A romantic speed short jam or contest can be good idea I can help you if you need help. Or if anyone wants help with something. Now you all can still ranting in peace 
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These might be of interest to yall 
And other monthly jams announced there (I also post about them here when they popup).
And if you’re looking for past romantic jam…
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I know you had some Good point sure it will attract people
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My opinion is that WIPs are experiments: sometimes by experienced, professional authors, sometimes by hobbyists with day jobs, sometimes by literal teenagers who are totally new to the world of commercial fiction writing. Many WIPs may never see completion, and not necessarily because the initial idea was bad or because of the laziness of the author. There can be a lot of things more important in many writers’ lives than spending years on coding and debugging an IF fantasy series, and the longer it takes, the more likely one or more of those things could happen.
Caveat emptor.
Basically I think you should take all these gripes you have about authors disappointing you and not suiting your tastes and flip them around to helping you decide how to spend your money and time. Maybe don’t get involved in any WIPs for series if you know you’ll be disappointed. Maybe don’t get involved in WIPs at all if you don’t want to take the emotional risk.
And as far as your frustration with cliff-hangers and slow-burn, tame romance, it sounds like you have pretty specific ideas about what you want. Why not try writing your own standalone, fast-burn adult romance? Be the smutty change you wish to see in the world.
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It’s kind of funny, in a way. Most of the things people actually have issues with, they rarely say in the WIP threads. I’d genuinely kill for someone to say “hey, vera, your pacing is a tad weird”, so I would not work on it all and then release the book and see complaints about it after. Same for romance pacing, same for romance options, although I still wouldn’t write romance the same way it happens in most WIPs.
Like, positive emotions are very good and nice to see. But I can’t know if something’s wrong unless you tell me: if I can’t see it myself, if I already released it, chances are, it slipped past my eyes.
And series… I’ve seen a lot of promised seven-book series being quietly dropped while Patreons were still active. In single-book games we trust.
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For a romance to really work for me it needs to have some build-up first. Not that I want a route where the romance consists only of meaningful glances for entire two books, but it’s nice to have more time to actually get to know the ROs before starting dating/flirting with them.
Maybe it’s just me, but I always found it a bit strange when I see one of my MCs falling head over heels for someone they just met lol (and that’s probably why I always preferred ROs that already have a shared past with the MC or that have known them for some time)
It would be pretty much the same for me in this case, since I would get the same content. But if it was a 250k standalone book vs. a series of four books with 250k words each, I would probably prefer the latter.
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Argh! I’d almost managed to forget that. I have trust issues when it comes to sci-fi/fantasy series and the big networks. They love to decide not to renew series and not everything gets the chance to have an ending like Farscape 
More WOT Perrin and general pacing ranting
Yes! Perrin was so wasted! He had a really interesting set up with the wolves and Elyas, and some really great moments like when he was trying to decide what he’d be capable of doing if the ravens caught them. He had a really nice storyline happening in the early books and then kind of finished up his growth arc and instead of staying “adult” or growing further he devolves into going back to the old “I’m just a blacksmith, don’t look to me” crap and being completely obsessed with Faile, but for some reason being able to have a conversation with her because she seems to semi-perpetually “smells angry/hurt/upset”. (Faile’s arc is not much better to be fair. Neither of them really faired well and it’s frustrating because they had the set up to be much better characters.)
All that wasted time where he’s obsessing on getting her back from the Shaido stating that he doesn’t care if costs the world the last battle. I mean there’s some idiot thinking right there. I’m sure she’ll thank him for coming to her rescue if the whole world is damned to live under the dark one’s thumb for eternity including her. And everyone keeps TELLING us that he’s such a great leader because he’s certainly not showing it. Eek. I mean I lover WOT overall, but that was a real slog to get through and needed a heap of stuff cut or rewritten.
I do really agree that WOT needs a good editor. I wonder if RJ got so big that no one thought they could touch his work? Asides from the really bad Perrin/Faile slog, there’s a heap of over description that could be cut. I mean I know what insert character/soldier type looks like. You don’t need to describe the ashamen’s clothing to me every time we see one. Notice how many times the girls end up in seamstress shops? And how much time everyone (including the guys) get their clothing described in detail (sigh Matt and his ranting about how much lace he should have on his clothes and how how clingy Nyn’s dresses are or are not) makes me think that RJ would have liked to design clothing for a living. Never the less, you could probably remove close to a book’s worth of text from the entire series and have a much better flowing story with less over description and pointless storylines that should’ve been cut/reduced.
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I don’t know numbers specifically, but my gut says he is right. The more ambitious the project, the better chance of it being abandoned and not completed. Anything that starts out with the intent of being the first story in a long series is already looking to be quite ambitious indeed. A lot of writers, when they see what it would take to turn such a sprawling epic from pipe dream to actual existing story, they turn tail and slink away. Oftentimes with no small amount of crowdsourced money in their coffers on the way out.
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Probabilities are right. I am even more negative. The chances are you won’t finish your first projects. You know how it goes better than most of us. You are one of the small percentage that made it through.
You know how I bashed your first game. But You having the chance to present a wip and that brought yoy a great improvement in your writing.
I loved what you did next.
I get how frustrating is seeing so many wips go. But it is how gaming industry work how many indies go away. How many triple A are cancelled or being a shadow of what they were supposed to be.
If you are looking as new person who are passionate about a project just do it. You probably fail horrible. Probably you won’t make it.
But look You won’t do it worse than me. You go keep all the improvement and feedback. And Starting new with your improvement until you are better and good enough to make it. It is a process.
I am far from that but I feel like I am getting closer.
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From what I seen most start out with the intention of being a standalone book then things start growing out of control and before you know it you are making the announcement that it’s a series before the first game is even out. From what I remember both Malin and Bacon expected their first game to be just a standalone book when they first post their wip
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I can’t process time correctly, so to me these are basically the same thing, with the exception that the one game guarantees me the full thing, and if I get the series as it comes out it doesn’t.
Sort of yes. “Shared past with the MC” doesn’t mean anything to me, because I don’t know them. But I too am in the camp of “this NPC is very attractive, don’t you want to romance them?” is meaningless. I don’t KNOW this NPC. I don’t know if I want to be AROUND them, let alone romance them. I have the internet, author, I can look at RIDICULOUSLY attractive people whenever I feel like it, if that’s what I want. Tell me WHO this character is, in their essence, before you ask me “wanna bang it”?
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The huge hype 1mil+ games gets is real. I don’t know which works out better financially for the author though as I’d imagine with each installment the original game gets brought back up to the surface again getting a bump in overall series sales and in total will probably work out more expensive than buying the entire game outright. Not to mention the time required to write a 1mil game with lots of stats. I suspect “installments” cause writers to make sure everything is relatively narrow at the end of each book in most cases to prevent too much build up of extra variable actions and story breadth. It also helps the writer see if there’s any issues that need addressing earlier on. I guess there’s pros and cons to each method for both writer and reader.
Personally unless it’s from authors I’m pretty sure will finish a series, or series that are structured with a complete book story arc (ok if there’s an overall continuing story, but I prefer the game not to just stop and have a “finish” or sorts where the main point of the first/second/etc book is tied up and doesn’t leave me hanging) I’m actually far less likely to buy them now and wait to see when the entire series is done then get them then. Best case is there’s usually a long wait (understandibly) between books to get the whole story. (Again this doesn’t apply to games that run complete “book 1” installments like evertree, deathless etc did.) But I also guess from my standpoint (extra initial outlay of time + money) I’m also less likely to buy a 1mil+ game unless I’m really invested in the concept and writing. A shorter, (initially cheaper) game is less starting outlay for the reader, so less risk if it turns out not to be your cup of tea 
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The counterpoint to this is that all CoG games have demos that run to a decent length, so you can find out the yourness of the cup of tea for free.
But I want to make clear I wasn’t making a case for either form of game.
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I don’t really agree with the idea that new writers should do something different than experienced writers. Just because you haven’t finished a book yet doesn’t mean you should restrict yourself to only writing a standalone, only writing a simple premise, etc. Because then they might not be working on something they’re passionate about, which is a sure fire way to not finish.
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True, but sometimes games (particularly long ones) don’t stay consistent through their entire length and TBH if I’m undecided I’m less likely to try out the longer game due to cost and my general lack of free time. That’s just me though :D.
I know, I’ve probably tangented a bit there.
Playing devil’s advocate here, but passionate is all good and well when you start a project, it’s finishing it that’s the problem. That’s one of the reasons why there’s so many abandoned WIPs about. The more ambitious a project is, the longer it’ll take that author to get it done, the more “life stuff” that can come up to delay it, the higher the chance is of it being abandoned if the previous one doesn’t do well, and the overall harder it is to write the next chapter (more stat and storyline tracking, burn out, new shiny ideas for other projects etc). I’d be willing to bet that a lot of people new to writing in CS don’t realise how big an effect a lot of these factors have until they’ve finished a game (especially one >100k words). Scope creep is also a thing. Plan to start off with a 200k game and I can just about guarantee it’ll be longer than that. So start off planning for a 5 game installment each of 300k each and…
Authors can write whatever they want to, but particularly for first time writers (and even to an extent more experienced people already with games out) the bigger you aim, all things being considered, likely the more likely it is to end up undone or at least delayed. I think that’s worth taking under consideration when deciding how “epic” a new project should be regardless of experience level.
^This. (Particularly as the individual stories that make up the series are rarely planned to be on the shorter side.)
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Oh man, this is why I don’t touch WIPs (unless they’re by authors who have already published at least one HG/CoG book.) I personally hate long series and being left hanging too. I’m not a huge fan of romance so I don’t care if it’s in the book or not, but now that I’m in my thirties, I feel very very tired and no longer like the teenager who could wait several years for the next instalment of her favourite book. It’s one of the reasons why I gave up on the GoT books too. It’s why I don’t watch Netflix shows unless they’re limited series, since it keeps cancelling them after one season. The same thing happened to me with Samurai of Hyuga. The second book was particularly egregious, since it didn’t even feature a single demon’s defeat and was instead just a long set up for the third book. But I didn’t mind since I read books 1-4 together when 4 came out. And then I had to wait for 5. And found it sooooo underwhelming. I will not be reading the next book when it releases.
My interest in the Fallen Hero books is also slowly waning. Although those are meaty enough and seem to have good, organic end points for each book.
WiPs also make you work so hard! I read 1 small chapter, and sometimes it leaves me hungry for more, but other times it might be so badly written that I can’t focus because the tense keeps changing. And then I wonder why the author didn’t just go over the text once and fix the simpler grammatical mistakes before posting. (This especially grates on me, I think, since English isn’t my first language and I learned it intuitively by reading a bunch of books instead of through osmosis, so I prefer to continue to read books that are well written in order to keep it polished.) A few mistakes here or there are fine. But if I find 2+ mistakes per page, and the author is a native speaker, I drop the WiP asap, because I feel that the chances of that game not getting completed are even higher. This is why I usually don’t touch WiPs, unless they’ve been written by seasoned authors.
Coming to CoG, I got so tired of my PC’s miserable existence in Choice of the Vampire, and so scared of having to wait for the next instalment, that I nearly always allow the PC to die at the hands of West. I absolutely adore Choice of Rebels but fear that I might not find it as engaging (because tastes tend to change and evolve) by the time the last book comes out…when I’m 50? (I’ll still come and Google the ending though. I need to know where that damn blight came from.) But the biggest villain of them all? Sergiverse!
Wow, I feel so much better after having ranted! Thanks for creating this thread, OP! 
Edit: Wow and now that I’m done ranting, I’m reading through other people’s comments and I feel compelled to respond, so this will be a very long message indeed!
For me, I would prefer the 1 million words long game by far. Preferably with checkpoints. But even if there aren’t any (Werewolves Apocalypse - the book I’m currently obsessed with - seems to be 2-3 books rolled into one and has no checkpoints), I would prefer that extra long single game since I got to read it all in one go instead of having to wait 15+ years for a story I like to be finished. Failing that, I would prefer to read a single 250k word standalone story. But I will absolutely not spend money or time on a book that is 250k words and leaves me on a cliffhanger.
That’s a good point. Perhaps it’s my own personal experience, but longer projects have a way of sucking all the passion out of you. Back when I was working on my Masters thesis, it was done in three months and I was so proud of it. I still go back and read it sometimes because it was so well written. In contrast, my PhD thesis… My biggest nightmare is someone I respect getting their hands on it and seeing how repetitive, unoriginal and downright lazy it got at points as I rushed towards the end to meet the word count. It took me 6 years. Of course, I got more “bang for my buck” for the PhD since it got me that coveted “Dr.” before my name, but it ruined my mental and physical health. I still remain very passionate about my research area, but I just feel soooo drained.
Of course, it’s up to the authors to decide what they want to do. It just feels nightmarish to get trapped into writing the same thing for a longer period of time and there aren’t enough resources out there telling them it’s not a good idea to do so. Trek up a nice hill before you climb Mount Everest, is all I’m saying. Think of the nice hill as a precursor to Everest. Everest will still be there when you’re done, but you’ll be more experienced and better able to pace yourself.
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A post was merged into an existing topic: May 2024’s Writer Support Thread
Hating what you’re doing is a good way to not finish it either, I’d say.
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I think the whole shared past thing works better for me when it’s a standalone game (especially the shorter ones). Since there’s not that extra time to get to know the characters, seeing the MC falling in love with someone they already know makes more sense to me than if it were with a complete stranger.
I’m not the biggest fan of fast-burn, you see. Especially when the characters only know each other for a short amount of time.
I’m not surprised that ItFO was originally planned/expected to be a standalone game. But Fallen Hero? I would have never guessed.
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Are you taking bets? Because I find my WIP pretty frustrating.
More seriously, @Jacic is right. Passion is nice, but consistency and discipline actually get stuff done.
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