Last week, I was quite busy helping out with family matters. This week, I have no such excuse and I will have to buckle down and catch up on the work that I recklessly believed I’d find the time for, last week. Sunday was all about organizing my schedule, and Monday…was supposed to be results day. Where I do work that shows actual results. Instead, it’s been a lot of background pondering of themes, characterization, narrative foils, and how the whole thing ties together.
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That sounds like a supervillain business management game.
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Gotta love taking a break from writing and the forum in general to focus on my Uni coursework, and coming back to see 176 new posts in this thread. Starting to regret setting each writer’s support thread to watching, heh…
Now that I’m (mostly) done with my work, I have some free time to spend on writing. Looking back at the goals I set, I’m not sure if I’d be able to do them with only ten days left in February. However, I am optimistic about writing a short story tying into the main plot, I’ve done that once before and thoroughly enjoyed it (I also learned I might be a writing sadist XD. My game is about death, and the side story was about a man grieving his dead wife. I made my English professor cry lol). All I need to do is decide which character to write about. Additionally, I first posted the demo on 15th March 2023, so if I can get this done for the year’s anniversary, I’ll be happy.
But anyway, glad to be back!
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I’ve got a set date for admission on Sunday 25th February. So I’ve got 4 days roughly to finish my Chapter 2 as I want to add it to the demo before I go into hospital.
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Another coding comment/query from me:
Any tips for remembering the correct number of parentheses in *if statements with and, or?
I often find myself trying to avoid using more than two conditions because I’m so convinced I’m going to get it wrong 
I know I need to figure this out though, cause there are enough moving parts in my project that sometimes 3+ conditions are just going to be the easiest and best way of coding things.
(in this instance, checking MC isn’t ace/aro and doesn’t have hangups about relationships and didn’t block romantic interactions with this character)
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Comparisons in pairs, equal amount opening and closing parentheses?
(A or B)
((A or B) or C) / ((A or B) or (C))
((A or B) or (C or D))
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I’m in the process of excising an old story to make room for a new one. It’s a bittersweet process, but one that has to be done; the real challenge is going to be getting the ideas consistently flowing for my new projects. So far, I’ve found that listening to music helps with the process. So I guess I’ll be searching for soundtracks now.
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I have no tips: I’ve been harangued by parentheses since I was making NPC mods at age 16. Honestly I just try to QuickTest and RandomTest regularly and if I have many parentheses, I build it up in pairs at a time.
Or, I don’t know if this is breaking coding good-practice but I recently used multiple *if lines which I did rather than having one vast parenthesis line:
*if raf_romance = false
*if ((mat_romance = false) and ((mat_discuss_romance = false) or (mat_interest = false)))
*if ((var_romance = false) and (var_discuss_romance = false))
*set fio_start_romance_eligible true
Each *if indent rules out each character’s romance being active, and if all of them end up passing, you’re eligible to start one with Fiore.
In other news: I have been in the weeds of revisions today, partly because I’ve had three nights of sleep deprivation and that’s what I do when I have some writing time available but don’t have the energy to draft something new. I have been sorting through the easiest-to-fix stuff first. Here is a copy-paste of my silly but earnest Tumblr post in praise of my editor Abby:
my CoG editor is amazing in a ton of ways but a few of those many ways is that a) she is incredibly gracious when I leave placeholder text in, b) she is very matter-of-fact about errors in my smut scenes (this one in Chapter 8 was probably the most graphic so far and she was just like “these two particular acts can be collapsed into one choice”) c) she asks “is this intentional here?” rather than going “wtf” about some nonsense I’ve done by mistake d) she always reminds me to take some time over making sure a romance interest is extra angsty when the moment calls for it
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I finished writing Chapter One of Meteoric and put up the beta today.
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Alright, I sat down today and wrote for 5 hours and completed a 4.2k short story for the Patreon that I’m scheduling for next week. Having done the content creator thing before, I think I’m falling easily back into the rhythm of it. Scheduling things a week in advance so I don’t get too backed up, not working after my allotted work time I’ve set for myself, etc. This story is a Rivals to Lovers/Rivals with Benefits short story AU, so I know I’m about 5 days too late, but here’s a couple small snippets of it.
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Finally finished all the first daemon captures. Now all that is left is to remember how I wanted to end the chapter and write the end bit which includes the next encounter with the main daemon.
Looks like I will be able to finish in time. Leaving it for the night now but will continue tomorrow night.
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I just need to say that *looplimit is wonderful. I just got the ‘visited line too many times’ error while playtesting, but the coding was working as intended – I just needed to increase the limit. It’s so nice when there’s commands that solve the situation for you. 
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With nine days left in the month, I have completed this pass. Except for a search for repeated word usage, I can now focus on:
If I complete this task in the last week of February, I will have met my monthly goals as stated on the first, for the first time in a long while.
Sometimes, my slow rate of work takes it toll on my writing in both inspiration and in moral, but every once in a while I can celebrate small victories as well.
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Repeated word usage? that is not usually something I’d put on my list in regards to things to check for when doing some polish and stuff. What does that entail?
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In the midst of the criticisms surrounding Falrika the Alchemist, plus some of my other works getting not-so-stellar reviews, I’ve developed much thicker skin. That comes with 20 years’ worth of experience writing.
And for those who are starting out, here’s an invaluable tweet of advice.
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Well, when I write, at times i repeatedly use the same word over and over. An example in my “apple scene” is the overuse of the word “bushel”.
Here is an example:
I used “bushel” three times in five consecutive sentences. If possible, I will change a couple of them, so readability is increased.
Using the same word over-and-over will sometimes interrupt a reader’s flow while reading.
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Definitely! And sometimes I find I’m just using filler words, or similar descriptions or actions, too often. I see it when I’m editing, too – ‘smile’ is a common culprit, for instance. But everyone has their own favourites!
I’ve found word clouds to be really helpful with this, and there are several generators freely available online. You can adjust to leave out certain types of words, or specific words, to help weigh the graphic better, too. (I know I need to cut back on my use of ‘little’ when it’s four times the size of most of my other words, oops….) I like to run them when I’m done with a scene to see what my flavours of the month were and if I need to cut out any distracting repetitions, especially of less common words.
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Same here. One thing I like about editing in Notepad++ (though I’m sure other programs have this feature too) is it can highlight all instances of a given word just by clicking on it. Helps me catch repeats, like when I used “look” four times in the same small paragraph. 
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In today’s news: I’ve decided to change my series title. No matter how much I love it, it refers to an element of the world that is relevant in only some of them. 
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Would you entertain the idea of using more temp variables often (to shrink down the number of comparisons before doing a final short enough conditional), or use subroutines for frequently used conditional checks? If you only want to learn to match up parenthesis, can programs that color-code parenthesis help you visualize the groupings of conditionals?
(you can direct message me if you want some code example)
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