Three Dollar Quill

In this post:

• I think about burnout, mostly.

So, this week I wanted to make an unspecified amount of progress on a brand-new conlang, subject to the restriction that I wasn't going to think about phonology at all.

I accomplished this by using nothing but deliberately-imprecise glosses with grammatical features glommed on. To get example sentences, I used a list of sentences from "Syntax Testing Game". I aimed for translating ten sentences a day.

I made good progress for a few days, then I got burnt out and bailed. There are several factors that could have contributed:

• Last week was somewhat stressful for unrelated reasons.
• The sentences get somewhat more sophisticated though the days, so working out a translation gets harder.
• Just typing the translations into a text file may be a non-scalable workflow.

For now, I'm happy with what I accomplished, though I need a break from it for now.

At the moment, I just really want a good idea of those causes. I believe a better workflow might be helpful if I pick this back up. I think I should try to find some conlanging software that works well with what I've done so far. The other thing that would help would be some way of moderating the amount of work I try to do in a day.

So, I think what I need to do when I come back to this, is take some time to figure out if there's any software or better organizational system that my existing work can slot into. Then, maybe set up some kind of fakey agile thing so I can measure my "velocity" with new translations, or something.

So, while I was working on this stuff, I was also getting Structured Data into a better shape. The API is way better, and I'm now curious how it shakes out in practice.

With that in mind, next week, I'll focus on using Structured Data in some of my projects. This may veer into writing plugins for it.