This is the tenth entry of my dev diary for The Weight of a Soul.

Progress

I wrote two scenes this week, both in the final room of Day Three.

Let it be known that burnout is real. It’s agonizing that it’s getting more and more difficult for me to exercise my creative juices, especially when I’m so close to my self-appointed deadline.

It’s not that I don’t want to write — it’s more like I emotionally can’t. I’m trying to reconcile my perfectionism and wish to write good prose with the reality that I’m going to have to bang something out, one way or another.

I’m going to try to enforce a one-sentence minimum on myself this coming week — “write at least one sentence every day.” It doesn’t have to be a full scene — just a sentence. It doesn’t have to be a good sentence. What matters is that I’m opening the Inform 7 editor and looking at this thing so that I can push myself towards the end.

Plot

Although I didn’t get much writing done this week, I did compile a (spoiler-filled) plot summary for my mentor, who discussed some of the finer points with me and the believability of an upcoming plot twist. There are some issues which he’s pointed out and which I plan to take a closer look at after I’ve finished banging out Day Four and the Epilogue.

In the immortal words of Red of Overly Sarcastic Productions on plot twists, there are quite a lot of ways that a plot twist can turn out badly. I believe and hope that the essence of the plot twist is interesting; I just hope that I’ll be able to execute it well. That’s something that will take a lot of careful reading and a lot of editing.

• The Weight of a Soul Dev Diary