July 2025 Writers' Support Thread

It just turned July here in Kathmandu, so: welcome, friends, to the support thread for the new month! And happy birthday to my fellow July babies.

We’ve now been keeping these threads going for fully half a year since we lost Eiwynn. So grateful for all the years that she singlehandedly MC’d this institution, turning it into a core part of the forum. Here’s to you, my friend. :clinking_glasses: You’ll always be missed, but your work lives on.

The feedback exchange is back up here, for anyone who wants to take part.

A couple of recent articles on writing: I liked Alex Jennings’ piece on “whereness” as the quality fantasy worldbuilding should seek to convey.

And over at Tor there’s a reflection on what sex scenes can add to a work (with extensive and explicit spoilers for NK Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy, be warned if you haven’t read it yet).


Personally, my goal for July is to get another XoR2 update pushed out, now that I’m no longer teaching my kids and fending off mice and monkeys. Let’s see how many words that takes.

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hi, i have been gone a minute but slowly getting back into things as one does. been doing minor life things, changing jobs (bartending was fun but unforch not good for my mental illness in the end, so gonna do something else and probably only part-time work for a good while, should be much nicer!) etc., and since june 10 i believe have been working back on Deux à Deux consistently, and privately which has been very nice and less stressful!

my goal(s?) for july:

  1. finish outline for Deux à Deux
  2. keep up with my personal devlog (nothing super exciting on there but it is encouraging even just to see on my own what i’ve looked at so far!)

excited to see what everyone gets up to as well :))

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I missed the June thread, but I’m here this month, lol. :joy:

Recently, I’ve been working super hard on the lore for my IF, and I’ve been trying to do monthly updates with a set word count to keep myself on track. I’m pretty straightforward, and I think this month will be too.

My main goal for this month is to start the Geldir Academy Arc and get the introduction of this arc out to my patreon subscribers by July 21st. (It won’t be the entire arc, just the beginning, but it’ll set the stage.)

I also want to:

  • Do a character compilation for my IF, cleaning up my stat page and writing proper introductions for key characters.

  • Work on the lore for my monster log and create a planet stat page for the world inside my IF.

  • Push out an update for DG this month.

  • Answer the questions I’ve gotten for my Truth & Truth session.

  • Get back to the two character lores I put on hiatus.

It’s a lot, but I’m excited to keep things moving and share my progress with my readers.

Even though July hasn’t started yet for me, I just wanted to say Happy New Month to you all :blush:.

I hope you’re able to achieve the goals you’ve set for yourself this month, and that things go well for you in your personal lives and with whatever you’re going through right now.

Have a good day, everyone. :heart:

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I think this is the first month I’ve participated in one of these threads from the start.

Current Project: Lamplighters Guild (solve a murder! fight monsters! fall in love!)

Current Status: I’m almost halfway through chapter three of ten. My current word count is 99,313 words, of that, 41k is chapter 3 so far. At this rate, chapter 3 alone is going to be around 80k. I have utterly given up on estimating my eventual word count.

Goals for July:

  • Complete chapter 3.
  • Review at least 3 WIPs in the forums (the two today don’t count as it is still June here).

Resource to Share: This wiki article “The Three Economies” is for gamemasters and specifically for D&D, but it provides a very high-level summary of the kinds of economy that might occur in D&D-style settings in a way that I think is broadly applicable for worldbuilding (e.g., thing itself, agreed-upon value of thing, etc). You can definitely delve deeper, but this article is enough, I think, to kickstart some thought: The Three Economies (DnD Other) - D&D Wiki

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My goal is to meet my self-imposed deadline of the 20th of July. I can probably make it (famous last words).

One thing I find quite humorous is that as an ESL who loves to read Victorian era literature, half of my vocabulary consists of obscure and archaic words. That inherently is not a problem, but the fact I find myself lacking in knowledge about everyday English terms and words, of common actions and descriptors, and such ‘basic’ stuff that whenever a defination search interrupts my perusal and the word turns out to be a common term, it always has me throwing my hands up and mentally ranting, ‘I spent two whole lines describing this freaking thing and there’s a term for it?!’

I suppose that’s what zero exposure to casual English does to a person…

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I mean I sometimes do that in Finnish. And it’s my mother tongue.

(That’s one of the reasons I keep lists of random words I’ve come across that seem like I might want to use them at some point. The other reason is I just like words.)

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How did I not know we were Cancer Brothers?! :crab:

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I don’t think I’ll update Westbound Travel this month. I want the next update to take the protagonist to a major splitting point into four different optional chapters, at least one of which must be taken to continue, but that feels too far in the future for one month.

Instead, my goal this month is to write both branched chapters the story came to, then the chapter of them coming back together. We’ll see beyond that.

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In July, I want to push myself to write full time. I want to submit Meteoric to Hosted Games, and post the full beta of a secret project at the end of the month… @K.L :wink: (just a heads up)

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This July, the goal is pretty much obvious: Prepare for the Philippine Game Dev Expo. I’m pulling out all the stops to make sure my game series, Lily Adventuresses!, is noticed by investors/publishers, since I’m in dire need of either one, or even both.

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I don’t plan to release a new chapter for July. The upcoming chapter breaks the pattern of previous chapters, so I’m going to take my time and think it through.

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Goal of the month is to finally make a thread here :folded_hands: :folded_hands: :folded_hands:

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We’re Caesar brothers! But I’m afraid I’m late enough in the calendar month to hit lion territory, Zodiac-wise. :slight_smile:

Happy imminent birthday, and may the year be rich with joy for you, my brother.

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@Havenstone
Haha awesome

The same to you, brother :grin: hope to meet you in person one day. Maybe at one of the IF meetings/conventions someday. I wanna try to make those regularly as I have never gone

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I’m moving this month, and it is already putting my stress levels through the roof, so I’m going to try and give myself a little bit of leeway with the writing part, this time.

With that in mind, my goals are:

  • Complete a rough outline for Chapter Six
  • Write 20,000 words or so of the chapter

I think that’s doable, but there’s going to be a lot going on, including no fewer than six five-hour drives, so here’s hoping I can manage to be gentle with myself if that doesn’t quite work out. :slight_smile:

Good luck to everyone, and happy birthday to the July-born among us!

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It’s the beginning of a writing month and I’m already waking up exhausted, probably from this being busy season at work. Once my friend make the trackbear, I’ll share it so others may join. My goal is an hour a day or ~1k words a day. I’m going to be writing more of the next project in my Dawn of Heroes series, I haven’t written anything for it in over a year, so it feels odd getting back to it.

I thought the HelloFutreMe channel on YouTube had a very interesting video essay last month on food within your worlds and how food is an insight into them.

I’ve been a Game Master (GM) for nearly 25 years, and I see many aspects of TTRPGs that work for IF games. It is a different medium, so things need to be adjusted for it, but there is a lot that I think works in both. This is an interview between two very famous GMs on world building, which I’ve thoroughly enjoyed. I really enjoyed Brendon’s rant on magic logic within the Harry Potter world (15 minutes in).

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Hello @Havenstone
Thanks for creating the treadh. Honestly we are very busy we are muving. My goals tentatively the same unfortunately: learn Choice Script, write the prologue, share it.

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My July goal is to get back into working on Quiver consistently. I wanted to finish chapter three by the end of June but Merlin’s death followed by the heatwave has stopped that. Now it’s meant to be cooling down over here I hope to catch-up this month.

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This month, I’m tentatively setting myself a flexible goal of writing 5000 words or more, across all my projects. This feels realistic, as I expect the summer heat is going to start having a seriously negative effect on my productivity.

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My goal for the month is to finish editing Chapter 2, publish it, and then also write at least a third of Chapter Three. @Hazel for weather related reasons I am also setting a slightly easier goal than usual. But it’s because it’s winter here and I don’t deal with the cold well at all, I can’t write when my hands are freezing.

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