Welcome to the inaugural writing club update! This is a brand new writing club, first proposed here. I have some ideas about what I want from this club, but where we go from here is open ended.

So feel free to start new posts or spinoffs in between my monthly posts, as long as they jive with the rules in our gracious host community’s sidebar, you have my full support. :)

On to the whole point of this club! The following brave things set to text concrete goals for themselves (linked beside their names, just below). If you’d like to join their number, simply say so in the comments, along with your goal for this month. Okay, here are the stars of our show: 👏👏👏👏

Participants

You don’t have to share any of the actual material you’ve worked on unless you want to (you could even use our local Etherpad to share writing stuff - for example).

Here are some questions to start you off. I’m genuinely interested in your answers, but don’t feel you need to follow my script. This is just a prompt:

  • How do you think you did on your goal(s)?
  • What would you like to accomplish for our next check-in in August?
  • Is there a part of your project that you’d especially like feedback on?
  • Is there anything about this writing club you’d like us to do differently?

No stress if you didn’t accomplish everything you set out to (I fell short and I’m still here hehe). I would love to hear your updates no matter how things went!

I’ll share my own progress in a comment below. What I’m hoping from this step is that we treat this as part check-in, and part conversation. This is your chance to really dig into each others’ projects (and if someone has done so for you, maybe it would be nice to return the favour and take an interest in their own project? ;))

  • grrgyleOPMEnglish
    2·
    4 days ago

    You mentioned art in your last comment too, and from creeping your posts I see that you’ve got some art chops! Are the art assets a big part of your project, or are they more there to illustrate the writing? I know a lot of writing begins with images and other aesthetic media (like in my case, with maps).

    I’m also wondering if you have a kind of “moral” that you want your players to come away with. Even in interactive projects, I usually have some values or concepts I’m trying to get across to the player. Sometimes it’s my secret purpose, and other times it’s pretty on the nose hehe.

    • JacobCoffinWritesEnglish
      3·
      4 days ago

      This project has actually been a bit of an extension of my Postcards from a Solarpunk Future project! Building out all the places and options for the players to explore has allowed me to write in way more worldbuilding than I could get away with in a normal fiction project (though the players won’t see all of it). Similar to the postcards where each is just a picture and little worldbuilding essay, no plot. It’s also let me focus on aspects of solarpunk that I realized really interests me while working on the postcards. Stuff like reuse, rewilding, deconstruction, and generally what rural areas might look like in a solarpunk world, especially current-day bedroom communities.

      As for the art, I’d been running out of ideas I was excited about for the postcard series, but since starting in on this, writing all these new locations, I’ve found a bunch of new scenes I’m really excited to do the art for.

      I wouldn’t say it’s critical to the campaign exactly, but the scenes and maps will be something the GM can put up on screen on Roll20 to set the tone and feel, or to help the players picture their surroundings. Character portraits might help them remember who’s who.

      As for a moral, I’ve definitely got things I want to explore: the motives for and consequences of a sort of negative peace, the shifting value of things like industrial waste based on use (and generally the very rare win-win where a waste product from one process becomes a useful input in another), the priorities of society and how it might look when one has very different goals than profits. Generally I want to explore what very rural places like my hometowns might look like when society has moved away from cars. And to generally tout values like thrift and reuse. But I’m not sure if I have a specific moral in mind.