Starting Over

One of my absolute worst bad habits when it comes to my writing is to start, go some way into the process, run out of steam, stop... and then some time later I start again at the beginning, revising the work that I've already done.

It's some small consolation that no lesser an author that J.R.R. Tolkien had exactly the same bad habit. On the other hand, it's quite tragic that for all his many years of work we only have a handful of works that he actually finished: things like "Children of Hurin" and even "The Silmarillion" were compiled from unfinished texts after his death. How much more could we have had were it not for those constant restarts?

The reason that I mention this is that there are already bits of Nutshell that I'm not terribly happy with. In particular, I think that characters simply have too many different defences to keep track of, and I'm not really happy with the mechanics for Saving Throws. However, I'm going to try really hard to simply ignore this going forward, with a view to getting something finished that I can then revise, rather than getting bogged down in constantly revising the same stuff over and over, and not getting anything done.

(For another example of this problem, consider my homebrew gameworld, Terafa, which has undergone a huge number of revisions. Unfortunately, the most recent revision left the world in a place where it wasn't really useable, and I've just never quite managed to do another revision that would fix it. But that's probably okay - the nature of that world is such that I suspect one would just be better off using Forgotten Realms anyway. I'm now inclined to think that the only reason to homebrew a setting is if you want to do something offbeat and unusual - there's no real point in doing another sub-Tolkien pseudo-European fantasy.)