Happy July, lovely people!
It is the school summer holidays, so my writing time is hugely curtailed at present. I will be happy (and surprised) if I can finish the first draft of chapter 3.
I have nothing to add to the conversation prompt. I have no idea how to take a break and instead oscillate wildly from intense procrastination to intense work with no middle gear.
@raywilson Hello! I added my WIP in June too! Can I please go on your list?!
Good luck, everyone.
Heatwave is finally breaking here so maybe I can get some work done. June was hijacked by ttrpg project, real life and a bout of autism that sent me some 40 000+ words down a separate but related FH project. Hyperfocus is nice, but oh boy, my numbers brain is stronger than my writing brain when it’s hot.
So the plan for July is: Finish the Rebirth update. Post the public new demo for Revelations. Get some good wordcount in on the next Revelations demo. SO close to getting to the point of fusing them all in one big demo I can taste it.
Breaks: Sadly my brain decides them for me. If I am lucky I can twist them to other projects just to get a change of pace. I don’t have a routine, I have hyperfocus. It’s either feast or famine, but the more real life interrupts the harder it is to get those focus moments. At least now I have gotten to the point when I can do them again, which is a lot better than it’s been in years since after my burnout!
You too keep getting distracted from stuff that makes you money by TTRPG passion projects?
I suddenly feel a little bit less alone. What kind of game are you working on?
When I started working on A Kiss from Death 2 I wasn’t an artist! I’m still working on it but three years ago I could barely draw stick people.
This is the lighthouse crew!
And these are all the bad guys. If you can guess the celebrity reference image I used for Chami then we should have a movie night to watch the film again.
Can I join in the TTRPG passion project crew? My stat system started to look so much like a TTRPG character sheet that I’m contemplating making an actual ruleset for it.
@will I like your drawings!
I haven’t posted any goals for several months now.
This month, I just want to get back to writing regularly. I’ve been in a multi-month slump, struggling to focus. It doesn’t help that this is my busy season at work, in buildings that rarely have central air (I live in Midwest USA).
I have yet another side project that has hijacked my mind lately. So while I’m working on the two follow up stories to Dawn of Heroes, I have also lightly been writing a story which spans the whole of the Trojan War. I’m liking the “stat” system and way to check success/failure I came up with for it and have been thinking about writing this story off and on for nearly two decades. It has only become a solid idea within the last two or three weeks.
I hate summer, hard to sleep and feel sticky.
Anyway, i havent made a goal since april and its never that difficult to reach.
My goal this month is to get to my yearly goal of being halfway done with my WIPs.
So half of Act 2 and chapters 5 & 6.
Writing deep cultural dives and adventures for RuneQuest: Glorantha with a friend (essentially cleaned up versions of the handouts and adventures we already have done). On drivethrurpg. But nothing new in that vein planned now until I get some Fallen Hero stuff out!
Though my hyperfocus episode was working on the Fallen Hero ttrpg…
Ah, June was a big month for me, not just because I finished the first draft of ch.s 3-4 of Project Ghoul, but because I finally got to both an ultrasound and a specialist, which means I managed to get treatment for the knee problems that have plagued me since April.
Now I’m sitting on a pile of edit notes for those chapters, so the first action item for July is clear:
If that goes well, and I manage to finish before the end of the month:
Chapter 5 has a lot of fun stuff in it. Gas leak. May pole dance. Grumpy flirt. Plot foreshadowing.
When I’m pleased with the state of the first 4 chapters, that’s also when I can finally think about giving the project a dev thread. Maybe.
My goal for this month is to write everyday. The words do not need to be polished, just there. I noticed that when you’re writing interactive fiction this approach works well because anything you would write will need to go through the edits so the first draft most certainly wouldn’t survive till the end.
Sometimes I still struggle to understand how English text should “feel”. Even in this message I’ve written “words do not need” instead of “words don’t need” because it just doesn’t sound right for some reason, even if it’s informal speech and using “don’t” would be perfectly fine.
On the bright side, writing fiction seems to be easier than writing messages/posts. Why does it works that way remains to be unknown.
Welcome to July and thanks to @raywilson for the thread, interesting discussion piece to start off the topic.
The recent heat has been a real damper on my writing, so June goals went out the window, who figured it would be so hard to write about winter sports in midsummer? Instead I ended up doing around 10k on a side project, and getting distracted with things on the forum, - @AletheiaKnights ChoiceBeat was entertaining (I remember Loom being so good when I was younger, I’m scared to sully the memory by playing it again now though!) - and doing research for a business I will probably need to start fairly soon, as other job prospects suck…
But I think this just goes to show my attitude (or reaction) to taking breaks. I get distracted with other endeavours rather than taking a ‘true break’, but then again I really only do this as a hobby, so in many ways spending time writing is my break.
July goals… Meh, too hot to care right now. Push an update I suppose.
Wishing good health to your knee!
Sold.
I tend to try to balance temperatures by playing games with opposite weather than what I’m currently suffering from… so, say, Fallout New Vegas in mid-winter and Wasteland 3 or Skyrim in worst of the Summer heatwave… whether or not it works is up to debate, but at least I’m distracted.
Good luck! I’ve been thinking about starting one, but I don’t have a ready customer base and I’d lose all income I have now if I start, without any income to counter that, so… yeah.
Oh, I did the same. My game of choice was Winter Burrow. Very cozy and relaxing.
Sadly, I’ve been a bit stuck on writing so made no significant progress during June.
And this month there’s a different event I’ll be focusing on
That said, i do hope to make even small progress; grammar and mechanic fixes as well as possibly implementing more specific stats. Might progress the storyline too but i won’t bet on it
Good luck to everyone else with your goals! And sending whomever needs it some cold winds and rains lol—it’s the rainy/ monsoon season over here
it’s july for me now! woohoo. this month, i expect to be a little preoccupied with non-writing life stuff. there’s a gigantic microchip center being proposed really close to my home city that’s going to fuck shit up so badly if it gets approved to be constructed/receive tax abatement, so i’m kind of planning to spend a lot of time this month trying to organize people to hopefully get it either at least stalled or cancelled all together.
in terms of this project, then, my goal is to write and polish 1-2 scenes again. priorities will lie elsewhere for the month.
-warily surfacing from lurking-
Thanky @raywilson for the thread!
Thanky @MeowMeow422 for the rain, it arrived here xD
___
I did not manage much progress for a while now for various reasons, one of them certainly being the heat, which is not at all conductive to my already rather precarious ability to get my brain to function (hyperfocus does not go with heat sadly).
Anyway, I’ve given up on proper formulated goals, but I’ll try to get done the branching mess that happend - I ended up with 3 major branches for the players former living conditions, which each have 2+ branches for job which again have minor but partly convoluted branching for how and who of the major NPCs will be met.. what have I done.
-retreats back into lurk corner-
My July goal: Complete chapter 3. That would be great! 
July goal: finishing touches on current chapter, get started on the next. If things work out I can release them both this month.
Also rethinking where I’m going to release my story. Reading the other thread about how many sales these stories get as well as the content moderated has given my pause. My story has extreme themes and I’m worried I’ll have to change it to get it published. Which I don’t want to do.
Well, if you trust your marketing skills enough that you think you’ll be able to make it profitable on your own, nothing’s stopping you from doing that while publishing via HG either.
I would personally wait and see what they say about the content before deciding if I want to publish elsewhere instead.
Makes sense. I should finish the thing first before worrying about anything else haha.
