turncoatPilot

Gay Little Villain

Trans lady, 26

Principal Keeper of the Kobold Lighthouse Establishment

Solo dev of The Blue Shields.

Icon by Fsnowzombie



kazeugma
@kazeugma

As someone who completed long and detailed personal projects, and someone who has worked on others not to completion, and is working on one now, my advice to myself and to anybody else who is like this is to, at least once per day, just open the thing.

Maybe it's your notes for your novel, maybe it's your timeline in DaVinci Resolve or Sony Vegas. Maybe it's the tracker for your audio. But whatever it is, without even committing to doing any work at all, just open it up and take a look. Every day.

You absolutely do not need to put in work on the thing every day. Do not commit to that. Just open it.


metaregress
@metaregress

this actually jives nicely with something I've been feeling lately re: personal projects and puts it very nice and succinctly.

I've been thinking of it as "even just thinking about this thing and what's making it hard right now counts as progress" which helps decouple "taking visible steps towards the thing being complete" from "making progress on the thing." which helps decrease some of the inertia/anxiety that can come from stalled projects.

Almost all my planning documents have a scratchpad section in them where I can vent or ramble or speculate, and even just going in there to be like "I'm interested in working on this more but I don't know how to move forward" can be nice.



graham
@graham

I think I might try making a crossword



graham
@graham

Update, there are several difficult parts I've found while trying to make a crossword puzzle:

  1. Words must be at least 3 letters long in each direction
  2. I want to pick words that in some way relate back to my interests, hobbies, beliefs, etc
  3. The "don't go beyond X by Y size" rule is a bigger constraint than I had realized
  4. Proper nouns and multi-word phrases are not something I have much affinity for, compared to regular individual words
  5. I keep running out of S and H pieces in my bananagrams set

Perhaps tomorrow I'll try again with some webapp, now that I've gotten a little bit of a feel for things


graham
@graham

Update: thanks to @topghost's recommendation to use crosshare.org's tools, I have now completed a midi (11x11) crossword board and just need to create the hints. I am happy with all but two or three of the words, which seems pretty good for a first attempt.

I'll plan on submitting to puzzmo once the submission form opens this upcoming week. No idea on whether it'll be accepted, but it'd be pretty cool on a number of levels if it did.


graham
@graham

Wow, hints seem way easier to make than putting the letters in the boxes!

If you're interested in helping me playtest, and you promise not to share the link with anyone, please let me know in my asks! I'd appreciate any help I can get


graham
@graham

Thanks to various folks for helping playtest, to @topchost @topghost for suggesting crosshare.org as a resource, and thank you in advance if you end up playing it!