I've curated my subreddits pretty well, so I will miss some of them if they don't move over here or someplace similar. But there's enough going on that I think it will not be too bad.

Agreed. I love Discord for having a hub for friends groups or gaming groups or whatever, it's nice to have everything in one place, but when you want a discoverable forum, discord is not the place. It's a communications hub, not social media.

Oh hell no. I never liked facebook much to begin with, and started despising it several years ago. I want nothing to do with anything involving Meta.

Some of them have a sliver of an excuse, as from my childhood until I was at least in my late 20s, gaming was the realm of kids and geeks with no social life (according to populate opinion). And some people have trouble changing their understanding of the world after a certain point in their lives.

They probably also have a lot of other issues as that kind of mindset can affect a lot of other things, but that is the way some people are.

I kind of skipped Fark entirely, but other than that, yeah that was my route here.

What's happening with Twitch?

Maybe a weekly thread for self-promos? That way those of us who have some form of self/web publish elsewhere going can promote our stories, but also avoid filling the forum with them.

Final Fantasy XIV is my singular favorite, but given all its expansions that might be cheating a touch. ;) The Final Fantasy series in general tends to have great music.

Nier series, chrono trigger, Skyrim, and there are a lot of others I've liked as well, but I think that covers all my favorites. :)

I use Libre Office, and when I paste to Royal Road, I let Grammarly offer edit suggestions in the browser. I often don't take them, but it also catches some things that are really helpful.

I like having local copies that are easy to rename the file of or backup. I do one chapter per file. If I need to write remotely, I can, and I use Discord to send files back and forth like notes for the story, plus my world has a campaign website that I use as well. this format works well in part because I'm writing a serial and posting it one chapter at a time (~2k words, sitting at over 100 chapters right now)

I've given this way too much thought:

Goth magical girl is the younger sister of the leader of her particular squad of girl power heroes and puts up with being dragged along for the heroics.
But the setting is more of a wild-west-themed fantasy world, and has the magical equivalent of Digimon (perhaps they are fey creatures instead of digital creatures)
Their adventures lead them to needing to conduct a raid against the vault of the biggest church of the lands, where they fight off a powerful (but misguided) young priest.
One of the items they successfully raid is a scroll with a prophecy that seems to indicate that the heroic older sister is supposed to fall in love with that same young priest and have a child who will be the final key to saving the world against [Threat]. But the two of them hate each other now.
Twist: Goth girl thinks that priest boy is kind of hot.

I also cross-posted this idea and thread to Royal Road here.

I can't say I have a story idea for it, but I can say that personally, I find the idea deeply terrifying. I am painfully aware that there is a lot in this world that I do not want to experience, and I do not find any counterbalancing thrill for any other bit of someone's life I might experience.

But for many types of gambling, I feel a negative feedback loop instead of a positive one. I can see the risks really fast.

With a little more thought: Maybe you need to expand the story more (but not with meaningless fluff) and cut it into three pieces for a neatly wrapped trilogy. Sell it as a trilogy. Name the trilogy and have it as part of the title.

Bold Print: [Title Here]
Smaller print: [Part One of the {YYY} Trilogy]

based on demonstrated speed, I'd recommend posting links as updates happen. You aren't writing fast enough to hold people's attention based on what you have posted.

If you were writing faster, I'd recommend using Royal Road instead, but you would be lost amongst the flood as most stories are posting 2k-ish chapters multiple times a week.

Yeah, my wife and I have a private section on my Discord server, we use it to send each other stuff and for our own reference.

I started using RR last year because a serial story posted on Reddit posted a link to his story there, and I loved it. About three months later, I started writing and posting my own story there. It's not a LitRPG so it's not as popular as some stories, but approaching 900 followers so I am doing something right. :)

Pen and Paper would never have worked for me, I am so glad electronic typewriters and then computers became a popular thing. Hand writing in any form cramps my hand somewhat badly, probably related to my bad hand writing and poor small motor skills (larger hand-eye coordination is fine however)

Hmm, I'll take a deeper look a bit later, but I am not sure how discoverable it makes your writing. That is one advantage of RR, it centralizes most of what I want. Once my revisions of Volume 1 are complete, I am going to throw the $50 at ads on RR (gets you a month of ads) and see if I get enough new followers who join my Patreon to justify doing it again. So far I have not spent any money on discoverability.

And based on your profile banner, looks like we share one of those communities: FFXIV :)

Hmm, I never have general writer's block beyond being too tired/unfocused at the moment. If I have trouble with my main story, I have two side stories I am slowly developing, plus short stories set in the same world as my other stories, plus lore excerpts I can write for the world ... yeah, I always have something to write about.

I guess I have enough confidence from feedback that my writing itself is decent enough quality, so I don't suffer there. As for whether or not people like my work, well, I've got feedback there too. It's not as popular as I would like, but I know at least a decent number of people enjoy it, and I really want to tell this story anyway, so I am going to continue.

Prose, absolutely. I can appreciate flowerful verse and such, but that does not fit my style of story telling.

I would say that it is closer to the feedback having given me the confidence that I don't have to fight my doubts so much. But it is also feedback from a lifetime of experience, from having read novels for 40ish years and having been doing online, text-based roleplaying in both chat rooms and forums/play-by-post. I can compare my technical writing against the works I've read, and I can feel confident that my ability to write a character is at least up to average.

My story feedback initially came mostly from my wife, but I also took a chance and started writing a serial story on Royal Road (my story here ). I am currently approaching 900 followers, over two hundred of whom have marked it as a favorite, and despite some clearly trollish or hostile/anti-competitive 0.5 ratings, my story has remained about a 4.3, with 5.0 remaining my most common rating. So I have developed feedback that complete strangers like my story enough to keep reading 100+ chapters later.

Now, for keeping track of my stories: All three of my stories are taking place in the same world/setting, so a campaign website is useful (there's tons of them out there, they offer different things at the free level and have different organization, pick the one best for you). This means the general details of my fantasy world are all in one place.

The stories themselves: I am writing very character-driven stories. I only need to know a few details about what the future holds for me to keep writing right now and develop as I go. So for each story I have a 'notes' file, and I reference that to keep track of what I have already done or what I have named certain characters etc. And I have organized the notes into relevant sections, such as all of the royal family that has been named being grouped together.

To get into the headspace of a particular story, I just reread the last chapter. I know where I am at, what people are doing, and I can move on. If there are multiple character perspectives and I need to focus on a character we haven't seen for a few chapters, I go read the last chapter they were in.

I mostly focus on little steps, but I have certain external forces set to act at certain time periods, but those aren't completely pre-determined. It's closer to "when these characters have reached this point in their story or development, that's when event X should happen." and I don't worry too much about the details of event X until I get close to the point where it's going to happen.

My antagonists have developed from the backstories of my protagonists, which I started detailing after the story got going. I didn't need to know the details of the antagonists because the story of my protags is about what they are doing, and the antagonists are in part responding to them. This is a bit of a script flip from the standard fantasy story where the protagonists are reacting to the actions of the antagonists.

Though I suppose it depends on how far back you want to go about who is reacting to whom. But for the purposes of what you are seeing in the written narrative, it's the antagonists who are responding to the protagonists.

That was quite the ramble. Sorry. That last bit had me looking at my story in a new light, this script flip was not premeditated. XD