✍️ Writing

So for the TTRPG campaign/manifesto on solarpunk in rural New England, I think we've been making good progress. We're officially in line edits now - we spent a couple weeks going through the sections and deciding on layout/organization changes, and now we're digging into the content. I'm still trying to make sure each section has a description the GM can read out if they're caught flatfooted, but we're also adding sections to make finding NPC motives and capabilities easier. I think the changes are a big improvement on making it easily usable for people who aren't me.

I'm especially pleased to have fit another regional issue/personal anxiety into a previously-underdeveloped section: the Hemlock Wooley Adelgid.

One of the groups the players can visit in the open world is a Rewilding Crew. Previously they were there to check up on plots of once-extremely-damaged land which had been restored decades before, and were mostly included so they could talk about destructive forestry practices, rewilding techniques like rough mounding, forest succession, etc, and to give the players a hand on researching potential dump sites. I gave them an additional job: re-establishing Eastern Hemlocks in their mid-suscession projects. This let me include some info on the modern-day threat of the Hemlock Woolly Adelgid, and some ways it could be neutralized or at least made less invasive in the future using IRL techniques (such as importing very specific predator beetles). Plus it was a chance to write some good news for one of my favorite trees. I really like finding opportunities to make the campaign a little more dense with relevant information, and making a somewhat bland section pull triple duty adressing multiple modern day environental issues happening in New England, that feels like an improvement.

My other writing-related project is more publishing related. A year or so ago I really got into bookbinding (by which I mean I learned one very basic technique for making decent hardcover and paperback books and used it again and again to make a bunch of books I'd only ever been able to get as PDFs into real physical books on my shelf). I love sharing anything that saves other people some work so I also shared all the print-ready interposed files and covers I prepared. I made several copies of the Fully Automated rulebook and provided the files for the book block and cover and the devs hosted them on their website AND SOMEONE CAME ALONG AND BOUND THEIR OWN COPY USING MY FILES! So cool. To this day the only way to get a physical copy of Fully Automated is to find an unguarded office printer and try some bookbinding (though we do plan to set up an at-cost print-on-demand book eventually).

Recently I was talking with a writer friend and one of our old topics of conversation came up - the gulf between indie music, especially punk and lo-fi and indie books. Indie music tends to be weird and different - proudly something a record label wouldn't release. It's it's own thing. But when you're self publishing a book there's a tremendous pressure to make it look like 'the real thing', to conceal that it wasn't printed by one of the big publishing houses. This goes on even as those companies cut costs, refuse to provide editors, use AI slop for covers, and generally screw their authors. We'd talked before about making indie books more like lo-fi music, but aside from sites like AO3, didn't have a good idea for that. But my experience with bookbinding and Fully Automated got me thinking about releasing more stuff that way - possibly even eventually building an entire archive of print-ready, interposed copyleft and public domain books and short stories and covers. I love the idea of sidestepping the publishers altogether and sending people the actual book itself, some assembly required, and spreading a wonderful skill set along the way. Bookbinding is fun and genuinely quite approachable even with extremely basic tools. Some classes and books make it sound a lot more difficult than it is, you can put a full paperback or hardcover together with stuff from your arts and crafts box and a couple tutorials off the Internet.

For the short term, I'm just helping writer friends interpose and bind stories they were already putting online for free, but I'd like to start something bigger eventually. There's a big bookbinding community out there but it seems kinda siloed - I think a place to share files and self publish without all the middlemen could be kinda neat.

In the meanwhile I'm happy to help anyone who wants to make a zine or bookbinder version of their stories.