Diary 2019-10-10

By Max Woerner Chase

Getting things done early tonight. I made some headway on figuring out the next scene in the story. I got a high-level outline, and now I'm filling it in because some of the outline is too vague. One thing I'm liking about using The Adventure Crafter is that, because it gives all of the plot aspects associated with a scene ahead of time, I can basically use it as a checklist instead of just focusing on what I've just now written, and what I can write next. It's freed me up to draft at whatever level of detail I feel is necessary, because I can refer to the plot details and just ask the question "Have I sufficiently addressed all of these?" If not, I know what I need to work on. If so, I can wrap up for now and move on.

I also like how it has me developing characters in ways I wouldn't necessarily think of on my own. Without the random rolls, I probably wouldn't have thought "Okay, this wanderer character who doesn't really talk about where he came from, let's have someone from his past coincidentally turn up." But that was the most natural interpretation of the rolls I got, and the resulting character... I don't know what anyone else would think of him, but I'm happy with him.

Other stuff I did today... Now that I'm not deep in the guts of Structured Data, I went and filed five or so bugs in reflection of the fact that various parts of the design on recently-added stuff are wrong or underspecified. I'm going to see how much further I can push this whole "thinking about what I'm doing" thing, and then maybe get back into the code on the weekend.

Okay, that's enough for now, I feel like. Good night.