Writer Support Threads are here for you to discuss your monthly goals and challenges, comment about any burning ideas you have, find support, share resources, ask questions, and more. Participant as much or as little as you’d like — participation here means much more than you think.
Continue reading for dates and reminders, featured WIPs and requested feedback, and monthly resources.
Dates & Reminders
On the 15th of each month, we host Snippet Day to help writers feel comfortable with posting their work publicly. Post as much or as little as you want. If you post, ask for feedback as wanted.
Feedback helps writers strengthen their works and creates engagement that helps other readers find their content. (Please feel free to add your own works.)
This is mostly due to a teacher I had, who once said something that could be summed up to: “If we consider the human mind as something real, then fiction doesn’t exist. What we call ‘fiction’ happens in our minds, which are real. Which means it IS real too. So, ‘fiction’ doesn’t exist - as long as a story and it’s characters are in the mind of at least one person, then they are just as real as you and me.”.
We’ve also got some interesting discussions in the following posts:
Discussion
What makes an RO stand out to you? How have you been impacted by ROs you’ve seen in games? What are some ways that you make your own ROs resonate with players’ hearts?
Closing
My goals are to rest and go very slow. Recovery is just as important as productivity.
After several years of being active in the CoG community, I feel a desperate urge to talk about anything other than ROs. Everything that can be said has been said a hundred times over, and that includes delusional takes where the author is made into history’s greatest monster because they dared to write a love interest who’s not player-sexual.
Of course, my next chapter will still be 50% romance scenes, because that’s what we do. Still, I’m tempted to write a story that’s all about trains or quasars, without any romance, just as a palate cleanser.
Thanks for starting the thread! And thanks to Ray for starting the previous one, too!
July was, in retrospect, a pretty successful month. My goal of the last few months was to get Pactbinder’s fourth chapter out by mid-late July, which I managed last Saturday. And whilst I’ve gotten fantastic feedback on bugs and some sentence flow stuff, nothing so far has been super-game breaking or flawed which is a big relief.
Not going to set myself any writing goals for August; my plan is to be patient and wait for more feedback over the next couple of weeks, start working through my Tumblr ask backlog, do some fun stuff with readers like share player stats, and release a couple of patches as required. Don’t want to rush into writing C5 without leaving plenty of time to get feedback first. Besides, I have life admin to be dealing with…
In the background I’ll try to channel my writing energy into refining my scoping and planning work for the upcoming arc during this time - I might start writing C5 later in Aug, I might not depending on how the other stuff goes, but I definitely want to at least be in a position where I can start writing it by Sep 1.
Edit:
I’m super interested about this. Most of the discussion I get on my thread is on worldbuilding and plot speculation, though ROs are definitely the third most popular topic, and early on I definitely had a lot of comments suggesting I add new ROs. (and RO talk is much more common than anything else on my Tumblr)
I wonder what drives this - maybe it’s a compliment to how well you write your ROs that everybody wants to talk about them!
After years of therapy and trying to catch and audience that despises me I don’t give a fuck anymore. I hate writing romance and I won’t write romance. People hate me anyway. So basically I entered in the I don’t give a crap the audience
I’m sure that you’re mistaken re: people hating you! People seemed super pleased to see you back on the Halloween thread from what I’ve read, and you’ve seemed nice on these writer threads whenever we’ve spoken.
Even so, I think it’s sensible not to write what you don’t want to write.
It’s not. Romance really isn’t the strong point of my stories, I have to actively force myself to write it half the time. And I’m not talking about my threads specifically, just the general state of the medium.
On tumblr, having ROs is more important than having games. I’m not joking. There are blogs full of detailed profiles of every love interest in the game, with verbose descriptions of their eye colors and long posts that explore their deep traumas and the MCs role in overcoming their rich inner struggles…and no demo to be seen. If your goal is getting clicks on tumblr, actually writing an IF is a waste of time. Just invent 11 hypothetical ROs, steal some art for people who can’t be bothered to read, and vaguely imply that an actual game is coming sometime this century.
Reddit is little better. They usually talk about actual games, which is nice, but their perception of those games is entirely defined by their ROs and nothing else. Shattered Eagle is the game where you can impregnate an empress and therefore the best thing ever, Spire, Surge and Sea is the game where an RO can leave you and therefore the worst thing ever, Saturnine is a game where you can hit on an octopus and therefore mid. It doesn’t even matter how well romances are written, just how carefully they avoid bruising the player’s ego.
See, I’m usually on the side of not catering to the audience too much. I write sci-fi, which is two strikes in terms of sales and popularity. But not having romance is ninety-nine strikes, so I just bite the bullet and try to make intimate scenes as interesting as I can.
Oh, thanks for your comment. However I am an ancient fossil in this forum literally. (This is not my first account as I was hacked more than a decade ago) And well, the fandoms and me have a very very very tumultuous and negative story that spammed more than a decade.
Funny enough I am absolutely friends with the authors (many personaly) through years.
However aI have noticed lately that I am so stubborn that I pass the storm as the toxic ones aren’t anymore so I am returning.
Welcome to the “then let me be evil” team. Best decision I’ve ever made.
Re: ROs, I’m a bit torn. I don’t hate the idea conceptually, I just have no idea about how to write romances.
(But I admit having bursts when I like building character profiles. Very occasionally, and usually they limit to randomly coming up with a quote or two, but I have them.)
Ah, gotcha. Saturnine is on my to-buy list so I’ve avoided your threads for fear of spoiling myself so far.
I do find the demo-less game hype a little funny sometimes - I think the forum’s policy of only allowing threads for games with demos is a very good one. But I suppose the promise of a game is always going to be more tantalizing than the reality; it can be all things to all people, until pen is put to paper and infinite possibilities collapse into fewer but more tangible realities, haha.
I have noticed that requests for me to add ROs slowed down a lot after I got a few chapters into my demo, for example - I think as the story’s structure became more and more evident, it became more obvious why I picked the ROs I did. I probably should write some more detailed character profiles for my cast on my Tumblr master post, though. I tried to go for short, concise and evocative, but I think people like a bit more detail there.
I love read good romances. Several of the best scenes on Cog and Hosted are romance or romantic adjacent. Still 75% romances are carbon copies. Not a rant about writers. It is what the audience demands.
I divide myself clearly as me writer Vs me Reader. What I love to write is not funny enough the thing I normally would be prone to read.
My goals for this month are to finish BotL’s epilogue and release the full demo to public scrutiny. Terrifying as always.
As for ROs… I think the best way to approach them (and one I have failed at sometimes myself, admittedly) is to just write a solid character. The potential subplot should follow from there. Not really helpful as advice, probably, but definitely something I need to write on a sticky note and attach to my computer so I don’t continue to fall into the trap of (inadvertently) trying to make storylines that can be all things for all people. Because then they’re just not… good.
In rebellion, I’ve been crafting my next projects to where the players are allowed (some would say forced) to interact with ROs beyond a romantic context. Games where the player is rewarded for making relationships across the board, with some being purposefully locked out in a playthrough.
Honestly, I crave for deep relationships in games that aren’t just romantic. Relationships like friendships or mentorships.
An advice always let the player the option to say F&CK X character I won’t make any interaction with them beyond the strictly necessary.
I hate HATE when games shove characters and assume that you love them. It is cheap. It is bad design and destroy pace.
An example I despise Black Magic character. Due they is shoved upon us with no explanation why That we are sexualy aroused for them it was creepy. It was Cullen levels of creepy and well, caused in many people stop playing the game even in the demo.
Making no romance scenes part of romance is great. Only don’t force everyone to having to suffer characters they don’t want to.
I love when authors let me be as nice or as mean as I want to characters.
I also love it when I can still be “mean” to an RO without them hating me. Sometimes I express my affection with teasing or saying “I hate you”, but will be the most loyal person when it comes down to it. Like in my two current projects!
In hindsight, I would’ve actually preferred a discussion about create more complex relationships and interactions with ROs and characters.
I feel like that should depend on the character. Not all would take kindly to that. Say you have a very insecure RO… saying “I hate you” might just crush their confidence. But if they’re giving as good as they get, definitely!
This is pretty much what I’ve seen. I get a lot of asks complaining about my child-free character even after making it clear they arn’t going to budge. It dosen’t matter what the character’s reason is either, because some people want me to endlessly justfy it like they need them to have this tramatic reason that they just dont have.
You shouldn’t have to, not when so many other types of relationships can be explored. Siblings are a fun one for example. I also find it funny that in some games where the stakes are so high or situations so dire that the MC could even think about kissing someone they met two pages ago.
I try to give the writers of these the benefit of the doubt, like maybe they just discovered the format and came up with an idea, started worldbuilding or whatever and felt confident they could make it. Then realise writing takes ages and theres a lot more to consider than they first thought.
If you’ve looked at any of the Writing subreddits you will see people continually posting about losing motivation, struggling with self doubt and realising they might not make money from their writing. They likely post on tumblr to get some validation that their ideas could appeal to other people and at the time, probably believe they will eventually write it.
Ya know, you don’t have to . I’m on team variety is the spice of life and all that, so normalise away games that have a focus on other types of relationships. I mean I’ve gone down the route of RO-less games multiple times (and even published one at HG), but yes, if you don’t have ROs then you should expect a game to under perform, as popular RO-less games are definitely the exception. I’ve kind of made my peace with it that this is one factor unlikely to change.
I’ve got some ideas why, but one thing I do find lacking proportionally in many games are real, indepth NON-romantic character (so we’re talking friends, family, colleagues etc). It seems like most characters of interest do end up being ROs. So perhaps the expectation becomes that ROs = game with good interactive characters. There’s also probably a bit of an escapism/fantasy element to it as well. There’s a reason why games where you can be a powerful wizard, superhero or superstar tend to perform really well, and why ROs that can reject the player are often seen as a big turn off.
But you know, if you ever want to write that story about quasars, I’m all there for it. Scifi’s another genre I’d like to see more of around here
Best decision I’ve ever made.