirographs, Mad Libs, spin art, paper marbling, and tie-dye. These artistic toys helped everyday people make interesting artworks (even if those people lacked creative talent or inspiration) by producing surprising and emergent results from simple choices.
Now that we have digital systems, we can make art toys with even more surprising and emergent behaviour. […]
This book (edited by Tanya Short, and Tarn Adams) was first published in 2017, long before the term “generative art” would take on a very different insinuation. I’ve certainly got some strong opinions on the subject of both interpretations, but this is a writing club update not my personal soapbox.
Having now fulfilled my self-imposed rule of introducing a quote related to the number of WC updates since we started, I now turn to an observation about my local climate/weather, before introducing our writers, and finally extending a friendly invitation to any lurkers in our midsts. :)
Up here in the Northern hemisphere, at the heel of October, it’s starting to get chilly. The ideal weather for reading and writing probably varies as much as the individual writer, but for me this feels like book weather.
Speaking of individuals, here is the call for our regular writers to share their updates!
I think I’ll move this list to the main Writing Club sticky post next update, since the @s don’t seem trigger notifications consistently across applications. Let me know what you think, if you have an opinion on this.
As is forever the case, passers-by are very welcome to come on in and lurk, comment, or post their own updates.
For my update, I’ve still been filling the well of creativity more than I’ve been drawing from it. That is to say, I’ve been reading a lot (mostly sci-fi), and catching stray ideas in notebook pages, sticky notes, text files, and plain html pages – Actually on that note, I have been doing more net-art kind of web weaving for a kind of chaotic diary I have up for one of my mastodon personas. Been spending a lot of time on the visual as well as screen reader experience.
On another note, I worked a shift this week with a prolific poet who is quite famous in my city. He works one day a week at the same art gallery as me. It was great talking in-person with someone so full of stories and creativity (he’s in his retirement years) about the creative process, our fav exhibitions, the soups we plan on making this winter, and cheap places to eat out in town. I feel like I got a glimpse into a modest future that would be so happy to inhabit.
My goal remains unchanged: work on that bio/corp/hell/hope/punk bromance fanfic short story. I’d love to get a rough draft going, but still at the stage of collecting inspo and other snippets that I want to include. The universe is also based a video game, so I should probably replay that game. Maybe I’ll even get my bro to replay it with me and we can live those glory days anew. 🤩
If you ever want input on that draft or somebody to brainstorm ideas with, you know where to find me!
I’ll probably take you up on that! Having had a chance to read some of your dialogue, I know I could definitely benefit from your notes.
I haven’t been doing much writing. I’m in the process of going to grad school and getting settled into a new job. I’m hoping things will settle into more of a routine in november, but I’m not super hopeful I’ll get much creative writing done.
I do hope to continue reading, and collecting ideas for when I do have more time to dedicate to creative processes :)
Personally and anecdotally, that has been my experience with post-secondary: that it can mark a decrease in creative writing, as so much of your active and even idle focus powers are taken up cogitating over what you’re studying. Not to say that that’s a bad thing, and I’m positive this is not universally the case. Also, it can be a very rewarding time for writing and reading, and in other ways, so please don’t take my factoid as pessimism.
Reading and collecting ideas is so great. In some ways it’s my favourite part of the cycle. It’s my suspicion that even if you aren’t consciously doing creative writing, that if you’re feeding your imagination your creativity will inevitably find some avenue to express itself. Even if that’s just hosting a monthly writing club, hehe. :)
I agree, unless I’m taking a creative writing class, my mind tends to be focused on my coursework. I’ve found I’m most creative when I have lots of slightly idle time – when I’m doing something with my body but its simple enough that my mind can wander. Things like driving, or working a very repetitive job.
Still its always good to get new information in, and I enjoy hearing about what other people are up to :)
This month has been very non-productive for me, at least in writing. I’ve been working on a bunch of other projects and hope to post about some of them soon, but the writing definitely took a hit. About the only thing I’ve been doing is reading through a solarpunk romcom novel manuscript someone sent me to see if I can suggest any edits to add more solarpunk stuff to it (which, it’s really cool they asked me to do that!). I’m about sixty pages into my readthrough and I think I have a few ideas but haven’t gotten back in touch yet.
Romcom sounds fun! That’s neat of you, to help out.
I absolutely love solarpunk world building, so getting the opportunity to slip some of that into someone else’s project is a delight. I’ve helped with a couple other books by another author (though they were a little more my genre) and did some research for them that eventually became my list of car parts that could be scavenged and repurposed.
So yeah, I’m always happy to help with this kind of thing! I’m also trying to organize my own writing research into easy building blocks for other writers and artists. To me it feels like writers often need a level of detail that’s hard to find in publications - news articles and pop science stuff tends to be too broad and lacking in specific detail (or incorrect) while industry publications tend to go in depth on a narrow slice of a topic, assuming the reader has the baseline knowledge to put it in context. I’m hoping to start a bit of a culture of packaging up and sharing writer-level research to make writing solarpunk easier.
I’m hoping to start a bit of a culture of packaging up and sharing writer-level research to make writing solarpunk easier.
That’s a great project. You describe a problem I hadn’t really thought of existing, but now that you say it it’s obvious. Like your Using Every Part Of The Car article. I can see that being so valuable to writers (and also actually educational).
Thanks! I think a part of the reason there’s not a ton of writers in the genre yet is that there’s a high barrier for entry. Changing genres is already fairly difficult and requires a lot of reading and research, but on top of that, 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 more 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 permiculture practices, phytoremediation, modern airship design and operations, 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 a lot of the information you need isn’t generally widely known yet, and it’s often intensely siloed into several different fields or communities. Just finding out that you should include a specific technology or practice or viewpoint in your story can be a hurdle (we don’t always know what we don’t know), and building up a good enough working knowledge within that field to write it adds even more difficulty.
I think as solarpunk accretes more of a collection of works and a presence in the culture, this’ll get easier. Core knowledge will sort of keep bubbling to the surface until we have a sort of layperson’s mix of broad solarpunk domains to go with the tropes and aesthetic.
But I also think we have a great opportunity to speed up canonization of the topics and themes and tech and practices we care about by collecting and packaging them in a way that makes including them easy for writers and artists. Sort of an onboarding kit or similar.
I’ve got a few ideas for my next articles (when I have time) but if you or anyone else want to gather references on rocket mass heaters and biochar production, or foraging best practices, or whatever fascinates you that you’d like to see in solarpunk, I’d very much encourage you to write something up!
Actually now that I’m thinking of it, perhaps this community would be a better place to centralize this information than on my website etc. As I understand it, each slrpnk.net community gets a free wiki, perhaps perhaps we could eventually set things up so people could contribute resources and get them added?
Very well put. Especially since solarpunk can be seen as sort of utopian (or at least anti-dystopian), and as you say these are culturally less familiar ideas, so you sort of have to justify yourself as you’re writing, specifically because so many people are lacking in the framework of hope and gumption that makes solarpunk make sense IRL and in fiction.
Actually now that I’m thinking of it, perhaps this community would be a better place to centralize this information than on my website etc. As I understand it, each slrpnk.net community gets a free wiki, perhaps perhaps we could eventually set things up so people could contribute resources and get them added?
Oh there’s an idea worth exploring… I haven’t explored the wiki beyond reading the manifesto. Is it just a matter of making a
https://wiki.slrpnk.net/writing:startand linking out to/from it? Definitely seems like a good hub for specifically solarpunk writing resources.EDIT Oh I see, yes the tutorial lays it all out https://wiki.slrpnk.net/tutorial. I’m just heading off to a job, but I’ll check this out when I have a little more time!
If you’d like help, let me know! The Fully Automated community is looking at using our in-house wiki to host community resources too (though we’d eventually like to move to a version anyone can add stuff to directly without being a mod) so we may have some lessons learned we can reuse over here!
If you don’t mind taking point on the wiki, that would be great! Makes sense that there would be solarpunk writing resources associated with the solarpunk writing community.
I agree it would be nice to let anyone at least suggest changes without being a mod, but I guess this is just what we have to work with for now.
Speaking of thinking ahead though, what do you think about a rule against LLM generated content? Not to pass judgement on the technology even, but just to prevent blatant content turfing.
Amazing. My one series might probably benefit from having some small solarpunk lore bits fit in, so if you ever write some sort of basic lore ideas guide I definitely want to read it!
What would a basic lore ideas guide include? I’m happy to add topics to my (currently quite short) list of resources! Or to make specific suggestions for existing projects.
Sorry for responding late! I feel like probably basic ideas about 1. what areas of society are best shown to be affected by solarpunk inventions and common examples of how, and 2. perhaps overall lore ideas to get into a setting where that makes sense.
For example, what daily living areas of a family would be good opportunities for solarpunk items like energy generation like solar (I guess for a mixed scifi fantasy setting that could be substituted with misusing some sort of spell or magical item to be tricked into providing energy?), finding other ways of cooling like underground rooms and water, and so on.
And for lore ideas, for example I have a post war low tech setting in my book where various tech is no longer available. That is a great idea for making average people want to use solarpunk technologies, I feel like. Or if you look at Africa now, they’re having trouble expanding the regular grid for profitability reasons and I’ve heard they’re having a custom solarpunk off-the-grid per-household solar revolution.
I guess perhaps all of that is useless and obvious already to somebody reading any solarpunk manifesto for five minutes, I don’t know.
guide
Oh that’s awesome. Given your posts/comments here and elsewhere, with your focus on the more pragmatic aspects of solarpunk, I can definitely see you as a editor. I know you’re usually more personally “productive” in your updates, but it’s cool to hear an update emphasizing the support side of things as well. That’s definitely in keeping with the solarpunk aesthetic.
I’ve reworked a few more chapters for the fun change I mentioned last month. Most of my time was taken up by unrelated tech things, however. But my writing work is ramping up again which is nice.
Nice, that is a major change, by the sounds of it. Glad to hear your writing is going well. Do you have any explicit goals for next month?
I want to get that change done, and then also rework something in the sequel. That may then naturally lead me into finally drafting the last one.
Hello everyone — Shayan here — new lurker in the group. I love the idea of having people to bounce ideas and pieces off of.
I published my first book (a collection of 10 short stories) earlier this year, and it was the most fun I’ve had doing anything in my entire life.
If anyone is interested, I’d be happy to share a link, but I don’t want to spam the group with self-promotion. I’ve been busy with my editing work, but I fully intend to get back into writing again soon. My current projects are:
- Second collection of short stories
- First novel (the first draft is complete, but it’s a MESS. and a half).
Short-term goal? Write ONE story before December.
Does anyone have any ideas?
✌️
Welcome! It’s considerate of you to show restraint re sharing links. If you’ve got a homepage or hub of some sort online, you can also put in your Bio for anyone who goes looking, if you don’t want to come on too strong.
It sounds like you’ve read the sidebar already, but yeah, the rule around self-promotion is mainly to keep people from just dumping their work in the community without actually engaging with other posters. On that note, a great way to open up avenues for sharing is to comment on the stuff other people have shared.
Also if you’ve got a specific story, sample, or draft that you’d like to share, either for feedback or just to show off (it’s allowed!), you can use pads.slrpnk.net to do that. It’s not a rule or anything, just one of the available tools.
Short-term goal? Write ONE story before December.
Does anyone have any ideas?
I mean… with the turning of the season, the nights drawing in… I’ve got to say horror, right? 😈 Hehe.
I accept. I’ve never written horror or anything close to it. But I’m gonna give this a shot!
Nice! Can’t wait to hear about it!!
Glad to see our club is slowly growing!
Haven’t written a lot, but I put down a short story I’m very proud of, and re-sketched the second section of the Kanteletar novel. Now for the whole next month I’ll be busy with advertising the crowdfunding for the (still underedited!) fantasy books, although I’m not very hopeful about that going well 😅
But regardless! Goals for next month are mainly to be able to do the required salesmanship and maybe polish that short story so I can share it with you!
Crowdfunding is scary, it sucks that it’s so hard to get art funded.
I’m looking forward to that short story! ☺️
I believe in you! 🙌 🙌 🙌
Pardon the unsolicited advice, but here’s a little trick for editing that’s worked for me (for tiny projects anyway): rather than editing the original document, open it in one window, then open a blank page in another window, then rewrite the original on to the blank document.
Most of it will be the same ofc, but since writing fresh prose is sometimes easier it feels less finicky, and rather than editing parts of this big huge document, you’re kind of changing things as you’re copying them over. This won’t work for moving around big sections, but it can help with line edits and rewording specific passages. Plus I’m sure you’ll notice some more edits that you should do in a future pass.
What is it about the editing process that is most daunting for you?
I edit without issues many of my more recent stories, it’s no big deal in general. It’s just that I’m grown past fantasy and the thought of having to edit that thing simply demotivates me. I want to write solarpunk and scifi now, fantasy is behind me. I have no interest for it.
Anyway, if the crowdfunding goes well, I’ll be followed by an editor, and I know myself well enough to say that with a clear goal and a set deadline I’ll breeze through it when push comes to shove. :D
I like your clarity of vision. I know what you mean about being like emotionally “done” with a project, but still having work to do to consider it actually “finished.” Good luck with your crowdfunding! I’ve never undertaken such a thing. It sounds hard!
What is it about the editing process that is most daunting for you?
You should answer as well, grrgyle!
I’ll answer for myself: I find the most daunting when I am making major plot changes, for example moving an entire chapter around or introducing a new bigger element early on that will affect most of the chapters after it. Often I miss some consequence that change will have later on, and I’m usually anxious that once I realize the less obvious effects it will have that I’ll manage to fix all the new plot holes that it will cause.
Eek! I’ve been called out ahah. For me it’s definitely dialogue. I never write enough. I find it very hard difficult, and many of my micro stories have 0 dialogue. So I end up with this lengthy descriptions that I know I should be illustrated by having characters talking about what they’re looking at.
It can work for microfiction, but for anything longer (that isn’t super experimental), you need to have characters talking to each other.
I can see major plot changes being daunting too, but since I don’t really write larger stories I don’t usually run into that problem hehe.
Passer-by here.
A family vacation (wonderful) and ADD (less wonderful) ground my writing to a halt this month.
And the previous month.
…Along with my other projects.
Ugh.
But the heat is fading here, which is indeed ideal reading and writing weather, as long as I can keep my allergies in check.
Now that we have digital systems, we can make art toys with even more surprising and emergent behaviour. […]
This book (edited by Tanya Short, and Tarn Adams) was first published in 2017, long before the term “generative art” would take on a very different insinuation. I’ve certainly got some strong opinions on the subject of both interpretations, but this is a writing club update not my personal soapbox.
I do too (probably different ones from yours?), but either way, the historical perspective is interesting.
Welcome, stranger! What were you working on in previous months, before your writing ground to a halt? If you don’t mind me asking, anyway.
I definitely feel you on trouble writing. If you were to line up all my updates, I probably have more “off” than “on” months. But, y’know, the “on” months still come, and that’s something to look forward to.
Always nice to hear from a passer-by, and from another instance too, how exciting. :)
What were you working on in previous months, before your writing ground to a halt?
A sprawling post-Korra Avatar fanfic, lol. I am more than happy to ramble on about speculative Avatar lore.
I probably have more “off” than “on” months
Yep. I have short periods of furious writing followed by luls. The story itself is practically bursting out of my head, yet getting it on paper is the difficult part.
I suppose I’ll take the opportunity to massage/trim what I’ve posted so far, and ‘get me going’ again.
Ooooo super cool. Some of the avatar fan fics are so well made and interesting. Definetly a fertile ground for creativity :)
A sprawling post-Korra Avatar fanfic, lol.
Hell. Yes. That awesome. I resisted the allure of reading and writing fanfic for too long. You’re definitely not alone in this thread – I know of at least two other people who are working on either fanfic, or projects that started out as fanfic and have morphed into their own thing.
The periods of furious writing and luls are so relatable, and so much like weather too. I wonder how common they are. I’m sure there must be many writers who experience this. It’s nice that you have a strategy for what to do when you’re not really to get the story on paper yet. I usually read more, or play videogames, but having a chunky story to massage/trim sounds like another great way to work on a story when you’re not in fully creative-generative-output mode.
Thanks! Yeah, my baseline behavior is basically:
I’m sure it manifests for others differently. Though the peculiar thing for me is that plot/imagination isn’t the problem as much as the minutia of the writing, like wording and dialogue. I have written one other 300k fic before (my only other), but I am trying to make this one less fanficy.
One thing I’ve discussed elsewhere is that there seemingly to be less interest in… reading long form fiction? On Ao3 and tumblr, most interest seems to be in one shots, shorts, social media competitions, stuff like that, and I’ve observed similar trends on TV, YouTube, and so on.
One thing I’ve discussed elsewhere is that there seemingly to be less interest in… reading long form fiction?
Hmmm I’m not sure. That seems to be the perception, for sure. And there is for sure a lot more short-form content now. But I feel like there is maybe the same amount of long-form content as well? Like I have no trouble finding long articles, long books, and long videos. Though I couldn’t really say if they’re more or less popular. I could see “snack” sized content certainly being easier to consume during little breaks, for sure though.
Anyway, that’s my gut take. Full disclosure I mostly write microfiction roffffl so I’m slightly biased.
I have not been doing anything other than thinking about it and longing for some free time and excess energy to start diving deep into the research phase. Since my last update there has been no progress. I initially stated that this is a passion project that I will only want to work on when I want, and that could lie dormant for some time if I don’t really feel like working on it. That is not the case now - I WANT to work on it, I’m just dead tired after work to get anything done.
I have another idea for a Solarpunk-based fiction that I half-started a long time ago, and I am wondering if I should pick that up for now instead, as I could then get straight to writing without as much research (although I would definitely want to do a lot of research for the world-building which is not complete).
I WANT to work on it, I’m just dead tired after work to get anything done.
😭 that sucks and I know what you mean. Sometimes I just do my work on the weekends if I’m too burnt out during the week.
For the solarpunk fiction project, is there any part of it that you can just start writing without prep work? Just because it sounds like you miss writing. Obviously research is important to solarpunk, and a huge part of the creative project so don’t feel bad!!
