September's Writer Support Thread

Last month was not very productive. I had too much work and wrote mostly on paper. Now I’m lazy to write that on the computer.

This month I’ll try to finish chapter 1 and write for halloween jam. It is a great idea, but I’m not disciplined :joy:

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This month and the next one I guess, I will Work in my Halloween Jam entry. My Goal is to write at least one sentence wach day, in paper or in cside. Planning goes well I think, I have the basic story together an start planning the needed scenes.

Hope everyone is having a good time. :four_leaf_clover:

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My plans for publishing my WIP’s demo went down the drain when I decided to write a smaller project for another interactive story publisher. I ended up writing a 30k story in one and a half months and just submitted it today. I’m really excited and anxious, but more importantly, happy to get back to work with my original WIP.

Writing a smaller project helped me see what was wrong with the first one, the things I knew were wrong but couldn’t quite figure out. I will have to make some changes, but I’m really confident about it now.

Wishing everyone a productive month!

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Maybe I’m misinterpreting your struggle, but if you have multiple paths forward you’re considering, that could work perfectly in the context of CoG, right? You don’t necessarily have to confine yourself to just one path forward. You could try writing one option out, and if you don’t like it you can scrap it, but if you do like it and want to keep it, it doesn’t necessarily have to override the other paths you also want to try.

(this is coming from someone who’s still really struggling to come up with more than one main story path leading to the Big Split Scene, so y’know, I might be projecting a little :stuck_out_tongue: )

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Early this morning my file for the intro of my Halloween story got corrupted . I could recovery part of it but still, Today I was more time rewriting than anything else. Still, 2k and I finished the intro. Not bad I guess after all.

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@poison_mara Like you’ve said in other thread, it’s better to have something written in your work than none at all. :slight_smile: Be glad, june for me is 200words haha. Keep going, keep moving forward.

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First of all, August give me a so much power to write, more than to I CAN WRITE. It is an awesome month for me, and I know the following months will be more awesomer if I keep myself writing for passion, and reading for motivation. How’s life in pandemic days everyone? I hope all of you still have some coffee in your back to carry this burden at all, anyway hope you all stayed safe as always.

Today, I am far from 5k words that I’ve written last last month, July. I am proudly to share that finally reach 20k words. Phew! But still in slow pace haha. Reading this thread is so much inspirational and motivational, that’s why I made some progress at all.

Goals for this Lovely September! This maybe applicable for the others too.

  • Stay healthy, for me to keep going.
  • Keep reading, for me to grow.
  • Improve my writing pace, for me to be more productive.

Stay safe, keep healthy, and always smile.

~Have some coffee, ladies and gentlemen. :coffee:

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First round of Chapter 2 revisions are done, just waiting for some more notes now! This evening I’ve done some thinking about altering a particular stat name for clarity and to make sure that its use is obvious… and that I’m testing it enough times that it really is highly useful!

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Here is a question. How do you work out your word count when half of the work you do is rewriting and refining code. I’ve done about 2000 words over the past two days of “new” content but probably another 1000-2000 words of rewriting code that doesn’t bump up the actual word count and can sometimes make is less words.

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That is absolutely on point.

To be fair I personally don’t do world count, because when I edit I tend to delete a lot. And sometimes less words can be better.

I measure progress in “plot advancement”. Or by milestones. Like “chapter progress”. Or “errors fixed”.

Anyway, I think that edit is hard work and should be celebrated. If I wanted to meassure, I would do what you just did:

2000 new words and XXx words edited. It would help you to track your efforts if you have that need. Also, for perfectionist I would put a limit of edits on the same chapter. 3 edits should be enough.

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I never count code as “new writing” and I always start the day with a floor of words written and then anything above that is counted as “new writing.”

For example: Yesterday, the project I am working on was at 7,800 words… so any writing above that number will be counted… any shrinkage due to re-write is counted against my count.

With all of that said, I do not just measure my progress by word count. I also have “milestones” I set up to measure my success.

One such milestone this month will be the rewrite of my Intro for the demo I gave you. I might lose “new writing” numbers when I do this (although my trend is I usually add words. lol) but “new words” is not an indicator of my success here, the success is completing the rewrite.

Same with the code. After I get recommendations on how to improve my code, I’ll make a new milestone for the project that focuses on redoing the code. Once I complete the revamp, I check that milestone off for the month and count it as a success.

I think this approach is better, the more you get into the project’s life-cycle, because you have already written the story for the most part and the majority of your work at this point is not focused on writing your story as it is rewriting, fixing and getting the project ready to push to publication.

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Ah yes that reminds me. I owe you some feedback. I did have a quick read through and meant to go through it again with notes but was having coding issues which took my time.

I will try and get something to you by Sunday!

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The funny Thing is, writing is a lot like agile software development. Always working in circles

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Managed to get 10k words in the last month :smile:, but I’m thinking of ditching my focus on word count. Mostly due to experimenting on how that will affect my writing this month. I worry if the stress of not meeting my own quota makes me rush a bit in my writing.

I’ve also decided to ditch the number of words required for my chapters as I am now playing around with the *temp variables!

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How about a base goal for each day: one or two sentences?

That is the actual goal I have, even if I keep track of all the statistics – as long as I write one or two sentences a day, I am meeting my daily goal.

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August was a mixed month. On the bright side, progress was made. On the other side, I got myself bogged down with a lot of other work. As such, my output is slowing dramatically. I hope to improve my situation an d allow myself more time to work on what I want to work on, but we’ll see. Currently, my plan is to asses my work mid-November.

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I edited a little and added 800 words to the pile so not a bad day…

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Hi everyone! Happy September!

Still waiting for AtS to go into content review. Meanwhile I have several wips to work on which I haven’t been very good about… and I just started another project yesterday. Whoops. I need to pick one to focus on, or I’ll end up not working on any of them :sweat_smile:

Best of luck to everyone with their goals this month!

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Alright update.
My writing is slowing down rather alarmingly and I’m losing motivation, I have a plan for the weekend to hopefully fix this: vodka and hope.
Vodka is doing the heavy lifting here as I’m running low on hope.

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Doing some steady writing so far during training scenes for available teammates. One of which includes a series of choices where you have to repeat two patterns (punching a left pad or right pad in the correct order 3 moves and then 6 moves) it works and is a neat bit of code although i could do it cleaner but splitting it into two parts helped remove an error that kept popping up.

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Hi everyone. I am going on with my Monkey Island/Pirates of the Caribbean project. I am on chapter 2! :star_struck: Hopefully, I will get to chapter 3 before this month ends. Looking forward to reaching chapter 4, so I can finally create an interesting playable demo.

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