this post was submitted on 24 May 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.

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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Hail and well met, and also welcome; welcome to the 11th writing club update. Fun fact about the number 11: it's only the tenth positive palindromic number, and it will be 11 more months before we encounter our next one (22). Wow.

The weather here has been exceptionally rainy lately, and so perfect for weeding, editing, and savouring moments over hot cups of ginger tea.

I hope you are all safe and that your ginger and writing projects remain free of mold.

Speaking of writing, this is a post about writing. And these are our writers:

Brave scrivenauts, out on the shoals of imagination. Wading through the pools of doubt, and mucking about in the mud of enlightenment. Probably talking with the crabs or clams of metaphor or simile or something, too...

As always dear passerby you're welcome to join us for as long or short as you like -- simply share what you're working on and your goal for the next month, and I'll add you to our list of illustrious weirdos.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

Tough month because I've been swamped with a number of things, but here's a bit of progress:

  • Took part in a Solarpunk Game Jam as a writer with an Indonesian team, for which I wrote ~25k words of dialogues on Inky. Eventually our devs didn't manage to make the game playable by the deadline, but it was a fun experience and I've learned how to do branched dialogues and storylines
  • Sketched a new setting, perhaps to be used in the future or lent to someone who needs it. It's a world with varying tides, so that "land" isn't defined and stable and maps can't be drawn.
  • Wrote a ~1k word short story on another author's setting

June is going to be a lot more free, so I'm going to try and tackle these things:

  • That one famous editing for the fantasy book I've postponed for the last... three monts 😵
  • Finish outlining the Kanteletar Library stories (five in total) and maybe write one of them
  • One more Meteorina? I have an idea about end-of-century Venice built on top of the current skyline, with bridges and catwalks on top of bridges, to deal with the risen sea levels... But I still need a plot so let's see!
[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Your updates are always so inspiring! I can't imagine writing ~25 000 words of dialogue and just moving on because of factors outside of you control. 💀 But I admire your outlook--it's not a waste if you got something out of it, like experience with Inky. Btw have you ever used Twines? It's more appropriate for making standalone adventure games than dialogue trees, but I feel like every writer should spend at least an hour playing around with it, just to see what's possible using just their words.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago

Never heard of that, but I'll make sure to check it out! I liked this different approach to storytelling, and I'll definitely come back to it in the future... as soon as the frustration dies out! 😂