That's high praise indeed! I'll have to check it out.

I would say so, even if it's hard to say anything bad about The Thing. With Good Boy, every scene with the dog you feel you can tell what the dog's thinking, and it's all down to cinematography tricks more than anything. They didn't train the dog to do anything in particular, it's all naturalistic behaviour.

Better than Jed the Wolfdog in The Thing? The only dog actor I've ever seen in a part that immediately made me say "I don't trust that dog."

NaNoWADMo exists?? Ahaha love it ❤️

In that case I would just focus the scene around her feelings. Mirror the men's actions with what happened in her past. As of she is watching a recreation of her trauma. Focus on how she is physically feeling it. Trembling or tight chest ect and finish.

If it's not about the men or really her relationship with the situation then what is being said isn't important. Don't five it too much weight.

The man the woman is with by the start of the scene, at this point in the story, has become part confidant and part lover for her. She found in him a maturity and confidence the men she usually sees and host to lack. From his side, when they met, he wasn't available nor looking for a connection, which was what made him alluring to her. They bond out of a shared sense of hardship and become safe harbours for each other.

That sense of security, for her, vanishes when the fight breaks out. She has a past of abusive and controlling figures in her life. The man had, without trying and without knowing, started to break that stigma in her. Seeing him lash out, in a way she has never witnessed in him before, brings the past trauma back to boil again. Her reaction is just instinctive and defensive.

There is lot of missing background for the man and the intruder but here, yes, it is the woman who is pivotal for the scene. He goes away to mull over what happened and how he also feels he lost something he hadn't realized he had. The intruder is more closely connected to him but is a minor character and fills an antagonist role that is both broken and exacerbated after this scene. Him showing at her door was just the sum of bad timing, bad luck and bad judgement.

If you can find the core emotion each character is playing with and where you want the characters to land emotionally at the end of the scene it should write itself.

I'd do this by asking why 7 times for each character. Why did you break in, because X. Why x? because Y Why Y? Etc

This way you know where their struggle is rooted.

Sounds like the scene is mostly about the woman dispite the men fighting.

What is she dealing with and how do you want that to be resolved or deepened by the end of the scene?

Sometimes you borrow a page from cinematography. Instead of saying everything a character is thinking and feeling, you can instead show what he's looking at. There's a horror film called Good Boy that has the most expressive and thoughtful dog-acting performance I've ever seen, and all we see is what the dog is looking at in various contexts. Your guy could glance at a visual cue and just say "Oh," and with a carefully constructed context the reader will get everything going on in their head in that moment. Especially if you've laid the groundwork previously for teaching the reader how they think.

Haha yes, one of the best feelings in the world!

Thank you! It's been almost three years and I'm so excited it's finished! I'm just starting to really internalize that I can just work on whatever I want now.

Yooooo!!! Congratulations!

Thanks for the lovely intro :D it is pretty neat that the writing club has been going on for so long. It's been cool to see people coming and going and returning after breaks etc, and to see the arcs of some really impressive creative journeys as well! And of course I'm very thankful for the motivation this monthly post has given me to stay in the game, even when I wasn't feeling creative.

For my part, since my obsession is currently leading in the direction of working within the constraints of the Doom engine, I said I would investigate using dialogue systems that more advanced sourceports of the Doom engine can make use of -- and I did! It's pretty cool to get to talk to the monsters rather than fighting them for a change.

I haven't gone into very much detail with it. Still very much just exploring what's possible as I read over the specification. But that's more than I would have done if I hadn't set the goal last month, so once again it seems the writing club works!

Continuing my theme of perverting the honourable craft of writing by mixing it with Doom I've signed on to NaNoWADMo 2026 (a Doom mapping challenge akin to NaNoWriMo), so I think my creative time in October will be mostly occupied with that. But the following month I'd like to start on an actual authored experience rather than just some conversation scripting tests.

How exciting!! 🎉 Having a smaller town be the setting feels very Stranger Things Season 1 esque, I love it!

Well the big news for me is that we finally launched Buried Treasure! I'm so excited to finally have it out the door and I'm told it's been downloaded almost 200 times so far!

We've started working on a new game? Expansion? In the Fully Automated setting, set earlier in the timeline during the chaotic decades of the Global Climate Wars, subsequent crumbles and reconstruction and eventual societal realignment. The idea is basically to make a cyberpunk/solarpunk TTRPG with more of a revolutionary bent, showing little glimpses of how people worked to make things better and eventually got to the near-utopia of the normal FA! setting. They're also working on the space expansion but I'm not really hugely active in that yet.

I'm working on a bookbinding project helping my SO prepare bookbinding versions of one of their story collections so they can provide a free bind-it-yourself option. So far I've finished versions in a serifed font and in the Brail Institute's Atkinson hyperlegible font, printed, folded, stitched, and glued both. We just need to finalize the cover files and print them (we're doing cardstock this time).

I'm pretty focused on that but I'm also getting back into the gamebook and I plan to draft some blog posts about bits of the Buried Treasure worldbuilding and writing process. I'd also like to work on some new solarpunk postcard photobashes!

Part of the issue is that unlike Cyberpunk which had Neuromancer and other early books as the foundations, creating a definition, Solarpunk and even Lunarpunk started on Tumblr as a collaborative concept, and became a collaborative genre over years. If you ask any three people what Solarpunk is to them, they'll differ.

I would say something collaborative would be the ideal; however, I am unsure how best you'd write it.

I'm not going to act like an expert on this, because I litterally have zero experience with collaborative fiction. But I think I would take inspiration from theatre and movie production. On the other side, I think it would be even harder considering it's over internet. I think such a project at least would be heavily reliant on good video meetings.

Sharing research and world building is a great start to envision a shared hopeful future. I guess all that is left is to collaboratively write a story in this setting, which is basically done by playing the game right? After some iterations and trying a few campaigns, I imagine one would get a good feeling about what kind of plot works and what characters are fun. So maybe some playthroughs can become the basis for short stories or novels, a way to share the experience of the players.

I believe the Book of Malazan started as a tabletop if I'm not mistaken.

This sound like a cool project! Keep it up!

You are right. Without any guide rails and moderation, such a project will most likely fail. But how is the vision of the whole work established? It can't be the conductor telling people what the vision is, because in that case it would be easier if the conductor wrote the novel along. Maybe the focus of the work could be established by something like the snowlake method by Randy Ingermanson? In the first phase, people come together to create the core of the novel, in the next, more details of the plot are determined. In every phase everybody can contribute, but a latter phase may not change what an earlier phase said the novel is about.

This would enable a much richer experience just like an orchestra with different instruments and voices.

Solarpunk, historias ecológicas e fantásticas em um mundo sustentável

This sound very interesting! It in fact an anthology with nine authors. And there is an english translation!

Fully Automated Solarpunk RPG

I mean, it definitely is collaborative. I think part of me wonders if such a thing would work as a written format.

Orion’s Arm

I'll look into it. A collaborative solarpunk novel would definitely need world building. Thanks for your ideas!

The New Wilderness by Diane Cook

added to my TBR. Thanks!

The Mongoliad

Very interesting. It seems to be a reoccurring theme that all these project took place between 2005 and 2015

I think if many people should write collaboratively, I think there needs to be a conductor. just like in playing in an orchestra. If everybody do their own thing without guiding, it is doomed to become a salad. A vision has to be established. That is not to say that the conductor is above everyone. If the conductor is doing tins part well, tin makes sure that everybody can meaningfully put their energy into the project.

A good conductor will make clear how you can participate, but will also be strict when tin judges that a focus may be destructive for the totality of the work.

Regarding the first question—whether there is a book considered to be the origin of solarpunk—I’ve heard that one of the earliest solarpunk books was "Solarpunk, historias ecológicas e fantásticas em um mundo sustentável", a book written by several authors, if I’m not mistaken.

As for the second question, I don't know of any specific collaborative solarpunk projects, but I do know of a solarpunk tabletop role-playing game called "Fully Automated Solarpunk RPG" where players collaboratively build a story. I'm also familiar with "Orion's Arm," which is a cooperative worldbuilding project, although it isn't solarpunk. https://fullyautomatedrpg.com/ https://www.orionsarm.com/

Not sure if people would consider The New Wilderness by Diane Cook as being Solarpunk, but it's sort of the closest I can think of.

On the topic of collaborative books, The Mongoliad is one I highly recommend. It's a trilogy written collaboratively by Greg Bear, Neal Stephenson, Erik Bear, Joseph Brassey, Nicole Galland, Cooper Moo, and Mark Teppo. Very cool historical fiction.

I'm curious if Fully Automated might sort of qualify for the collaborative fiction bit - the manual and initial lore was written by a small group of devs, GMs, and players with all three groups picking up members as it went on. I joined as a spectator, to have a place to talk worldbuilding, then started making lore suggestions that got incorporated until they eventually made me a dev. We added one more the same way in the last year.

Much of the original worldbuilding was focused around the southern California area, but so far pretty much every GM who's joined and ran a game just grabbed the parts of the setting they liked and wrote the solarpunk future version of wherever they live. (I certainly did when I wrote my campaign!) I think the narrow focus is a strength of the original manual - it makes zero effort to dictate how most of the world looks and invites the reader to write it in.

There's no enforced cannon, the dev team really doesn't want that kind of control, preferring to provide lots of options and modules people can pull from.

The devs work to support new GMs and writers who want to pick the world up and make their own area, including giving them their own channels in the discord. The long term goal is to publish campaigns, adventure modules, even loose factions, geographic areas, bits of lore, gameplay mechanics etc when people contribute them. In this way we're trying to cede control of the thing basically right from the start.

So far there's only a couple bits of prose fiction in the works, and one of them is the gamebook I'm working on, but I don't see any reason we couldn't do more of it or that the community wouldn't be thrilled to have it.

Also it's not collaborative fiction, but we do have a place to share solarpunk worldbuilding research: https://wiki.slrpnk.net/writing:start

I don't know any collaborative solarpunk works (other than this server itself) but you are raising really important points, and I love the idea of collaborative fiction. Btw slrpnk has a wiki, so maybe if nothing exists yet we just start it?