Reddit mentions of Stealth Bomber vs Pony

How I stay motivated in the short term (with a little promotion mixed in)

/r/WritingPrompts is how I stay motivated to write in general. Pretty much every day, I find at least one prompt that inspires me, and writing a short story for a prompt isn't as time consuming as a full novel. As to why I respond to prompts, it's similar to what /u/Probroscis said: I like the idea that someone is entertained by what I've done.

So this sub fulfills the short-term small project sort of writing. That said, the amount of work put in to a response will almost never be proportional to the recognition received :) I know there are things I can do to get my responses noted more (post at a certain time of day, watch the rising ones) but it turns out I'm pretty terrible at those sort of things. Plus I have no control over which prompts I'm inspired to write for.

As a for instance, I wrote a choose your own adventure in response to a prompt. The upvotes have it somewhat well received, but I put in a good six or seven hours to create it. Personally it's worth it for me because it was one of those prompts I just couldn't stop writing once I'd started. Plus now I have a script that will upload and tie together future CYOA prompts so they'll only take an hour.

So it's a bit of a double-edged sword, but people in this sub are friendly and helpful, and if the occasional 'great work' comment is motivating enough then it works pretty well. Plus every once in a while, a response you write will blow up unexpectedly :)

How I stay motivated in the longer term (with a little promotion mixed in)

The above is helpful for keeping my writing abilities up to snuff, but I personally would like to write books that people enjoy. Writing a novel is a lot longer than writing a prompt response. The latter have the advantage that you can get them done in one sitting, whereas a novel becomes one of those multi-day/week/month/lifetime projects, and that's a lot harder to keep going.

There are two kinds of longer-term writing that I do:

• All-consuming: Every November, I write a novel for National Novel Writing Month. The easiest way to do a longer project is to simply keep doing it every single day, and if you want to write a novel in a month you can't afford to skip that many days :). Only one of my projects from that has ever made it to book form, but NaNoWriMo "practice" has instilled a lot of good habits in terms of writing. It's definitely worthwhile, especially if you've always wanted to write a novel but never could find the time.
  
  The second way I write takes a little explanation:
  
  When I published Stealth Bomber vs Pony, I figured my friends would buy it and maybe one or two people who found it randomly, and it's held pretty solid to those expectations. What I didn't realize is that it would add up: It wouldn't take a lot of sales for my hobby to become self-financing. So when a recent prompt I did blew up unexpectedly, I felt that if I could expand it into a novel, it could fare pretty well.
  
  Thankfully my mind was eventually forthcoming, and I started to create an outline of the plot. Once I had that, I knew I could write the whole story. But a funny thought occurred to me once I'd completed the first chapter...
  
  
• Episodic: There was no reason I couldn't publish what I'd written as I wrote it. I'd already gained quite a few subscribers to my personal subreddit from the initial story, so I put the next part up there and pinged the people who asked me to tell them when I wrote more. I've found this to be enormously motivating: I have an audience now, which is hit or miss for regular prompt replies. Every week I don't just write another chapter, I want to write another chapter because I know there are people who want to read it.
  
  That said, I don't know how long-term the episodic approach will work. Each week I lose a few people to attrition, so there may come a point where the audience that is motivating me is gone. But I think that if I'd tried to just write the entire novel without posting as I went, I'd feel like everyone had forgotten much sooner. So thus far it's a good way to keep motivation up!