this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2025
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✍️ Writing

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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.

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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.

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5. Solarpunk rules still apply. The general rules of solarpunk of course still apply.

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Hello hello, and welcome to our now 13th (XIIIth) writing club update. My dictionary explains that the meaning of "thirteen" is:

One more than twelve.

Truly words to live by. Shuffling around my books for a more inspirational bit of numerology, I find the chapter in Mervyn Peake's "Titus Groan" book, wherein we're introduced to the outsider "Keda" who is to be a wet-nurse for the titular prince of Gormenghast. I'm not sure how that relates to what we're doing here, but it's a pretty weird, and cool, book.

Speaking of weird and cool...!

As always, all are extremely welcome to participate in the writing club, regardless of whether they're in the list above.

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[–] JacobCoffinWrites@slrpnk.net 5 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I've been making slow but steady progress on the campaign, editing sections and jotting down text for future sections of the Choose Your Own Adventure book version. I also photobashee a couple of bits of artwork for it.

Watching people read old Fighting Fantasy games has helped me identify some of what I want and don't want in the experience of reading the one I'm trying to plan:

It'll need lots of artwork - people love the weird old fantasy art, and though I probably can't swing anything quite so unhinged, my line art photobashes are fairly close in style.

I want to avoid dice rolling or other random chance stuff like lookup tables. It's tempting to include given the source but they break the flow too much and people start skipping them if the bad result is just failure with no forward path. The most I'll include is an inventory.

Every choice needs to go somewhere interesting, even if that means fewer total branches. I don't like the "one true path" school of design where you just end up backtracking. Every branch should be valid and have different content in it so it's worth rereading. So far, the hard part is choosing what stuff goes in what branch, since I already have an open world with plenty of content to divide up.

I also drafted a background for the campaign version. Working on foreground now.

[–] grrgyle@slrpnk.net 3 points 2 days ago

I agree that the "one true path" feels like it removes player agency. Thinking about tabletop games, and even some video games (like Disco Elysium), one of the most entertaining things is finding yourself in a condition of "failure" then working your way out of it.

Sounds really cool - thanks for the update!