Last month I set the goal to finish a first draft of my short story, and while I did make some headway on that, I did not actually, like, finish it. So my goal for this month will be to finish that. Or failing that, at least to try!

I’ve been looking for a full time job for what feels like forever, and it’s coming to a head now, so it’s hard to find the drive to focus on writing when I could be studying something that will help me land a paying job. Related to that I’ve somewhat fallen out of my habit of writing short “morning pages” but I’m sure I’ll get back into it eventually. Maybe even today!

Luckily the kind of writing I do doesn’t require much time investment. Even 10 or 30 minutes a day could be a decent enough contribution to the short story I’m currently at.

Bit of a topsy-turvy month for me. What I’ve done:

• Wrote (and sent) the short story for the solarpunk contest
• Sent three short stories to the anarchist zine that was mentioned around here
• Joined the Solarpunk Game Jam as a writer; I’ll be tasked with writing characters and dialogues for a videogame prototype

What I will try to do in May:

• Finish the goddamn Words of Tomorrow revision… 🥲
• Revise the lore and structure for Kanteletar, so I can start writing it this summer

…and that’s it, basically. Now onto checking out what you all have done while I was slumping! 😂

Sorry I’m late! I think I’ve made pretty good progress so far on the campaign - I’ve been spending most of my writing time on organizing the document, moving sections around, and getting the layout right. I’ve had some good suggestions on section additions from Andrew Gross, such as creating an Adversaries and Escalations subsection for each major part of the campaign. These consolidates information on the people who will (or might) try to interfere with the players’ investigation. Previously that information was sort of scattered across locations, character profiles, and assorted scenes. Getting it all in one place for each potential adversary and making their motives clear has felt good.

I’ve also continued running the second playthrough, and have had a great time making it a more cloak-and-dagger campaign for this investigator-heavy group of players. They uncovered the cold case murder mystery at the heart of the conspiracy to stop them much earlier than the first group, and there’s been some tense scenes even though I’ve been striving to avoiding any outright combat because I don’t think it fits this group.

This has been really helpful in planning and describing other ways the campaign can go, and TBH proving that the open world sandbox design is fairly solid! My goal was to make sure there was enough information, locations, and opportunities that you could spin a decent adventure out of it no matter how the players decided to pursue their investigation, and it feels like we’re pretty close to that! In terms of writing all this info into the guidebook, I’m trying to hit a balance between making the information available and not driving myself insane trying to write a choose-your-own adventure book. I’m recognizing that once they get to the main location, basically all bets are off and I’m making sure that any overarching plot and adversary tactics read as branching suggestions from that point forward.

I’ve also been working on adding additional Non Player Character profiles though there’s still a handfull left to make.