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!
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!
It’s an incredible resource and I will definitely try and use it for my future stories! Thank you for all the time and effort you put into this.
For sure! I’m really excited to get the chance to build a bigger, more thorough version, and to hopefully start something of a culture of sharing resources in the solarpunk fiction space. I’ve got a few more pages I’m working on, and I’ve reached out to a few knowledgeable folks who I hope will contribute their own specialty.