Welcome to the 16th (5+5+5+1) writing club update. Looking at the intro to the 16th chapter of Procedural Generation in Game Design: Generative Art Toys by Kate Compton, we find the somewhat quaint observation:
Everyone loves being creative. And everyone likes discovering that they're more creative than they thought they were. For many years, people have enjoyed crafts like pottery wheels, Spirographs, Mad Libs, spin art, paper marbling, and tie-dye. These artistic toys helped everyday people make interesting artworks (even if those people lacked creative talent or inspiration) by producing surprising and emergent results from simple choices.
Now that we have digital systems, we can make art toys with even more surprising and emergent behaviour. [...]
This book (edited by Tanya Short, and Tarn Adams) was first published in 2017, long before the term "generative art" would take on a very different insinuation. I've certainly got some strong opinions on the subject of both interpretations, but this is a writing club update not my personal soapbox.
Having now fulfilled my self-imposed rule of introducing a quote related to the number of WC updates since we started, I now turn to an observation about my local climate/weather, before introducing our writers, and finally extending a friendly invitation to any lurkers in our midsts. :)
Up here in the Northern hemisphere, at the heel of October, it's starting to get chilly. The ideal weather for reading and writing probably varies as much as the individual writer, but for me this feels like book weather.
Speaking of individuals, here is the call for our regular writers to share their updates!
I think I'll move this list to the main Writing Club sticky post next update, since the @s don't seem trigger notifications consistently across applications. Let me know what you think, if you have an opinion on this.
As is forever the case, passers-by are very welcome to come on in and lurk, comment, or post their own updates.
Amazing. My one series might probably benefit from having some small solarpunk lore bits fit in, so if you ever write some sort of basic lore ideas guide I definitely want to read it!
What would a basic lore ideas guide include? I'm happy to add topics to my (currently quite short) list of resources! Or to make specific suggestions for existing projects.
Sorry for responding late! I feel like probably basic ideas about 1. what areas of society are best shown to be affected by solarpunk inventions and common examples of how, and 2. perhaps overall lore ideas to get into a setting where that makes sense.
For example, what daily living areas of a family would be good opportunities for solarpunk items like energy generation like solar (I guess for a mixed scifi fantasy setting that could be substituted with misusing some sort of spell or magical item to be tricked into providing energy?), finding other ways of cooling like underground rooms and water, and so on.
And for lore ideas, for example I have a post war low tech setting in my book where various tech is no longer available. That is a great idea for making average people want to use solarpunk technologies, I feel like. Or if you look at Africa now, they're having trouble expanding the regular grid for profitability reasons and I've heard they're having a custom solarpunk off-the-grid per-household solar revolution.
I guess perhaps all of that is useless and obvious already to somebody reading any solarpunk manifesto for five minutes, I don't know.
Speaking of responding late, sorry for the long turnaround time on this but I think the wiki is close to meeting these kind of goals - I'd like to do a set (starting with exurbs) on how different things might change in a solarpunk transition, and I'd like to add a section on phytoremediation and on airships, but I think it's coming along.
Thanks for your input, I've referred to this a few times while planning which resources to build out.