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!
It’s been a busy month! I shared this photobash, added a page on levee removal to our worldbuilding writing resource wiki, and made additions to a bunch of other pages.
We also made solid progress on the TTRPG campaign - we’ve finished the final text edits and page layout tweaks, and I’m working on the final tables of contents. Once that’s done I’ll make sure the maps, character/location art, and other handouts all organized, zip em up, export the PDF, and we’ll put the whole thing online. I’m really excited to share it - it represents two years of work on the biggest fiction project I’ve taken on so far, and it’s as much a manifesto on rural solarpunk worldbuilding as a guide to running a game.
I hope to finish it up in the next few days, work on some more solarpunk postcards, and to add a wiki page on ‘high context living’ - a term I’m borrowing from a zine that I think provided an excellent name for the kind of bespoke systems people living off grid often grow accustomed to, but which baffle their guests. I think we’d see a lot of these sorts of custom arrangements retrofitted into any solarpunk society with a collapse or crumbles and recovery in its backstory.
Neat! My shapeshifter story (that I described earlier in this thread) is actually kinda solarpunk too!
The MC’s father runs The Hammer which is a blacksmith’s forge built into the valley between a volcano and a mountain range. The forge runs mostly via a heliostat array—hundreds of mirrors aimed at a concentrator right over the middle of the forge. It also sits on top of a huge underground biogas generator, which is used as additional heating on cloudy days (and the winter).
I actually did loads of research and calculations to figure out if this setup was even possible or realistic. Turns out, it’s a very real possibility.
I even checked to make sure that the geography made sense and how much feed stock would be necessary to keep everything firing in the winter.
I may have gone a bit overboard.
I applaud the research! At first glance that actually sounds like it might be a bit overkill depending on what kind of forging they’re doing - a single solar concentrator made from a fresnel lens from a large rear projection TV is enough to burn a hole through a skill saw blade on its own. That wouldn’t be a great experience for forging (though I’m still planning to set one up and try it out) but if you can burn steel you can technically do forge welding. It’s just that the concentration of heat on such a small area would be really unpleasant/impractical to work with.
I’d be interested to see the math if you’ve still got it, it’s extremely possible I’m way off and you’d need way more light for a really effective forge. I would have figured even a dozen mirrors would be sufficient.
Wait are they smelting steel too? That would be closer to those molten salt solar thermal towers out west or the big parabolic mirror/heliosat combo the smelters use IRL.
When I was learning from a blacksmith we used coal, he favored it because it was traditional and you could do forge welding (propane forges don’t get hot enough) - I couldn’t really manage the temp on my little diy forge well enough to do do it often but he had a full out smithy with the big brick forge, bellows, and everything, and I learned there. Mostly I made basic stuff with thin stock I found at the dump, hooks and shelf brackets and such. At his forge we made andirons, trivets, railings, and all sorts of heavier or fancier stuff.
I’m between forges at the moment but I’d really like to get into blacksmithing again. If I ever build my solar forge I figure it’ll probably be a single big screen fresnel lens on an adjustable frame, with a brick lined fire pot laid out so the focal point isn’t concentrated completely on the work but instead diffused over a wider area. I don’t expect it to work anywhere near as well as even my rickity old coal forge but as long as it’s equivalent or better than a burnzomatic propane torch will no shielding it’ll be a step up from where I’m at now.
Oh this isn’t a normal blacksmith forge. It’s a huge thing with loads of workers. Like a mini industrial foundry.
The concentrated solar energy is used to melt steel inside silicon carbide crucibles. You put your steel in and send er up! Once melted, they bring it down and pour it out into molds or they can direct the concentrated sunlight down into a pseudo crucible (an oven, really) that heats the object to workable temperatures.
They’ve got it down to a science, literally.
Then my protagonist comes along and tells them about the Bessemer process and the blacksmith (his dad) is like, “well FUCK! We just revamped the whole forge two years ago!”
There’s a forger’s guild and they’re super excited about the information the MC gave them and all the blacksmiths in the guild are rushing to be the first to get that process working.
My MC was a biologist in their past life, but they’re all into this forge stuff! From their perspective, they are like a forger’s guild superstar, haha. Even nearby royalty are trying to get his attention (steal him away to their countries). Even though he wasn’t really an expert on metallurgy in his past life. He just knows a bit more than the current world’s level of technology.
Then he accidentally gets himself stuck as a girl at age ~13.5 by being hexed by a witch into a Common Reed Frog for a month (that species can change its sex under certain conditions). Hahaha.
Suddenly the forger’s guild isn’t interested in her anymore. She’s tiny! She can’t wield a hammer or move heavy steel works!
She ends up getting stuck working as a seamstress apprentice for ~2.5 years, waiting for the [Shapeshifter] [Sex Change] skill to unlock (it’s an “adults-only skill” so The System won’t let her use it until then).
This entire time he/she has been trying to min/max their build. Unlock all the skills! Level them up to max level! Which is the attitude that got him stuck as her in the first place.
I’ve got all sorts of cool “tech uplift” stuff in the story:
Etc etc.
All while this is going on, she’s an unhinged maniac, bleeding herself as much as possible every day to level up her [Blood Production] skill (which she unlocked after getting her first period! Haha).
She also laid hundreds of frog eggs when she was stuck as a frog and now those “kids” are growing up as sapient half human frogs. They need bedtime stories! Hehe.
It’s a comedy and I have so much silliness to cover, I don’t think I could cram it all into a traditional publishing format without sacrificing a lot of the world building that I want to do.
I know that’s a classic mistake! Too much detail! However, if I squeeze a little bit in every chapter and focus on character development, maybe I can keep the reader interested throughout it all 🤷
I recently saw a video about the water sanitation systems that are commonly used in the US, and only then I realized even nowadays a lot of houses over there are effectively “off the grid” when it comes to their entire water system. Quite fascinating as a European! (Over here the towns are so dense that you always have municipal water treatment available from somewhere.)
One of my British friends was kind of horrified at how we do things over here, especially in rural areas. The houses I grew up in only had electricity and phone lines (and eventually cable tv/internet) run to them. Individual wells and septic tanks/leach fields is very much the norm, even in planned developments. Lots of redundancy and you need to get your water tested occasionally to make sure the groundwater hasn’t been contaminated by industry or neighbors (and basically no recourse if it has).
Once you get into adding rainwater collection for showers/toilets and switching to small scale solar, especially stuff like partial or whole house conversions to DC power to reduce conversion loss, things get complicated enough that a houseguest probably can’t safely assume things work the way they expect. It’s possible not every outlet is lit the usual way, or maybe they can only charge a device when the sun is out, or maybe you need to know the right valves to open to draw water from a cistern.
IRL building codes and consumer mindsets in first world countries have standardized a lot of things and offloaded/hidden a lot of the complexity that underpins our day to day existence. For many of us our power and water are handled by specialists in dedicated facilities, and the equipment which goes into our homes have strict codes and expectations to keep the experience of using them fairly standard.
But in a solarpunk world, especially one that’s rebuilding, and relying on salvage and diy, I think we’d see many more retrofits and ‘bespoke’ solutions which are more efficient but leave the complexities of filtering water or generating electricity or disposing of sewage more exposed to regular people. I think there’s some cool worldbuilding potential in that.
Y’know I’d never thought about this directly but I’m realizing that it’s been sort of on the periphery of my brain lately - I recently installed Linux on my other laptop and have been delightedly customizing it to suit my specific needs. The other day my partner asked about something and I was like “Here why don’t you just boot up my laptop, the password is XYZ, I’ll come help in a minute” Cue my partner being absolutely baffled as to how my laptop works.
Since then I’ve been thinking about standardization/convenience vs function and all those complicated big thoughts. People don’t switch to Linux (and my partner does not want to use my laptop XD) because it’s not familiar to them, because unfamiliar things are inconvenient and inconvenience takes energy. But something like Linux can be made so it suits the user extremely well, like my laptop, so it functions much better (for me) than, say, the standard Windows layout. I suspect where this is going is that we should design things for function rather than standardization in many cases. To do that, we’ll have to remove the things that are making people choose convenience every time - our good ol’ enemy Capitalism. But once we sort that out, think how well stuff could work for people!
Anyway, that’s a bit of a ramble, but TL;DR I’m excited by the idea of well-functioning but unusual systems and I’m looking forward to reading your wiki page c:
Same! I’m actually about to start posting around asking for anyone’s favorite examples, and digging into permiculture forums which are often a gold mine for this stuff.
I’m 100% with you on linux, I’ve run into the same situation and conclusions a few times. In fact a lot of how I live tends to involve having to explain the quirks of whatever system to people who want to use them, and I’m still in an apartment with standard up-to-code water, electricity, and sewer hookups. I’ve known homesteaders who were far and away further along on that stuff than I am. I’m excited to see what we can gather up here, as one of my ongoing projects features a mostly-abandoned region where people likely would have introduced some high-context systems just to get by once the grid and everything else started to fall apart. And those systems have had decades to metastasize until each location is weird in its own way.
That’s so interesting! I grew up on well water. When my family moved to the city I was like “what do you mean we have to pay for water it’s water it comes out of the ground”