Do your fight scenes keep readers on the edge of their seats, or bore them to tears?
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When you write a fight scene, you have a great opportunity not only to thrill your audience, but to thicken the plot and develop the characters in a way that few other types of scene can.

It all depends on how you write it - and I recently published a guest post on The Write Practice that gives you six practical, creative tips for writing exciting, poignant and plot-enhancing battles.

In today's distraction-packed world, it can be a challenge to focus on one task for a protracted period of time.

You're just getting into the groove, your train of thought is leaving the station, and you're ready to be productive... and then an email comes in, someone messages you on Facebook, or you think of something else that has to be done, and the next thing you know, you've lost half an hour.

Now, not only are you behind schedule, but you're wasting even MORE time on mentally kicking yourself!

This challenge comes up a lot in my lines of work.

As a novelist, artist, copywriter and coach, I have lots of fields of expertise that require prolonged periods of attention and concentration.

And as a creative type, I'm naturally prone to daydreaming.

Wandering through fictional scenarios is my mind's natural habitat, so depending on my energy levels, it can be a challenge to buck that tendency for long enough to write a blog post, create an email for a client, or actually write a scene instead of just thinking about it.

So how do I stay on task for an hour or more at a time?

As a creative daydreamer, I've had to come up with a few good strategies for staying mentally on track for long periods of time. Here are five things that work for me - hopefully they'll work for you, too.

Strategy 1: Break your tasks into chunks of time.

If you can't concentrate for an hour, don't schedule in a block of time that lasts for an hour.

If you can't think clearly during a certain time of day, whether it's the evening when you've been working for hours, or the morning when you're a zombie slowly shambling out of bed, don't schedule your more challenging tasks for that time period.

Determine which tasks are the most important and mentally demanding, and schedule those in for the parts of the day when you tend to have the most mental energy.

Also, break them into manageable chunks, and schedule brief breaks between tasks, so you can rest your mind, go to the bathroom, grab a snack, and otherwise rejuvenate and be ready to concentrate on your next task.

If your attention span tends to work optimally for half an hour, schedule your tasks in chunks of half an hour.

Whatever you need to do, as much as possible, work WITH your natural mental rhythm, not against it.

Strategy #2: Close unnecessary tabs and programs.

Do your Facebook or email keep interrupting you? Unless you have good reason to believe that someone will contact you through those channels with a legitimate, time-sensitive emergency, turn them off.

Close the tab, log out, mute your notifications - whatever it takes to silence the interruption long enough for you to complete your high-priority tasks.

You can check your inbox between tasks, but if you want to get through your to-do list on time, you can't interrupt your work every time someone wants a piece of your day. Your day belongs to you, not them - prioritize your attention accordingly!

Strategy #3: Use instrumental music.

If you've never tried playing beautiful instrumental music during high-concentration tasks, I highly recommend it as a way to both stay focused and make the job a lot more pleasant.

If you have an album or artist you especially enjoy listening to, it gives you something to look forward to when it's time to start working, and the ambient sound helps to block out the distractions in your surroundings.

It helps if you choose a full album or long compilation, rather than needing to break your focus and switch songs every few minutes. Just look up "1 hour of peaceful music", or "1 hour of (whatever mood you desire) music" on YouTube, and you should have plenty to choose from.

If you'd like a recommendation, here's an hour-long compilation by two artists I especially enjoy.

Strategy #4: Get up and move.

If you've been sitting still for long enough that your butt is sore, your mind is starting to wander, or your body is beginning to feel twitchy, it's probably time to take a two-minute break and move.

Walk around, go to the bathroom, grab a drink - or, if you're like me and your cats are a bad influence, sprint randomly around the house a few times. (Yes, I do that. My family has learned to cross certain paths with caution in case of low-flying writers.)

Don't let this break stretch on and on - that defeats the purpose of me writing a blog post to help you concentrate and stay on schedule.

But you'd be amazed by how much difference the occasional movement break can make in clearing your mind and keeping your body feeling good when you work in a sedentary occupation.

Strategy #5: Don't get distracted by having been distracted.

If you realize that your mind's been wandering and you lost a few minutes, the worst thing you can do is waste even MORE time on beating yourself up about it.

Instead, just pull yourself back to the task at hand, and keep going.

Now it's your turn.

Do you have trouble concentrating on your writing, art, or other work?

​Did any of these tips help you?

How do you keep your focus?

I look forward to hearing from you in the comments!

So I decided that, instead of having Frisk's soul mode affect the movement of their soul, I'd make it affect the shape of the battlefield.

When Frisk is blue, the battlefield will narrow, or the attacks will become vertical, or both, forcing them to jump. When they're red, the battlefield broadens, and the attacks are horizontal instead of vertical, so they have to run around instead of jumping.

I figured it made more sense than having them pilot their soul through the air by waving their arms around like a conductor and becoming vulnerable to electric attacks.
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On a related note, I'm 62 pages into the first draft of the written version of Just Cause! Lots of progress on all fronts, and I look forward to sharing it with you. :)

In the meantime, the full 9-panel WIP is available on my Patreon, so if you want to see more of the battle, feel free to check it out!
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What's the difference between writing a story you like, and writing a story you're flat-out obsessed with?

Over the last week or so, I've seen the difference firsthand, and it's been really striking.

​For two years, as I worked on Catgirl Roommate, I was writing a story I liked.

I had lots of funny material to share, I enjoyed the way the protagonist's character development caught me by surprise, and it was an interesting challenge to write a genre I'd never written before.

Apparently it worked out well, judging by the fact that when one of my friends was partway through it, he was laughing so hard he couldn't speak.

Unfortunately, I've got a dirty confession to make:

While I did like the story, I wasn't obsessed with it. And although I liked the characters - well, most of them - I wasn't in love with them.

As a result, writing Catgirl Roommate was more difficult than most of my other projects, and I enjoyed the process less than I did when I was working on stories where the characters really tugged on my heartstrings.

After I finished Catgirl Roommate in December, I didn't do much fiction writing for a while, because I had a lot of client projects and I was focusing most of my creative time on my Undertale webcomic, Just Cause.

Now that one, frankly, I AM obsessed with.

Sure, it's fanfiction. Sure, it's not one of my novels. But the relationships that grew inside this story, and the character development that blossomed within those relationships... these are a few of my favorite things.

Some of the characters became so psychologically complex, some of their bonds with each other deepened in such beautiful ways, and there are so many little running themes and symbols (I'll admit, I'm a sucker for those)... I'm just so in love with this story.

But the trouble with telling a long story via webcomic - especially when you feel a compulsive need to add lots of layers of shading instead of just basic cel shading - is that, while a picture is worth a thousand words, it takes a thousand times longer to create.

​It took months of drawing, and several pages of comic, to work my way through what would be a single scene in a written story. And, over time, I began to get frustrated with how long it was taking to get the story out there.

I have so many scenes that are burning in my heart, and I want them out there now!

So I decided it was time to do what I'd been procrastinating on for a while, and start actually writing the story.

When I did, I was stunned by what happened.

I already had an outline, so I didn't need to figure out what was involved in each scene. I could just go ahead and write, and boy, did I write!

​Where it used to be a challenge to get 300 words written in one day - partly because I had to make sure that as many of those words as possible were funny - now, I was EASILY writing 800 to 1,000 words or more. Sometimes over 2,000.

​​This, despite the fact that I'm also running a business that sometimes keeps me busy for 12 hours a day.

Now, going by chapter count, I'm almost halfway through the story. Barring unexpected delays, I should be done by the end of February, easily.

And then I can continue gradually working my way through the comic version of it, one thousand-word picture at a time.

Do I regret spending so much time on Catgirl Roommate?

Not at all. Even though I wasn't as thoroughly in love with it as I am with my current story, I still enjoyed it, and I still believe it was a story worth telling.

People are still laughing until they choke because of it, and who knows - maybe Sam's growth as a person will inspire other people to see where they can grow, too.

In the meantime, I have stories to write, things to draw, a neglected YouTube channel to create music videos for, and maybe even some healthy self-care to squeeze in between my content creation and business-running.

I'm three scenes away from getting to the part of the story where the backstory is revealed, and I've been dying write that backstory for so long... I LOVE the relationship between these two characters...

*Gives a totally undignified squeal and runs off to work out and write*

Now it's your turn.

Have you written stories you liked, and stories you love, and noticed the difference? I'd love to hear from you in the comments!