✍️ 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.
Click here to visit our solarpunk writing resource wiki!
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I've been making good progress on the campaign - I did a review of the first five sections (two more to go) and received a ton of help from a couple new folks who started reading and commenting and copyediting those sections. They caught a ton of stuff! I'm so glad they helped because I would almost certainly have sent it out the door with some of those problems.
I also wrote up a new section on Beaver Dam Analogs.
I also got a copy of the groundwater contaniminant map Andrew was making and made the tweaks I wanted to get a finished version. We're both quite pleased with how it turned out.
Even one of these would make for an impressive month! And as always, rooted in real and practical education, as I've come to see as characteristic of your creative projects. :)
Thanks! The education bit is really important to me! I want this thing to teach about the region but also a lot about the kind of work we'll need to do to fix all the types of damage our society has caused.
My next step is a map the players might receive if they talk to the right person, intended to show the flow of groundwater.
It's kinda hard to parse but it's based on some real maps showing this kind of thing. Ideally that kinda turns the challenge of figuring out a science/industry specific convention as a layperson into a game puzzle. My favorite game mechanics are stuff like this, sort of funhouse mirror versions of real life tools and processes, where you're getting something useful even if you don't know it.
Andrew made this one through some arcane process I don't really understand: he "wrote 27,004 angles and 27,004 magnitudes in two separate csv files one-by-one and had Python plot them with matplotlib." I'm just going to use GIMP to select and rotate a few to match a few changes we made.