Hi folks, and welcome to the 10th writing club update. That’s right, it’s the big “One-Oh” - we’re in the double digits now.
I hope you are all safe and as well as can be, and able to find some time for creativity/writing. The weather here has been a hodgepodge of warm to surprisingly brisk; although seems to be angling towards warmer now. It will be nice to see the pollinators waking up and doing their rounds soon. Life doing its thing and all that.
Onward to our writers! By my count we’ve got:
Here is a link to last month’s post if you’d like to refresh your memory, or just take a little trip down memory late.
Sorry I’m late! I think I’ve made pretty good progress so far on the campaign - I’ve been spending most of my writing time on organizing the document, moving sections around, and getting the layout right. I’ve had some good suggestions on section additions from Andrew Gross, such as creating an Adversaries and Escalations subsection for each major part of the campaign. These consolidates information on the people who will (or might) try to interfere with the players’ investigation. Previously that information was sort of scattered across locations, character profiles, and assorted scenes. Getting it all in one place for each potential adversary and making their motives clear has felt good.
I’ve also continued running the second playthrough, and have had a great time making it a more cloak-and-dagger campaign for this investigator-heavy group of players. They uncovered the cold case murder mystery at the heart of the conspiracy to stop them much earlier than the first group, and there’s been some tense scenes even though I’ve been striving to avoiding any outright combat because I don’t think it fits this group.
This has been really helpful in planning and describing other ways the campaign can go, and TBH proving that the open world sandbox design is fairly solid! My goal was to make sure there was enough information, locations, and opportunities that you could spin a decent adventure out of it no matter how the players decided to pursue their investigation, and it feels like we’re pretty close to that! In terms of writing all this info into the guidebook, I’m trying to hit a balance between making the information available and not driving myself insane trying to write a choose-your-own adventure book. I’m recognizing that once they get to the main location, basically all bets are off and I’m making sure that any overarching plot and adversary tactics read as branching suggestions from that point forward.
I’ve also been working on adding additional Non Player Character profiles though there’s still a handfull left to make.
I’m glad the second campaign is going well and providing additional insight :)
I’m trying to hit a balance between making the information available and not driving myself insane trying to write a choose-your-own adventure book.
That’s a struggle in any creative context. What to fill in with detail, and what to leave open for the player(s) to fill with their (potentially wrong) intuitions… I’m reminded (often, lol) of “The Lens of Imagination” from Jesse Schell’s The Book of [game design] Lenses. Basically it states, what do the the players need to understand to actually play the game, and what should you leave up to them to fill in? Kind of separating areas into hi-def and lo-def. Too much definition can even stifle imagination, rather than inspire it!
Bit of a topsy-turvy month for me. What I’ve done:
- Wrote (and sent) the short story for the solarpunk contest
- Sent three short stories to the anarchist zine that was mentioned around here
- Joined the Solarpunk Game Jam as a writer; I’ll be tasked with writing characters and dialogues for a videogame prototype
What I will try to do in May:
- Finish the goddamn Words of Tomorrow revision… 🥲
- Revise the lore and structure for Kanteletar, so I can start writing it this summer
…and that’s it, basically. Now onto checking out what you all have done while I was slumping! 😂
- Wrote (and sent) the short story for the solarpunk contest
Nice!
- Sent three short stories to the anarchist zine that was mentioned around here
Nice!! I remember that post. I hope to see your work pop up in the rss feed. :)
- Joined the Solarpunk Game Jam as a writer; I’ll be tasked with writing characters and dialogues for a videogame prototype
Nice!!! I’d love to play the game if you want to share a link when it’s completed. Also, I didn’t even know there was a solarpunk game jam on (is this the one you joined?). I’ll definitely be watching it. I love these things.
That’s a very productive month; like @hazeebabee@slrpnk.net already said, if that’s slumping for you then I can hardly imagine what a truly “productive” month looks like for you haha. 😲
I would call that a pretty productive month :) if that’s your slump I’m excited to hear about what all you can accomplish once you’re on a roll lol
Good luck with your submissions, hopefully you get some good news this month!
It’s cool to see so many people back! Seeing you all productive is amazing.
I’ve briefly jumped between series since my post last month, and I reworked about short of two books worth of an older dormant series with really extensive changes back to front. But I’ve since set it aside again. It was a nice breather from my main fantasy series, but both series lack an ending and currently the fantasy series simply has more concrete actionable ideas on how I’ll wrap it up.
Currently I’m doing some more revision work however. The fantasy series with the disabled protagonist has quite some dark parts, and some of them are a little overbearing at times. Less so deaths and destruction, but longer ongoing illness and fights. I’m trying to make sure there’s always enough of the main plot mystery arc and more lighthearted topics going on to make it easier to swallow.
But I’ve also had some tech work on the side, so I’ve been a bit distracted by that. In any case, I’m still hoping to wrap up the fantasy series before 2025 ends, but we’ll see.
Endings can be so tricky to get right. Any ideas on why this one has been eluding you? I know for me it can take a while before the story fully clicks and I know what I want the arc to be.
It’s mostly because I’m a pretty extreme discovery writer. (Not that I recommend it, but it’s how I best keep myself going.) Hence I kind of tried to write a more definite ending and failed, twice, which is why there is now a third book. This time I’m forcing myself to do at least the minimum of essential planning about the overall theme and message to actually wrap it up in a manner that will hopefully be satisfying and meaningful.
Volunteering for some brainstorming if you need to get the ending right! I’ve done it many times for people in our (Italian) writing group 😁
That makes alot of sense. I also kind of discover endings as I go. Best of luck discovering the right ending, i know how hard it can be :)
I have found I just have too many arcs to wrap up and too many thematic things to add in to purely “discover” it to make a satisfying ending to a series. At least so far I haven’t managed to.
Makes sense, I’ve found with bigger and more complex stories writing out a condensed outline of what I’ve already written can help click things into place. It helps me see the structure more since I tend to get lost in the details. Again best of luck, endings are so important and so challenging!
I love how you keep so many platters spinning. It seems like a great way to keep up forward progression, even when one project slows down a bit.
It’s great that your story has a disabled protagonist, and sounds like you’re not trying to sugarcoat it. Would this fantasy series be the dystopian one you mentioned? That is also cozy?? (I think I can picture it, but all these descriptions sound wildly unique when put together.)
Do you find the endings usually come together later for you? I find that really curious, because endings are usually one of the parts that come to me earliest. Very often before the middle and beginning even.
That’s the one. The protagonist is in a wheelchair from some later point on, so there’s definitely not meant to be any sugarcoating.
My usual approach is to think about the ending once the draft is about 80% done, in terms of page count. That works well for me if it’s not the definite ending for the entire series.
I’m back after missing last month. I was pretty overwhelmed with work and gutting my laundry room after I found a old leak (so much mold, yuck).
I have still been writing. Mostly notes and reviews of books I’ve read. I did get inspired after reading stepford wives to do kind of a modern interpretation of it. One thing that stuck out to me is how bored all the men were with their robot wives & how much they had isolated themselves out of their inability to engage with their families on a human level. I think there’s a deep sadness to the book that is often overlooked because of horror elements.
I wrote a short story about a future where most people are plugged into a sim & have robotic partners. The MC is a guy who wakes up one day to find he’s bored with having a partner and life he completely controls. It then follows him as he tried and fails to have a romance with a real woman, but learns the value of human relationships and a world that we cannot control.
I’ll see if I can get it typed up and edited to share, I think it’s a fun little thought experiment. Though it does get pretty dark in the middle.
Happy spring to everyone, i look forward to seeing what people have done :)
I wrote a short story about a future where most people are plugged into a sim & have robotic partners …
That sounds really cool! Definitely a great hook. I imagine this is the modern interpretation inspired by The Stepford Wives you were just referring to? I would love to read that if you do share it. It sounds like an interesting angle to take on the experience of loneliness.
Yes! It is an interpritation/response to the stepford wives. Kind of extrapolated it to an extreme and definetly influenced by more modern concepts like virtual reality. Kind of asking what would happen if that tech/world continued to the present day.
I’ll definetly keep working on it. Knowing there’s someone who might give it a read definetly helps with the motivation/ inspiration :)
I’d also be interested in reading that!
Last month I set the goal to finish a first draft of my short story, and while I did make some headway on that, I did not actually, like, finish it. So my goal for this month will be to finish that. Or failing that, at least to try!
I’ve been looking for a full time job for what feels like forever, and it’s coming to a head now, so it’s hard to find the drive to focus on writing when I could be studying something that will help me land a paying job. Related to that I’ve somewhat fallen out of my habit of writing short “morning pages” but I’m sure I’ll get back into it eventually. Maybe even today!
Luckily the kind of writing I do doesn’t require much time investment. Even 10 or 30 minutes a day could be a decent enough contribution to the short story I’m currently at.
Solidarity, unemployed sibling! The day will come where our struggle will be rewarded 🙏
I regularly take breaks from writing for a month or two. Life just happens, sometimes it can’t be helped.
I think I already intuited that, but hearing it from someone else actually does help legitimise the feeling. Thanks for your comment!
It’s totally understandable that real world job searching has been getting in the way of focusing on writing – we live in a capitalist society and need money to survive :(
I’m glad you’ve been able to still get some writing done & hope this spring brings you some luck on the job front :)
