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TTRPG Tuesday: How'd I Finish That Draft In A Time Like This?

Heyyyy it’s TTRPG Tuesday.  I should focus on knocking this out before I head out for a long weekend vacation, instead of the Twitter troll raising my blood pressure.  I wanted to do a short post today about the DOLLIE Extraction, as I got together a first draft of the scenario last week and got it submitted for review.  It had been kind of sitting on my To-Do list, and I wasn’t sure when I was going to get around to it.  That’s been the case with so much of my writing/game-making lately: A big slice of executive dysfunction, a paralysis wherein even broken-up tasks feel impossible, insurmountable.  Granted, I’ve felt like this at several points throughout my life, and I’ve developed various mechanisms at different times in order to adapt to and overcome that feeling.  Which is why this week, not only did I get the scenario draft together, I also got a full Fantasy GM Squared build onto Tabletop Simulator.  How’d I manage that?

My productivity last week had a couple of different factors.  For one, I took my on-paper deadline (EOM October) and identified my practical deadline (prior to my anniversary, as I wouldn’t want to be on deadline during that time).  It helped me to forego playing Hades or watching TV to remind myself that crunch time was at hand, not some nebulous can-kicked-to point down the road.  Another incentive: turning work early over to my collaborators.  In this instance, I was motivated to get the scenario in to Logan so that he wouldn’t have to review all his submissions at once, and my build of FGM^2 came at a good time to revisit that design process with the Ironrise guys.  Finally, I happened to have fairly charged emotional batteries, and I just made time to do it - dedicated time, not split or shared or stolen, but a solid chunk of time where I had nothing else pressing.

Now, as for what helped me over the finish line for this scenario draft itself: I knew from my checkin that the target word count was much smaller than I’d expected, and with it the scope of the Scenario.  So my job became to pare down and then fill in minutely, which I did my copying all the text I’d written so far, copying the section headers of the original sourcebook scenario, and chopping my text to fit into those sections, trimming away what wasn’t strictly necessary.  Some bits were able to be transplanted to fill in further gaps, and I was left with 80-90% of the work done and a short sprint to the finish line.  At that point, oddly, I decided to clean things up a little bit (I can never resist editing when I should be generating), but that gave me quick little blurbs of endorphins that helped me build momentum.  Getting the pistons firing on how to creatively present the information, had my brain in a good place to generate solutions for my last few remaining unknowns.  Chipping away at a bottle of rye as I chipped away at the draft didn’t hurt either.  In the end, I was done sooner than I expected, much to my delight.

Not sure there’s anything super repeatable as a takeaway here, but I hope that maybe these recent accomplishments will help me stay positive and maintain creative momentum as the nights grow longer and my batteries deplete once more.  We’ll fucking see I guess! Til next time.

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