Writing Club - May 2026
17d 6h ago by slrpnk.net/u/grrgyle in writing@slrpnk.net
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. :)
My obsession with making Doom maps has blossomed into a full hyperfocus, so I've been riding that muse for most of my creative exertion. I've no idea when the obsession will wane, but actually there have been some increasingly, uh, literary for lack of a better term, entries in the Doom community canon in recent years. I've got some ideas I'd like to try out RE entering into conversation with the toxicity of nostalgia, that kind of stuff. Pretty funny but also apt to use a game that came out in the 90s to talk about that haha.
But yeah, most of my writing has been in the form of journaling. I've been struggling with performing well at work and being present in my community (I have a pretty low social battery), so most of my entries are basically just me doing therapy on myself ;p but it's writing of a sort, so it's got that going for it.
I'm going to leave my goal purposefully blank for this month, and see if I can surprise myself with what I come up with by the end of next month. :)
My writing lately has also only been journaling (of the self therapizing sort). I think that's still writing and also very productive for our brains and creative wells!
I want to test more of those maps! Pretty please? 🥺
Most of my writing time has been split between editing the TTRPG campaign (or, mostly accepting changes from our editor), drafting the solarpunk gamebook, and adding to the solarpunk worldbuilding resource wiki.
In the campaign, we made it through section 4 and into section 5, which is all about the region where most of the campaign takes place. I think we're about 60% through final edits. Also I finished the cover for it!
We originally tried to hire an excellent artist to paint a pulp adventure style cover but after several months of uncertainty they finally had to drop out for life-happened reasons. I looked around for another artist, got overwhelmed trying to vet various online artists to make sure they were real people who weren't using AI, and gave up and made it myself. (Losing half our art budget as a down payment which hasn't been refunded didn't exactly make things easier when looking for a new artist.) The final cover is a mix of a photobash and freehand painting which I then painted over in Artrage, because I like their oil paint and pallet knife tools the best.
The gamebook has been interesting, I've built out the first main hub area, and am trying to get a sense for the big main branches this area will lead into. I'm essentially trying to write four or five versions of the same story, and need them to all feel like a satisfying mystery story, so we'll see. It may be a bit too big to take on but I really want it to work.
I've added bits and pieces to many of the pages in the wiki, a new page on solarpunk work inspired by a conversation on mastodon, and I'm looking at reworking the page on deconstruction and house shifting to add more information and improve the layout.
That's such an evocative image. I don't know what the other design you had in mind was going to be like, but that looks like a great choice for a first entry.
Thank you! I am quite pleased with it, especially the colors overall. The original plan would have included a solarpunk adventuring party done in a sort of '60s pulp adventure style, but this was always kinda my fallback. It looks out on a location in the campaign, in the (fictional) dis-incorporating town of Comity, NH and shows sort of the overall status of the place (overgrown).
At the very least I can guarantee it doesn't include any AI art. I've seen other writers get called out in a huge drama storm when it turned out their cover artist had deceptively used some generative image nonsense and TBH that's mostly put me off relying on other artists (unless I can be really sure of their process). The first one I hired has a portfolio going back over a decade and a really consistent style, and was outspoken against AI. A lot of the new people I looked at had much newer and less consistent galleries and I learned I'm bad at telling whether someone I'm talking to on bsky is a bot or scammer so best to avoid it altogether. Andrew from the dev team reached out to some artists on the story seed library but by that point half our budget was still missing and I was thoroughly burned out on the idea of working with someone else so I just made the thing myself. Maybe we'll commission another cover someday but right now I'd rather put the remaining art budget towards an editor and kick this thing out the door.
It's a lovely image. Well done!
Thank you!
God I'm late this time! Kind of a dry month because of the last wave of essays, but at least I'm done with that shit for possibly ever!
I managed to make a thorough revision on a story from 2024 I prepared for a collection, and I sketched Kanteletar's Section C (6 chapters) which I want to write in its entirety before the end of July. I really want to get back to my usual rhythm of writing every weekend, let's see if I can manage this summer.
Good luck! Summers have a way of getting filled up with all kinds of activities hehe, it seems like everyone want to do things together which is lovely, but writing is so often solitary, that it can take a backseat to a rockin summer sometimes.
Anyway, you seem to sort of thrive under constraints? At least going by recent updates. :D