I have a story underwork for which I got myself stuck into a corner in a scene. It is not something I want to delete because it has meaning to the overall development of the story and for the characters.

I am going to be purposefully vague on some background details but I will be available to clarify any questions on the scene itself and leading up to and from it.

Fair warning: I touch on sensible subjects in this work, like sex work, violence, abandonment and social isolation.

The scene boils down to the following:

A couple is having a moment for themselves. A phone buzzes in the room until it goes to voicemail. A few moments later it starts buzzing again. The guy breaks a kiss and notes someone is calling her. She apologizes because she had meant to turn off her phone but forgot. They resume their moment but after a few minutes the phone buzzes again. They ignore it but the phone calls become insistent. The guy, again, breaks the moment and asks if she had something set up previously and if he should go, to which she reiterates it was on her for forgetting to turn off the phone and that he should stay. She turns the phone off, throws it onto the couch and leads him to the bedroom by the hand.

Already in the bedroom, they hear a loud knock on the front door. It's already late in the evening, well beyond the time to be doing visits. They first ignore it but as the knocking becomes louder and more insistent, the moment breaks. She tells him to stay where he is and goes to the front door.

He finds it strange she is taking so long and decides to go check. The room is far enough from the door that no dialogue can be understood but as he is walking through the house he picks up the tension in the exchange. The voices grow louder, he hears her shouting to the other part to get out and the door slams against a wall as he is walking in.

Another guy has forced his way into the house, is shouting at the girl while pointing at a shirt that was left forgotten on the back of the couch. The two men recognize each other immediatly and the intruder redirects his aggression towards the other man. The girl tries to calm things down but as the intrudes makes the gesture to push her to the side, the other man moves forward and throws him out the door with a brutal front kick and steps out in the same motion.

The wannabe intruder throws insults against the couple, first at the girl then the guy, and it evolves into a brawl, where he finds himself, unexpectedly, with the lower hand. The girl watches in shock as the two men fight. The commotion attracts attention for the surrounding houses, with people coming to the window to watch as the fight comes to an end, with the wannabe intruder on the ground, overpowered and badly beaten by his opponent.

Police sirens are heard in the distance and the two men stare at each other, knowing none of them can be caught there. The intruder staggers to his feet and makes his best to walk away, while the other man steps back inside, to have his clothes thrown at him and the door shown, as what happened is probably going to attract attention to the girl, something she has made her best efforts, for years, to avoid.

Distraut, he walks out and away.

There is a lot of dialogue in all of this, which is the part I'm finding myself stuck.

I want to convey in the dialogue between the couple that he is aware he may be in the way of something without making him sound possessive or pushy. At this point in the story, he already knows about that part of her life and how discreet and almost secretive she tries to make it. It is a fact and although he has been in her life for some time now, he considers himself a very lucky guest, nothing more.

The dialogue between the intruder and the girl is easy to write; it's down right abusive and linear. What is not as easy to write is the dialogue between the two men. I don't want to make him a white knight fighting for his damsel in distress. It's about setting present and previous matters between the two, with the abuse towards the girl acting as a rationale for the violence to break out.

For the third part, it about the girl throwing him out. The fight triggered in her memories from her past, events from which she has been running away, and something that man is unaware of. She is nearly in a panic as she shouts at him, throwing him out of her house, because she now feels she let her guard down and allowed someone to get too close and she is going to get hurt again. On his side, he does not understand and just offers a couple of tentative apologies before obeying her and leaving.

I'm usually very good at writting dialogue but this involves a depth of meaning I find myself constantly fudging.

Any advice is welcome.

Harbour is Scrappy Capy Distro's anarchist zine, published digitally for free since 2023. They accept a huge variety of submissions, from short stories to photos, from poems to art, in both English and German.

Consider sending some of your works!

Welcome to the 27th writing club update!

...and I just realized this writing club has been going for well over two years, mostly thanks to /u/grrgyle - wow, that's really cool! 💜 Where I live we've finally had a bunch of truly cooler down days, which I love for writing, and I hope you did too and had some fun moments this month! So I wonder, what have y'all been up to?

To quote from previous entries:

To anyone stumbling upon this post and wondering about the rules – there really aren’t any! This is a club for mostly the same regulars and semi-regulars, but visitors are encouraged to comment on writing, or writing adjacent, updates or share their own. The idea is to set a goal for yourself and try to achieve it by the next month’s update. :)

I hope you are the right community to bounce some ideas of.

Lately I pondered on the thought that solarpunk is missing a single book that represents the movement and the genre. I've seen people pointing to A Psalm for the Wild-Built and Always coming Home (Le Guin), but take fantasy for example:

Undoubtedly, LOTR is the single monolith everyone points to and reading LOTR will give you an (outdated) gist of what the genre is about. Its story takes place in a world which was created to facilitate as context for a constructed language.

Or take scifi. There are many works which are widely considered to be classic scifi. My example would be The Left of Darkness, a novel using a fictional setting to test an idea (What if gender was weird) and especially reflect on our current understanding of the idea when comparing our world to the fictional. I will argue that this is the core of scifi.

Now solarpunk. Did I miss a work that is the definition of solarpunk and generally considered to be a good example?

If not, what would be the process / method used to write the solarpunk book? Solarpunk is grass root, anti-authority, community and action. In my view, this does not combine well with the idea of a single author representing the genre, like our JRR Tolkien the grandfather of fantasy. Following this idea, I wondered if the classic solarpunk novel would not be written by a single person, but a group of people contributing to a shared story. Collaborative Fiction is the key word. This would enable collecting the perspectives of marginalized people from different places from the world to contribute. It would not seem right to me, that a single european/US guy writes the whole thing. Maybe it even would not be written in english?

So my second question: Do you know any collaborative fiction works associated with solarpunk? Or any big ones at all?

The Wikipedia page on Collaborative Fiction mentions one project I want to highlight: A Million Penguins. They set up the Mediawiki instance and allowed everybody to edit the manuscript just like Wikipedia. It kind of went wrong because of trolling people and a lack of a shared vision, But maybe this is something that could work given the right circumstances? Maybe a change request process would fit better, similar to how open source developers accept code from strangers with pull request.

Such a project would need some oversight of course, but a part of me believes that solarpunks are alike enough that we have a shared vision that we can distill into a single story, much like Wikipedia pages converge on the truth because people are more passionate to correcting things than to destroy them.

tl;dr: What do you think about the idea of a collaborative solarpunk novel as a classic of the genre?

Sorry, if this does not fit your community. I just thought some of you might have an opinion.

Dear /c/writing community,

I just wanted to let you know that we mods put in place a new no LLMs rule now:

No LLM advocacy. Due to the many ethical problems of current LLM technology, we neither allow LLM-written posts in this community nor do we think discussing the use of LLMs for writing texts in any positive manner is appropriate. Don’t feed people’s works into commercial LLM services either.

Since we're on a solarpunk instance, I assume most people here already found big LLM datacenters run at below cost and with high environmental damage to be too unsustainable. But I thought why not actually add a rule for it.

(I think it should go without saying that AI covers aren't really overly welcome either, but since this community is about writing that seemed like the most pressing concern to address.)

See you around,

Ellie

Welcome to the 26th writing club update!

I hope everyone has been having a pleasant late summer. The weather here has been a mix of rain and sunshine back and forth, in an almost 50/50 mix that I don't recall seeing for years. It's been great for the vegetables, anyway.

To quote from previous entries:

To anyone stumbling upon this post and wondering about the rules -- there really aren't any! This is a club for mostly the same regulars and semi-regulars, but visitors are encouraged to comment on writing, or writing adjacent, updates or share their own. The idea is to set a goal for yourself and try to achieve it by the next month's update. :)

I've been working on a new page for the wiki, gathering up examples of the kind of bespoke, solarpunk systems people rig up when they live offgrid, in places with unreliable grids, or when they just want to reduce their energy usage.

https://wiki.slrpnk.net/writing:high_context_living

It's far from being comprehensive or definitive on the subject, but it's got some useful information and I find that it's often worth it to set up these pages just to have somewhere to put new links and references as I learn about them!

If you have anything you'd like to add, either your own stories or links to blogs, forum posts, etc, please feel free to add them in the comments and I'll copy them over to the page!

I don't know how many poets we have in our community here but I wanted to extend an invitation from over on reddit - cromlygames is working on some kind of light hearted solarpunk poetry book and is looking for contributors! They're a mod over there and a dev on the Fully Automated TTRPG team and this isn't their first book project so I think anything they put together is going to be cool!

https://www.reddit.com/r/solarpunk/comments/1vf6qn3/i_want_to_compile_a_happycozyfunny_poetry/

It's an idea I can't shake. I love poetry, but I'm pretty miserable at the moment. I can't handle the angst of https://ypn.poetrysociety.org.uk/features/young-poets-on-climate-change-the-power-of-being-a-young-writer/

So, be the change you want.

I want to put together a set of light hearted poetry about places and characters (like Pam Ayres "who are you calling vermin"), but set in a recognisable solarpunk world. Poems that might be called 'Overheard at the library', 'Ballad of Bike Bridge', 'The Agrivoltichian's holiday', 'Lawnmower's reincarnation'. ect.

Examples of the tone I'm hoping for:

Poetry about people and situations. Funny Snapshots.

Pam Ayres: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYeVhBUhITI Allan Alhberg: https://childrens.poetryarchive.org/poem/talk-us-through-it-charlotte/

Grace Nichols: https://childrens.poetryarchive.org/poem/cat-rap/ Roger McGough https://childrens.poetryarchive.org/poem/funicular-railway/

Poetry about places and hopeful feelings: Matt Goodfellow: https://childrens.poetryarchive.org/poem/meet-at-the-horizon/

Andrew Fusek-Peters and Polly Peters: https://childrens.poetryarchive.org/poem/the-nighthawks-after-edward-hopper/

Laura Mucha: https://childrens.poetryarchive.org/poem/albatross/

Rough plan. Small paper book, 34 lines to a page. Submissions close end of Jan 2027. Send to cromlyngames@gmail.com sbj: 'solarpunk poetry book submission' Plan A is all typset and made available for download, local print on demand (as we have done for Fully Automated RPG). Plan B is using laTex to set out as a foldable, bindable zine, and personally doing a limited print run for participants (postage from uk is going to suck).

What I need:

0. share this to likely people, there's a world out there beyond reddit.

I should probably set a dedicated website or something for this. Never done that before. If you can help, please reply here :)

if submitting, somewhere between 3-9 English language poems, ideally 6 with varied topics. This is to get variety so many different people can be accepted. 2.1) Ideally no poem longer than 100 lines, be kind to your editor.

2.2) Poems rated PG at worst. I want to be able to give a copy of this to my 12 year old niece.

3. if submitting, include a very short blurb. This may or may not be your real name, I don't really care. PLEASE include explicit permission for me to share your email address with other editors (UK GDPR). 3.1) If you are interested/willing to workshop poems with other entrants, please state so. I'd like to be able to link some like-minded people up together.
4. if not submitting, but interested in getting a copy at the end, shoot me an email saying so.

Welcome to the 25th writing club update! 😊

I hope you've all found some nice cozy spots in the shade, to do some creative thinking or writing. Or perhaps some of you have been taking a break, there's nothing wrong with that either!

The usual info about how this writing club update works:

To anyone stumbling upon this post and wondering about the rules – there really aren’t any! This is a club for mostly the same regulars and semi-regulars, but visitors are encouraged to comment on writing updates or share their own. The main idea is to set a goal for yourself and try to achieve it by the next month’s update. :)

Feel free to comment and tell us how things are going for you, regarding writing, creative works, and everything related!

Welcome to the 24th writing club update! This one's a little late, apologies for that. But we're doing our best to not let you down even when things briefly get in the way 😊

We've had some blistering heat so I hope you all had some okay enough shelter or good AC. I'm on Europe where AC isn't so widespread yet, so I've been sweating quite a bit. But I've also done quite a bunch of writing, yay!

To quote grrgyle on how this writing club update works:

To anyone stumbling upon this post and wondering about the rules – there really aren’t any! This is a club for mostly the same regulars and semi-regulars, but visitors are encouraged to comment on writing updates or share their own. The main idea is to set a goal for yourself and try to achieve it by the next month’s update. :)

Feel free to comment and tell us how things are going for you, regarding writing, creative works, and everything related!

Here is a list of free ebooks from Peaceful Village Raw Vegan Healing Community.

They are also looking for vegan anarchist authors to promote on this page.

Welcome to the 23nd writing club update! The number twenty-three is one of those numbers that contains a clearly incrementing sequence, so always satisfying to type on a keyboard--you can kind of roll your fingers over the number keys: 23 23 123 1234 (that kind of thing).

Speaking of satisfying to type, I hope everyone has had at least two or three great writing experiences this month!

On to weather, Spring is really happening here finally, after a bit of an extended chilly period. So that's always fun.

To anyone stumbling upon this post and wondering about the rules -- there really aren't any! This is a club for mostly the same regulars and semi-regulars, but visitors are encouraged to comment on writing updates or share their own. The main idea is to set a goal for yourself and try to achieve it by the next month's update. :)

Tractor Beam’s “Water Issue” is looking for speculative stories exploring humanity’s relationship with water, land, food systems, and survival. Editors want anti-apocalyptic fiction centered on irrigation, farming, migration, sea-soil technologies, environmental adaptation, and the social impact of water scarcity or abundance. The publication welcomes hopeful, inventive, and deeply human stories about ecosystems and interconnected communities rather than traditional collapse narratives.

Submission Guidelines Is water the original technology? Have a soil and sea story to share? Submit to our Fall issue. There’s a Mandinka proverb: rice fields that share borders share the same waters. Neighbors share more than fences; they share seasons, soil, and whatever tempestuous, whorling thing runs between them—animal, vegetable, or otherwise.

For the sixth issue of Tractor Beam, we’re looking for stories about the role of water in soil, growth, land, and ecosystems large and small. We are specifically seeking anti-apocalyptic visions that explore the future of water in farming and food production, island ecologies, hybrid sea-soil technologies, the people who move water and the people water moves. Stories about drought, diaspora, and what gets carried downstream.

There’s a reason hunger symbolizes longing and thirst symbolizes need. No matter how rich the soil, a seed needs the catalyst of water to grow. Water is the original technology.

We’ve been calling this the water issue, but it’s as much the fluidity issue, the migration issue, the can’t-contain-the-flood issue, the can’t-survive-without-it issue. There are no borders that can contain water, and no borders that will contain the fallout of not having enough.

As anyone who’s irrigated anything knows, water goes wherever it wants to go.

Tractor Beam pays $1,000.00 for all accepted submissions. Submissions will be considered for publication online on our website and Substack, and in some cases, for one-off printed editions.

We prefer stories under 6,000 words and comics 12-16 panels.

Stories may also be considered for the Protopian Prize with contributor consent.

Submissions close June 30th.

This one is a little more editorial than some of the other pages, (which are closer to being lists of links) but it's a complicated topic which needs some introduction.

I think about this topic a lot, as someone who always has more projects going than he can finish, and because I really hate this (capitalist) idea that people are inherently lazy and won't work unless compelled to with the threat of poverty, starvation, homelessness etc.

The page outlines ways work might change (including problems with modern work and unnecessary work), new categories of work, and ways to sift solarpunk callings from modern day examples.

I hope it'll be useful to you - it's very much a work in progress (as all the wiki pages are) so feel free to send me any additions/modifications you'd like to see.

Welcome to the 22nd writing club update. Spoken aloud in English "twenty-two" or "two two" or "tutu" reminds us that anything can be made cutesie or twee, even a harsh number like 22. And shouldn't that give all some hope for a cuter future?

Things have been getting warmer here, but still unusually cool, which suits me just fine. It's lovely bike riding weather.

To any new eyes, this is a monthly writing club where we share progress on our writing related projects and general goings-ons. Everyone is free to participate either by commenting on others' work, or by sharing their own goals and/or achievements.

Welcome to the 21st writing club update. On pondering this number, I'm reminded that we are currently in the 21st century according to the Gregorian calendar, and that this will be the only century I'll really get to know. But there have been at least 20 other of these things (and I'm told perhaps even more), so that might give one pause / perspective.

My region has been unusually cold for March, which though it's unexpected, I've been trying to enjoy it. Let some of the last cold into my bones so I can bring up the memory when I'm too hot, later this summer.

So this is the monthlyish writing club update where regular participants are encouraged to share progress on their monthly goals and goings-ons. Anyone is welcome to chime in with their own happenings, or comments on each others happenings.

The simple advice "Just write." is dished out plentifully in writing discussion boards (especially those frequented by many aspiring writers).

Although it can be hard to hear for a beginner, I believe it's worth internalizing. It is relatively easy to come up with excuses for not writing. What's hard is writing despite it all. Being able to do so is invaluable.

What are your thoughts on this mantra? Criticisms? Perspectives? Stories? I'd like to know.

Hey folks, just wanted to give you a quick update. I've been making some updates to assorted pages in the writing wiki, mostly just adding more links/concepts.

The big change change is that I finally got enough of a page on remediating contaminants in the environment using plants, fungi, and microorganisms put together that it feels worthwhile to add it to the site. It's still very much a work in progress, but I think there's enough there to introduce the concept and provide a place to add stuff to as we go. One of the real, unexpected joys of this project for me has been having a place to save links and concepts as I come across them, rather than having to track them down later when I need them.

So if that sounds interesting to you, feel free to click through and check it out. And if you want to add corrections/additions, please let me know!

Welcome to the 20th writing club update! I can't let the twentieth such club pass without giving props to that great generative tool to so many impromptu stories: the d20 die. How many stories, written or oral, have started from a group of friends gathering to tell a collaborative story--literally rolling with what chance gives them...

Speaking about rolling with what life gives you, some astute members and visitors (welcome!) with functioning calendars may notice that it is actually March, but I maintain real time does not resume until Sunday has finished. So in this liminal place of the week-end-almost, let us take stock of the year so far, and our hopes the coming months.

What happens between you sitting down in front of the computer and you beginning to add words to your work?
I suppose a part of my difficulty is tied to lack of motivation, but a big part of it is not really knowing what to do next after I've opened up my text again.

Welcome to the 19th writing club update, and first update of the new year! Continuing with my numerical tie-ins that no one asked for and which I refuse to give up, XIX is the number of The Sun card in the tarot deck. It's currently a blistering winter here, so a kiss of sunshine sounds lovely.

Anyway, according to Wikipedia, this card is "often seen as a sign of achievement and authentic self-expression" which sounds great for writing, so whether you put any truck in tarot, you could do worse than to head into the rest of the year with that thought.

I hope you've all had a brilliant year so far, but even if you haven't (maybe especially so) I want to hear from you. That goes for any passersby: feel free to chime in with your thoughts or writerly projects.