My further apologies to anyone who has looked forward to another Writing Club while I was busy running from a cruel summer. Finally stationary, I send this from a bewitched region.

I've wandered into a church of horrors recently, at 10 pm, completely ignorant of the liturgical occasion for it standing open and illuminated at that time of night. An elfin woman in a sweatshirt spotted me and my wife as we took in a St. Sebastian statue.

"Come take your photos of this!" she said, and drew us toward a glowing pit under the tabernacle. Besides a priest scribbling behind a cracked door we were the only souls stirring. I kept him in view as we climbed the steps to the high altar.

"Is this OK... are we OK here?" asked my wife, in sparse Castilian.

"Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes," replied the churchwoman. I'm learning that such verbal generosity is typical here.

What she led us to was the sacred center of the church, the relic over which swarmed a hundred angel heads, pewter candelabras, attendant saints and golden aureole. But they were above ground. Beneath the floor it stood, lit extremely: a worn, worn, sea-washed stone, about the size of a cocooned 10-year old child. Coins rested in a depression at its crown. It bore a jumble of an inscription in a font you could count on James Cameron to pick if he had to display an "ancient curse." What or whom the monolith hallowed was beyond our powers to decipher or the churchwoman's to explain. But it seemed older than the cross barely scratched into it. Somehow I knew it had stood apart for millennia. It was the sick feeling it provoked in me, the reflexive reverence it forced from someone. Down the aisle a Mater Dolorosa wept tears like glue beads into her properly black Spanish dress. St. Lucy served her eyeballs on a platter. An underlighted St. Iago trampled moors unlucky enough to have been caught inside the glass case with him and his white charger. The viscera of belief.

We left without understanding, and the lady promptly shut the doors to us and the night.

The stone might have moored a ship purported to have carried St. Iago. Its letters might signify a dedication to Neptune. It may have come from a flooded temple.

Surely these are elements for an eerie tale, but this was merely my birthday on a full-moon night.

And now I would really like to read some Halloween writing. Please plan on sharing some short, tense, spooky, autumn-scented, decay-touched words with the writing club. Due on October 31.

I'm asking specifically about writing fiction.

I need to write a lot in a short time. I'm a perfectionist -- a therapist once called me obsessive. Sometimes I spend hours on just a few paragraphs. I eventually make good paragraphs but that is not very productive. Deadlines fly by, I become anxious and stressed. I wish to write more, even if it's not as good. Better to have something to edit and correct than nothing at all.

I reckon that a book is not made of 100% perfect phrases. At some point you gotta lift the house, even it is not as pretty as you want. I want to experiment with writing more freely, finding ways to overcome my self-criticism and impostor syndrome. I see people writing 3000 words a day... maybe I don't need to write that much, but I envy them. I often don't write more than 500 words per day. This is just not working for me as a professional writer.

Maybe I could try something like stream of consciousness. But I don't know. Looking for advice. Not necessarily on literary techniques, but also on how to put myself in a position to avoid self-recrimination, let things flow a bit more. I'm looking for a better psychological outlook. Right now I edit my stuff so aggressively that I transform pages into tweets.

I’m writing the best man speech for my brother’s upcoming wedding. I haven’t been to many weddings so to be honest I’m not super familiar with the format of this speeches, or things I should be sure to mention (I.e. things like “be sure to thank xyz person”). I’m asking some family members but thought I should cast a wider net and ask here too. Any advice for writing this type of thing? Any memorable ones, good or bad, to emulate or avoid?

Shakespeare's birthday is observed today. Thank you, verily, for sharing your writing!

Please post your efforts below, with an introduction and/or questions for your readers.
Here are the guidelines, again.

Rounds one and two of the Tildes Writing Club have been smashing, if small-scale, successes. In the interest of luring out a few lurkers with a timely provocation, I want to establish this month's theme by fiat.

What do you have to say about madness? Your contribution can resemble a clinician's assessment, a confession, a polemic, an absinthe specter, the cry of the cuckoo, the diagnosis offered by Major Clipton (but hopefully of greater length), or a 1980s ska band. That is, whether you take the word to be romantic, offensive, biographical, inspirational, or risible, take it as inspiration for your writing this month.

Just follow these easy guidelines:

Your submission can be prose or poetry of any reasonable length. Less than 7,000 words, surely.

Watch for the April 23 submissions thread to appear. Reply to it with a link to your work, which may be housed anywhere you like, including on Tildes. Prioritize venues that are not known to be aggressively anti-privacy (e.g., Google Docs). You may provide questions for readers.

You must provide feedback on 3 submissions if you are posting a submission. Only one needs to be a substantial critique. If you see a post without feedback, consider giving it preference in the order of your responses. No one likes to be left hanging.

You don't have to follow the theme. Your detective fiction about beaver glands is welcome, too.
Feel free to post questions or comments.

It's nearly spring (in one hemisphere) and time to share our first longer pieces! Whether or not you've been inspired by this month's theme of liminality, I hope you've found this transitional time a pithy precipice.

Please post your efforts below, with an introduction and/or questions for your readers.
Here are the guidelines, again. I applaud everyone who submits for taking part in something new.

Valentine's Day Edition

Optional Themes: love / unlove / hate / red / heart / viscera

Submit your "Quick 'Ficts' and Poems" below! Very relaxed rules apply to this first round. Basically, just post something short. And remember to leave feedback for at least two pieces if you're submitting (but more is welcome). You don't need to submit to leave comments. Looking forward to reading!

You are invited to cut right to the heart of things for the first Tildes Writing Club event. Let's road test the club with brief fiction or verse. Got a sonnet that needs airing? Want to weave a brief spell and dip before the magic fades? Let's read it!


Length: less than 500 words of prose, or 30 or fewer lines of poetry.
Theme: Optional. But if you're in search of inspiration, @acdw suggests you work with this palette: love/unlove/hate/red/heart/viscera.
Guidelines: Post your short work in the submissions topic, which will open on 2/14. Throughout the next couple of weeks, leave feedback for at least two other submissions. Brief rules for a brief, trial-run writing event. To opine on the rules that are taking shape for 3/1, reply here.

Let's discuss themes for our March 1 Writing Club submissions. (If prompts or themes aren't your thing, you may write what you like and post when the submission topic opens.) Feel free to suggest a prompt (a scenario, dilemma, or background), a theme, or an ambiguous title to jump-start writing efforts. What do you want to suggest?

All writers are invited to take part in the newborn Tildes Writing Club! Let’s let the club organize as it grows, but as a starting point, I present loose, inclusive guidelines formed from the meeting of ideas in the last thread. (I was going to list aspects as separate replies for easier picking apart, but I guess I can’t make separate replies to the same post.) Feel free call out an aspect to compare it with a different approach.

Schedule

A thread will surface every three weeks inviting you to post your work. You may post your piece to the thread at any time before the next appears, but you risk missing out on readers. Finish and submit your critiques before the next recurring thread. (I declare this quite confidently for someone with no idea how recurring threads work.) Should the inaugural submission thread open on March 1?

Sharing

Reply to the recurring submission thread with a link to your work, which may be housed anywhere you like, including on Tildes. Prioritize venues that are not known to be aggressively anti-privacy (e.g., Google Docs). You may share a selection from a larger work, but your submission should not exceed 7,000 words. Shorter by half that is likelier to be read. There will be no minimum length. You may provide questions for readers in hidden expandable text, if you like.

Feedback

Critique participation will operate on the honor system. When submitting, you are encouraged to provide meaningful feedback to three pieces each cycle. These will be self-assigned. To assign yourself a piece, post a reply to it as placeholder. Assign yourself to pieces that haven’t yet been taken before signing on as a 2nd, 3rd, or 4th reader. That is, while there are still pieces without assigned readers (which will be apparent due to the lack of replies), take one of those first to ensure everyone is getting read. Naturally, you may leave critiques or comments in a free and unregulated fashion if you aren’t submitting work for critique this round. I suggest leaving feedback in the reply you created as placeholder. Others may have better ideas.

Themes / Forms

Hopefully, taking part in the club will motivate you to produce new writing. The community will suggest themes as inspiration after the posting of a submission thread. These could be chosen democratically, or by a rotating theme-warden, but should be mooted outside the submissions thread. I prefer themes to be extremely flexible, rather than a prompt: “Orange; Breathless; Common Parlance;” instead of “On Tuesday you discover the ability to control trains with your mind.” Submissions do not need to follow the theme. We might decide to have a round dedicated to poetry, but then again, why not gather an assortment of forms and genres?

Showcase and ‘Zine

As motivation for writers, and to benefit the wider Tildes community, I would like to see a periodic showcase thread highlighting the best of our work. It makes sense to post this separately, rather than just by tagging exemplary pieces, because most of us will want to improve our submissions with feedback in mind. @acdw has the idea of organizing a ‘zine to further showcase our best work. This, it seems to me, suggests wonderful opportunities for collaboration with visual artists. The schedule for both of these will have to depend on activity in the club.

Spirit

I hope for the club to be egalitarian, advanced by participants with good ideas and a flair for organization. Despite my failings, I hope to be such. To the degree that I can direct the energy of the group, I would like to give the following precept: Be generous. Writers, be a gracious guest in the minds of your readers. Be generous in your criticism. Don't abstain from lauding your favorites--that is important. At the same time, recognize that you compliment writing when you take it seriously enough to voice serious problems you may wish to see it avoid. Interpret criticism in the same spirit of generosity.

I'd like to gauge interest in a writing group. The quality of expression I find at Tildes and the nature of some of the Timasomo projects prompt me to wonder if maybe there aren't enough regularly-writing members to form a circle for critique and support. I have some experience teaching, but never have run a group. I'm a committed generalist--I don't think I would want to limit it to a particular form or genre.

Anyone interested? Have you taken part in one before / belong to one now?

I've been re-watching Avatar: Legend of Korra, and I've always thought Bumi's crazy stories would be super interesting to go into more depth on how they actually happened (if his descriptions were indeed true to life).

Then I thought it would be fun to have a sort of creative thinking exercise where the set up is provided and you have to come up with the details of how the characters got to it. Can you make it work?

Top level submissions will be the end state. You should reply to those top level submissions with how the subjects / characters got to that point while using the information provided in the set up.

Example:

"Yo Johnny, you remember that time we talked our way out of getting arrested using my pet rabbit and a dead cell phone?"

Reply:

"Yea dude, that was wild. I was shitting bricks when he walked up to my window with all that weed we had in the trunk. If Fluffy Jorge hadn't been in the back and your allergy pills hadn't wore off that you wouldn't have been all glassy eyed and looking like you were crying. I don't think he would have bought my fake ass story about your family being in a tragic car accident earlier that day."

I'll provide a couple to get y'all started with, but if you have any good one's feel free to submit those as top level entries!

In school we teach kids that good stories have conflict and have them fill out plot diagrams, analyzing the different parts relative to the conflict of the story.

Every time this comes up, I always wonder about its universality. As it's taught to kids, this is "how stories are" and conflict itself is considered essential to storytelling. The conventional wisdom goes that a story without conflict is "boring".

Is this the case, though? It's always felt to me like a very limited way of looking at stories -- fine for children but something that doesn't necessarily scale up past the early stages of literary analysis -- but I don't have anything to back that up. I don't have enough in my repertoire/expertise to really go beyond it, and I'm left with just a sort of empty suspicion that may or may not be justified.

• Is conflict essential to storytelling?
• Are there examples of good stories without conflict?
• Is teaching narrative in this way effective, or limiting?

I've been thinking about note-taking a lot recently. I'm not a particularly great note-taker myself, though I do use a calendar and a to-do list. My SO is a habitual digital note-taker, but also a hand-written journaller too. I do neither of these things (and don't feel the worse for the lack), but I am curious about how my fellow tilderen feel towards notes in general, and journalling to a lesser extent.

Are you a note-taker? If not, why not? If so, how does it add value to your life? Do you prefer a digital or a pen-and-paper notebook, or even a hybrid approach? And do you have a system?

Somewhat inspired by this post, I wondered what (non-personal) blogs/online jounrals you read? Here are some of mine in no particular order.

• opensource.com for open source devlopment

• Glimmer for tech culture as a whole

• lwn.net for linux kernel articles etc..

• WeDistribute for content on federated networks/the fediverse

• PrivacyTools Blog, The Privacy Issue and decentralize.today for privacy articles*

*I'm a team member at PrivacyTools.io

Just finished (re-)watching the Friends TV series ... End of the last episode, sitting in the empty apartment (Joey: "Has it always been purple?" Phoebe: "Do you realize that at one time or another, we've all lived in this apartment?")

Got me thinking, more as a plot contrivance than the actual plot, a story about an apartment, spanning a century or more, and the various people that lived in it, jumping back and forth across time, linking them together through history ... perhaps even, a la "Ship of Theseus", spanning multiple centuries and multiple homes/dwellings that occupied the same space.

So specifically, I'm wondering if anyone can think of any novels that adopt this idea, or anything similar, as a primary vehicle for their storytelling?

I have a vague recollection of a short story or novella in 2ndary school, about the life of a redwood, and the various people and animals that lived in and around it over the centuries ... and also I recall reading "A Winter Tale" by Mark Helperin -- a semi-fantastical novel about the city of New York ... oh look, apparently, they made it into a movie, too.

But those two are the only examples I can think of that come close to this idea.

PS: I love to write fiction, and someday I may even finish a novel ... but generally, I get about halfway through, figure out how it's going to end, and then lose interest ... so if anyone with more ambition likes the idea, you're welcome to it.

ETA: I'm not looking for the 10,000 variations of "oooh, haunted by the ghost of a person that died here 20 years ago". Broader, covering a longer timeframe, multiple substories interwoven into the same living space, you get the idea.

For context, Microscope is an RPG system where you collaboratively write the history of a world. It's focused entirely on collaborative storytelling, rather than dice-rolling (there are no dice).

• Homepage : http://www.lamemage.com/microscope/
• PDF Manual

So I wrote a Dictated Scene for our world, and I was rather proud of it, so I thought I'd post it here since it almost stands on it's own. I'm curious what other people think and what kinds of questions it provokes about the world it inhabits.

Meris had played in the clearing all her life. Every time she went to play by herself the little Jima would come out and sit on it’s rock to watch her. She always talked to it, though it never talked back. It just liked to watch with it’s tiny eyes, wary of approaching shadows that might scoop it up.

Under the Jima’s rock was where Meris kept her treasures. Well some of them where the Jima’s treasures. Meris had found all of the treasures, but she let the Jima watch them so it seemed only fair that she let him keep some of them. Her favorite treasures were the small crystals no longer than her finger, though her fingers weren’t very big since she wasn’t very big yet. They were probably half as big as Momma’s fingers.
When the wind blew hard enough on some days, like right before Momma made her come inside before a storm, the crystals hummed. Dozens of little humming voices, like a choir singing a song just for her.

On some mornings Meris went to the market with Momma. She liked listening to people in the market, especially when she heard them use new words. Sometimes when she repeated the new words, Momma would scowl at her, which usually just made Meris get the giggles.

The last day that Meris went to the meadow, she was repeating some new words she had heard an angry man yell at someone. As Meris looked through her treasures, she counted to make sure they were all still there. As she picked up her favorite treasure, it’s shiny crystal facets cast spots of rainbow light around her. Meris repeated her new words one final time, and then was silent.

When Momma found her, the sun was low and the last rays of light were still shining on Meris, sitting unnaturally still, looking down at the crystal she held in her hand. The last rays of sunlight were still striking the small crystal, sending a few small prisms of light across Meris’ motionless face, frozen perfectly in marble.

Momma took the crystal from her daughters hands, tears streaming down her cheeks as she asked the gods what she had done to deserve this, what her daughter could possibly have done to displease them. She pleaded with the gods to return Meris to her, gripping the crystal tightly in her fist. As her desperate Words reached toward the heavens, the crystal suddenly emitted a single clear Tone, and all the grass around became frozen and still.

She ran as fast as her legs could take her, the crystal still gripped tightly in one hand.