Bastion Goes to Fight Camp, Coming Soon (kind of). Free Anti-Writer's Block Tip.

Story's not 100% finished, no. But I've uploaded the first six chapters, and will be publishing the first three chapters throughout next week. I still have the issue with editing in the Brave browser, the screen lags like crazy when I hit 'Edit,' but hopefully I can get the kinks out. So it's in final editing now, yay!

At the time of writing, it's uploaded, final checks will be today and tomorrow, expect the upload tomorrow or Tuesday at the latest, and the next three chapters will follow soon after. In the meantime, I'll wrap up the last few things in the final chapters so it'll at least be halfway decent.

I'll keep repeating this, though: I'm not happy with it myself. It took too long, it's over-edited in some places and barely edited in others, so level of detail is inconsistent throughout. It's been started over so much and redone at a concept level that certain scenes just don't mesh while being necessary at the same time. On top of that, even at a concept level I don't think it's my best work, I think it has too much of my old style in it. It was meant to be a lead-up to the third story, to be kind of the War of the Spark or Avengers Infinity War precursor, but mostly I've learned that such projects simply aren't worth the hassle. They lead to bad habits, both in the consumer and the producer. So definitely keeping that in mind for future projects. Chalk it up to a learning experience, I suppose.

One upside, though: I have found a brand new way of combatting writer's block that I didn't find online (it probably is, though, somewhere), and that's been pretty effective in getting the wordcount up, and will be using it in the future.

The tip? Go to any lorem ipsum generator and get a block of 250 or 500 words, whichever you prefer depending on what interval you tend to write in. Copy-paste that two or three times into your file depending on your goals for the day, and mark it in a different colour. Then hit the insert key, switch to regular black, and start typing. Take a break every time you hit a new lorem ipsum block.

This works if you're the type who is afraid of the empty screen, or if you're more of a detail-oriented editor type than a spontaneous writer. You trick your mind into going into editing mode that way, and you already have an idea of what the word count is going to be because, hey, those pages are full now. It won't be exactly the same word count, but it's close, and it helps get over that initial gap. Because you're writing in smaller blocks, it's a smaller hurdle to cross: you need to do four sessions instead of 20k words, it looks smaller in your head. Besides that, once you get in the zone, your 500 word block goal ends up bleeding into the next one, becoming 750.

So, you know, if anyone recognises similar problems in their own writing habits, here's something to try.

Song inappropriate for the current weather, but hey.

Cracker out.