✍️ Writing
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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Wow, bookbinding sounds like a cool skill!! Regarding TTRPGs I admire people as well who have the time and patience for them. I'm lucky enough when I can remember the rules of my own novels well enough, I doubt I would fare well in a more complicated gamified setting.
I'm lucky Fully Automated's primary mechanic is both flexible and simple because I'm here to tell ya, I've played D&D and I don't think I could DM for that. Some folks are heavier on special game mechanics for each thing, and lots of rules, I treat my games more like collaborative storytelling with dice rolls just when the players want to do something cool or difficult. The big challenge for me is managing all the potential story paths on the fly and sort of adjusting what/when certain events outside the players' control should happen to manage the pace of the plot and keep things feeling cinematic. At this point I know my NPCs pretty well and can kinda ad lib reactions to the players just fine, so sessions where I'm just reacting to the players are kinda easy - but when they set big events in motion I need to quickly balance what happens and try to case out where those events end. Does this push the bad guy to try and confront them directly? Should one of their informants call in now with the information they asked them to find last session? Stuff like that where I know it'll adjust the course of their story. So I guess I'm mostly constrained by "what would happen" - what feels reasonable or believable for characters, some of whom the players don't even know about yet!