✍️ 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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In part thanks to a certain test reader (can I say who it is?) my disabled mage series has gotten a few small but substantial plot fixes since I've had a good reason to tweak it more.
My primary focus has been drama scenes, those where the dialogue revolved a little too purely around the protagonist at the cost of either the scene not feeling relevant enough to the main plot or like the others were revolving a little too much around the protagonist. I injected fun tangents, side conversations, and interesting bits that hint more toward the main plot to break things up. This also helps the pacing and makes these scenes feel less universally depressing.
Other than that, I've still been mostly focused on tech work, and might be for another 1-2 months. But I remain confident I'll get back into more intense writing work moderately soon, in a few weeks.
God bless sensitivity readers!
It wasn't one in this case, I definitely could use some more. The fixes were mostly pacing related!
That's awesome!! I'm glad you've had a reason to do some editing (I dread editing large pieces of text 👹), and I can say as one of your newer test readers that it's so cool seeing a series in its earlier form, while it's still taking shape. It makes me wonder what some of the old books I've loved looked like before they were all polished and edited and in their final drafts.
Good luck on your tech work also. I too am spending more and more of my time on computer stuff generally.