Hello and welcome to the February 2025 support thread. For this one I’ve temporarily taken over from @AletheiaKnights who kindly created the January thread as she has other commitments - many thanks for doing that last month
Happy birthday to those with birthdays this month! Thank you to everyone for participating in last month’s thread and keeping this tradition going - it was great to see it so busy!
If there are particular writing topics you’d enjoy discussing, please carry on bringing them up as it’s really useful to share perspectives on writing craft.
As it’s Valentine’s Day soon, I thought I’d share an article from game designer and writer Alexander Freed on the subject of writing interactive romance. It’s full of useful advice and even (especially!) if you don’t agree with all of it, I’d definitely recommend taking a look if you’re interested in writing romance in these games!
With birthday month and the Global Game Jam now behind me, I’m going back to developing Lily Adventuresses! Episode 2. I originally intended to release this some time in Q1 2025; and now; the release window is April or May of this year, depending on how fast I can finish the rest of the chapters (I’m currently developing the climax of chapter 2).
My goal for this month is to get a decent amount of Project Amble Chapter 3 drafted. If it doesn’t get finished that’s OK, though; I’ve been working very fast and this chapter is going to be longer than the earlier ones.
I am hoping to do an official announcement about the title and what it’s about this month, as well.
Happy February, writers! Thanks for keeping the thread alive—it’s awesome to see so much energy here. And big shoutout to @AletheiaKnights for holding it down last month. That romance article looks like a gem, especially with Valentine’s Day around the corner. Whether you’re crafting love stories or just here for the vibes, keep the words flowing!
It’s a bit of a shorter month, and I’d like to try a goal that isn’t explicitly a number of words, so it’s fortunate that there’s a big, obvious one right there for the taking.
Finish drafting BotL Chapter Three
Also, get at least a little ways in to Chapter Four. (I’d like to finish one of the six paths through that, if possible.)
Other than that, I’d like to try not stressing myself out too much, but it’s inevitable that I will track words and will keep up the pressure on myself to produce something like 7-10k a week. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but sometimes I do wish it felt a little more like a casual ‘do what I can’ and a little less like ‘if anyone else but me applied this much pressure to me, I could probably bring a lawsuit against them for a hostile work environment.’
It would be nice to have more to show for it, at least.
Anyway, good luck to everyone this month, and if you’re your own boss, try to be nice about it.
Added 45K words last month. Goal for Feb: finish the narrative threads for all the different people you can choose to engage in Irduin. There are a lot of them, so that’s an ambitious goal…but hey, that’s what goals are for.
I wrote around 40k last month, finishing my new chapter of my wip up. Yet there are still a few scenes I had locked behind a WIP branch sooo… my goals this month:
finish those WIP scenes. I dont have a set wordcount for it.
Implement my little visual indicators regarding choices made and approvals that I had created last month
Finish planning out my next chapter!
Perhaps and hopefully get around writing the intro to this chapter. I’ll see about the wordcount once I am done with everything else on the list, but I am aiming for the 10k for now, seeing as I have the intro planned out already.
10,000 words into my new novel. I’ve managed to get this far before my biggest ever writing project is at 50,000 words but I’ve never gotten to this point as quickly before so I’m seeing that as a kind of progress. Spending less time focusing on worldbuilding and coming up with plot outlines more time just writing down whatever I think sounds fun, it’s been a much more creatively fulfilling process and my hope is that this is the year I finally finish a novel.
My goal for this month would be to edit, expand and code what I’ve written last month into an actual update, including the stuff I’ve been procrastinating on like the codex entries.
Good luck to us all
My goal is to continue my primarily consistent writing. However, I’m deciding to keep focusing on Quiver because I’m too unsettled about what to do with Season Three, even if I do have an outline in my head.
So I’m aiming for another 25,000 words for February as well.
I’ve nearly finished Chapter One, but I just need to do two romance-based scenes. I think I’ve got a few ToDos that I’ve missed.
The 1st February word-count for today is 2,246 words. A decent start!
I guess I’ll try to finish the first chapter of my project too. It will be a bit of a challenge, since it’s shaping up to be 30k words at least and February is a short month, but maybe I can maintain the pace of over a thousand words daily.
Oh, and I guess I’ll submit my previous project to Hosted Games. First thing tomorrow morning.
What you’d suggested sounds reasonable enough- though I only ever talked with Brittany, and, truth told, didn’t know she was married. I was told she was staying with her sister, and just… believed it, never questioned it. Two, in years passed, and her other sister passed away some years ago. I’ve never talked with them; if you have a way to contact her wife, I’d be happy to do so, I do think Brittany talked at least some about me with her. If in doubt, someone that knows how can contact her for me and ask- tell her that I’m still on Brittany’s discord and can be contacted there or here. Other methods that may have worked before would fail because of computer issues from my end this last year that wiped all my access to old profiles and routes of communication. I do not know Brittany’s wife’s name or contact info, only Brittany. So someone that does, who is willing, please ask on my behalf?
February will be an interesting month for me, writing-wise, because I recently learned of a new opportunity that excites me. Normally, I would be hesitant to take on a second major project, in addition to [secret project] which I have been working on relentlessly since summer. However, this is a unique opportunity with a limited time frame, and it’s quite competitive. I would be disappointed in myself if I didn’t try applying to it, even if my odds of being accepted are quite small.
So I will be taking some time to draft the perfect proposal, in between continuing work on my current project. Meanwhile, last week I found myself browsing an anagram generator, with the passing thought of coming up with some kind of codename for the project. Since I’m not ready to make anything public (and probably won’t be for a while), but calling it just “the project” is a bit confusing, isn’t it?
@HarrisPS I was wondering if we could revive an old initiative where writers who needed feedback for their WIPs could advertise them on the main topic, and people who were looking for WIPs to beta read could refer to the topic.
I have some time to beta read other WIPs over tea and bus rides, but searching the forum for random WIP threads often causes my head to spin.
Thank you to everyone for participating in last month’s thread and keeping this tradition going - it was great to see it so busy!
