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Well, writing 5000 words in seven days is a big challenge. It's a big part of why I decided to do something that's more about experiencing an interesting city ⁠— because writing several thousand words of setting and situation in seven days is more achievable than designing and writing the same amount of mechanics. Five thousand words of mechanics is a substantial, mechanically complex game.

And then last night I used Google Translate on the thread where people linked to their submissions from prior years and saw that others had also found city exploration as their solution to the writing challenge.

But even still, I will need to do a lot of brainstorming prior to the start of writing. In order to hit five thousand words I'll need to generate a lot of inspiration. Years ago I read Julia Cameron's book, The Artist's Way, which encourages creators to do three pages of stream-of-consciousness writing every morning, as a way of letting their creative brain develop confidence and power. She calls them the "morning pages". I've been doing them for almost twenty years, pretty regularly. Mostly what I write is unremarkable garbage. Thoughts about sounds I can hear at the moment. Thoughts about what I need to get done that day. Frustrations about life. But I came up with the idea for My Life With Master in the morning pages back in 2002, and I brainstorm about other game ideas in them all the time. So for this project I expect to brainstorm all kinds of stuff, both mechanics and about the city, in hopes of generating enough quantity of inspiration to support five thousand words during the writing phase.