I've never been in a writing club but I'm interested in trying to get one going. Would anyone else be interested in giving it a go? I don't have to lead it, but will do so if no one else wants to.
What I'm picturing:
Monthly check-in cadence
Everyone sets a personal goal, and then talks about how they did the previous month
No pressure other than what you want to take on to motivate you
Maybe some "assignments" in the vein of a creative writing class
I volunteer to send members reminder DMs to motivate them :)
I was thinking I'd just start with this post - come up with a goal for myself to accomplish by end of June, and then check back sometime in the first week of July. If that sounds interesting to you, feel free to join in and comment with your goal, and any details you want to add.
PS Also very open to writing club discussion meta. I'm new to this so wide open to suggestios, comments, critique, etc.
Almost a year ago I started trying to write solarpunk fiction and got daunted by the amount of research I needed. Writing scifi had always meant extrapolating current trends and pointing out problems. To do solarpunk I had to be able to offer solutions and that meant lots and lots of reading to learn from the folks who've been talking about and trying out alternative ways of doing things (from agriculture to infrastructure to anarchy) and thinking through their answers.
For awhile I did a worldbuilding art/essay project focusing on very small glimpses of a solarpunk future, trying to emphasize things like creative reuse, industry, and seasons/weather that didn't show up much in solarpunk visual art. The narrow focus helped a lot.
I think I'm finally comfortable trying to write something, though instead of a short story I'm working on a campaign for the solarpunk TTRPG Fully Automated, where the players are on a treasure hunt for tons of industrial waste which were illegally dumped sixty years before. The waste is valuable because it's a useful input in the production of geopolymers, and the stakes are high as the largely-abandoned rural town they're searching is in the process of being deconstructed and rewilded, so nobody else is likely to notice it in the future.
I've had a lot of fun building a wide swath of locations, communities, and means of travel for the players to possibly explore, along with the rough outline of the decades-old conspiracy and coverup murder.
My goal is to build out the characters, build out the past/conspiracy, and to start seeding people and locations in the present with clues for that mystery.