✍️ Writing
A community for writers, like poems, fiction, non-fiction, short stories, long books, all those sorts of things, to discuss writing approaches and what's new in the writing world, and to help each other with writing.
Rules for now:
1. Try to be constructive and nice. When discussing approaches or giving feedback to excerpts, please try to be constructive and to maintain a positive vibe. For example, don't just vaguely say something is bad but try to list and explain downsides, and if you can, also find some upsides. However, this is not to say that you need to pretend you liked something or that you need to hide or embellish what you disliked.
2. Mention own work for purpose and not mainly for promo: Feel free to post asking for feedback on excerpts or worldbuilding advice, but please don't make posts purely for self promo like a released book. If you offer professional services like editing, this is not the community to openly advertise them either. (Mentioning your occupation on the side is okay.) Don't link your excerpts via your website when asking for advice, but e.g. Google Docs or similar is okay. Don't post entire manuscripts, focus on more manageable excerpts for people to give feedback on.
3. What happens in feedback or critique requests posts stays in these posts: Basically, if you encounter someone you gave feedback to on their work in their post, try not to quote and argue against them based on their concrete writing elsewhere in other discussions unless invited. (As an example, if they discuss why they generally enjoy outlining novels, don't quote their excerpts to them to try to prove why their outlining is bad for them as a singled out person.) This is so that people aren't afraid to post things for critique.
4. All writing approaches are valid. If someone prefers outlining over pantsing for example, it's okay to discuss up- and downsides but don't tell someone that their approach is somehow objectively worse. All approaches are on some level subjective anyway.
5. Solarpunk rules still apply. The general rules of solarpunk of course still apply.
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We've been making good progress on the Buried Treasure Fully Automated campaign! The second test group finished their 14-session playthrough and had a blast. They were sad it ended but are looking forward to the follow-on story.
We've been making good progress on line edits and have talked out a lot of goals and changes in the weekly developer meeting. I need to work on the cover but haven't gotten to that yet. Andrew has been working on some additional, realistic watershed maps which I'm very excited about. Anything that presents realistic how-it's-done info is awesome and if they're a little complicated to understand, I think it's a good kind of puzzle. I can't remember if I wrote about testing the new soil testing mechanic last time or not but we did that too.
I've also reached out to a few more folks for input. I'd very much like to vet everything for accuracy, even the stuff I know.
I also had the great good fortune to make friends with some more writers, one of whom has published a Choose Your Own Adventure before. Long, long, long-term I'd very much like to make a CYOA version of this campaign. The more self-contained format really appeals to me as a way to present much of the same information. A reader can just pick up a solarpunk CYOA in a way they might not try to read a premade campaign for a specific TTRPG. It'll be a huge project, restructuring the open sandbox into branching storylines, but I have a lot of content already written so flowcharting it out doesn't feel as impossible as once it did. It's not something I'll start working on until the campaign is finished but I'm having some fun thinking on how to do it and what will go where. Like the campaign it'll be copyleft, with a free ebook and bookbinding version.
Woo! That's awesome. I first learned about copyleft not too long ago, and I love to see its spread.
Really glad to hear the campaign continues to go well (14 sessions!!!!?! I am in awe of this dedicated group), and wow, what a multifaceted project--and now with the concept of a CYOA to puzzle over while you're working on this, it seems almost endless, if you'd like it to be.
It's been really cool getting a sense for your personal aesthetic/ethic over the course of this writing club. I like your approach of sort of play-acting out real skills as part of your fiction. It's like the fiction is a delivery mechanism for these lessons. Anyway, that's a long way of saying it's very solarpunk. :p
I love the idea of a cyoa version of the campaign, it'll definetly help open the material to another audience.
I hope this continue going well for you :)
Thank you!