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.

I’m starting to think I actually might name this one character I already have Alfhildr. And make her twin brother Alfbjörn, while I’m at it.
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.

Thanks so much, I hope it’ll be fun! I feel like it gives the characters’ feelings a bit more nuance especially if they’re not very emotionally open towards the PC and my hope is that it’ll make the romantic developments feel organic/responsive.
Exciting and intrigued to try this.

I feel like I’ve gone through a rollercoaster of emotions when it comes to my writing. First I was so giddy about it, almost manic with happiness over completing a project, and now I feel like it’s so full of problems that I have to fix. I kinda wish I had waited until I felt it was “perfect” before posting, but the feedback is the reason why I want to change it in the first place. And either way, there’s no piece of media that everyone considers perfect, so trying to make it so is a waste of time and effort
…knowing that doesn’t make me feel any better though
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.