Hi! I hope you’ve been doing well. I decided on a whim to sign up for NaNoWriMo, so that’s been fun. I figured because of this, I’d talk about my writing process a bit this month.

>Talk about how you cheated at Nanowrimo.

…

Well, okay, my defense of How I Cheated At Nanowrimo:

I did not mean to! I said that my work was in progress and then entered that I wrote 24,491 words, and Nanowrimo said “okay!” and told me I had written all those words THAT DAY. I did not! That was written over the course of months!!!!

Also, I didn’t even hit 50,000 words by the end of the month, so does it count as cheating if you don’t actually WIN?

Anyways.

I did find Nanowrimo super useful for making sure that I actually wrote every day! Nanowrimo keeps track of a streak, so it was very good at activating my Gamer Brain Instincts of not liking letting my streak go (I eventually broke it in the name of letting myself enjoy Thanksgiving). I also made a point of only holding myself to writing at LEAST 100 words a day, which helped because it’s a very small goal, so even on days when I was like “ughhhhhh I don’t want to write”, I could hold myself to “okay, 100 words is basically nothing, let’s just knock it out and then you can relax”. I also have issues with - and I think this is an ADHD thing - poor impulse control and delayed gratification, where my brain is very aware that I am the only thing standing in the way of me ignoring my responsibilities and playing video games, and that I require very little persuasion to give up a pleasant future for a fun present. So, it was nice to have something other than my personal Google sheet keeping me accountable for writing, and there is absolutely something to the joy of Number Goes Up.

I definitely did not use Nanowrimo as intended; I think it’s meant for professional writers who sit down and write for x number of hours every day, but I have a 9-to-5 and I tend to write very sporadically in little chunks either on my lunch break or in the evenings. It also is meant for, you know, novels, and not code, so there’s a bit of wiggle room. I know there’s a similar event for visual novels, but I was more interested in the actual writing aspect than I was the rest of dev. Maybe someday I’ll try the visual novel version (especially with a shorter project), but I knew there was no way I was getting the entire game done in a month. Overall, I did enjoy it! I’ll probably keep fiddling with it, especially if I can set my own daily and monthly goals. As of now, I'm trying to write 10,000 a month, and have adjusted my nano settings accordingly.

CURRENT PROGRESS: We have been Writing. It’s pretty much oops all writing till the writing is done, then we'll worry about drawing and coding. Current word count is 31,663. We’re about at the end of the second act.

That’s about it for progress! Till next time!