September 2021's Writer Support Thread

Game Development Writing and Content
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Welcome all to the support thread for September 2021.

:spiral_calendar:

:birthday: Happy Birthday to September babies.

Thank you, everyone that continues to participate in these threads – it helps others when you do participate, sometimes more than you think.

If anyone has specific questions or concerns I may help with, please let me know.

:open_book:

One of the hardest things to deal with for many is burnout. If anyone has ways to cope and/or to prevent burnout, feel free to share them. I’m sure there will be those that appreciate it.

Scheduling downtime is one method I use to combat burnout.

When I am focused and dialed in on a task, I can continue working on it for many days at a time. That is normally a good thing for me, but I found that if I do not enforce breaks for myself, my productivity and efficiency will both suffer.

To combat the tendency I have of keeping at a task for an extended period of time, I schedule days away from my task, where I do something physically away from my work-area.

By doing this, I prevent running myself down in both mental will-power and I help keep myself from negativity towards my own project.

This past week, we had a release:

Congratulations to Jo Graham (forum name unknown) and Amy Griswold (@Amtelope)!

This was one that I gave feedback for, so it was fun seeing the game evolve.

If anyone else has something special going on in September, let us know!

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Happy September everyone,

Last month was a strong month for me, I hope to continue onward with these two projects. The beginning of September is filled with non-writing activities, so I will need to be very productive in the time I have to write in order to make these.

Month’s starting goals:

  • Project One goal: reworking choices to address feedback

    and

  • Project Two goal: Complete the “Social” scene

:fountain_pen:

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Northern hemisphere is getting into autumn! Whuuuu! :maple_leaf: :fallen_leaf: :leaves: :apple: :mushroom: :ghost: :skull:

My goal this month is to go for a walk each morning, and then sit down and try to write afterwards, when my brain is freshly aired.
There’s still some stuff going on in my life, that is taking most of my energy, but I’m going to try making an effort anyway!

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I’m honestly looking forward to September. (well, I like every month in its own ways.) My goals for another great month are…

  • Write at least 500 words every day.
  • Finish writing Chapter one.
  • Outline the basics of Chapter two.
  • And most importantly, I’m planning on releasing a Demo somewhere along this month.

Good luck with all your goals for this month. And Happy Birthday if you’re born in September :tada:

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Has the southern hemisphere goes into spring, online classes start to resume after online HSC trials. I sit at my desk, giving myself the following goals for the month:

  1. Work on chapter 5
  2. Work on Extinction’s re-writing description in chapter 1
  3. Work on the build up to the climax of chapter 3. (basically, wright the beginning and middle of the chapter, seed some foreshadowing, and so on)
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Happy September everyone!

I kind of finished the Tuesday storyline, besides some grey spots, at least till the point when the main storyline meets. So yeah!!!

My goal for this month would be finishing what I started a couple of days ago which is structuring out the rest of the book in some detail. I found if I do not do this first I seem to keep inventing new variables and rethinking systems way too much and making things unnecesarily complex for myself. Giving my thread on this forum got locked due to inactivity, by structuring everything out, I will also get a better idea of the scope of the book and can answer myself if it’s worth continuing. Maybe I do need to make things simpler and cut a lot?

Hopefully I’ll get my answers this month :slight_smile:

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In the past 2-3 months, I’ve tried both number-based goals (e.g 500 words a day) and time-based goals (e.g minimum 20 minutes of writing) a day, and they impacted by writing in different ways.

More about personal observations with setting these different goals.

In June and July, I aimed for 500 words a day. I believe in June I aimed for a 10,000 words by the end of the month. This resulted in me not writing consistently, but when I did, I often wrote more than twice my daily goal.

In August, I wanted to try writing consistently, so I set my sights on writing for at least 20 minutes a day. This worked out well and I wrote almost every day, with an occasional break every week or so. Since I didn’t put a time limit nor minimum on words, I wrote much more (and for much longer!) during August. I hit something like 30k words – however, a lot of it was deleted and re-written.

I ended up a little burnt out, but the productivity was fun while it lasted.

So, this month I’ll try to focus on more specific goals:
Finish editing second draft of my main project
Finish the first chapter of my second project
Take it slow because of school and other personal matters

Happy writing, everyone :smiley:

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This month, writing practice. What form it’ll take is TBD.

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August report: just 1233 words… what’s happening to me? :cold_sweat:
Lack of concentration, lack of constance, lack of ideas…
I just can’t afford them anymore.

September goal: from where I stand, just anything

EDIT: It was 1352 words, still it doesn’t change much

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Just taken on a new job and some extra responsibilities.

Goal for September is to complete one chapter per week.

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Congratulations on the new job!

I barely got even 5,000 words last month. My goal was 10k, but I figure I had 3 5k months allowed for this year. So instead of having one in December, it’s 10k or bust from here to year’s end every month. No more safety net.

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Just started up University again so I will have significantly less time, but I’m still gonna try to write as often as I can. My goal for this month is to get Elizabeth/Arthur’s one-on-one scene done.

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My goal for September is to get the epilogues written and move onto to beta testing.

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YES! It’s September!
First of all, Happy birthday to September babies :birthday: :tada:

Last month was great for me, for I at least manage to bring more words into my demo. Well, it’s soon not a demo anymore because the chapter one story is close to its end (so far, I’d say 30% on Word).

For this month’s goals:

  • Write at least two to three hours a day, including cmds.
  • Finish writing Chapter one before Sept 15th.
  • Finish all my cmds by Sept 18th.
  • Get my WIP an update (a big one) before Sept 20th.
  • Started the outline of Chapter two.

Thank you to everyone who supported my WIP, and good luck with everyone’s goals this month.

If I may know, what kind of story are you writing for your demo? Are there any related posts about it?

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You can get some info at the Interest Check Thread over here :slightly_smiling_face:

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My goals for September:
  • Stop feeling bad and disappointed about myself.

Good luck, everyone.

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Happy September! Good luck to everyone with their goals for this month.

I am very, very excited for fall to arrive. :fallen_leaf:

My goal for this month is to just keep writing every day. I struggled a lot toward the end of August with second-guessing myself. Looking back, I accomplished around 15k words last month, but whether they were good words or not…

So really, my goal is to just keep trying, because I can’t improve if I don’t. I also want to finish the prologue for my WIP, make headway into the first chapter, and make edits/improvements to what I already have.

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My goals for September:

  • Write 20k words for Asphodel
  • Get solidly into the next scene for Diaspora

They are rather pared down, but I’m doing that because burnout is threatening, and I want to extend myself some grace and flexibility. Even theoretically having those things within reach tends to be helpful, and may help me exceed the more modest goals.

Good luck to everyone with writing this month! :dizzy:

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Second day of the month and things are looking good! I’ve wrote around 270 words today for chapter 5. I’ve also worked out how to do a cut in writing! I would like to write some more… but I think I’m out of writing juice today… because chapter 5 is proving difficult, not like chapter 3 levels difficult (need to finish that.) but it’s just being difficult for me today. (And since writing my story is proving tough, I just want to talk about it. Probably shouldn’t do that to potential readers, because spoilers is one thing I do not want to talk about to potential readers.)

But no matter: I’m writing and it feels good.

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I 've had an idea for a while, and I’ve been thinking a lot about whether I actually want to do something with it or not, and after a long time contemplating I’ve decided to go for it. My goal is just to spend the first few months planning because I tend to be more of an off the cusp person which has resulted in some really good unplanned scenes, but I also never finish anything, and I think this is due to my lack of planning, so if like to spend the month thinking through my ideas before I get too far ahead of myself.

Question: About how detailed do you guys usually plan? I know having one is important, but there still needs to be some room for improv/off the cusp scenes/dialogue so what’s a good balance between the two?

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