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Tinker Tuesday for September 17, 2024

This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.

Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.

If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service.

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I've been trying to write a painfully sincere litRPG.

"Trying" because I keep getting a few chapters in, realizing something big needs to be changed in order to ensure the story's foundation is good, and then procrastinating the edits for months before I get back into it. Writing and continuously revising is a whole lot more fun than going back to old chapters and rewriting them.

Also, my day job (programming) seems to use the same part of my brain as writing, which is really suboptimal. If I felt I had a real chance at making it big as an author I'd quit my job and work at a warehouse or something while I wrote, but fiction is such an incredibly packed field already that I think that would be an enormous mistake.

I'm five chapters in right now on my fourth try and just realized some more major edits have to be made, so I guess it might be another few months before my fifth try gets started. Pressing forward isn't really an option because the revisions will change things substantially--I've tried pressing forward without editing before and the constant references to unwritten material which will be inserted before what I am writing just make it too difficult to keep moving forward. The solution is just to keep at it but man, it's hard with my day job in the way.

Also, my day job (programming) seems to use the same part of my brain as writing

This is hard. The best move I've got is to brute-force my sleep schedule to be awake at 5 or so, addy up (back when I had access), and use those crack-energy disinhibited hours while there are no distractions from the world to get some work done.

Also, my day job (programming) seems to use the same part of my brain as writing, which is really suboptimal. If I felt I had a real chance at making it big as an author I'd quit my job and work at a warehouse or something while I wrote, but fiction is such an incredibly packed field already that I think that would be an enormous mistake.

I often experience the same, and supposedly so do many established writers who indeed work deliberately simple day jobs to keep their head free for writing. A friend of mine who somewhat recently started writing books while working as a software dev also told me that the only way he could get anything done was by getting up several hours early, writing, and then going to work.

If you're looking for an alpha reader, give me a shout - at this point my litRPG addiction seems terminal, so I might as well stop resisting. Are you aiming for the Eastern/cultivation style or more of a gamelit approach?

Thanks, I might take you up on that. The story will be more gamelit.

Just once, I'd like to see a protagonist with a game overlay try to clip through a corner by repeatedly crouch jumping.

What do you mean by "painfully sincere"?

I like stories where the protagonist suffers and tries to help/save weaker people. Maybe it's a bit grandiose to call it "painfully sincere" but I want to write a story about the strong sacrificing everything to protect the weak, with little to no irony or self-awareness involved.