28 Comments

Nice work, Claudia. Very organised. Great to see all the things so far and where things are at and headed!

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Thanks Nathan, it was fun putting it all together and making sense of what I do here. I also thought it would be nice to share some of my plans to give everyone a feeling of where it’s all headed.

I’m still working on Dust Pirates, the third story from There Is Hope. I’m at the layering phase where I make sense of the details, enrich the characters with inner life and add more worldbuilding details.

How’s Brae doing? I was excited to read that you brought another glimpse into Precipice.

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Ooh that's exciting! Yay for Dust Pirates!

Brae is... getting there. A little slow, unfortunately, because I can't find the longer sessions to sink into writing at the moment. Work is at ultimate peak madness, hence why there was just a slither of Precipice-based something on Saturday, literally scrawled out in the space of an hour or so. 😶

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I understand you perfectly! It's been the same with me at work since last September. It's hard to write, especially the stories that are more immersive and need more work, when there's no head space to sink into the story.

That's why I'm also working on reorganising my work here right now, to buy some time before the new stuff comes. 🤹🏻‍♀️

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Good plan. Wise move. 🤗

I hope work eases off for you and there's more time for the deeper writing.

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I'm working on this. How about you?

Also, I'm thinking about publishing Dust Pirates in shorter bits... 1,000 words each instead of 2,000+. What do you think? I noticed your episodes/chapters are on the shorter side and I do enjoy that for reading in a newsletter.

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Yeah I'm increasingly erring towards 1000 words or less (partly due to me just trying to be able to write more than that in a limited few hours per week at the moment). 1000 words is a good mark, I think. That's partly me feeling overwhelm, though. Nothing wrong with a longer post, though.

In terms of work, another month ish of madness and then it calms down when semester is over.

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My dude, what is it with you and Romanian writers?😂 you’re all over our comment sections.

Jokes aside, I will be trying out Solenoid later this year. Will let you know what I think!

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I am remiss. The genre concept is absolutely brilliant!

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Thanks Hudson, really appreciate your support. Let's see how this goes forward. Lots of work to do.

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Great to have your work laid out like this. Thanks for putting this together, looking forward to keeping up with Story Voyager! 🌿

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Thanks Shoni, I guess it would've helped if I published this before our chat, right? 😅

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Ah, but I had the joy of discovering it all myself. Perhaps, I didn't approach methodically, but it was so fun to explore it all!

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Happy to read that it was fun and not a drag! 😅

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Loved every word! I'm setting about writing what I found so valuable about Elle's course, and this collab is top of the list.

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Thanks so much, Shoni! Meeting you and connecting here was the highlight of this challenge for me as well 💚. Hope we'll have more opportunities to collaborate in the future. Maybe you're interested in writing A Letter to the Future for my Museum of Life.

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For sure! You haven't opened it up yet, right? I'm not exactly sure what's involved.

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Would love to read something about tea ceremony from you. How did you get started? What about it do you find interesting?

I’d also recommend a novel, which is one of my favourites and the one that got me into reading and writing fiction at the end of high school: Thousand Cranes/O mie de cocori by Yasunari Kawabata. I wrote about it for M.E. Rothwell’s The Books That Made Us.

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Send me a link to your review, Andrei! I just started learning Japanese, so I'm down the rabbit hole of Japanese culture fully. ;)

I will most definitely do something with tea but I am not sure if it will be part of this newsletter. I already eliminated non-fiction writing about climate change to focus fully on writing and reading fiction. I am not the type to gather an audience around me as a person but rather around a topic.

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That makes sense. I think it’s a great choice. I’ve also spent a lot of time debating with myself whether I should stick with essays or also publish fiction on my newsletter. For me, I think the best choice was both. For you, the best choice might be fiction only.

In any case, I shall await any future tea ceremony posts with interest. Here is my review of the book: https://open.substack.com/pub/booksthatmadeus/p/the-spark?r=1tks3b&utm_medium=ios

Good luck with the Japanese! I just started learning Dutch a month ago and looking forward to exploring that culture in the future and maybe writing about it at some point.

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Sure would be.

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That’s great, I’m looking forward!

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Nice work Claudia! Looking forward to the next book club!

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Would you be in for reading The Ministry for the Future?

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