Hello everyone. Welcome to April 2026 writer suppord thread. I’am Hosting writing suppord thread again. The writer support thread is a low-pressure, low-judgement space to talk about writing, share our progress and ask for feedback or questions. Thank you again to everyone who participates in these threads and helping to support each other. Please suppord and motive each other. I hope everyone reachs their goals. I don’t have resourcess to share but a topic to disscuss. İnspration. What inspired everyone to write? Thanks @ChanceOfFire for giving me the chance.
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New month, new attempt to get some forward progress in, though it’s shaping up to be one of those times where other people really need me to show up and do things, so I’m going to try and temper my expectations about what I’ll be able to manage in my own time.
So with that in mind I’d like to:
- Finish four of the remaining eight scenes in Chapter Nine
- Make some significant progress in planning at least one of my next projects
I think these will be relatively attainable goals for me, but still represent significant forward momentum.
Good luck this month, everyone; I hope you all accomplish what you set out to do.
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I had been trying to finish Chapter 3 of my WIP, The Rise of Cthulhu, by the end of March. I still have almost two hours left, so I may actually make it, as I only have to write the last page or two. Then it’ll be done, but it won’t be finished, as I still have to test the final parts of the chapter and fix any issues before I move it live (which will most likely take several days). I had originally planned to finish it by mid-March, encouraged by finishing the first two chapters ahead of schedule (three weeks or less each, when I’d expected a month), but I quickly realized that would be impossible. I was busier than usual in the second half of February, which I had expected, and all of March, which I hadn’t. I also had to fix and change a bunch of stuff in the earlier parts of the story, so I didn’t get started actually writing Chapter 3 until nearly the end of February. Chapter 3 is also longer than the other chapters, and covers a lot of new territory, whereas Chapter 2 took place in many of the same locations and same general setting as Chapter 1. For April, I hope to finish Chapter 4 by the end of April. It should be shorter than Chapter 3, but there’s also more complexity.
I was inspired to write in 1979 by the first Choose Your Own Adventure books, which I found in my school’s library when I was in kindergarten. I was immediately taken by the concept and devoured any interactive fiction I could find. I also started writing my own then. My first one was inspired by Space and Beyond (and in fact, quite derivative of it), and I finished it in 1979. Sadly, it disappeared. However, my second one written in first grade was much better and more original, and it still exists in a box at my parents’ house.
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Nobody touch the typo in the title. It’s perfect. We’re all writers here.
Goal for April:
24/30 writing days.
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Thanks for kicking off the thread, Leanna!
I was inspired to write by the Lone Wolf gamebooks I read as a kid, overambitious fantasy authors like Martin and Jordan, and Choice of the Dragon.
I havr a lot on this month so don’t expect it to be super productive for writing-- but I’ll keep chipping away at the endings of XoR 2!
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Little unprepared but excited to return.
My goals: fix the computer, write the prologue, publish.
I have many insprations but main ones are for books Harry Potter. For İFs a loth of authors I can’t fuly list but at list I try to list some: @Cataphrak @Havenstone @HarrisPS @Zapper @MichaelMaxwell @Moochava @Bacondoneright if their games not exsisted I may never inspired to write my own. They are great storytellers and able to balance with mechanichs. Unforgettable storys. Further more they have their own unique stiles. Thanks for your perfect games. I hope you can give adwise to a blind author.
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Busy month then. Good luck. I hope you will reach all of your goals.
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Good luck. Wow great respect. Sadly I don’t know the book but sounds interesting.
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Wow ambitious goodluck. Where? I will check thanks.
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You can play a years-old demo of A Dance with the Devil by jusg searching for it in the forums. The next update will almost double the wordcount, and that’ll be sometime before the end of this year, hopefully only a few months.
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Hello thanks. All so fixed haha. Choice of the Dragon stil a legent. First Choice of Ganes game İ played. İt have a special place on me. Goodluck. PS Choice of Rebels Uprising is hartdest game I ever played. I love it!
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I will play it thanks.
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I’ve been a Lone Wolf fan since I discovered it in 1987, and that was another inspiration for me. I’m really looking forward to Book 32, which I hope will be released this week.
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I loved the first three most of all, and then the first twelve. The Grand Master ones never grabbed me to the same extent. But I’m glad Magnamund is still being explored. 
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In March it felt like I was beset on all sides by paperwork, illness, and tech issues, but I like to think I have successfully defeated these opponents and can focus better on my story. I’m hoping to finish this round of revisions for Chapter 2 of Iron King’s Heir by the end of the month, or at least make it to the final beat.
Inspiration for me was a long, slow, lifelong process, but I suppose what got me most motivated was listening to podcasts that talk about the importance of stories and symbolism and their power to point us to goodness, beauty, and truth. One niche podcaster, Richard Rohlin, did an interview where he talked about the value of TTRPGs in particular and that’s when I really felt inspired to finally create something of my own.
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My goals for April:
- Complete part A of chapter 4 (and start part B)
- Write 20,000 words
- Edit chapters 1 through 3 to address the issues readers have pointed out
20k is less than what I wrote in March, but I can’t be certain I’ll have the same high output weekends I had this past month.
As for inspiration, I’ve just always loved stories. And ideas have always been a hodgepodge. For my current story, a long time ago, back in college or maybe even high school, I remember looking at the streetlamps extending over the road late one night and thinking they looked like guardian angels. And I never really did anything with that, but it still lodged the idea in my head of ‘what if streetlamps protected people through more than just light?’ So that’s just one tiny piece of what all eventually glommed together into Lamplighters.
Ogilvie’s essays on guilds were another inspiration. Her work is all academic, but still lovely and full of really meaty ideas related to guilds and economics. Society in Tethenen takes some of the points she made in one essay to an absolute extreme.
There’s not really just one piece of inspiration. It’s always a collage of thoughts, ideas, things I’ve seen or read, etc.
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God, I remember having an android tablet as a kid and then ran across the game books on one of the apps on the Google play store and then just kind of getting addicted, that was maybe nine or 10 years ago? I found the website and then the rest is history. Really a bummer the last four don’t come as digital copies though, not much good the physical books would do me after all but I’m really glad to see the series is finally being finished.
Edit: 3, rather, I do recall playing Chai, it’s the last three that never got the project aon license
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My plan this month is to… obviously I don’t have any plans. Plans are for people who know what they’re doing, and mine never survive first contact with the page anyway. But I would like to push a WIP for the skiing game this month, so I guess that’s a plan…
On the topic of inspiration… I’ve been designing games in various mediums since I was a kid, so writing IF, is in many respects, just another medium with it’s own unique learning curve and peculiarities. The inspiration for the Skiing game… I like skiing, live near a ski town and have a kid who skis competitively. ‘They’ always say ‘write about what you know’, and I guess this is that. (The saying also makes me very concerned about some writers life experiences! 
)
Good luck everyone for April!
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I tried to write my first novel as a teenager after reading Terry Brooks’ The Scions of Shannara. I read about a dozen of his books and soon grew to greatly dislike his writing in general, but I’ll always be grateful to him for that initial inspiration.
I was inspired to start writing my current game after reading Gengen Kusano’s Last and First Idol, an anthology of three hard science-fiction stories each about a specific Japanese pop-culture phenomenon. It’s got a cutesy cover illustration, but it’s probably the most brutally violent book I’ve ever read. It nearly made me throw up at one point. Two thumbs up! (?)
My story isn’t very violent. If I succeed, it’ll be a touching romance (and also some other stuff happens).
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I’ve been making up stories longer than I can remember, so I have no idea what actually triggered it. But my first long-term projects were inspired by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Jack Higgins, King Arthur stories, and Star Wars.
(I still have a soft spot for the King Arthur one and might want to return to it.)
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