✍️ Writing @slrpnk.net grrgyle @slrpnk.net 2w ago

Writing Club - January 2025

Welcome to the seventh writing club update!

Happy new year!!! 🎉🎉🎉 I was just getting used to drawing the "4" in "2024" in my notebooks, and now I have to get used to a whole new number. I always liked "5" though, so hopefully we get along alright.

As always I hope everyone has had a good month (but not so good as to leave nothing to stoke the fires of creativity).

Anyway, on with the important part - the Writers!

I can't wait to hear from you all. Your updates no matter how trivial always manage to motivate me for the next month.

As always, anyone and everyone are welcome to comment or share their own work in addition to the club participants above.

20 comments

I've been having a great time running the Fully Automated campaign and working on the guide for running it. We just finished session 10 and it looks like next session will wrap up this story, hopefully with time for a little epilogue.

Overall I'm very pleased with the players' arc through this campaign. They hit a bunch of locations and events I was hoping they would, and also surprised me a bunch of times with creative, thoughtful, and community-oriented solutions. I'm a huge fan of games that let the players stack the deck in their favor by being smart or creative, and I've had a great time watching them short-circuit potential conflicts before they could begin, rally an investigative effort in the region that's essentially too big and public to stop, and assemble a small army to help them confront a villain while stealing damn near all his weapons out from under him before he could use them. Their community-first approach has felt like a really solarpunk way to play this solarpunk campaign and their concern for my NPCs has been very sweet.

In running it I've found that I have enough of the setting and NPCs (and even some pre-set triggerable events) all established well enough that I can let the players do whatever makes sense to them and let the world sort of operate around them. The only time I've really weighed in rather than just reacting to them is to adjust certain NPC actions to keep the story's pace engaging and narratively satisfying.

After it wraps I'm planning to do a second playthrough with some IRL friends (where I'll be introducing them both to the game system and solarpunk as a genre) but I'm also looking forward to really digging into the campaign doc with some of the devs and doing some proper editing. General consensus so far is we should be ready to publish it in a few months through their usual channels (website, itch.io, and drivethruRPG), libre and gratis. They've already made some great suggestions so I'm looking forward to seeing what else they come up with!
- Sounds like the campaign is going amazingly for you! I'm glad to hear about it being played and published in the semi near future :)
  
  Thanks! I'm very excited about the reception it's received so far! @andrewrgross@slrpnk.net, who is a dev for the game and a player in the campaign has been making a set of recordings of, I think it's fair to say, okay quality, (we're no Dice Friends or Crits and Critters) as we've played it, in case that's interesting to anyone. And I'll definitely post about it when we release the campaign guide.
- Wow that sounds like such a great group (of people, as well as players).
  
  It will be really interesting to see how a fresh group differs in their approach, especially if they're more used to the somewhat nihilistic style of D&D et al, where you don't often question how many beings are killed or who you're stealing from, etc.
I didn't really follow my goal at all for last month lol. I was busy over the holidays and didn't write at all, then the first half of January I've spent distracted by a couple of topics I got inspired by.

One of the topics centers around liminal spaces and horror. I'm not sure if the final product I make from all this research will actually be an essay or if it is going to shape up into a fiction piece. I'm kind of just enjoying getting lost in the genre and taking notes on different aspects of it.

The other thing I've fallen into is the history of communism and cults of personality. Trying to look at the history of why many of these movements end up authoritarian despite the good intentions of their founding. The also includes looking at why democracy is often seen as the antithesis of communism when I would think it's more communism vs capitalism and authoritarian vs democratic. I found some really interesting books on the topic (both fiction and non fiction) and have been diving into them. This area might also end up being a few essays, but will likely more so be back ground research for some of the fictional worlds I've been building.

This month I want to keep diving into this stuff and hopefully next month will have something to share that isn't just messy handwritten notes lol.

Happy new year to everyone, I hope January hasn't been too scary for you :)
- That sounds like you've done a lot of interesting reading and thinking at least.
  
  I suspect if you forced yourself to just sit down and write on the subject more would come out than you'd expect.
  
  Super true! Hopefully this weekend I'll be able to take a few hours and just write through some of my thoughts. I think your right and my ideas will be alot more formed than they feel right now :)
- No lie, that sounds like a great time to me! Sometimes I label these periods as "filling the well" or planting seeds for when I go to do some creative expression. Even if they're not directly related to my current project, it's all grist for the mill (to borrow another expression).
  
  The other thing I've fallen into is the history of communism and cults of personality.
  
  I would love to hear more of your thoughts on this. I've just recently started more formally reading an intro to Marx, and I'm finding it pretty compelling. I've skimmed the Wikipedia pages of course, but that's not the same as really studying the subject.
  
  I did corner two communists at a house party this month and try to get a sense of where they stand on social democracy, but I think they were not interesting in lecturing a newbie haha. I did come away with some questions on Maoism, though.
  
  Anyway, so yeah, not to repeat myself, but yeah I would love to hear whatever you put together, fictional or otherwise on the topic. It's fascinating to me, and as someone who doesn't actually know much on the topic I'm still hungry for more takes!
  
  ... liminal spaces and horror
  
  G- g- g- gulp! Hahaha, but for real liminal spaces are a form of creepiness I adore. The concept of something going on forever in this weird unknowable order, is super scary and un-look-away-from-able to me. 🫣
  
  This month I want to keep diving into this stuff ...
  
  Great goal! Fill that well hehe :)
  
  I love the metaphores you used at the start :) filling the well is definetly an important part of the process, plus it just feels good to have something to hyperfixate on lol
  
  And yay! I'm glad there's some interest in the my current focuses :) I'm curious to see where I end up with all of it. Sometimes it's fun when even i don't know what I'm doing & suprise myself lol
  
  Also very funny to imagine these cornered communists at a party being questioned about the nuances of their political beliefs by a well meaning but uninformed person :p i have a decent grasp of the theory (I commune hopped in my early 20s), but the actual history of its implementation is in some ways more interesting because it's actually testing the theory & points to certain weakspots in the underlying ideology. I'm not sure where it's all headed but I feel excited to find out :))
  
  Edit to add: I'll definetly try and do a write up this month to make some of my thoughts understandable l. It would be cool to have someone to bounce ideas back and forth with :)
My goal proved a touch ambitious for this month.

I said I would complete at least 10 morning-pages-like "writing sessions." I completed maybe half of that lol. But I'm still counting this month as a win because 1) I dunno I just feel pretty good, and 2) because I did some heads-down work on a short story. This one is brand new so has the advantage of not having been bouncing around in my head for years (poor unwritten stories, I really should treat them better).

I tried to start with a real outline this time, and actually, I kinda love it. Like always, there is the sensation of distaste at seeing your own ideas on the page (instead of in the perfect crystal prison of your mind), but it helped me get off to a decent start.

In the interests of continuing to practice publicly, here's what I've come up with so far. It's very rough, so please excuse the draftiness. Right now I'm trying to 1) figure out how to story will actually go from scene to scene, and 2) inject some personality, character, and overall detail, into the writing. Right now, I feel like it reads like I'm just hitting plot beats without much flavour (because I guess that's literally what I'm doing).

Link to early draft of untitled short story: here.
- I really like getting to see people's early drafts and how their writing process works. The little comments to yourself are fun & i enjoy getting to see that side of the process.
  
  Also glad to hear you're enjoying using outlines. I tend to be an outline kind of person, though my outlines tend to be very broad then I kind chunk out the bulk of the writing when inspiration hits.
  
  As always thanks for sharing and posting :)
- The skill of planning, if well honed, is invaluable in writing works that stand the test of time, I think. I reckon I use my plans like maps who's traces of roads I use to plan stops in my text. I try to make sure that the reader's view at each of these stops is worth the travel.
  
  Reading that comment was well worth the travel for me. Yes, I like the way you put that. While I'm sure there's a place for seat-of-your-pants writing (aka "pantsing"), it's nice to know what the view, as you put it, is going to look like from different parts of the story.
Hi everyone! I'm going to have to submit my master's thesis by the end of the year. I'd like to improve my writing substantially before sending off my final draft.

This month, I'd like to write a short essay or a short story. Get the ball rolling and all.
- Welcome, you've come to the right place! I'll send you a reminder before I put up the February writing club post, just to give you a head-up and a chance to maybe give your monthly goal one last push. :)
  
  I love your overall goal of improving your writing. I have the same long-term goal. Is there anything about your writing in particular that you're trying to improve?
  
  This month, I'd like to write a short essay or a short story.
  
  Great goal! Do you have something in mind already for a topic or genre, or is that still open-ended?
  
  Thanks for your questions!
  
  I'd like to make my writing more valuable for readers by, among other ways, writing more clearly.
  
  As for the essay, I'm not quite sure yet what to write about. I have a few little ideas pinging around in my head, but I don't know if any of them are worth fleshing out.

20 comments