Lots of truth here. Not least of which is excluding me from the fine folks.
For your first point, that’s true up to a point. 4 or 5 100-200k stories might be a better bet than 2 350-500k entries (though I am by no means sure about this). But once you go under that magic 100k number you are taking your life into your own hands.
Can’t speak to the second one. Pantser all the way, for good and for ill. It means sometimes I paint myself into corners, but years ago I tried to write NPT as a novel and got into the trap of spending all my time outlining, writing choice snippets and dreaming of the future and never getting around to the actual writing. Never again; that works for some but clearly not I. Plus, my average available time to write per day hovers between two hours to, like, fifteen minutes, and like any mortal human I still squander a lot of that checking my phone or playing a game so I have to make the most of the time I actually put fingers to keyboard.
With TPS and Day After I don’t even write and then code it like I did with NPT. I write in CSIDE itself, coding as I go. I barely know more about what’s going to happen than my beta readers. Sometimes what they say causes me to veer off into a new direction right off, a freedom I only have because I am not constrained by a bunch of framework I erected weeks or months ago.
Your third point, that’s all there is to it. Folks, get that tattooed in reverse on your forehead so you can read it in the mirror every day (you may want to truncate it a bit, or use really small print).
Writers write. That’s what makes them writers. And authors are nothing more than writers who finished. It sounds simple but the vast majority of writers can’t get there. If you want to avoid joining the ranks of the fallen, you just keep writing and know that eventually you’ll get there.
My main thing I’ll say is: writing a book is often not pleasant. It’s grueling, time-consuming and drains you in ways you could not imagine. Having written a book, however, is pretty sweet. Sure, you can feel judged by the reviews or the potential lack of sales, but for the most part it’s just connecting with a larger group of readers and getting checks in the mail. Just keep plodding along, Littlefoots of the CoG forum, and I promise you’ll eventually reach the Great Valley of publication. How long you rest there before undertaking the journey again being up to you, of course.