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That's good to hear cos as long as you never give up, you'll get there eventually :3 Doesn't matter how long it takes cos it's not a race, just working bit by bit will get you finished in the end.

It's a good idea to note stuff like that down :3 I have a rough idea how long I've been building SR in Tyrano since it tells me my hours used on Steam, but I didn't keep track of how long it took me to write up the original story documents, make sprites, write scripts, cut audio for voice lines, etc. And all of that will have added up to hours upon hours and I have no idea how many other than lots xD

My memory is awful, if I don't make notes either on my phone, on the PC, or on actual sticky notes then I will end up forgetting things repeatedly >.< Even if I remember and tell myself, okay, remember you need to do this thing, I will just forget again still without notes, haha.

I definitely agree with you about noting down ideas too :3 I do it quite a lot cos again, my memory sucks, so if I didn't write stuff down the second I think of it I will forget! I have a list of ideas for future VNs and other projects I wanna work on, some more detailed, some just very basic, but it's better to have them written down for future reference.

It's good to have planning and a solid idea of where you wanna go with a project before starting it cos it helps ya sort things out in your head, even if planning takes a long time, it's super useful :3 With SR I started out with notes and drafts and then I moved on to writing each route one by one, I'd even planned what BGM was going where and actually listened to the BGM that would be playing in the game while I was writing the scene. That's something that really helped me out a lot because I could imagine the story better with the atmosphere that the music created :3 If you have good planning then it'll make things a lot easier to work on cos you'll always have your plans to look back on.

It doesn't really matter whether ideas are good or bad cos if you get them all written down you'll be able to sort through them all easier and decide which ones are suitable for working on more :3

I often wish I had started with a much smaller project than SR, SR is definitely too long for a first project but I didn't realise that when I started it >.< I should have kept the ideas for later on though and tried to create a smaller project first, haha. Like you say though, all you can do is keep going and be pleased with whatever progress you make :3 I still get angry at myself sometimes if I have set a goal to do a certain amount by the end of the day and I don't manage to get it all done, so I have to keep reminding myself that it doesn't matter, I did something, I made progress, that's what counts :3 Doing anything at all is better than doing nothing cos even if it's just a tiny bit, it's one step closer towards the end goal :D

Even if your motivation does fade, or life gets in the way, if you always have that passion inside you to make stuff then your motivation will come back at some point :3 SR got stuck on pause multiple times because life happened and I just couldn't work on it, it would have been released aaaages ago if not for that. The important thing is that you do what you can while the motivation is there ^-^ 

The few people who know me well all think I'm nuts for having worked on this for as long as I have xD They think I'm even more crazy when they remember that I'm not making any money out if it either, haha. These past few months I've been working on it for between 6-12 hours a day and it had almost become like an addiction! Which isn't particularly healthy but I can't help it :( working on this is what keeps me going. I found out late last year that I have ASD, the guy I saw said it used to be called high functioning autism or Aspergers, but that it's now just referred to as ASD... that might help to explain why this project is so important to me since he mentioned that people on the spectrum tend to have obsessive interests, haha.

I wouldn't bother with Palette, it's very short and not really something I'm happy with since it was just something I knocked up quickly as a Jam entry >.< I doubt I'll bother with Jams in the future because they just feel too rushed for me, haha. I don't think I could ever make anything I'd be content with considering the time restrictions of Jams. They can be a fun way to get motivated I guess but for the foreseeable future I just wanna focus on projects properly I think.

I hope that you're doing okay and that you're managing to stay safe with all the Coronavirus stuff that's going on, the world is extra crazy at the moment!