looking for a human co-author for a permaculture / solarpunk speculative story

Hi everyone,

I’m looking for a human co-author for a permaculture / solarpunk speculative story called Roots Across Realities.

I’m also developing an indie ecological RPG called Seed-Walkers through my studio, Living Pattern Games, and this story grew out of the same universe. It follows Alex Chen, a nonbinary person exhausted by a struggling contemporary world who crosses into Solace Commons, a regenerative society built around ecological relationships, distributed infrastructure, shared memory, local resilience, and community trust.

At first Solace looks like the better world Alex always hoped could exist. Then the cracks begin to show. The central conflict eventually becomes a question I care about deeply: When does protecting something become controlling it? I’m posting here because I want someone who understands that permaculture is more than green aesthetics. I want the ecology, social systems, technology, food, water, memory, and governance to feel relational rather than decorative.

I also want to be transparent about the manuscript itself. The current roughly 24,000-word development draft was created with substantial generative-AI collaboration during an early solo phase. I do not want to simply polish that prose and publish it as though it were entirely human-written. Instead, I’m looking for a writer who can read the existing manuscript as source material, understand the characters and canon, and then write the publication edition in their own human voice without generative AI.

The right person would be credited as a genuine co-author and receive a negotiated share of the book’s proceeds. If they eventually want to contribute original lore to Seed-Walkers too, I would love to explore that separately.

I have a short project brief and a small writing exercise for anyone interested. The exercise gives you the facts of a scene and asks you to write it entirely in your own style. If regenerative speculative fiction, strange realities, flawed utopias, permaculture, memory, and the idea that relationships are infrastructure sound like your kind of soil, I’d love to hear from you. I have a discord, website for the game, and an active GoFundMe to help our start-up game studio 🌱 Hope to talk soon ^_^

John Morey

Living Pattern Games

https://www.livingpatterngames.com
https://discord.gg/v3BfrNwc
https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-us-bring-seedwalkers-to-life

I love the idea and 5 years ago, I would jump at the chance. I am keen to learn more about TTRPG (table top role playing games) and even looked into some solo rpg.

But lately, I have lost confidence in my writing skills.

Perhaps there is another way to participate?

Thanks for the reply r ransom
I would absolutely love to find another doorway for you into it. 🌿

Writer is only one class in the party. 😄

The thing I’m building first is Seed-Walkers as a video game. Roots Across Realities is a companion story project, and farther down the road I’d love to explore things like a standalone tabletop game and even some real-world applications of the Living Pattern systems we’re developing. Those are stretch goals though. The video game is the trunk of the tree right now.

That still leaves a lot of ways to contribute: worldbuilding, permaculture knowledge, systems thinking, character brainstorming, reading and reacting, future TTRPG ideas, solo-RPG experiments, lore development, scenario design, asking inconvenient questions about whether Solace Commons would actually work, and probably a dozen roles we haven’t invented yet.

One thing I care about with both Roots Across Realities and Seed-Walkers is giving people genuine creative room. I don’t want collaborators functioning as hands for ideas I already finished having. I want someone to be able to say, “What if this worked completely differently?” and actually explore it.

And your interest in TTRPGs especially caught my attention because there may eventually be a really interesting bridge between the video game, the story, and a future tabletop experience.

So yes, please stick around! If you'd like, the best place to reach me is our discord. You don’t have to prove anything about your writing skills to be welcome in the garden. 🌱 We can figure out what kind of contribution feels exciting to you.