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.
I have just today started on a scientific book project I've been wanting to write for some time. It is a very long term project, and my main goals are 1) to have fun researching and writing and 2) document my research for my own enjoyment down the line. If this becomes a coherent work eventually, I will aim to release it under some CC-license, although this is not my main goal.
It's off to an enjoyable start at least :)
This sounds really interesting! What branch of science, if I may ask?
Also keep us posted, I'm down for betareading if you ever need!
That's so cool and I love how you describe it as an enjoyable activity, rather than like a chore or obligation, or I don't know, like a duty. It kind of flips the script in my head about how I think of science writing.
I'd be really curious to hear more about this project, if you ever feel like going into detail. Also, this is more the gearhead / process obsessive in me speaking, but I'm interested if you're using any kind of special organizational tools or "knowledge base" in your writing.
Gone are the days when I had to do science writing as part of my job, so this is entirely a pet project, and I avoid committing to releasing anything to avoid it becoming another deadline in my life. If I lose the motivation to work on it, I will take a hiatus and get back to it if and when I am ready. There are enough things in my life that are not like this, so why add to that list?
The project is essentially to write up a coherent picture of the observable, physical world (from where I am sitting and looking out the window) and their associated physical processes. So essentially everything from the fusion reactions of the Sun, to the scattering of light in the atmosphere, to the colors of things, weather phenomena such as rain, fog, lighting, the sounds moving through air and through media, the relative movements of Earth, the Moon, the Sun and the stars etc. I have a PhD in a natural science discipline, and have touched upon most of this in my studies, but have 1) forgotten a lot of it, 2) have some big holes of topics I never learnt (fluid dynamics being one of them, optics being another) and 3) have probably a bunch of misconceptions originating from a misunderstanding at the time I originally learnt it.
So it is a quest to relearn and document this stuff in a way that is for my enjoyment and not for passing an exam or getting a paper published.
Also, this is more the gearhead / process obsessive in me speaking, but I’m interested if you’re using any kind of special organizational tools or “knowledge base” in your writing.
I write in LaTeX, keep my references in Zotero and will use Obsidian for notetaking during research prior to writing it up.
Whoa! That sounds like such a cool project. Kind of a poetic approach to the scientific understandings of our reality.
Im excited to hear more about your process and hope you enjoy digging into the new project :)
Cheers :)
Disregard the question in the above comment: this is absolutely metal! I would love to use such a (text)book in my future classes! High schools generally do such a bad job showing why physics is important and how much of what we are surrounded by is explained by the discipline.
Thanks! Yeah, I honestly find that (in my experience) university courses also often tend to get bogged down in examples too far detached from the observable physical world, which can make them demotivating. In my time at the university, I especially found the mathematics courses lacking, as they would focus almost entirely on formal descriptions and rote learning, and avoid using proper examples on the applications of mathematics in the real world. I'm a trained engineer/scientist, not a mathematician. It is the universal language used to describe so much, and yet I would spend my time solving Fourier integral after Fourier integral, not really understanding what I was really doing until it showed up in a physics course later on and within 20 minutes I would have a much better intuition of what I was spending 6 months trying to learn before.
And regarding beta-reading - that could be useful in the future, but as I said, it is first and foremost a personal project for my own enjoyment. But if it turns into something that looks like it could be of value to others as well (i.e. structured, coherent, complete and factually correct enough), I might prioritize trying to get that to a publishable state.
[...] I avoid committing to releasing anything to avoid it becoming another deadline in my life. If I lose the motivation to work on it, I will take a hiatus and get back to it if and when I am ready.
I want to bottle this feeling up and inject it into my veins.
The project is essentially to write up a coherent picture of the observable, physical world (from where I am sitting and looking out the window) and their associated physical processes.
Am I understanding correctly, that this project is about writing about your very detailed and researched perspective of the world--from like your writing desk?? That sounds SO COOL. Is your subjective position a part of the project, or just a starting point? To me, this feels like an empirical version of what some meditation feels like.
Thanks so much for sharing what you're working on. It's really fascinating.
Is your subjective position a part of the project, or just a starting point?
I have no real prior knowledge of biology, neuroscience, psychology or anything related to this, and I don't want to include anything I would need to research from scratch. So I guess the starting point is to draw a line from my eyes to whatever I see first :) Then I will attempt to keep topics as separate as possible so they could be enjoyed on their own, and where a topic is completely dependent on some prior knowledge from another part of the book, it will come after and with references to which parts would need to be read and understood first. Or that's the initial plan anyway
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.
I haven't written in a long time, but it's really cool to see what everyone else is working on!
Do you read? I found that reading and writing go hand in hand for me, and the times I've written the most were the ones when I also read the most. It's kind of a mutual feedback dynamic!
Long breaks are fine! I think most of us had them. I've gone long months without doing anything, ignoring the initial decade it took me to even realize I had a worthwhile interest in it.
When was the last time you wrote, if you don't mind me asking? I've taken some long, long, looong breaks, myself.
Exciting were on month 13, its wild to think its been over a year since your first post :)
This month has been busy, but I have gotten some writing done. I drafted a new story idea and wrote a wedding officiant speech.
This month I would like to get at least one of my drafted stories into a finished draft. I have way too many ongoing projects and need to get some things done enough that I can put them to the side and move on to new ideas.
Exciting were on month 13
slrpnk writers go brrrrrrrr
This month has been busy, but I have gotten some writing done. I drafted a new story idea and wrote a wedding officiant speech.
Speech writing is so hard! Spoken word writing in general is a real challenge.
Glad to you hear you got some writing done, despite your busy month. :) And I can definitely relate to the problem of having too many ongoing projects haha; they really can start to weigh down new ideas after a while if you don't either finish them or mothball them.
100% to both things lol
I find the timing of speeches to be the hardest part. Keeping things engaging & consise while still having enough to fill the time slot is tricky.
& unfinished projects have such a way of sucking energy from everything else! I think it might partially be a perfectionist thing where I have a hard time recognizing when things are good enough and I really just need to leave them alone.
This is such a human phenomenon that it doesn't really need a name, but I stumbled upon the Ovsiankina effect, which is basically describing the feeling of being a "completionist" which yeah, I feel like it would be very difficult to want to finish everything and also be a (sounds like?) a bit of a perfectionist!
I'm projecting really hard right now, but I've found my own perfectionism paralyzing at times, so I wish you luck in recognizing when things are "good enough" so that you can free yourself and move on.
You're definetly not projecting lol I get stuck over thinking things when in reality the project is essentially finished. I think it might also be a result of being too close to it? Like I've thought about it so much that all I can see are the flaws, but when someone else reads my work they really enjoy it.
I'm trying to be better about calling things done once the inspiration has faded. I've definetly ruined a few things because I keep messing with them long after I should have walked away-- though that's more of a problem with my visual art.
Hopefully we'll both get better at finishing things and recognizing that they are indeed good enough :p
FINALLY some sun popped out, so I did my best to enjoy it. I still wrote plenty, and by following my usual template:
Done this month:
To be done in August:
I'm starting fulltime courses in September, so August is the last month of unintentional vacation I got. Will try to make the best out of it.
Wow, sounds like you were incredibly productive! Congratz!
I hope your last month of break goes well. It sounds like you've been making the most of your time off :)
Thank you! Part of me is kind of self-sabotaging though, because I already know I'll beat myself up if in two months I won't be able to match how much I'm writing now 😅
Wrote a small “analysis” of state-of-the-art solarpunk hieroglyphs
Uhhh this sounds cool as hell?? What is that?
So basically hieroglyphs are like "supertropes", stuff that when you see it, you can immediately tell which genre you're reading/watching. After I translated the SSL (check June Writing Update) I got curious and tracked which were the most common ones and which ones were, let's say, missing:
Excellent article. A real call to action to step up the quality of our conversations in the solarpunk aesthetic.
I wasn't familiar with the vast cultural significance of the Calabash. That was really cool to learn about.
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.
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!
For my goal, I said I wanted to write another blog article for my realname website. So while I didn't do that... I did manage to scratch out a half dozen or so rough drafts 🙈 I've been struck by the curse of creative restlessness haha, and so I find myself overflowing with ideas, starting little projects, jotting down many outlines; but ultimately finishing nothing.
In a way, I'm building up my own rough version of a story seed library. It'll be fun to pick over them and see what's worth cultivating later, when I'm a little less restless.
Oh, so like a short story collection? Sounds very exciting!
Haha it's closer to a collection of snippets that might become short stories or other projects.
Oooo I love the idea of a story seed library. It lets you harness that creative energy while its there :)
Im glad you've had an inspired month, even if it hasn't resulted in a finished project lol
I think I do something quite similar, although in different form. When I get an interesting idea, I put it down in an "Ideas' Drawer" and let them rest. If after two years they're still interesting, then they're worth writing a novel out of.
Now, this is not financial advice, but this method of sketching the prompts and see what grows can work very well and I support it!
When I get an interesting idea, I put it down in an “Ideas’ Drawer” and let them rest. If after two years they’re still interesting, then they’re worth writing a novel out of.
I heard of the sci-fi writer Orson Scott Card (problematic fellow, but had some decent notes on writing) having a similar process of letting ideas germinate--I think for two years exactly, too.
But yes, I love poring over my old notes for inspiration. It's so cool leafing through them and coming across an idea that you'd forgotten and getting inspired by it.