20000 Words in Two Months & More To Come

Success is getting words down on paper. Publishing them is huge success. And every step beyond that is success! Keep going.

Thus was the encouragement I received from the two presenters of a very popular RPG podcast when my very first attempt of creating something that 30 people like did not, shall we say, exactly fly off the shelves: Bent Goblin's Companion to Dragonlance: Scales of War clearly is not what people had been waiting for.

Then, just before the OGL debacle found such a beautiful resolution, inspiration struck and I was on fire to writing something new -- said encouragement provided the final impulse and off I went.

What exactly I am working on, I shall tell you about in my next blog post, but for today I am proud to present an overview of the progress I have made in almost exactly two months:

20000 words in two months, i.e., around 330 words per day on average, is probably nothing a professional game designer would be very proud of. Creighton Broadhurst of Raging Swan Press, whose work I greatly admire, is shooting for 500 words per day for his Citadel on the Wilderlands project, and had for some time upped his production to even 1000 words. But for me, with my day job, the family, and all the other engagements, but without any experience in writing consistently day after day (not counting scientific papers, those are different, I find) ... well, I am absurdly happy with having managed 330 words per day on average. Had not Corona knocked me out for a few days, it might have even been more.

I have found that the key to writing a larger adventure "on the side" of my day job is to do the planning and plotting on the weekends (or vacation days, if I happen to have them) and work on little, well-defined bits of writing and designing (e.g., describe a room, an encounter, or an NPC) during the work week. It also helps that I tend to wake up early and often have close to an hour for myself before the workaday life starts. Thinking about the project when walking, running, or cycling, also helped: that way, I got some of my best ideas for the adventure.

My guess is that I have maybe another 5000 words to go. In the next few days, I think I will prepare a Trello/Kanban board to get an overview of what is left to do ... my feeling is that it is going to be fuller than I would want it to be. But having managed over 20000 words, I am confident now that I will be able to finish Release from the OGL Vault ... and that is no April Fool's hoax!