I have been unhappy with 2025 and want to make the most of the year. I’m planning to rewrite a novel I drafted last year for NaNoWriMo. I envision it as a solarpunk story. You can find the previous version of Chapter 1 here. I have changed the storyline based on feedback from last year.
I will link to each chapter in this blog post.
I used to write these Weekly Notes on my older blog, Parallel Spirals. From now on, I will begin writing them here. I do not want to import the old Weekly Notes.
This week was mostly spent trying to understand lunarpunk. I wanted to understand this to take forward and conclude the story of Meera in my novel, Red Mars, Grey Moon, and Green Earth.
I was following Venkatesh Rao who put me on this video about The History and Philosophy of Cypherpunk.
This talk mentioned lunarpunk and Rachel-Rose O’Leary who would speak at the conference about it. When I searched on YouTube to see if she had spoken elsewhere, I saw this talk she gave at CoinDesk.
This seems to point to lunarpunk as a crypto response to solarpunk. A broader Google search revealed otherwise.
My understanding of lunarpunk is based on these Tumblr posts:
This understanding has helped me to go ahead with Meera’s story in my novel.
Saurabh created a WhatsApp group for people interested in reading David Deutsch’s book The Beginning of Infinity. We decided to begin reading the first chapter and discuss it next Saturday (23 November 2024) as the delivery time for the paperback version on Amazon was long.
My progress on reading Sandeep Mall’s Finding the Oasis has also been slow.
I wrote the fifth chapter of my novel Red Mars, Grey Moon, and Green Earth on thinkdeli.
November is celebrated as National Novel Writing Month in America. It’s called NaNoWriMo for short. Although it began as a US phenomenon, it has turned into a global movement. There is growing global participation each year of authors writing every day in the month of November. They hope to write about 50,000 words in the month of November. Consistent daily writing with global accountability.
My tryst with NaNoWriMo began in 2012. I do not have any public record of this. I had emailed a bunch of people in 2012 asking if they would be my beta readers. There is no record of this novel on my private storage or on Google Drive. I seem to also not have informed these people about the status of this novel.
In 2018, I started writing chapters of a science fiction novel. I had called it One in Malayalam – Onu. I had published the chapters on Medium. Although I call them Chapters, the number of words in each was very low. I don’t think the whole thing together would qualify as a short story. I was also not sure where the story was going after Chapter 8. Hence, I abandoned that effort.
In 2019, I took to a physical notebook and started writing a nation-state fiction. The first book in the series was called William Horsborg – Life and Times. I wrote about 1200 words before I gave up on that. I will take this up again. It is a story I used to tell myself as I drew maps in a notebook as a 11 year old child. I have the stories in my head and they will not leave me in peace until I have told them.
I gave 2020 a hard pass and did not attempt NaNoWriMo.
In 2021, I had mixed feelings about writing a novel. I see-sawed between wanting to write and not wanting to write. An opportunity to write for about an hour a day opened up for me yesterday. I took the time to read the story I had written in 2018.
Although, I started writing it in the month of November, I am not counting it as an entry for NaNoWriMo 2021. But, I would like to acknowledge the part that NaNoWriMo played in remembering about writing the novel.
I am calling the novel, Return to Earth, tentatively. It is not a final title and it may change. Once each chapter is over, I will share it here and on my About page. I finished writing about 1000 words of the first chapter today morning.
Parallel Spirals 