I haven’t read K.J.Parker but I’ll take a look! I read a lot of schlock military scifi and a lot of cyberpunk, so in my reading I’m often all over the place on the tech-realism scale. I work with computers IRL so I tend to be kind of obsessive about getting it right when I write. I do a lot of research and try to run any ideas past people who know more where possible, which is often a limiting factor on what I write, but I think for good reasons.

Character writing is a bit of a weakness of mine, unless the idea at the core of the thing starts with them. But it’s usually a setting idea. Without good characters driving a good plot, its easy to end up with a “here’s an idea, the end” kind of stories, which I’ve definitely been rejected from magazines for submitting before. I think that can work on flash fiction, though I haven’t written as much of that. I’ve got the luxury of writing for fun, so I can get away with just writing stories that I want to exist, and then trying to find a home for them. I’m waiting to hear back from a magazine for a rural-cyberpunk-with-environmental-rage thing and I’ve got a couple backburndered stories I’ll probably pick back up when I finally burn out on the photobashes.

I definitely find myself wanting to try out some of the stuff I’ve been researching for the art. I’d like to build a parabolic solar cooker, and I’ve been making plans for a fresnel lens solar forge, which would be cool to build next summer. And now that I’m researching agroforestry, I’m looking at what crops I could be planting in nearby woods.

Best of luck with your writing! There’s wonderful opportunities there to demonstrate solarpunk concepts, technologies, ways of life, in hands-on kind of ways that’ll help regular people picture it for the first time.