My goal for the month is to write half of chapter one of my story AND to make less coding mistakes. (Unfortunately, I have an unexpected work project to do. I thought I’d have more time for finishing Chapter 1, but sadly, no.)
Sounds intriguing! Welcome to the forum!
Feels rather odd to have this be my first ever post but…
My main goal for March is to write about 4.000 words a week so that I might be able to finish chapter 1 before April starts to get a WIP thread up and running. It feels weird writing this, considering I just started in the beginning of February and basically brute-forced myself into learning the scripting language, but it’s been smooth sailing ever since I got the hang of it (mostly)!
You and me both 
. The coding took me the longest and I still have errors. Good luck!
Welcome! That sounds like a manageable goal, good luck with it. What’s your story about, if I may ask?
Fixing my coding mistakes almost took longer than writing the Prologue! 
Who knows, maybe we’ll be great at coding in a year’s time and we’ll laugh about this.
I hope it is! I had a week off from work and wrote about 12K, don’t think I’ll be able to do that coming week with work being a thing again… Thanks!
Story is a bit more ‘standard’. Set in a (relatively) low-fantasy magic high-fantasy creature world I’d say. tt’s primarily on how you grow up from a nobody into the leader of a small order.
I’m trying to embrace the philosophy of giving enough agency by making the sections inbetween be different as well as have different endings based on your choices throughout, as best I can anyway. It’s not supposed to be a ‘save the world’ kind of deal, but instead smaller scale: as you aim to save a town (it’s inhabitants, but also your friends/allies and yourself) from several threats.
Sounds very cool. Looking forward to reading it. Good luck with the writing!
Thank you everyone for welcoming me in :'-] You’re all lovely!! So far so good on Day 1; I’ve written a ton today. Here’s hoping I can keep up the momentum!
Welcome to the forum, and the writer’s support threads.
This is how I did it. Honestly, the best way to learn coding is just by doing it. I downloaded choicescript for the first time in Dec 2022, and posted my first demo in Jan 2023, so it definitely can be done.
My game releases this month, so my goals are to enjoy that and start back up with my other writing (I paused everything last month due to health issues). I’m really happy with it. Nothing in life is perfect, of course, but when I was reading through it for one final pass I caught moments where I was like dang, I’m proud of this section 
Good luck to everyone in their goals 
Day one of March is finished and I’ve (re)written 1,508 words this evening. This has mostly been rewriting what was originally the end of Chapter One so it works as the start of Chapter Two.
The actual word count will be more but I’ve done a lot of rewriting and bug hunting today to get the Chapter One revision finished. So I’m just counting my words put into the second chapter.
Last month, I finished chapter 3 of Lily Adventuresses! Episode 2. This month, I’ll naturally be working on the fourth chapter; and since it’s the penultimate one, the pasts of the four MCs will slowly be revealed via a diabolical plan by that chapter’s antagonist.
Speaking of that antagonist, is it OK if he has the following attributes?
I just want to make sure that it doesn’t rub LGBT+ people the wrong way, as I’m writing a lesbian/WLW work.
I’m not a gay man but I am an LGBT+ person and this idea for a villain sounds like a homophobic stereotype; for that reason I struggle to see it being something I’d want to play.
I’d strongly recommend rethinking. Not only to avoid offence, but also: if this game is aimed at an F/F audience, what makes you think they will be keen to see a gay male villain written in such a way? If I came across that in a game I’d be thinking “what’s the next homophobic trope on the horizon, and is it going to be directed at me next time?”
I trust your word. Good thing I’m just planning out the story for chapter 4, and I’ll excise all the homophobic references out of the antagonist right away. I’ll just focus on his specific grudges against the four MCs, who are all women. I had the MCs’ backstories all planned out, BTW.
The reason why I was planning that was because of posts on Twitter from transphobic gay men who seethed against drag artist Pura Luka Vega, who was arrested in 2023 on alleged obscenity charges.
Also LGBT+, and I imagine you are too with the topic of your WIP; there’s a lot that can be said about intracommunity fighting and I’d be loathe to completely discourage handling difficult topics in one’s work, but consider how it might come across to your audience; no matter how delicately you write this, who might use this as more ammo against gay men? who will this inevitably hurt? if someone made a story about an evil lesbian who wants to destroy all gay men… how do you think that’d make you feel, no matter how it’s handled? Having an evil gay man isn’t immediately horrible, just like having an evil lesbian isn’t immediately horrible – but it can hurt the wrong people, and maybe not in ways you intended.
Just be careful and kind, is all.
I’m a straight guy who likes yuri/WLW works, and am also an LGBT+ ally, since I have some gay friends and acquaintances, for the record. I didn’t want to offend them with my attempt at making such an antagonist; but with your voices heard, yes, I’ll definitely not put in any offensive references.
To @HarrisPS and @zayats, thanks for quickly handing out advice. Like I’ve said before, I’ll just have the chapter’s antagonist focus on his specific grudges against the girls instead, justifying his plan of snuffing them off by their own nightmares.
My primary goal this month is to stay active on the forums. My secondary goal is to finish cleaning/expanding the first chapter of my entry in last year’s Halloween Jam. I keep coming back to it and noodling around, so I guess it’s going to haunt me until completed.
I’m sorry, but what the absolute fuck.
This is one of the most outrageously homophobic things I’ve ever read. And I’ve read Westboro Baptist Church blogs.
You were going to write a character who’s willing to drive the human species into extinction so he can get laid. No, not even that - it’s so he can rape anybody he wants. Do you know what the most damaging stereotype about gay men is? That their sexuality is inherently predatory and they want to force themselves on straight men. And that’s exactly what you wanted to write, only cranked up to a level of homicidal mania that makes Hitler, Mao, and Stalin look like candidates for a Nobel Peace Prize.
Would you write a straight male villain who wanted to exterminate everyone in the world who isn’t a hot chick? I doubt it, because you know that straight men, even the ones who are perpetually horny misogynist assholes, aren’t defined solely by where they want to stick their dicks.
I understand that you’ve reconsidered and you no longer intend to give the character this motivation, but the fact that you even needed to ask makes me think you have a lot of learning to do before you’re ready to write about lesbians. Are you aware how much of the media that purports to celebrate women loving women actually panders to the straight male gaze? How do you plan to avoid falling into that trap? Do you know what not falling into that trap would even look like?
It’s especially interesting to me that you wanted to make the character bipolar. Presumably that was supposed to be relevant to his characterization, since you thought it worthy of mention, so how come you didn’t go into more detail about how you intended to portray it, and ask if anything about that might rub people with brain disorders the wrong way? Or did that strike you as unnecessary, because everyone just knows crazy people are violent like that?
I would… perhaps shy away from centering your work on queerness and gender politics, in this case. Certainly not in the way you’ve outlined.
When writing an entire anthology centered on fantasy WLW, I wanted to prioritize relationships and slice-of-life moments. The thought of titillating straight males seriously never crossed my mind, because I clearly intended the entire anthology to be an all-ages work.
The thought of the villain being dyslexic and bipolar was based on a certain Twitter user who is pretty much a “pick me gay”, and loved to pick fights with anyone who doesn’t agree with his simping, and he never even shows his face. Now that the “gay” is out of the question, I’m reformulating his motivations to be personally linked to the four female protags, that all caused him over-reactional “trauma”. In simpler words, he himself is making mountains out of molehills.
On the topic of queerness, the entire anthology’s backstory is centered around a benevolent goddess who decides to become a lesbian herself. So in the world I’m building, lesbianism and female bisexuality are pretty much accepted.
I’m glad you’re not writing anything porny, but that doesn’t mean you’re totally out of the woods. There are other ways to fetishize or trivialize lesbian love. If you’re portraying two women together as inherently “cute” or sexy in a way a man and a woman, or two men together, wouldn’t be, you’re doing it wrong. If you’re depicting romantic relationships between women as less serious or more “ideal” than other kinds, you’re doing it wrong. Now, I’m not saying you are (or aren’t) doing any of this, specifically. The point is that LGBTIA representation is both a lot simpler and a lot more complex than you seem to realize, and you can’t do it well until you come to terms with what you don’t know.
Nobody said he couldn’t be gay. Nobody even said he shouldn’t be gay. There have been gay villains in history - gay warmongers and gay gangsters and gay slaveowners and gay robber barons and gay Nazis. The lives of LGBTIA people don’t revolve around how cishet we aren’t. Why can’t you write a villain who happens to be gay in a way that has nothing to do with his villainy, and villainous for reasons that have nothing to do with his sexual orientation?
Maybe it’s different for goddesses, I suppose, but humans don’t “decide to become” gay (or straight, or bi, or ace). You know that, right?
@apple and I aren’t asking you to reconsider because we think you’ll create a fictional society that doesn’t like lesbians. We’re asking you to reconsider because you haven’t demonstrated that you have the perspective and creative empathy to write about identities other than your own with dignity, truth, and nuance.