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grrgyle @slrpnk.net

Writing Club - July 2025

Hello hello, and welcome to our now 13th (XIIIth) writing club update. My dictionary explains that the meaning of "thirteen" is:

One more than twelve.

Truly words to live by. Shuffling around my books for a more inspirational bit of numerology, I find the chapter in Mervyn Peake's "Titus Groan" book, wherein we're introduced to the outsider "Keda" who is to be a wet-nurse for the titular prince of Gormenghast. I'm not sure how that relates to what we're doing here, but it's a pretty weird, and cool, book.

Speaking of weird and cool...!

As always, all are extremely welcome to participate in the writing club, regardless of whether they're in the list above.

44 comments
  • I've been making slow but steady progress on the campaign, editing sections and jotting down text for future sections of the Choose Your Own Adventure book version. I also photobashee a couple of bits of artwork for it.

    Watching people read old Fighting Fantasy games has helped me identify some of what I want and don't want in the experience of reading the one I'm trying to plan:

    It'll need lots of artwork - people love the weird old fantasy art, and though I probably can't swing anything quite so unhinged, my line art photobashes are fairly close in style.

    I want to avoid dice rolling or other random chance stuff like lookup tables. It's tempting to include given the source but they break the flow too much and people start skipping them if the bad result is just failure with no forward path. The most I'll include is an inventory.

    Every choice needs to go somewhere interesting, even if that means fewer total branches. I don't like the "one true path" school of design where you just end up backtracking. Every branch should be valid and have different content in it so it's worth rereading. So far, the hard part is choosing what stuff goes in what branch, since I already have an open world with plenty of content to divide up.

    I also drafted a background for the campaign version. Working on foreground now.

    • I agree that the "one true path" feels like it removes player agency. Thinking about tabletop games, and even some video games (like Disco Elysium), one of the most entertaining things is finding yourself in a condition of "failure" then working your way out of it.

      Sounds really cool - thanks for the update!

  • FINALLY some sun popped out, so I did my best to enjoy it. I still wrote plenty, and by following my usual template:

    Done this month:

    • Kanteletar's first section is almost done (17k words, draft, 🇮🇹)
    • Translated a "quick fic" (1k words from a random prompt) that didn't quite make the cut for our collective's magazine
    • Wrote a quick fic on an orbital city in year ~2350 of my setting
    • Wrote a small "analysis" of state-of-the-art solarpunk hieroglyphs (can share/explain upon request)

    To be done in August:

    • Translate Kanteletar's first section to English
    • Sketch that Meteorina story (setting is post-Campi-Flegrei detonation, where rebuilding communities ask for help to whale communities in the Tyrrhenian Sea)
    • I'm not editing that fantasy until the editor(s) contact me with comments xD

    I'm starting fulltime courses in September, so August is the last month of unintentional vacation I got. Will try to make the best out of it.

  • For my goal, I said I wanted to write another blog article for my realname website. So while I didn't do that... I did manage to scratch out a half dozen or so rough drafts 🙈 I've been struck by the curse of creative restlessness haha, and so I find myself overflowing with ideas, starting little projects, jotting down many outlines; but ultimately finishing nothing.

    In a way, I'm building up my own rough version of a story seed library. It'll be fun to pick over them and see what's worth cultivating later, when I'm a little less restless.

  • I have just today started on a scientific book project I've been wanting to write for some time. It is a very long term project, and my main goals are 1) to have fun researching and writing and 2) document my research for my own enjoyment down the line. If this becomes a coherent work eventually, I will aim to release it under some CC-license, although this is not my main goal.

    It's off to an enjoyable start at least :)

    • This sounds really interesting! What branch of science, if I may ask?

      Also keep us posted, I'm down for betareading if you ever need!

    • That's so cool and I love how you describe it as an enjoyable activity, rather than like a chore or obligation, or I don't know, like a duty. It kind of flips the script in my head about how I think of science writing.

      I'd be really curious to hear more about this project, if you ever feel like going into detail. Also, this is more the gearhead / process obsessive in me speaking, but I'm interested if you're using any kind of special organizational tools or "knowledge base" in your writing.

      • Gone are the days when I had to do science writing as part of my job, so this is entirely a pet project, and I avoid committing to releasing anything to avoid it becoming another deadline in my life. If I lose the motivation to work on it, I will take a hiatus and get back to it if and when I am ready. There are enough things in my life that are not like this, so why add to that list?

        The project is essentially to write up a coherent picture of the observable, physical world (from where I am sitting and looking out the window) and their associated physical processes. So essentially everything from the fusion reactions of the Sun, to the scattering of light in the atmosphere, to the colors of things, weather phenomena such as rain, fog, lighting, the sounds moving through air and through media, the relative movements of Earth, the Moon, the Sun and the stars etc. I have a PhD in a natural science discipline, and have touched upon most of this in my studies, but have 1) forgotten a lot of it, 2) have some big holes of topics I never learnt (fluid dynamics being one of them, optics being another) and 3) have probably a bunch of misconceptions originating from a misunderstanding at the time I originally learnt it.

        So it is a quest to relearn and document this stuff in a way that is for my enjoyment and not for passing an exam or getting a paper published.

        Also, this is more the gearhead / process obsessive in me speaking, but I’m interested if you’re using any kind of special organizational tools or “knowledge base” in your writing.

        I write in LaTeX, keep my references in Zotero and will use Obsidian for notetaking during research prior to writing it up.

  • In part thanks to a certain test reader (can I say who it is?) my disabled mage series has gotten a few small but substantial plot fixes since I've had a good reason to tweak it more.

    My primary focus has been drama scenes, those where the dialogue revolved a little too purely around the protagonist at the cost of either the scene not feeling relevant enough to the main plot or like the others were revolving a little too much around the protagonist. I injected fun tangents, side conversations, and interesting bits that hint more toward the main plot to break things up. This also helps the pacing and makes these scenes feel less universally depressing.

    Other than that, I've still been mostly focused on tech work, and might be for another 1-2 months. But I remain confident I'll get back into more intense writing work moderately soon, in a few weeks.

    • That's awesome!! I'm glad you've had a reason to do some editing (I dread editing large pieces of text 👹), and I can say as one of your newer test readers that it's so cool seeing a series in its earlier form, while it's still taking shape. It makes me wonder what some of the old books I've loved looked like before they were all polished and edited and in their final drafts.

      Good luck on your tech work also. I too am spending more and more of my time on computer stuff generally.

    • God bless sensitivity readers!

      • It wasn't one in this case, I definitely could use some more. The fixes were mostly pacing related!

44 comments