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$ published 2026-09-22| ~1 min read| 271 words

Fantatrias, Literary Workshop

Today has been an interesting day. At the literary workshop I run, a genre writing workshop (Fantasy, Horror, Science Fiction), we worked on a few ideas about setting in science fiction, specifically:

  • Samuel R. Delany, and the use of words as a form of setting. “The door dilated” is a narrative device that lets us precede, or even do away with, an entire description of the setting with just one sentence.
  • Ray Bradbury and his list of nouns, or how to draw up a list of nouns (“THE LEVEL CROSSING, THE VACANT LOT”) that resonate in the writer’s mind, as an alternative to generating a huge amount of information in order to build up the setting
  • Georges Perec and the exhausting of a place, or how, by going back over a place to the point of exhaustion, you can reach the infraordinary, which is what you cannot make out until you have noted down what is in the foreground and what is in the background.

On top of that, I managed to fit two new rooms into the floor for my roleplaying session.

Top-down map of one floor of the dockside warehouse, with more furnished rooms than before: bedrooms, bathrooms and kitchens in the corners, a library with shelving and chests, a dark room with a red sofa and junk piled up, and an armory with weapons hanging on the wall; in the center, a large clear bay with a circular emblem on the floor and a meeting table.

Not much else to tell, these days of intense work don’t leave room for much. Ah, I’m wrong! I’ve managed to get back to the novel, I wrote some four hundred words very early on, which isn’t a lot but puts me back at the point I need to be to write one of the book’s difficult chapters, which is going to be, so to speak, the leap into the void, or the road with no turning back for the protagonist.

So all in all, not too bad.