Progress Report (21/09): So conferences are tiring…

I’ve had a very eventful time since last update – but sadly, this means little has happened with the story.

This week, I attended Sweden Game Conference, to present a video game I’m working on. I spent the week before that preparing stable, playable builds of the game. A chinese publisher actually got excited about the game and decided to pick it up, and there’s been a bunch of negotiation and preparatory stuff there.

As you can hear, eventful week. But bad for writing.

So how are we doing?

It’s not outright catastrophic. I didn’t actually get my half hour in most days as I was just too busy in general and too tired in the evenings, but I did get some writing done. I’ve written almost a thousand words since last update. It’s not much, but it is at least something.

The next two weeks…

Now that Sweden Game Conference is in the past, things should hopefully slow down a little again. I’m sure more crunchy deadlines await in the future, but the immediate time ahead of me is clear. While at SGC, I saw Chris Avellone speak (he wrote for some of the best-written games out there, like Planescape: Torment – *fan squee*), and he strongly recommended something called Write or Die.

This is an app that will push you to write, or it will punish you by, for example, showing creepy pictures of spiders, playing unpleasant sounds and, oh, deleting what you’ve already written. If you do keep up, though, you will get pleasant sounds and backgrounds for writing. I’ve tried it, and it is utterly brutal. In the thirty minutes I tried, I pumped out 800 of the roughly 1000 words I wrote these past two weeks. It just completely freaked me out when the screen turned red and it started deleting text, but it was also pretty fun. The stuff I wrote definitely has to be edited, of course, since it was written under duress and in a darn hurry, but it’s getting the meat of the text written that’s hard.

I intend to combine my daily half hour – which I hope to be able to keep up better now there’s less stress at work – with this blessed tool of the devil, Write or Die. I shall report the results in two weeks.

Progress report (06/09): Slow weeks

This update will be short. Once again, work is getting in the way of writing, in addition to my being tired in general. I’m once again in trying-not-to-burn-out mode.

How are we doing?

Not well – I haven’t even been getting half an hour of writing done every day. Come evening, I’m generally too tired and worn out, and I often end up just going to bed instead of writing. So, boring non-update this week – I only wrote maybe 400-500 words total, in scattered bits that will have to be sorted out later.

I also finished played Life is Strange, which is a game I can very strongly recommend for those who are into story-based games and having their hearts broken. The after-effects of playing this game is partially responsible for me simply not being in the mood to write much these past two weeks.

The next two weeks…

I’ll continue trying to get in my half an hour every day, even though I may not succeed all the time. I think I will try to get more work done on a lore post, as a fallback if I can’t get into the writing mood more. This status quo is still much better, as occasionally I hit a good run and write several thousand words in one evening.

The long term future…

Finally, I just want to reassure you, my readers, that… well, while this may take a while, this will get written. If I’m still writing a decade from now, well… I will have done this very slowly, but I know that I will either be done or still going, one bit at a time.

In other news, I’m strongly considering taking a sabbath year soon, as all this relentless work and study is beginning to wear a bit on me. I know you don’t read this for an update of my personal life, but the relevant point here is that I will be trying to get more time off, and with that comes a very real chance for writing sprees that aren’t just hours or days long, but potentially weeks or months.

So let’s hope for that.