✍️ Writing
A community for writers, like poems, fiction, non-fiction, short stories, long books, all those sorts of things, to discuss writing approaches and what's new in the writing world, and to help each other with writing.
Rules for now:
1. Try to be constructive and nice. When discussing approaches or giving feedback to excerpts, please try to be constructive and to maintain a positive vibe. For example, don't just vaguely say something is bad but try to list and explain downsides, and if you can, also find some upsides. However, this is not to say that you need to pretend you liked something or that you need to hide or embellish what you disliked.
2. Mention own work for purpose and not mainly for promo: Feel free to post asking for feedback on excerpts or worldbuilding advice, but please don't make posts purely for self promo like a released book. If you offer professional services like editing, this is not the community to openly advertise them either. (Mentioning your occupation on the side is okay.) Don't link your excerpts via your website when asking for advice, but e.g. Google Docs or similar is okay. Don't post entire manuscripts, focus on more manageable excerpts for people to give feedback on.
3. What happens in feedback or critique requests posts stays in these posts: Basically, if you encounter someone you gave feedback to on their work in their post, try not to quote and argue against them based on their concrete writing elsewhere in other discussions unless invited. (As an example, if they discuss why they generally enjoy outlining novels, don't quote their excerpts to them to try to prove why their outlining is bad for them as a singled out person.) This is so that people aren't afraid to post things for critique.
4. All writing approaches are valid. If someone prefers outlining over pantsing for example, it's okay to discuss up- and downsides but don't tell someone that their approach is somehow objectively worse. All approaches are on some level subjective anyway.
5. Solarpunk rules still apply. The general rules of solarpunk of course still apply.
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I think that's a good goal, and reasonable if you're going to be spending time with family (me too! I am too!), and good to keep up the habit of writing during both the week and week-end.
Woooo! We're doing it - sharing our writing! I'm so excited. :D Okay, on with the feedback:
I didn't really think about the writing tense, so I'd say it fits.
It doesn't feel too strange at all. I think the strangeness of the dream opening works in its favour. To your other question, maybe it does feel a bit ungrounded? I'm not sure, I feel like the protagonist's yearning to integrate with the robotic intelligence is the grounding, but it's only stated in the last sentence, so hard to tell from this sample.
I agree, it's a great opening line. I like this kind of dreamy, poetic writing, so opening on a subjective works for me. I was a bit confused by the outline of silver light, and had to read that part a couple of times (not unusual for me). My unsolicited hot take is that it's perhaps missing a simile, just to give the mind's eye something to picture. But that's just me backseat writing lol :P definitely follow your own intuition first, if this ambiguity is part of what you had in mind.
To change your text colour in etherpad, you go to the top-right of the screen and click the icon that looks like 3 people. Then you press the circle next to your name that's the same colour of green. I just use it to paste my work into for sharing right now, but I could see how it would be neat for more collaboration. Like for example, I see there is a plugin that would let us leave comments on each others' stories! That would be cool imho.
Thanks so much for the detailed feedback! I see what you mean on having a hard time picturing things. I think that's what I meant by ungrounded. I often write in a poetic way, but it can leave my prose lacking in detail. Maybe I'll revisit that area and add in some more physical descriptors.
I'm hoping to share some of the first chapter next month, and it is much more grounded since it's starting the actual story and has more specific events going on.
And it would be cool to be able to leave comments and other things on people's stories (as long as they request it).
So glad to finally be able to share some of my writing with you :) also I'm glad you like the first line as well, it's a little pet of mine lol