Congratulations to everyone who submitted an entry!

If anybody has stories to share about their experience of writing in the jam, I’d love to hear them.

For myself, I decided at the last minute that the path I was trying to force for months was not working, and I ended up scrapping everything and keeping the only thing that sparked joy: a bit of background world building that made for a cute short story.

What about all of you?

Heya GenieProblem,

     It's definitely tough trying to force a story. I had a professor once who said forcing form onto an idea just doesn't work. I can relate to your sentiments, and decided to write a story close to my heart.

     Crunch time in college made this project ridiculously difficult. The timing of this jam was a perfect storm of hectic chaos. In the end, though, I got everything done, and got a bonus lesson in time management. :-p

      I'd like to echo, congratulations to all who participated and submitted something! You're all awesome, please stay that way always. <3

People who know me on discord will know that I had an idea right at the start, a plan to manage my submission in the last two weeks...and them my Real Life went very, very bad. It definitely affected the story a bit, and I ended up writing through the night to complete my 9-page story in time. It was good fun though, and I'm hoping it'll make getting back to my badly-overdue thesis a bit easier.

It began quietly. With a few ideas, then more, until finally I wrote The Office Catgirl. Here are few things I learned during my month-and-two-week-long journey.

• Outlining took way longer than I expected it to be. Much of what I wrote in it, I ended up discarding for better ideas that came up in my scenes. I'm a discovery writer by heart and very little tolerance for writing out a scene whose outcome I've predetermined by the time I committed to writing the draft out, I threw away everything I had. Obviously, new writers shouldn't do this. The culprit, I believe, was outlining like a planner and not like a discovery writer. I'm fairly new at taking the craft seriously, so I'm still research ways that outlining works best for me.
• Magic the Gathering is a fun game and soaks up free time like a sponge.
• Never, never, never write past 2:00am. My brain doesn't work after that time. I have to heavily change or cut what I wrote past that time anyway.  Forcing myself just that little bit forward will only make me less likely to return to my draft the next day.
• Breaking the story down into scenes helped with both pacing and moving the narrative along, Scrivener is really helpful with that. It really helped with questions like: "When do I stop writing?" and "Does this scene convey the information I need to keep the story moving?"
• Waiting until the last minute to come up with a goofy light novel title might not have been the best idea...
• Waiting for inspiration to strike to close the light novel might not have been the best idea...
• Waiting until the last day before submissions were due to write that conclusion might not have been the best idea either...

holy crap so many entries! it is going to take even me forever to get through them all!

I spent some time at the beginning of this project drafting out roughly what I wanted my short story to look like. That sort of drafting isn't unusual, but in this case it also included how long I wanted it to be!

For this project I deliberately put a lid on the story to make sure it didn't grow outside of my ability to produce within the timeframe of the jam. I actually think I may have ended up erring too far towards the side of caution in that regard, but I like the story I came up with so I can't complain too much. =p

But the more you know. Next time I'll put in another 500 words of Cats doing Cat things. XD