I’m feeling this so much.
Anyway, my fav line from last night:
“Cold iron. You’re making it look like you think I’m one of the fae.”
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Yeah in my case was my horrible mother but yes same thing.
But mercy is a tough leason when you are said even before that reaching 5 years that you are a disgrace and never ever be able to be successful in anything in my life.
My dad fighted for my total custody and he achieved it at court because my mother was toxic and a drug addict .
But the negative effects and self esteem and anxiety was already there .
I reply what my mother said to me even before I can remember as baby. what my therapist say that is the worst thing as it is there since the very beginning of my mind.
Thankfully my dad was a saint with my grandmother giving me support and an a great childhood.
The half dozen kids that she had after me with several other men hadn’t that luck Between jail and drugs I think we only 3 are free and alive.
So I still try to learn to erase it. And I am advancing in the process.
Many of us here know the feeling that is why all of us has to support each other journey.
Writting is same time a fountain of way to health and a recovery tool. My therapy include lot of writing exercise and learning to notice my emotional state.
How is alao something that can be trigger of anxiety.
To people lurking in same situation Hold on. Everybody cries sometimes.
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I’ve just finished up a 2-week long exam and I feel utterly exhausted. It likely is to the surprise of no one that I’ve done no writing these past two weeks, but I hope to get back into the swing of things this weekend.
Side note, during the exam, in the final half hour, the files that contained my submission got deleted somehow, and I nearly had a meltdown/heart attack. Luckily, IT guy comes in like the absolute legend he is, and restores it. I am never complaining about my uni’s IT department ever again 
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How is your exam THAT long?!
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I’m doing a game design course. We had 20 hours over the course of two weeks to make a game to the set specifications. It was split into several two hour segments because it’s maybe definitely illegal to keep us in a room that long.
What I don’t get, is that the examiners literally encouraged us to google things in-between the sessions. The entire exam was a pisstake. If you ask me, the board required them to have at least one exam so they threw this in 
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Well, it obviously was less about you knowing stuff, and more about you knowing how to use stuff. It’s not like you’ll supposed to know everything, instead of knowing how to find out information, when you graduate from whatever it is you’re studying. I think that’s smart.
In other news, I seem to have accidentally created a possessive (suffix… sorry, grammar joke) RO. How on Earth did that happen, I have no idea.
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See, now that makes sense the more I think on it, but I still think they needed something to call an exam, otherwise they’d have just made this a coursework with a deadline like usual (in which we can google things willy-nilly). With the exam we didn’t have internet access, only the game engine.
You have opened Pandora’s Box. Dare not alert the sleeping thirst beast.
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It was really clever from your examinators. It is differences aside what in Laws is call a Case simulacrum…
They give you a suppised real case like everything where real. Even few hours you have access to all database precedents and that. to simulate how a real case is developed in all preparation fases
Then you enter in the mock judgment with teachers as jury and judges. There you only have access to all your case dossier like in a real court.
I only have one of those. It is long but it is the most important preparation college did. By far.
For you a game development is similar
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The worst part is that this specific RO was meant to mitigate the “canon RO” syndrome, not make it more obvious, but I can’t really help this now.
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I say go with it. One of my favorite tropes is the “Who did this to you” feral energy of an RO who goes on a rampage for love. I haven’t written this into any of my games yet but it’s going to happen at some point.
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Unfortunately it’s less “who did this to you” rampage and more “I don’t like who your parents married you off to, let’s get rid of your spouse” scheme, with a side of “I’m your bodyguard now whether you like it or not, so you have to do what I say”. Granted, I’m having hard time picturing MC who isn’t on board with that (which is a problem as of itself), but it doesn’t change the “this is the correct RO” optics, which wouldn’t be a problem in a traditional novel I think, but I fear it’s just going to turn readers against the said spouse just because they see that neon sign pointing at them in IF (instead of, say, something wrong with the actual character, which I don’t have a problem with).
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Whatever the specifics, the feral protective trope is a favorite of mine when done well. I suppose with a choice-based game it might be helpful to have checks to see if the PC is okay with the RO being bossy or super overprotective or going vigilante on behalf of their lover/friend, and I expect being they’d be extremely grumpy about it if the PC doesn’t want them to. Or maybe they do whatever terrible thing they’re driven to do first and ask for forgiveness later. Thinking this will make it into one of my stories… 
Good luck with your WIP!
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From this I presume you mean that the person the MC is married off to is an absolute asshole, at minimum? So there’s at least TWO people in your game that I’m going to have to take a flamethrower to, then?
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They’re not… they just happen to be a supervillain.
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Flamethrowing two characters is still on the table.
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Oh, I’m sure you’ll find more.
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I read this today and found some parts interesting. It’s focused on larger-scale games than we do here in terms of tech and team size, but it’s a solid look at the effects of building too much detail on static elements (existing setting, character backgrounds) before or to the detriment of dynamic ones (plot, decision points, character development etc). I think that misplaced focus is part of where I went wrong with the unfinished/unpublished novels I wrote during my teens/20s.
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Thanks for the article, Harris.
I think the biggest takeaway from it is to prioritize in your development the important elements to your story, with characters and plot beats controlling the others.
The example he provides: nixing a narrative beat due to three pages of character backstory is a lesson in recognizing the importance of your narrative as a whole and prioritizing that over all the individual elements.
All the authors writing IF that I can think off the top of my head seem to fine tune and develop out the details of their world building, even those that start out with deep and/or complex elements in place.
Personally, I feel keeping the balance between prepping the world-building and background material for future success by giving it structure and at the same time keeping the flexibility of changing details is one of the greatest challenges of IF writing.
I think this is the case because with interactive story-telling, you need to keep track of both width and depth and still keep all the elements juggling at the same time. It is like flying a plane – change the pitch, and you might still need to change the yaw – making an actual adjustment all that more complicated.
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My weirdest line from last night
“If I’d known how much paperwork being a supervillain is, I’d have become a vigilante.”
Speaking of worldbuilding, I’ve had a few cases where what’s required for the plot conflicts with the established facts of the world… those are fun to solve.
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