I will be honest that my word count has not been all that impressive as of late.  As noted a few weeks ago, I had been battling an illness and then the work side of my life had some increase pressures that resulted in me not doing a good job making time to write.  With the start of this week, I’ve recommitted to getting back into my preferred writing habit.  It has me thinking about what it is that helps me stay motivated with writing.

Motivated really is the right word here.  There are plenty of times when I get excited about writing, whether its a fresh idea for a drop or working through the plot line of a larger story.  However, excitement fades with time and without continued motivation writing is a hard habit to keep up.  I’ve done several things over the years to help me maintain my writing motivation.  One of them was making this website, the knowledge now that there may be some of you out there expecting a story every Saturday helps keep me accountable and motivated.  I’ve also made use of productivity tools.  In particular is a website called 4theWords.com.  Its premise is to introduce a bit of gamification into the writing process.  Word counts become your weapons in defeating monsters, and combined with quests, items, and levels there’s enough there to add that nice dopamine dump to keep me motivated through writing stories.  Similarly, the artist Blue Turtle just released his game Ithya: Magic Studies which has its own set of planning and motivation tools along with beautiful art and music.

As an aside, I got to play the beta of Ithya: Magic Studies and even if you’re not interested in it I do recommend Blue Turtle’s YouTube channel for his art and the original music of artists he partners with (no AI slop there).

However, at the end of the day the tools only go so far.  I could easily copy and paste in the same words into 4theWords to pad my word count and defeat monsters.  Ultimately, it’s up to me to want to be a writer.  I spent years writing on and off, enjoying the process of creating a story, a world, characters but buckling under the pressure of the scope of writing, of wondering if any of it was good enough, and really only chasing writing when it excited me.  I’ll reiterate again that excitement is not enough, if nothing else there are simply always going to be parts of stories that aren’t full of excitement.  Sometimes the characters have to go through a dull moment, something to set up some greater payoff but isn’t enjoyable to write in and of itself (and thus creating the profession of ghost writers that some authors use for duller bits).  However, I have over the years found that I have shifted from writing because a story excited me to writing because I wanted to be someone who told stories.

Being a writer is exiting to me in and of itself, and I’m motivated to write as a daily reminder that I’m striving to be the person I want to be.  It’s nice to be spending time feeling like I’m making progress on that with every word written.

This week we’ll have Part 3 of End of War with Airka revealing a relic that will change the course of the upcoming battle.  Beyond that, with me feeling better, and with the total number of stories growing I’m hoping to finally implement some improved navigation and organization to the site.  For all its struggles, writing is definitely easier for me than web design so wish me well as I muddle may way through the sea of WordPress guides.

Go forth and do good things,

Sean

Note: This article was edited on 27Apr2025 to add links to the various resources and correct the name of Blue Turtle’s upcoming game to Ithya: Magic Studies. Magical Journey was used in error.