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? ;))

  • grrgyle@slrpnk.netOPMEnglish
    2·
    14 days ago

    Thank you for your feedback! This already feels like a better place to be writing from, so I’m hopeful I can use this new approach to get, yeah, a solid foundation for the characters/world.

    While being mindful not to get too trapped in my own infinitely entertaining worldbuilding reverie (not sure how else to put it, but I suspect this is common enough).

    Also, having finished reading Dune this year, I agree with your sentiment about deserts! Haha give me moisture, give me teeming verdant buzzing squawking lifeforce, rofl

    • hazeebabee@slrpnk.netEnglish
      2·
      14 days ago

      Getting stuck in the world building is a classic problem, but not a horribly bad one. I think it can make the process last longer, but once a story starts to form within it I think all that backdrop in the writers mind really adds to the story. World building icons like Tolkien show how powerful that can be.

      I think the hard part is not getting lost in the world building & finding characters and interesting plot points within it. Sometimes it’s just so fun to create a world it’s hard to move on to the writing :p

      And nothing can help you get over desert settings like finishing the dune series hahahahaha great books, but they can be as long and dry as the setting in some parts