Writing Something Every Day*, Xantalos Edition

I know it sounds horrible but have you tried to look at it like work? Basically fixing yourself either a word objective to reach each day, or an action or section.

I say that because my best update speeds were reached when I had this outlook. Planning is often a cure for writer's block.
 
I know it sounds horrible but have you tried to look at it like work? Basically fixing yourself either a word objective to reach each day, or an action or section.

I say that because my best update speeds were reached when I had this outlook. Planning is often a cure for writer's block.
Oh, that's somewhat what this thread is meant to do. I dunno that I'd call my periodic dry spells writer's block so much as just a lack of the habit of working at it. I do have a soft limit of at least 100 words of progress I'd like to reach each day, but that's just me putting standards on myself - if I can force myself to produce something, I'll produce words. The struggle's always been getting around to doing it because of 'motivation' or what have you, so I figure simple's best. I take the words of our cannibalistic overlord Shia Lebeouf to heart:
 
Speaking of which...
November 30, 2019 - wrote 572 words for Respect Your Elders turn 8. Coatl reproduction practices are weird and esoteric enough that I was able to make a short scene out of it.
 
December 1, 2019 - wrote 466 words for Respect Your Elders turn 8.

Another section down, I'm feeling pretty good about my progress right now. Only got ... 6 sections left, and they're all research ones that I've got a fairly clear idea of what I want to do with, meaning I should be able to pump them out fairly quickly. Update will probably end up at 8 or 9k words by the time I'm done, seeing as I'm around 6k in now.
 
Last edited:
Snippet 1 - Making My Way Downtown - Dec. 2, 2019
December 2, 2019 - wrote 25 words for Respect Your Elders turn 8.

Worked a pretty busy shift today, which kinda sucked a lot of me energy out, so not much progress on the actual turn front today. However, I see no reason to let that stop me from doing stuff, so have this snippet. Not sure what to call it, any suggestions?

---

Broken fingers dug into cracked ground. Parched dirt crumbled under their touch, the dust whispering against their skin with tongues of merciless lack. The digits clenched, digging soft furrows into the turf before finding purchase.

The man's body scraped forwards inch by inch, a dead sack of meat soaked through with congealed blood and abdominal juices. The moisture had left his flesh long ago, leached out into the hollow air, cooked out under the unrelenting gaze of the sun. The desert was a grand tomb, and the man's corpse the unnamed, forgotten pharaoh, mummified by his own mucous and the slowly tightening sack of his skin.

The man's trail stretched far behind him, and his destination lay far ahead. He would spend an eternity in the desert, and should he ever stop moving he would calcify, becoming bleached bone and dust under a pale sky. But though his death hung heavy in his flesh, the man's limbs continued to move with relentless, mechanical patience.

Reach forward. The crust of the earth bites at leathery skin, sizzling with heat as crumpled digits push through.

Grasp. Tendons groan like rusted cables atop a decrepit bridge as they slowly contract.

Drag. A little more dust seeps into the man's open chest cavity, drifting into his heart.

The promise he made rests there still. It is muffled by the sand and dry, crumbling dirt, but it never breaks.

The man's body scraped forward a few more inches.
 
December 3, 2019 - wrote 386 words for Respect Your Elders turn 8. Dunno if I'll finish the section I'm doing tomorrow, since I'll be fairly busy tomorrow, but since the whole section is basically magical technobabble I reckon if not tomorrow I'll have it finished by Thursday. Then it'll just be 4 more sections and some mechanical stuff to finalize.
 
Snippet 2 - Vague Unexplained Myth Thingy - Dec. 6, 2019
The Rethmejir was rising. Long had it hung over the world like a detached finger of God, slavering towards the warmth of the sun with a hunger it could never be allowed to fulfil. By chains of rock and of bone and of blood it had been married to the earth, the entire Kathmanji people having given their lives to meld their flesh to the tip of its tail and hold it down.

But the whips of time had eroded the sense of the world, and the men of now had sent their sons with heavy picks of lead and copper to mine away at the rocky tether holding the Rethmejir to the earth, seeking fragments of its skin to adorn their palaces with.

They had forgotten the cost paid by their past mothers, and now the Rethmejir rose from its confinement, a great pillar of basalt flesh fifty miles high. The Rethmejir stretched its form in exultation, and its sinuous pale hairs extruded from its side, whiplashing back and forth, passing through ground and sea as though they were made of ghost-flesh.

The servants of the multitudinous gods of the deep sky, freed at last from the great pit of Hell by the conclusion of their ancient oath of noninterference, flocked to the Rethmejir and brought upon their wings a storm of twisting light and mist-fire. They brought the full wrath of their dead gods upon the monster, shrieking sky shanties as they died, and it was not enough.

The Rethmejir left the downward grip of the jealous Earth, and was freed of the world forever. The sun was shrouded by its maw soon after, and an age of dark, and of long, slow slumber, followed.

--

Busy day today, couldn't get meself to write anything with actual effort so I did this.
 
December 7, 2019 - wrote 60 words for Respect Your Elders turn 8. Meant to write more but The Blade Itself series by Joe Abercrombie is really damn good so I've been reading them for like 8 hours straight at this point.
 
Right, while I didn't actually write any notable number of words today, I'm not gonna mark this post with the SHAME threadmark because I did like 3 session's worth of planning for the DnD campaign I'm running, since I didn't have time to do that all week and the session was tonight. So given that I went from functionally no idea where I was going with my plotline to having a decent set of quests and plots set up and such, I think that counts as far as creating something. Heck, maybe I'll count the outlining I did for the campaign as my words for the day, it was like 150 or so.

Edit: Yeah it was 287 words of outlining, I'll call that decent.
 
Last edited:
you made plans for telling a story llive action instead of through text. Great work!
 
Right, while I didn't actually write any notable number of words today, I'm not gonna mark this post with the SHAME threadmark because I did like 3 session's worth of planning for the DnD campaign I'm running, since I didn't have time to do that all week and the session was tonight. So given that I went from functionally no idea where I was going with my plotline to having a decent set of quests and plots set up and such, I think that counts as far as creating something. Heck, maybe I'll count the outlining I did for the campaign as my words for the day, it was like 150 or so.
So
Would you mind sharing the campaign plot with us?
Because this sounds interesting
 
So
Would you mind sharing the campaign plot with us?
Because this sounds interesting
Long story short, we have a human monk - rough fellow from a tribe of barbarians - and a dragonborn warlock raised by a fey patron. Occasionally our third player, a human fighter samurai guy, drops by, but the first two are the consistent ones. They're in a dwarf city and have run into the local mafia, who've been stirring up more trouble than usual recently, so the main gist of the plot is 'figure out what the mob is up to and stop them'. There's more to it than that, but that hasn't been revealed to them quite yet.

One funny thing happened last session that I didn't really expect. The warlock gets targets named to him by his patron occasionally, and it's his mission to go harvest their souls. So he received a dream vision to 'seek the Long-Hat', who's gonna be an important adversary later. Of course they don't know what that means, so on the way to go find adventuring jobs they ask everyone they run into if they've seen a tall hat for the monk's dwarf girlfriend. Naturally, no one has any idea what the hell they mean, so after they get a job and meet a detective NPC who'll be important to the plot later, they decide to go hat shopping.

I wasn't anticipating this, so I lead them to a luxury dwarf hat shop, which has various high-end fashion stock that's pretty expensive. They then proceed to bully-persuade the manager of the store into letting them look around the back of the store and see how their custom orders are made, and while looking around they manage to find an order log and find one particular dwarf's name mentioned an unusual number of times.

Unknown to them, the name is of a local crime boss, who's actually buying the hats for his boss, the BBEG of the campaign. After all, a duergar wizard (or maybe cleric, I haven't decided) intending to subvert the local government and take over the city while the dwarfs are distracted fighting off recent Underdark incursions (from our other campaign that's running parallel to this one) can't very well go and visit the shop himself to feed his hat obsession.

So yeah, that was an important story point they stumbled on somehow by going hat-shopping.
 
Back
Top