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?

Iml haven’t been very creatively focused. I’ve been settling into a new job and getting certifications sorted. Im hoping to pass my certification this month & hopefully things will settle down enough that ill have the extra brain power to be creative.

Its always so motivating hearing about what other people are up to and how their creative efforts are panning out. Even if I’m not writing, I like hearing from people who are :)

I spent an ungodly amount of time in school last month (for my teaching practice), and I’ve only written… slides for my lectures 😅 …which was an absolute blast! I even closed it out with a legendary story of our understanding of light, from optics to quantum mechanics, and the students loved it! This overshadows the disastrous failure of the crowdfunding campaign for the other book, from which I finally feel free. This last month will be entirely dedicated to writing Section B of the Kanteletar novel, which I can hopefully complete before New Year’s Eve.

So yeah, nothing new on the fiction front, but I got to try my hand at scientific outreach writing and I should absolutely do it again at some point!

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!

As grrgyle mentioned, they graciously agreed to use the built-in /c/writing docuwiki site to host writer-level resources/notes! So most of my project time this month has been working on getting that set up, starting by copying over the resources I’d already made and updating them. Then I started reconstructing my notes and research from recent solarpunk projects. That turned out to be more of an archival effort than I’d expected because the Internet is getting worse but I think I’ve got enough content added that hopefully you can see what I’m going for.

I’m thinking of this as a kind of ‘soft launch’ of the new wiki for our regulars - I plan to add a few more pages and then do a standalone post announcing it to the community. I’ll be soliciting input then too but if you want to contribute something, whether that’s a page of notes or a single bullet point, I’d love to hear from you! It’s currently very biased towards my solarpunk interests, with some absolutely massive gaps. There’s no way one person can cover everything and I really hope others will contribute their own specialities.

Unfortunately the docuwiki system only allows for community moderators to make edits, but feel free to message me with anything you want to add and I’ll be happy to change it over to docuwiki’s markup and add it!

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.