My goals for this month.
Wish me luck 
May hasn’t been a good writing month, and it seems that the first half of June at least won’t be as well. My impacted wisdom teeth decided to pull a surprise infection, so…
Crossing my fingers and hoping that post-surgery, I’ll be able to get some concrete progress into chapter 1!
Still always feels weird liking a post like this 
Hope you recover soon!
My May goals were:
I wrote a first draft of all of chapter one! Honestly didn’t think I’d get that far.
This month I want to work on chapter two: I want to refine and detail the outline and also write a complete first draft. I’m also thinking about submitting to a poetry contest that’s coming up next month, so I need to clean up some old work and maybe work on something new. And, if I can, I want to make an outline for a secondary, smaller prose project.
Good luck, everyone! 
I know there is inherent value in both pantser and planner approaches, and haven’t the slightest interest in criticizing anyone’s writing methodology. But I would urge everyone that if you are spending way more time outlining and plotting than you are with actual writing, it may be time to throw caution to the wind a bit and just put the proverbial pen to paper.
Outlines, character profiles, timelines, excessive worldbuilding, supplementary materials…these are a means. Not an end. Don’t let them loom so large that they make you take your eyes off the prize, or allow them to psych you out on the ever-increasing scope of your project compared to how little you have actually written. If I knew how bad some parts of my stories would get I probably never would have embarked upon them at all. Fortunately, I don’t see much past the nose on my face and while that sometimes mean I slam it into a tree, I also don’t get intimidated by what is way up ahead because I can’t really make it out from back here.
Yeah, and early ideas change by the time we get there! Several of my old ideas for certain scenes sounded cool (and thus were semi-motivational), but then when the moment comes I write them differently or not at all. 
Whether it was for the sake of simplification or some other reason, it’s what actually gets written that “matters.” They can still be edited/cut later (after subconscious brain stews on the ideas some more), but first there must be something to be edited.
It’s June! It’s Pride month! I have donned my rainbow suspenders and people are glaring! Feeling blessed, y’all.
My bicep is still wonky, but my doctor said I won’t need surgery unless physical therapy won’t work, so I’m kinda happy. Still barred from doing heavy lifting and strenuous work and that’s got me antsy. My poor minimal gains.
I set a goal to write two chapters this month, to get the demo out. It also counts to the healing process, so I’m getting a 2 in 1 deal here. The chapters would preferably be around 20-30k words each without any code, depending on how much impromptu ideas slither they way into the text.
For now though, I’m going to wait for my arm not to ache as much, and focus on character profiles until next week. Maybe make a Tumblr account for the game, who knows.
Here’s to a great, productive month for all of us, on all fronts!
I managed to get this up before midnight my time! I wanted to start this month right by setting intentions on Day One and so that’s what I’m doing.
My first goal for this month was to dye a section of my hair rainbow for Pride month, so we’re starting off strong! I also I decided to chop off about a foot of hair to both do something that I’ve been wanting to do for many months now, but also to overcome my anxieties about cutting my hair because I’ve been ruled by the anxiety of not having long hair for so long and I wanted to change that. So far I’ve really been enjoying the short hair and I’m really, really glad I decided to do so. I feel better both inside and out.
As for last month’s goals, I by far achieved my goal of starting to interact with the community. I made a few polls for some concerns that popped up during planning and I even started my own thread! As for my main goal of doing something every day of May–it didn’t go as smoothly as I’d hoped, but I only missed three days until the final week of May. Overall, I may not have been perfect in my simple goal, but I’m still incredibly proud of myself for doing all that I did this past month. Even without the chaos that happened in my life, I would’ve been proud because I’m doing my best and that’s what matters.
My goal this month is the same: to just do something every day. No matter how big or small. Hopefully this month will be less chaotic than last month and I can get back on track despite the rough past week!
All things considered, May went better than I had feared. After having a tremendously productive writing day at the end of April that left me optimistic, my health forced me to reevaluate my writing routine. I made some adjustments and tried some new things. I’m back on track now, but it’s been a setback for sure.
Best of luck to everyone with their June goals, and happy Pride! 
Hearing from everyone helps a lot to keep motivation and confidence flowing. Sometimes, knowing you are not alone will help as well.
@Jaybirdy’s goals seem to be on point for me for the month, so I will commit to similar goals for myself as well.
Write daily - again, even if I must do so at odd hours, this is an important goal to keep focused on.
@Jaydeepsinh_Dabhi – A project based on Indian culture, myths, history and legends will be very popular and it will be seen as fresh within the community. Good luck with your game.
@Entracte – just add a space between the colon and the text … so, : ) instead of normally :.) (without the period) for the emoji.
@Ellery – you got this. Only cautionary thing I would advise: Wait until the gas wears off before trying to write 
Thank you for reminding me that this month is Pride month. I will edit the first post to reflect that.
For this month of June, I’m planning to do some serious editing of chapter one of my upcoming WIP. Hopefully I’ll release it this at the tail end of this month! Fingers crossed.
I guess the problem I’m facing are some scenes in the game. While there is violence in the game, it’s not graphic. But there is a scene where the MC is forced to commit ritual suicide by the evil vizier. The scene is not graphic and no mentions of blood or gore.
The MC can’t avoid the ritual suicide. The cleanest option the player can choose to end the life of the MC is to drink water mixed with iron sulphate. Since the MC is a jinn and thus iron is poisonous to jinn, it will kill the MC peacefully. There are other options like a trial of combat (which will be rigged against the MC). I think the most violent option occurs when the MC chooses not to commit ritual suicide and therefore the vizier orders their death through an Ottoman style string around the neck.
I keep editing these scenes to make sure it is not too uncomfortable or graphic for the reader. But I’m still worried my game will have to be put in the Adult Section, where fewer people will see it. I could have two versions of the game whereby the SFW version simply states the MC is killed in their sleep and it does not give an option for the player to choose how they die. I’m not sure how readers would react to this.
Maybe I’m worried over nothing. I still have to release the WIP and get feedback from readers. It’s a habit of mine to be worried
Yikes, I question the wisdom of including a mandatory suicide scene! Are you sure there isn’t another way you can approach this?
Anyway I’ve started a new project this month which is going pretty well. I’m sitting at three chapters, 18,000 words done, out of a projected 20 chapters. What does that mean, a projected length of 120,000 words? Much smaller in scope than my last project, and a lot more linear. 18k words is pretty good for a few weeks of writing!
(it’s killing me not sharing, but I want at least 10 chapters done before I share anything – the first few chapters set up a lot of stuff but don’t have much payoff. I’m especially excited for a sudden genre shift towards the end that reframes the whole story in a new light)
I get what you’re saying. The WIP is partially inspired by Game of Thrones. As the saying goes “when you play the game of thrones, you win or you die. There is no middle ground” and the MC dies in the beginning. Instead of calling it a suicide, it could be called an execution because the MC is forced into doing it. But giving the player the option on how to end their life might be too much for some so I can always change it.
Now thinking about it, there were a handful of Abbasid caliphs who killed their rivals and then simply lied about not leaving any marks on the deceased body. So I could have the MC executed and the vizier could lie and say the MC died in their sleep. So the player won’t be forced to pick an option of their execution/suicide.
At the end of the day, I still need to publish the WIP and get feedback from readers. Without the context of where the game is set, I don’t think I can get the feedback I’ll need here.
So my goal for this month is to finish editing the first chapter and then releasing it in the Forum. Only procrastination is going to be the major cause of delay 
My goal is to finally finish chapter 2 and rewrite chapter one and release the new updates to the game. It’s been a roughy few months for me but hopefully the summer does me some good.
Been having a weird time of it lately. Managing pace and progress has been a bit of a struggle. I’mma put my big authorial vent under the break, so that people don’t have to read it: this just seems like a useful place to summarize where I’m at now.
Basically, the problem with my current project is that it’s really, really complex, at least to a baby coder like me, and at least compared to the first book (current project is part 2 of a trilogy). As someone who finds coding a grind, I always knew that there was a danger that I might get sick of it, burn out and not finish. The good news is that I know that’s not going to happen now: I’m 100% sure I’ll finish. The bad news is that the way I went about it is making things feel a bit rough right now.
Basically, the book is 8 chapters, and when I started writing I identified Chapters 5 and 6 as the “danger zone”, the point where I was most likely to flake out and give up, the point where I would have been writing the book for ages, but I’d still be miles from finishing! I figured that if I made it to Chapter 7, the end would be in sight, and I’d be back in the “safe zone” in terms of motivation. So I decided to resolve this problem by just forcing myself to power as quickly as possible through 5 and 6, to force myself to make it into the “safe zone”. And it worked - after many, many bleary-eyed days of heavy coding and many, many late nights, I managed to crank out 5 and 6 (two very long chapters) in a month each. But now I’m feeling guilty about returning to “normal” levels of progress. I kinda feel like my readers now expect a new long chapter every month because of my recent productivity spurt, and I feel bad about not delivering for them. Even though 7 is progressing nicely and at what I would previously have considered a reasonable pace, it still feels like a crawl after my recent unsustainable level of output! I hope my strategy doesn’t backfire and end up being demoralizing. But, on the bright side, the book will definitely get finished, and I even think that 5 and 6 are quite good, despite being produced mostly in a semi-delirious haze!
Rest assured, nobody is sitting there with a spreadsheet cross-referencing your date of delivery with your wordcount and impatiently checking their stopwatch. Your personal goals are personal for a reason. Go at your own pace.
Anyway, today I wrote 5,500 words for a scene that was only supposed to be a few thousand words, and it’s just one of four mini-scenes within it, and I haven’t even gotten to the main event yet!
More specifically, the MC and their partner go to a “meditation retreat” to help build mindfulness and confidence. It’s a two and a half hour drive, so they amuse themselves on the car ride. Then, in the lobby, the MC realizes that a mutual friend of theirs has actually paid for the whole thing and has the option to get too skeeved out and leave (they still receive the intended confidence boost, as they need to put their foot down in order to convince their partner to leave). If they stay, they have an hour and a half until the meditation event begins, so they can grab lunch, chat with the other clients, get a massage, or clumsily make out with their partner in a broom closet. Once they’ve done three of these four mini-scenes, the meditation starts. I’ve just finished writing those four mini-scenes, checked my wordcount, and I’m at 5,500 words. God dammit! All four of the confidence-building activities together were supposed to be a few thousand words, and I literally have not even gotten to the first main activity! I’m enjoying the writing, but I think I’m gonna have to reduce the scope of the other three confidence-building activities.
Chapter 2 has been progressing quite nicely, but I underestimated the amount of scenes I still have to write! Chapter 2’s wordcount was at 24.8k words before I started the edits, and now it’s already at 37.5k words. I’m pretty sure I’ll easily surpass 40k before I finish it.
I really hoped I’d be able to finish it today because I still have a lot of stuff to do before I can update the demo (figuring out the personality stats for each choice, coding in the new stat mechanics, writing the stats screen diary entries, updating and cleaning up the art assets, finishing my to-do list), but I still have like 3 or so scenes to complete, plus some bits I skipped over. It’s definitely doable in a week, but I have some more important stuff to attend first, and it’s already cutting into that time.
I knew it was dumb setting myself a 2-week deadline.
Fuck it, skip the personality stats and diary entries. Get your minimum viable product and fill in the cool bonus stuff later.
For assigning personality bonuses, you’ll need to go back and revisit them later anyway. Put it off!
I love this thread! My goals this month feel pretty daunting because of my hiatus:
*write at least another 15,000 words in new scenes.
especially when it feels like im stuck
I haven’t been doing any writing lately (not that I’ve been doing anything else either)
Mostly my files have just been sitting open on my desktop and I haven’t even peaked at them in weeks.
But today something possessed me to open up those files. I don’t really know what it was, whether it was simple boredom or the gods whispering in my head. And yet somehow looking at my own words on the computer screen felt good, I still have no idea what I’m going to write and I can’t really make heads or tails out of my code after being away from it for so long. And yet the text felt like I had made it back home. It’s going to start mocking me for getting nothing done soon, but then, it wouldn’t be home if it didn’t.