February 2025 Writer Support Thread

Wow! These threads sure grow fast - my appologies to anyone I don’t comment on, as there are just so many things to reply to already only a few days into february . . .

Ha, it varies. I do some notes on my phone from time to time, as its near me usually, and if I wake up in the middle of the night with an idea, I can add it to my notes section easily enough. Sadly, my hand writing has decayed so much over the decades that if I really want to read my notes, I have to write pretty slowly, so its just faster to write the notes on a computer. Though sometimes its nice not to have to deal with an electronic device, so I have thought about doing more in notebooks and posterboards, etc.

Do it! Do it! Those sound like such great names! I think in my haitus wip The Ice King’s Call I to had a character with alf in their name, and I have no regrets.

Exciting and intrigued to try this.

This was about how I felt towards the end of last month. Ah, to want to be a writer - sometimes you are a sun, other times you are a piñata, or so I feel anyways. I keep going back and forth on that matter myself too - wishing I’d only presented any of my games until they were about ready to be published vs. wanting to get them out there in case something happens to myself and I won’t be able to ever complete them.

As for the emotional roller-coaster, I think part of the problem is that the convention is that we all need to be these stoic, hard edged writers ready to kill our darlings and we all need to be perfectly emotionally and creatively healthy at all times . . . but that’s not just how writing has ever worked. While I love and adore most of the great writers throughout history, I think a lot of them were hit hard by depression and also sorts of neuro-divergency - it’s a hard craft, and while convention calls for thick skin, I think in practice that’s something not too many writers are really going to have. We are called to be empathic, in touch with our humanity, so we can channel our energy into intense scenes that will grip and touch our readers - hard to do that while being super stoic, no? I think, in my humble opinion, it is far time we admit that writers are human too; just as we allow athletes these days to have nerves and even drop out of competitions due to this, i think we can respect that not all writers are going to want their work bashed and shredded senselessly. Anyway, in short, I think we’ve all been there . . .

Lost a few days due to various coworkers being sick and then myself being sick. Deadly wicked multi-day headache and some GI concerns. More or less healthy again now, so baring to many extra shifts at my day job, work continues on once more for Sense & Sorcery. Still working on the sandbox, talky-talky sections. Though it won’t be complete, hoping next update should have a simplified variant of this for chapter 11, which I’m rather excited for. On working on this I happened to remember that I actually need to finish a smaller sandbox section for chapter 6, I believe, though that one was restricted to the prots tower, so it will involve less characters and places and be less expansive.

I may also try to fix the leveling process for my game. I think I know what I need to do to fix it; leveling will occur every few chapters and as I had planned before, you may only level skills you have practiced at least a little during actual game play. However, there is no guarantee of increasing the skills - there will be a randomized roll or two to decide, and in general, the worse you are at a skill, the more likely you will succeed at increasing the skill. Once you get fairly good at a thing, I imagine the possibility of improving grows perpetually harder, yeah?

For this month I want to finish my update for Sense & Sorcery - just the sand box sections, fix leveling, and maybe a few other odds and ends. Very unlikely to get to the travel section, but I did get a few more books on regency travel and found a few more maps, so who knows? Would be really nice to have that section done, as then the game would flow up to chapter 6 or maybe even further with hardly any breaks in the narritive, save a few for combat and use of magic, which also still need to be fixed. At this point I’m thinking of doing a simplified combat based on a percentile system - it will be a bit less flashy, but I can always (and intend to) add in later the version of combat that requires geometry and trig to figure out if you hit or not. And while I and perhaps I’d hope half of my players want combat, I think the other half just want my game to be a romance novel, so yeah . . .

Will likely push my updates for Dice & Dungeon Masters and All the Way to quarter two as with work, sickness, and oither things, I am bound to be behind. Inevitalbe.

In other news, very briefly, let me state that I stand in shock and horror at some of the rumors on one of my favorite authors, Neil Gaiman; it brings up the question once more of how related an author and an authors work are. If an author does something reprehensible, does that make their work reprehensible? How about the other way? On this sort of thing I am reminded of a book I read maybe in fourth grade or so for Battle of the Books, I thiiiink it was called Dito and Pa and I vaguely remember there being some villain in the story who was a gifted musician that made beautiful music, however, he did some unbelievably (to a fourth grader) wicked things. In any event, the question of an artists work being independent in regard from the artist themself was introduced to me back then, and i still don’t think I have an answer. All I remember is that the villain was eaten by wolves towards the end of the story, his violin still in his hands, his music forever taken away from the world. Perhaps that says it all? In any event, I feel bad for Gaiman’s stories, many of which had such a beautiful, gritty, magical feel - and yet . . . I don’t know.

I’d say sorry to the aside, but I think these questions, an author’s relationship to their work and vice versa, are relevent to the community at large, and wanted to make sure it was thought of.

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It really is easier to do things like flow charts and more visual planning by hand, I’ve found.

Battles in particular are far easier to lay out when you have a visual reference of which unit does what and goes where.

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Have you looked into getting a Remarkable? it’s a digital writing/drawing tablet that can link up to your phone and computer.

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Awww, your adventure here fills me with fondness for coding. It’s a very silly business, that politely generates puzzles and mysteries. Great enrichment in our enclosures. :smiling_face: In any case, I’m glad my thirst for Maid Marian was helpful. :joy:

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It’s really great that you shared it. I absolutely know the feeling of wanting something to be perfect before doing so, but: well done for taking that leap!

This is also good to remember :slightly_smiling_face: for ourselves as well as others! It’s unreasonable to expect ourselves to feel totally dispassionate about work that matters to us.

Regarding the other parts of your post @Zodac01, I’m glad you’ve recovered and I hope you can get back in the swing of things. Illness is rubbish and I feel there’s a lot around at this time of year. Best of luck with your Sense & Sorcery writing!

About Neil Gaiman - I will just mention to others reading to be aware that the news stories about this author are very hard reading and contains a lot of potentially triggering descriptions so I’d ask that we not dwell on the specifics of it on the forum.

In general though, if an artist’s work means something to you, that meaning and feeling is yours. If the artist turns out to have done something reprehensible, that isn’t your fault and can’t be taken from you. And it’s not your fault that it carried, or still carries, that meaning.

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Good observation and thoughts as always. Thanks for the thoughtful response; I think in the end this is probably the best way to go with these things on the question I posed.

In other news, thanks to Nocturnal_Stillness WIP Quiver I now know that we can have more than one choice per page - so life changing! Wish I’d known this years ago. While its still a lot more clunky than twine, this opens up a lot of possibilities. Don’t know that I’m going to rush off to recode anything, but going forward, I’ll definetly have a new tool in my gear.

Probably most of you were aware of this, but if not I built a very short sample program to demonstrate this:

Summary

*title test game
*author Zodac
*comment your code goes here

*create eye_color “”
*create hair_color “”
*temp ec_wrd “Eye-Color”

this code is to test multiple choices per page - lets see how it goes.

Your eyes are

*choice Eye_Color Hair_Color
# brown.
# blonde
*set hair_color “blonde”
*set eye_color “brown”
*goto past_mc
# black.
*set hair_color “black”
*set eye_color “brown”
*goto past_mc
# brown.
*set hair_color “brown”
*set eye_color “brown”
*goto past_mc
# green
# blonde
*set hair_color “blonde”
*set eye_color “green”
*goto past_mc
# black.
*set hair_color “black”
*set eye_color “green”
*goto past_mc
# brown.
*set hair_color “brown”
*set eye_color “green”
*goto past_mc

*label past_mc

Your eyes are ${eye_color} and your hair is ${hair_color}.

And it displays as this:

Summary


image

Next game I make I am totally going to use this for character creation. This will save so much reading energy for players, I hope and think.

p.s. the temp var was part of a clever but futile idea to get around the one word limiter - sadly didn’t work, but still a cool tool.

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Zax-san,
Although I have not seen your project (this post of yours being the first I’ve heard of it personally, though consider my interest a little piqued), I think it only right to let you know that there already exists a visual novel named ‘Once in a Lifetime’, which can be found on itch.io games.

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Thanks for the heads up!

In this case, there shouldn’t be any form of overlap. Once in a Lifetime is a life simulator and far more a game than a novel in any shape or form.

That said, I’ll still cross-check this with my copyright attorney!

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No need. You can’t copyright a title.

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You might be able to trademark it, though

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You can trademark the title of a series of works, but not of an individual work.

And a common phrase, that happens to also be the title of several films and music albums, multiple novels, and a couple dozen songs - as well as not one, but three itch.io games? For all intents and purposes, that’s public domain.

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And you may find yourself
Writing a million-word IF
And you may find yourself
Trapped in an endless loop of code
And you may ask yourself
“Am I copyright, or am I copywrong?”
And you may say to yourself
“My God, what have I done?”

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As it is now, do you feel like a reader would get a satisfactory sense of the story’s premise, setting, and tone, and what they can anticipate from future updates? If so, and you’d prefer to put out the demo sooner rather than later, I’d say go for it! If not, or if in doubt, I’d say finish the first act before posting it.

Mostly by computer, but occasionally by hand. On the rare occasion that I was on cashier duty at a really quiet time, I’d start scribbling notes on scrap receipt paper; or if it just made sense for me to visualize things on paper, or I wanted to write by hand to use a different part of my brain, then I’d use a notebook.

Ah, art in its purest form.

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I feel this uncertainty a lot, even after making lots of games. I think many of us do.

I think it’s important to remember that things don’t have to be “perfect” before they’re shared with the wider world - there’s lots of room for it to be polished and constructive feedback will help you along the way.

I like this talk by Olivia Wood on this subject - the sound isn’t perfect, but her points stand up well:

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I sung that in my head…

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My goal for this month is… writing anything. I think I can do it!!!

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O glorious research.


File:Vasarakirves.jpg - Wikimedia Commons

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So that’s why in my language it’s called “war axes culture” (which sounds epic)
And next to it is the Yamnaya culture, or “the culture of holes”, which sounds a bit less epic…

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I am very salty that our scholars abandoned the name “hammer axe culture” in favour of “rope ceramics culture”. Like, come on! Have some sense of drama! “Hammer axe culture” sounds epic.

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Just dragging my fingers across the keyboard so far this month, TBH. Focus is split, brain is lukewarm porridge, and my college classes are kicking my butt this term for some reason.

So far, have managed to get a meager start on the next chapter of the next game, and finally started on book four for my current series. Also got myself a mini whiteboard to sit next to my writing spot so I can keep track of what actually needs done. So surely, that will make this work flawlessly…right?

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