Special thanks to The Grandmaster Procrastinator for helping yoink the title away from the undeserving degenerate.
If there's an MHD commission involved, I'm going to get up at 5:30am before work to ensure enough words get written while the brain's still fresh. That's what I did, by the way. A storygame of this length was always the goal since reading Eternal for the first time. Strangely enough, it doesn't feel as satisfying as I thought, likely because the end goal was centered around total word count. I think the story has to reign supreme, no matter the length. I actually ended up cutting two semi-planned branches (I don't outline) because I ran out of space.
Like what's mentioned in the War on Intfiction post, I already wrote a "smug" article on the writing process, so I'll keep this short. With Blackbirds, I touched it nearly every day since publishing Degenerate. The midnight oil never burned. There weren't any captivating fits of inspiration with the need to immerse myself in the story. Just consistency. 45 minutes in the morning before work and about 2 hours each day on the weekend. The cyberpunk contest was tempting to join, but the quickest way to kill a story is to abandon it for another.
If writing is priority for you, and I imagine that's the case for most members here (or at least the idea of having it a priority), then it's easy to find the time for it. Wake up earlier. Turn off Netflix. Bring a laptop to write on your lunchbreak. Hell, I blew off a coffee date recently because I didn't hit my two hours in time one Sunday. "Blew" as in skipped; not the other meaning of the word, you middle schoolers. Whatever you make time for is how you identify your life priorities. If it's writing, cool. If it's not writing, also cool. No one's forcing you to create storygames. I will say, it's a unique feeling to edit through tens of thousands of words that you wrote, often not remembering putting them down (although I rarely write sober. Sorry, mom). It's like a time capsule of your past, your very imagination becoming something real, a weird mixture of actual life events and fantasy viewed through the lens of a nameless main character.
