✍️ 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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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.
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!