Welcome to this our third writing club update! See previous writing clubs here. As always I hope you have all had a great month, with a good balance of outdoors and indoors activities.
Here are our participants with stated goals from last month, although anyone is free comment with their own writing progress. If you’d like to join this list of participants, just say so in a comment, with a description of what you’re working on and what you’d like to do this month. Easy as pie!
Okay, without further delay, our…
Participants!
I got laid off from my job early in the month, and haven’t had much luck finding a new one, so that has been sapping my will and energy for creative writing.
Thankfully, it has not dampened my appetite for reading, so I have been doing plenty of “research” for my story, in the form of reading many many short stories (primarily from World’s Best SF #3, and the Analog and S&SF magazines), and various Wikipedia entries on indigenous lifeways. It’s actually been nice just planting seeds in my creative garden, without asking it to produce anything.
My goal for this month (not counting my unfortunate requirement to secure a day job) is very humble: I would like to get back on track with sketching out my outline. I think if I can handle that with everything else that is going on, I will be quite proud.
Reading is a great way to continue building up inspiration and references when you’re not quite in a space to be actively writing. I love the planting seeds metaphor too :)
Good luck with everything this month!
I’m still working on the adventure module for Fully Automated! but I’ve definitely slowed down a bit. I know someone who does environmental restoration IRL so I want to work with them to add more information on testing sites for contamination, and to maybe try and build out a minigame around it. Then I have to write up one set of characters (build out descriptions and personalities and goals for them) and then go through and start adding all the game mechanics stuff. Right now, the campaign is essentially system-less. You could drop it into anything from GURPS to FATE but you’d have to work out the character stats etc that come into play when the dice start rolling. My goal is to stat out all the characters I’ve written descriptions for (which in FA includes a bit more history than I’ve currently got for some of them) and to script the handfull of possible combat encounters.
Outside of the game, I’ve finished a photobash of a solarpunk cargo ship and been doing research on other possibilities for solarpunk shipping. I’ve also had some awesome discussions here on slrpnk.net about things folks would like to see in scenes of ships, boats, and coasts, and about what they’d like to see in depictions of cities in wet areas (which many cities are or will be).
Most of my solarpunk projects start with a sort of input-gathering stage these days.
I’ve also been putting together a list of parts from cars which can be used in other (hopefully more solarpunk) ways. This is part of my ongoing attempts to get more reuse in solarpunk media - just trying to make including it easy for writers and artists.
So that’s it, a lot of discussion, one bit of art, and some incremental progress on the campaign.
It’s cool you want it bring in more real world knowledge and references into the campaign. I love seeing creative stuff thats grounded in real scientific knowledge and current practices.
& the art looks awesome!
Thank you!! I very much want to ground the campaign (and solarpunk fiction in general) in worthwhile, usable information, at least to the extent that I can learn/present it accurately! I’d very much like to help people learn about real-life illegal dumping tactics, watersheds (and how they’re frequently split by borders, and their importance to humans and habitats), and getting to add a basically-functional understanding of soil testing (possibly just minus sending samples away for a lab, unless we use drones for that) is a great opportunity.
I’m really looking forward to seeing how they’ll investigate - will they focus on old records? Oral histories from locals who were around at the time? Scientific test kits of modern soil? Some combination? Will they consider erosion and the sites’ proximity to the town’s three watersheds to narrow their options? Will they think of something completely out of left field and leave me scrambling to provide useful info?
I love that approach to creating the world: open ended and educational. Realistic games are such a fun way to delve deeper into new topics – especially ones that can seem a bit dry other wise. Like soil testing!
I think the multilayered approach works particularly well for the slrpnk genre too, since our ecosystems are complex with many different changing parts that contribute to the whole. Having all of that baked into the game encourages the player to get familiar with all the different ways our environment can be hurt and healed.
Super cool :) thanks again for sharing your process, I find it very inspirational
So this month went by in a blur, my sister stayed with me, and my full time job started up again. I haven’t done much work on my book, but I have done a few story outlines/concepts over the month when ideas came to me.
They’re probably not stories I’ll ever flesh out fully. It’s still fun to imagine entirely different story concepts and plots. Plus it feels refreshing to soend some time writing and thinking about other stories after being so invested in one particular project.
This month, I’m hoping to have my new office area set up and do a bit of work on my book. Write a chapter or two and do some editing. Mostly my goal is to keep writing now that I’m back to working full time & getting settled in a new house.
Plus it feels refreshing to spend some time writing and thinking about other stories after being so invested in one particular project.
Agreed, taking time to do more open-ended work feels great in contrast to a more monolithic project! This has definitely been my experience over the last period of, uh, my entire life haha. I used to be down on myself for “getting distracted,” but I think it’s healthy to know yourself and what drives you, and if that’s working on other stories then that’s great.
Obviously I’m doing a tonne of projecting there, but nice to hear how your work is going. Apologies it took me so long to actually type up this reply! I think I just have just imagined that I already replied.
