After recovering from yet two more deaths in my life (Seriously, this has been a ROUGH year. Dad died March 9th, then one dog, then another dog, then my best friend, and now my aunt. And it still has not been a full year yet.), I finally hit my groove writing again.
Got my latest series published in paperback at long last, plugging away at book four in that.
And I’m almost done with chapter two of the newest game. Should have it fully drafted by the end of the week. It’s nice to be ahead of schedule.
(Although I have projects for both my Sociology class and my Developmental Psychology class due this week, so who knows how that will impact my schedule.)
I’m so sorry to hear - it’s never easy but having so much like that is awful. I’m impressed that you’re doing any writing at all, let alone hitting a groove. Massively well done!
If you’d like to link to your series that’s just come out in paperback I’m sure people would be interested in having a look - I certainly am!
Had a bad writing week last week, but here’s a very small snippet:
Summary
As if my thoughts summoned him, the doors ton the dinning hall open and Emperor Konstantin strides through.
Like everyone else, his entrance captures my attention mostly because I’ve never seen him like this. He still walks with his shoulder’s squared, but there’'s a slight droop to them that isn’t normally there. The area around his eyes looks red and puffy, and he crown is angled to the right just enough to stay on his head without falling. Instead of taking his seat, he walks straight to Queen Claudia who is in more shock than any of us.
“Come with me,” he orders, and turns back to the door.
I did a grocery run and hurt my shoulder, and now I can’t properly use my arm at all. Of my writing hand. And just when I was recovering from my previous arm problem and my cold.
Hey there, my friends. First off, thanks @HarrisPS for taking care of the Support Thread this month. We all appreciate it! I know it’s a bit late to mention this (it’s already February 18), but I forgot to say it earlier.
So, a quick update on my goals for the year—nothing major has changed over the past month and a half:
New Laptop: Still working on getting a loan, so no new laptop yet. I’m planning to stick with Lenovo Yoga since my last one was pretty reliable. I don’t want to gamble with my money on something new.
Organizing Brainstorm .txt: I wouldn’t say it’s fully organized, but I cleaned it up a bit. Deleted a few pages, added some new ideas that came to mind, and just made it look nicer overall.
Story Draft: No progress here—I’ve been a bit lazy. But I’ve been writing a lot for my university classes, so at least I’m getting back into the habit of writing regularly after more than a year. It’s not the story I wanted to work on, but hey, it’s something!
Learning ChoiceScript: This one’s on hold until I get a new laptop. Coding on a phone isn’t practical. But I’ve picked up some useful tips from this thread, like multiple choices on the same page. Didn’t know that was possible, and it opens up a lot of possibilities.
That’s it for now. Baby steps.
It might not be super relevant to your question, but when I played Skyrim a couple of years ago, I used a mod to replace the spiders with bears. That’s how much I dislike spiders. And cockroaches. And geckos. And snakes. And butterflies. And rats. Honestly, anything that shouldn’t be inside my home, but somehow found it’s way inside.
Progress continues on that WIP and I have given myself a soft goal of getting the update released by the end of this weekend, which, as I have a three day weekend, should be doable, barring real world stuff sneaking up on me.
Ha, same, despite my treatment of them in All the Way - really, I wish I lijked these criters more, but there is something in our nature that just makes the flesh crawl when around them. And yes, so very with butterflies too - we have this wing in our museum that is a giant butterfly room. When they were younger my niece and nephew loved to go thru there - it’s meant to be very peaceful and zen, and mean while I’'m basically cowering before the mass of fluttering wings.
I hope you feel better soon. About a month ago I was worried I was getting carpal tunnel, but the feeling of numbness seems to of dissipitated despite my numerous hours typing.
Oh, intriguing and a nice snippet - makes me want to learn more about why he is as he is there. Lots of good intrigants in a couple paragraphs.
I am so sorry that you are having to go through that.
I feel like sometimes the writing is a relief to deal with things sometimes, and other times, if to much is going on, writing is next to impossible. Definitely hats off to all the amazing writers throughout history that wrote despite all the rough times in their lives - I don’t think I could have done it.
Or sometimes the coding or planning, depending on how one feels.
I struggle with this a lot myself. If I were less insecure about what I think is good, it would be so much easier to just accept “I’m writing for me.” I found a sort of happy medium in that I asked a close friend of mine to read/play what I’m working on because we share very similar taste in genre, tropes, humor, etc, that writing for him is like an extension of writing for me. It’s not a perfect solution, but if he likes it, then by golly I must have done something right.
Please rest up and feel well soon!
Bears are such an interesting substitute choice and I’m a little in love with it.
As for myself, I’ve spent a lot of energy just trying to stay positive through a lot of bad weather events, frozen pipe scares, snowed in for a day and a half; semi-normal for the area, but it feels a lot worse than usual.
Writing-wise, however, I feel much better about things! I’ve gone through some serious edits, adding a few things that people suggested, and have been working through a small branching section that I feel I made more complicated than necessary, but am determined to see it through.
Picturing tiny bears running around now, and it’s so cute that I want to add that as an option now.
Perhaps less that you think, it has a lot of limitations.
Thanks for the well wishes! I got it un-dislocated at least (I have lousy joints, so this is relatively normal, but in this particular case it was worse than usual), so here’s hoping.
Today, I’m now struggling with trying to have my Star Trek -inspired setting and my urge to write in Borderlands-inspired warring megacorps, which… isn’t going well.
Good news, everyone.
Episode 1 of Lily Adventuresses! is now a nominee to the IGG PH Indie Community Awards.
You can vote for my game as well as other awesome games made by fellow Filipino developers.
Full list of nominees: https://iggph-awards.carrd.co/
Vote here: Indie Community Awards Community Vote
Remember that voting ends on March 7, 2025 11:59PM (GMT+8).
It’s funny how getting slightly better at coding in choicescript means that I’m more annoyed when adding content to older chapters. Like it’s not worth it to redo the code at this point because it does work and has been bugfixed, but man is it ugly. I’m not looking forward to dusting off the cobwebs from an older project because of it
This is me currently . Went and did the whole thing just to realize there are way’s I can do something better/ make it neater. Good thing it’s still the beginning for me.
Hello. This month my goal is starting to write my Xianxia Wip. Every think is planned in my head but trying to learn Choice script. I’am blind and I’am thankful for Choice script being accessible.
That is the best image ever - I can just see them roaring in their miniscule webs. Would definitely make me want to dust my house better to avoid getting mawled by the wee things.
So true; the next new game I start I am going to present my personality variables better. In the past I’ve done things like making a variable named joyful_vs_woeful, but then I always get confused on which way goes which and I need to do more double checking to make sure I don’t have the math wrong, where if I did it just did it as joyful the measurement would be easier to read and the woeful would be implicit with the lack of joyful and I can always do whatever I want to the stat display anyways. A simple thing but it will make it so much easier.
Hadn’t realized it was, but that is wonderful to learn. Good luck on your wip!
I’ve committed to remastering Sabres of Infinity at some point, and oh boy am I not looking forward to editing whatever the fuck I was doing back then.
I wrote a stat requirement for a good ending that I get the feeling might frustrate some players, and I know this because I was explicitly told in some feedback something along the lines of “so long as you don’t do this.”
I wanted to write a narrative ending where a player who made some morally bad choices during their playthrough decides that they’re still deserving of happiness and, while they’ll never be truly redeemed, the act of trying to be a better person will make things better than if they didn’t. Here’s the thing: that’s the only way to convince the RO to try to be a better person as well.
And I’ve been mulling it over for about a week now, trying to figure out a way for a good MC to convince the RO to become better… and it just isn’t working for me creatively. Which feels bad, cuz I’m looking at feedback to explicitly make my work better, I’m just at odds with what I think makes the work better versus what the feedback said to avoid doing
Well, I’d say that in the end you should do what you think is best for the story. It’s your story. Listen to feedback, but don’t apply things that go against your vision.
That’s true, I’m just concerned that my vision makes for a worse experience/narrative and am not realizing it. It’s a dark romance and I understand that that audience (or at least the dark romance book audience) wants a “love can save you” narrative, they’re less concerned with whether or not the RO would realistically change and instead are into the fantasy where the RO does change. Technically it falls within that trope, just not in a way that I see the average reader being appreciative of it.
Though I am prone to overthinking it, so I’ll need to wait and see how unpopular of a decision it really is
. Went and did the whole thing just to realize there are way’s I can do something better/ make it neater. Good thing it’s still the beginning for me.