Monday project management report

Hey guys!  Thanks for all the get well messages, I’m back to normal!  I think we’re now two weeks (or so) away from the release.

This week I’ve been working on the last difficult bit of writing, which are three related scenes.  I’ve been working on them all at the same time, because there’s crossover in the emotional beats in each scene, and they’re all partly completed.  I aim to move all three into the “complete” column this week.

I’m really happy with how it’s going and I feel like I’m close to doing something we’ve never done in Female Agent, which is write a sex scene that is hot but doesn’t rely on any stunts (like someone else coming into the room or whatever).  You guys will be the judge.

Once these scenes are done, all that’s left is some minor editing, polish and bug fixes.  Alllmost there!

Thalion update
On Tuesday Thalion tricked me into what I thought was just a call to catch up, but was actually a part of the process called a sprint retrospective.

Having tried to implement my own half-assed versions of Scrum and Kanban in the past, I knew these were a thing, but dismissed them as a waste of time.  In fact – it was incredibly useful.  We spoke about what had gone well and the problems I had encountered, and Thalion was able to give me some great advice on the problem I had two weeks ago, when I needed to go “off plan” and do some tasks that weren’t on the Kanban board.

I didn’t really know how to deal with it at the time – I thought it was maybe a symptom of underplanning, and my intended solution was to take extra time to plan the shit out of the next episode so it didn’t happen again.  But Thalion gave me better advice: if it happens again, it’s fine, just create a new ticket and work on that.

He said that in the future – as I get more mastery of the basics – we’ll start moving towards more industry standard techniques (like weekly Kanbans, the addition of “story points”, etc).  When teams are using these methods weekly it’s normal for new tickets to be created every week, so I shouldn’t lose confidence in the process if I need to create a new ticket over multiple weeks of work, that’s normal.

This was really helpful advice, because I think not really knowing how to handle problems like this is the reason I drifted away from the Kanbans in the first place.  But they’ve been really helpful both to me and our illustrator lovely Victoria this past few weeks, so I intend to use them again for the next episode.  (And beyond.)  Danke schon Thalion.

Okay, I’m gonna go chill out and get back on it tomorrow morning.  🦀❤️‍🔥