✍️ Writing

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.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/41813793

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/41813791

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/41813739

Hello to everyone visiting this community!

I just wanted to apologize to everyone, as I didn't want to spam here.

After communicating with several members of the community, I've decided to stop posting for some time, until I make an article that suits this community better.

My last post remains the "No title writing challenge!" , which is a writing prompt for a contest organized by me. And sposored by me. The deadline for submissions is 17.6.2026. and the first prize is 100€ and a featured story in my publication. So check it out if you want to share a personal essay.

I've come to this community in order to get feedback and share my work, as well as to promote my publication and reach more readers and writers. I don't sell anything. I just want to find real people who like to read and write and to build something together.

I wish the best to all! :)

About a year ago — a month after my 40th birthday — I realized how stupid New Year’s resolutions were.

Illogical, perhaps, is a better word.

But not in concept. Specifically, I’m talking about the absurdity of collectively setting goals in January, only to (more often than not) lose all resolve and forget the entire affair before the end of the first quarter.

The hollow, repetitive cycle has rendered this tradition banal.

Why does that matter? Because by ritualizing resolutions into our calendar, we have, in this writer’s opinion, devalued and stripped an otherwise noble custom of its vital role in self-actualization, development, and care.

Think about it.

What were your top resolutions this year?

Chances are, one was also a headliner last year … and the year before.

That’s right — you, me, and everyone we know wants to be healthier.

Whatever form of diet or exercise it takes, getting into shape is a staple and tops the list for most American adults.

But as Bernie Sanders likes to say, let’s be clear: This isn’t an American phenomenon.

The same is true here in Canada. And before you get ideas about the health utopia of Europe, it seems things are no different in the UK, France, Germany, Denmark, or Croatia either.

Everywhere you look, people want to eat better and be fitter. That’s why year after year, there’s an uptick in new gym memberships in January. But most won’t be surprised to learn that by June, half of those newcomers abandon the quest altogether.

But what causes people to put down the kettlebells and pick up the Kettle chips? Why does lifting so quickly turn into scrolling? Why are so many resolutions flopping? What happened to everyone’s resolve?

There are many factors to consider, but I want to highlight one:

Resolutions ought to be avowed and assessed from birthday to birthday, not January to January. Right?!

Can you even unthink that idea?

It makes resolutions more meaningful. More powerful. It gives you a reason to look forward to your birthday (as I do) with the zeal of a toddler.

Motivation and accountability work together. Your goals are personal and intrinsic, but also extrinsic, because you know someone is always setting new resolutions and reviewing their progress from last year.

Instead of having the same tawdry conversation about resolutions around the holidays, it would give you something more interesting to talk about at birthday parties. It could even solve the problem of gyms getting over-packed in the first few weeks of January.

Making resolutions on your birthday makes more sense. The day you are a year older, not the Gregorian calendar.

So after my 40th last year, that’s what I started doing.

I began the year in northern Colombia, but by the first week of January, I’d arrived in Buenos Aires.

There, I resolved to write a book (Resolution 40) and spent three electric months feverishly creating my first work of fiction, So What: Short Stories — Big Questions.

It was the best three months of my life.

The experience was thrilling. I use the superlative intentionally. It was exhilarating. Most evenings, when fatigue prevented me from continuing, I’d go to bed giddy for the prospect of the morning, fresh and ready to get back to it.

Never in my life, before or since, have I felt such fervour for my work.

I self-published in April, proud of my effort to learn about the process along the way. I'm also proud of the stories, though acutely aware of their many shortcomings.

I knew the possibility of selling many copies was slim. But I’d be remiss if I didn’t confess, like all first-time publishers, I had the sanguine belief that the stories would resonate.

That the potential in my voice would be seen. That somehow, I’d get lucky, be discovered, and sales would proliferate. Cha Ching!

Spoiler alert. I sold seventy-five copies.

As a certain someone would say, sad.

That’s when I realized I’d spent all my time focusing on the product — tinkering with the syntax like I’m splitting the atom — governed by the belief that if the writing is good, the readers will come.

But what I learned last year, along with my brilliant friend and entrepreneur, is that good ideas are of little consequence without a clear, strategic, and dynamic marketing strategy.

**Welcome to Hell ** After three months of following my bliss — giving life to ideas and playing with words — I spent the next little while clumsily (and futilely) trying to sell my book.

That’s when I essentially first considered marketing. After publishing. That should tell you enough about how little I understood the game.

I have no delusions that, unlike the industrious effort that went into writing and editing, my marketing attempts were dispassionate.

Lackadaisical. Half-hearted.

It was dreadful. I hated it. I still do.

Eventually, I stopped altogether.

For the rest of the year, I oscillated between despondence and dejection. I was demoralized. The disappointment of my book amounting to nothing more than a depleted bank account and a bruised ego had become my only way of framing things.

Then, at dinner with a friend one evening, after recounting stories of happy delirium from the trenches of writing, I spoke of my marketing failures, financial woes, and disillusionment.

After a few minutes, she stopped me.

“Stop. Go back,” she said. “This all sounds depressing. You should do the part you love. Write another book. Write two. Let the first fester and forget marketing for now. Don’t spin your wheels on that. Find some way to make a little money and write another book.”

**Follow your bliss. ** Despite the pit of despair I’d dug up for myself over the last six months, I found relief in the notion that I didn’t have to do any marketing.

Is it something I must eventually confront if I want to be a writer who is read, versus one who simply writes? Yes.

Is that something that matters now? Absolutely not.

For six months, I lost myself looking for validation, desperately trying to promote sales and solicit reviews. And when progress was slow, and I loathed the process and stopped, it felt as though I’d quit on myself. I’d failed.

But nothing could be further from the truth.

I now realize my first book was a success precisely because writing it gave me the greatest thrill I’ve ever experienced. Not publishing, sharing it with others, getting reviews, or selling my first fifty copies. All that was cool, yes, without a doubt. But the writing itself — that was the good stuff.

I was in Germany six weeks ago, on the morning of the first day of the year — my birthday.

I achieved the goal I set for myself last year.

I’m also now working on Resolution 41:

To write another book.

One of my ongoing goals in the solarpunk genre/movement is to start a bit of a culture of packaging up and sharing writer-level research to make writing solarpunk easier. Writers often need a level of detail that’s hard to find in publications - news articles and pop science stuff tends to be too broad and lacking in specific detail (or incorrect) while industry publications tend to go in depth on a narrow slice of a topic, assuming the reader has the baseline knowledge to put it in context (I usually end up muddling through a lot of these trying to build a working understanding).

I started by organizing my own project research into easy building blocks for other writers and artists but the mods of the writing community have agreed to use their built-in wiki to host these resources, to make something bigger, more comprehensive, and more open to the community at large!

I think a part of the reason there’s not a ton of writers in the genre yet is that there’s a high barrier for entry. Changing genres is already fairly difficult and requires a lot of reading and research, but on top of that, aspirational fiction is hard. If you’re trying to write a better world, you need to build actual, workable, solutions into your setting, and that requires so much more knowledge to do well.

Descriptions in a single solarpunk scene on a pedestrianized city street could involve a mix of civil engineering, history, cultural knowledge, plant knowledge, city planning, accessibility outreach, mass transit vehicle design/infrastructure, and more. A whole story might add in permiculture practices, phytoremediation, modern airship design and operations, or all kinds of other stuff! Compare that to cyberpunk where there’s both a sort of cultural familiarity to lean on, and a pass on bad ideas because you’re writing in a dystopian setting and it's pretty easy to see the difference.

And a lot of the information you need isn’t generally widely known yet, and it’s often intensely siloed into several different fields or communities. Just finding out that you should include a specific technology or practice or viewpoint in your story can be a hurdle (we don’t always know what we don’t know), and building up a good enough working knowledge within that field to write it adds even more difficulty.

I think as solarpunk accretes more of a collection of works and a presence in the culture, this’ll get easier. Core knowledge will sort of keep bubbling to the surface until we have a sort of layperson’s understanding that certain broad solarpunk domains go with the tropes and aesthetic. But I also think we have a great opportunity to speed up canonization of the topics and themes and tech and practices we care about by collecting and packaging them in a way that makes including them easy for writers and artists. Sort of an onboarding kit or similar.

So basically if you want to see something in the genre, make it easy to write it! Gather up examples and details in one place. I've gathered most topics I've researched for previous projects into the wiki, and I'm hoping to do posts on phytoremediation and on airships next, but I'm just one person with very specific interests and some pretty significant blind spots (especially on the community and anarchism side). One of my big goals for this project is for it to take on input from many more people, both in additions to existing pages and in brand new topics I don't know enough about to write up.

Like I said in the wiki itself, any future worth building is going to be pretty collaborative and consensus-driven, so it makes sense to build our depictions of it the same way.

Unfortunately the docuwiki system only allows for community moderators to make edits, but feel free to post in the community or message me with anything you want to add and I’ll be happy to change it over to docuwiki’s markup and add it!

Welcome to the 18th writing club update, and the last day of the year according to the computer. Looking at, ummm let's see... Oh! Looking at E1M8 of Doom (1993 video game), the last level, or "mission" of the first episode (the level chiefly authored by Tom Hall & Sandy Petersen, with score by Robert Prince) has you confronting two "Baron" enemies. And isn't that just like life? The Barons may differ (financial ruin & job loss, or capitalism & fascism), and the weapons too (revolution, or mutual aid, or rocket launchers), but the struggle is the same.

Anyway, good luck to us all in the coming year with your own Barons, whether personal or societal. Also, speaking of shareware (Episode 1 was offered freely), let us now sharew...words; about, our projects!

I won't @ everyone in this post, mostly to emphasise that blessed randos are just as welcome as regular participants. So here's to our writers 🥳️ I look forward to reading your updates!

Would love to get some thoughts on this initial part of a story I'm woking on:

One without the Other

---

Elizabeth pushed through the double-acting doors to find Simon and Praveen squabbling in front of the entire staff, who were frozen at their workstations, pretending not to listen.

“You’re a disgrace to the profession, Simon,” Praveen snapped. “This isn’t a scullery. You see this? This is a Turbofan E32D5. It’s a Moffat, a six-thousand-dollar piece of machinery. I had to beg Elizabeth to let me buy it. And look, hardly three months in, and there are signs of early oxidation. You, sir, are a perfect example of why we can’t have nice things. I haven’t the slightest idea what Elizabeth sees in you, but here we are. Can you at least pretend to respect what I do?”

“Ha!” Simon snorted indignantly. “That,” he pointed to the Turbofan, “is not oxidation. I can get it clean in a heartbeat. And Lisbeth hired me because I have the vision to push culinary boundaries. To create something new. You—”

“That is oxidation, Simon,” Praveen cut him off. “Otherwise, it would have come off when I tried to clean it five minutes ago. This is what I’m talking about. Where’s your attention to detail? You’re the only CDC I’ve met who treats his workspace like an art studio.”

“What about you? Making madeleines and canelés and acting like you’re in a science lab!”

“Cooking is chemistry, Simon,” Praveen said, trying to keep himself composed.

“No, Praveen. Baking is chemistry. You follow a recipe, you get a result. Congratulations. Cooking? That’s craft,” Simon shot back.

Neither of them had noticed Elizabeth, their culinary director and boss, standing in the doorway. This was the second time this month she’d walked in on them bickering. The restaurant sommelier—with whom Elizabeth was having an affair—had reported at least four more altercations between them. The spats may well have become daily episodes.

Three weeks earlier, a fire in the adjacent building had damaged part of the wall in the upstairs kitchen. This meant that both her chef de cuisine and pâtissier were to share one workspace during emergency renovations. Elizabeth expected there would be a few contretemps, but nothing like what had transpired.

“Boys! Enough!” Her words cut through the room, instantly stopping the argument. “It’s getting rather tired, don’t you think, all this quarreling? Hmm?”

Both men looked like they’d been caught with their hands in the biscuit tin.

“You both deserve to be here,” Elizabeth said, taking off her coat and slinging it over her arm. She took a few moments to look around before returning her gaze to Simon and Praveen. “A lot more thought went into your hiring than either of you realizes. And to think: the men I’ve put in charge are constantly squabbling like children. What does that say about my judgment, huh? Did you think about that? I have bosses too, you know. And I promise you, if changes have to be made, you’ll both be replaced. I’ll see to it personally. So don’t even think about pulling me aside to poison me on the other. I’m sorry about the space squeeze. I know it’s not ideal, but the work upstairs is temporary. Two weeks. Three at the most, and you can have your kitchen back, Praveen. But until then, you’ll share this space, and the fighting needs to stop. We’re going to figure out how to do that today. Understood?”

Simon, who’d retreated to the cold station and was practically standing behind his garde-manger, nodded and said, “Okay.”

Praveen, stationed behind a speed rack looking at Elizabeth through freshly baked croissants, also nodded, muttering, “Agreed. Yes. Let’s.”

“Splendid. Now, I’m going to fix myself a cappuccino and meet you in the dining room in ten minutes. Everyone else, please get back to work. Oh, and Praveen, bring a few of those madeleines, would you? I happen to have it on good authority that Simon has described eating them as biting into a cloud.”

---

The first essay anybody writes is for school. Same here. But the only examples I remember are the ones I wrote at the end, in my A-level exams. One compared Hitler to Stalin. Another, Martin Luther King, Jr., to Malcolm X. I was proudest of the essay that considered whether the poet John Milton—pace William Blake—was “of the devil’s party without knowing it.” I did well on those standardized tests, but even passing was far from a foregone conclusion. I’d screwed up my mocks, the year before, smoking too much weed and studying rarely. Since then, I’d cleaned up my act—a bit—but was still overwhelmed by the task before me. My entire future rested on a few essays written in the school hall under a three-hour time constraint? Really? In the nineties, this was what we called “the meritocracy.” As a system of evaluation, it favored the bold and the brash, laid waste to the rest, and was irrelevant to the rich, whose schools drilled essay technique into the student body from Day One. In a school like mine, exams came as a surprise. Up to that point, we’d basically thought of school as a social event, a sort of mixer for a diverse group of teen-agers, many of whom had only recently arrived in the country—like a mini U.N., but with easier access to psychedelics. Almost half the school was felled at the first hurdle, leaving after G.C.S.E.s, aged just sixteen. (For G.C.S.E.s, you usually studied about nine subjects; for A-levels, only three.) Those of us who survived struggled on, trying to jump through meritocracy’s narrowing hoops. If you couldn’t do maths and had trouble with the hard sciences, each hoop came with an essay topic attached. (I did English, History, and Theatre Studies.) The stakes were presented as not just high but existential. You had to produce a thousand effective words on the rise of the Chartists—or else! What did “else” mean? Never earning more than minimum wage, never getting out of your mum’s flat, never “making something of yourself.” My anxiety about all this was paralyzing me.

Then something happened. An English teacher took me aside and drew a rectangle on a piece of paper, placed a shooting arrow on each corner of the rectangle, plus one halfway along the horizontal top line, and a final arrow, in the same position, down below. “Six points,” this teacher said. “Going clockwise, first arrow is the introduction, last arrow is the conclusion. Got that?” I got that. He continued, “Second arrow is you basically developing whatever you said in the intro. Third arrow is you either developing the point further or playing devil’s advocate. Fourth arrow, you’re starting to see the finish line, so start winding down, start summarizing. Fifth arrow, you’re one step closer to finished, so repeat the earlier stuff but with variations. Sixth arrow, you’re on the home straight: you’ve reached the conclusion. Bob’s your uncle. That’s really all there is to it.” I had the sense I was being let into this overworked teacher’s inner sanctum, that he had drawn this little six-arrowed rectangle himself, upon his own exam papers, long ago. “Oh, and remember to put the title of the essay in that box. That’ll keep you focussed.”

Welcome to the 17th writing club update!

Before launching into the writing club, I have a little preview of something @JacobCoffinWrites has spearheaded: a wiki resource for solarpunk writers who are looking for realistic visions of the hopeful world to be. You might have noticed a new link to the 🎉 this brand new writing wiki 🎉 in our community sidebar. Anyway, I'll let the intro speak for itself here:

Writing aspirational fiction is hard. If you're trying to write a better world, you need to build actual, workable, solutions into your setting and that requires so much knowledge to do well. Descriptions in a single solarpunk scene on a pedestrianized city street could involve a mix of civil engineering, history, cultural knowledge, plant knowledge, city planning, accessibility outreach, mass transit vehicle design/infrastructure, and more. A whole story might add in permaculture practices, modern airship design and operation, phytoremediation, or all kinds of other stuff! Compare that to cyberpunk where there's both a sort of cultural familiarity to lean on, and a pass on bad ideas because you're writing in a dystopian setting, and the differences are pretty clear.

It's a lot for any one writer to try and take on. Luckily we don't have to work alone. Any future worth building is going to be pretty collaborative and consensus-driven, so it makes sense to build our depictions of it the same way.

(On that final note, we're still trying to figure out a way to let people contribute to this wiki.)

---

But back to the seventeenth writing club, in the sage words of chapter 17: Communicating with a PostScript Printer (page 571) of Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment, by Richard Stevens, /* don't want to write() to block */ -- but isn't that just the thing? Sometimes you have to write() in order to get through the block.

Speakering of writing(), here are our writer[]:

• @Clockwork
• @Ellie
• @grrgyle
• @hazeebabee
• @JacobCoffinWrites
• @johnny_deadeyes
• @ManualOverride
• @shamousk
• @solbear

As is it ever has been and will eternally be, blessed randos should feel totally free to drop in with their updates, or comments on the goings ons of others. This little writing club thrives on our interactions, so go interact!

Welcome to the 16th (5+5+5+1) writing club update. Looking at the intro to the 16th chapter of Procedural Generation in Game Design: Generative Art Toys by Kate Compton, we find the somewhat quaint observation:

Everyone loves being creative. And everyone likes discovering that they're more creative than they thought they were. For many years, people have enjoyed crafts like pottery wheels, Spirographs, Mad Libs, spin art, paper marbling, and tie-dye. These artistic toys helped everyday people make interesting artworks (even if those people lacked creative talent or inspiration) by producing surprising and emergent results from simple choices.

Now that we have digital systems, we can make art toys with even more surprising and emergent behaviour. [...]

This book (edited by Tanya Short, and Tarn Adams) was first published in 2017, long before the term "generative art" would take on a very different insinuation. I've certainly got some strong opinions on the subject of both interpretations, but this is a writing club update not my personal soapbox.

Having now fulfilled my self-imposed rule of introducing a quote related to the number of WC updates since we started, I now turn to an observation about my local climate/weather, before introducing our writers, and finally extending a friendly invitation to any lurkers in our midsts. :)

Up here in the Northern hemisphere, at the heel of October, it's starting to get chilly. The ideal weather for reading and writing probably varies as much as the individual writer, but for me this feels like book weather.

Speaking of individuals, here is the call for our regular writers to share their updates!

• @Clockwork
• @Ellie
• @grrgyle
• @hazeebabee
• @JacobCoffinWrites
• @johnny_deadeyes
• @ManualOverride
• @solbear

I think I'll move this list to the main Writing Club sticky post next update, since the @s don't seem trigger notifications consistently across applications. Let me know what you think, if you have an opinion on this.

As is forever the case, passers-by are very welcome to come on in and lurk, comment, or post their own updates.

I don't talk much about my brain situation because I generally get along just fine - I've got a stack of tricks and coping strategies worked out from years of trying to be as normal as possible, or to channel my obsessive cycles into productive activity. In a lot of ways, I don't know if I could make nearly as much of the stuff I write about on here if my brain worked like my teachers used to say it was supposed to.

That said, I've been coming to accept that all that stuff puts me in some category of neurodiverse, even if I remain a little skeptical of the specific diagnoses I caught way back when.

So it rankles a bit to see scammers and talking heads who've never made anything, recently appointed to high ranking positions, claiming autistic people can't create poetry etc. Rekoning Press recently put together a compilation of reprints of stories, poetry, and art by their Neurodiverse contributors in response and C.G. Aubrey wrote a better rebuttal of these claims in her editorial than I ever could and I'd very much like to share it here:

In the US this year, we neurodivergent folks have heard a lot about what we cannot do or will never do. Our differences have been increasingly pathologized, demonized, and used to deny us basic respect and decency. Our diagnoses have been dismissed, our personal autonomy, access to medications, and medical care threatened. All because we will never write a poem? That is true for some of us, but poetry is hardly a standard skill set among neurotypicals. It is, after all, uncommon experiences and mindsets that shape creativity. What is poetry, after all, but the manifestation of uncommon wonder?

I began this editorial back in May, when we here at Reckoning first decided to produce this special reprint collection. This was seven drafts ago. Each time I sat down to write, I found myself wanting to avoid vulnerability and to explain . . . well, everything. I wanted to be certain we all understood that neurodivergence is more than ADHD and Autism Spectrum Disorder; that the face of neurodivergence is neither white nor male nor USAmerican.

Neurodivergence is complex and intersectional, and what is considered neurodivergent can vary greatly with cultural norms. I wanted to define terms and provide helpful links. I was drafting a rebuttal to a certain US public official’s list, both scholarly and emotional. Then I realized that I was coming perilously close to defending our existence.

We should not need this kind of defence (though too often we do). We do, however, need acknowledgement, and we deserve celebration. Neurodivergent folks live with differences and difficulties that shouldn’t be dismissed, but likewise, with determination and daring that cannot be disregarded. We are out here, every day, doing the deep, meaningful work of living. And there is much work to do. There are voices to find, voices to lift, especially among the most vulnerable of us. There is art to create. There are discoveries to be made, policies to change, and stereotypes to dismantle. We’ll get to all of those, and more, because

We have been doing, all along, the very things we continue to be told we can’t.

If we must speak in generalities (because this is apparently what we do, /irato/), let us speak instead of neurodivergent curiosity and creativity, of the many artists, writers, and, yes, poets among us. Let us speak our devotion to making sense of life’s chaos, and not ignore the ongoing contributions of neurodivergent scientists and scholars. Let us speak of our strong sensitivity to injustice, of the many neurodivergent individuals who pursue careers in social work and activism. We should also speak of our determination to connect with others, to understand and to be understood. There are communication deficits among many of us (this is also a cultural malady affecting neurotypicals, but never mind that), and yet we persist. We listen for words unspoken; we acknowledge the silenced. We continue, despite so many obstacles, to find our voices, to speak for ourselves and for those who cannot.

Among the works collected from Reckoning’s first decade, you’ll find these refrains. Short stories like T.K. Rex’s “SQUAWKER AND DOLPHIN SWIMMING TOGETHER” and Taylor Jones’s “Possession” build communication bridges between disparate communities and species. Powerful works like Mari Ness’s poem “Green Leaves Against the Wind” and Ariadne Starling‘s essay “The X That Means Both Death and Hope” remind us that justice is both personal and political, inextricably intertwined. Jacob Coffin beautifully imagines a greener, more tenable, infinitely possible future, repurposed from an unsustainable present. We meet our current uncertainties with actionable hope.

This special neurodivergent reprint collection is for us—to celebrate, to encourage, and to fortify our neurodivergent contributors, readers, and supporters. However, it is shared in hope and gratitude with everyone, wherever you might fit within humanity’s sprawling neurodiversity. If you have found yourself a little lost in reading this editorial, please know that I did, in fact, find a way to over-explain. In the back pages of this issue you’ll find definitions, explanations, and resources.

When I consider the struggles of this present moment, and the voices that seek to drown out those of neurodivergent individuals and communities, I am reminded of nature’s song. Cacophony seems an overused word, and yet it is filled with breath, with the rise and fall of syllables, notes dulcet and discordant. It embraces every cadence of birdcall, every splash and screech, scurry and slither; it holds within it the dissonance of the chase, the flee, the sweet stench of decay, the quiet flights, and the screaming iridescence. There is room for the consonance and dissonance of humanity’s harmony, though many of us would rather not consider ourselves a part of it, and some of us try too hard to decide who gets to sing at all. We forget that the chorus has always been divergent, that the moth’s silence is not unspeaking.

There is poetry in its wings.

In this article, Hassan Osman curates 5 excerpts from Gary Provost's "100 Ways to Improve Your Writing". You can put into practice the presented advice when line editing . I especially appreciate how Provost, through Osman, reminded me that sentence length and clause order emphasize parts of a text.

I came across this advice once before, when watching The Craft of Writing Effectively, a talk given by Lawrence McEnerney, director of the University of Chicago's writing program. Sidenote: I can't recommend that talk enough.

Welcome to the 15th (fifteenth) writing club update. Opening Manu Saadia's Trekonomics to page 15 ("Portrait of the Author as a Young Fan"), we find this fiction related snippet:

When the movie [Star Trek: The Motion Picture] was over, I really, really did not want to leave the bridge of the Enterprise. I had to make that experience last. I still remember that very precise feeling, equal parts wonderment, recognition, and melancholy: this was the place I had been looking for, this was where I wanted to live, this was where I belonged. I had found my promised land. Pity it was all fiction and make-believe.

A pity indeed that the post-scarcity almost-utopia of Star Trek's Federation is only make-believe. But then isn't a story an almost-world, waiting to be brought forward by the midwives of action. Maybe casting writers and artists as parents is overstating our importance a little bit... it's nice to think about, though.

But what I can't overstate is how great our writers are:

• @Clockwork
• @Ellie
• @grrgyle
• @hazeebabee
• @JacobCoffinWrites
• @johnny_deadeyes
• @ManualOverride

If your name is not on this list and you think it should be, or vice-versa, just let me know and I'll fix it right away. Also, is this list serving anyone? How do we feel about it? Is it motivational, useful, etc? DM or comment me your thoughts. I could go either way.

As always, guests are welcome to participate in this thread as much or as little as they like. A special hello to our honoured lurkers 👋️ your eyeballs are my drug of choice.

I'm an aspiring writer, mainly interested in writing psychological speculative fiction. Never been published traditionally. I'd even say I don't have a habit of writing regularly.

I'm thinking of starting a blog or something of similar where I can post my writing. It will help me hopefully receive feedback on my writing and become comfortable with sharing my work and develop a sense of accountability to post regularly.

I'm looking for a blogging platform where I can have a domain...it's not very necessary...just nice to have.

I'd also appreciate some advice on developing a writing habit. I worked some content writing jobs and after that I lost interest in writing very soon.

Thank you :)