Matt Lichtenwalner

OTR guy for Kett - roaming the US and Canada constantly. Maybe a bit of art and/or writing here and there to spice things up.

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Random Stuff in Google Sheets Matt Lichtenwalner 2/20 '26

A photo of mrlich’s laptop as he creates a tutorial for making random item generators in Google Sheets. We also see some of his dice collection in the photo.

I went through the Wayback Machine and found an old post that I wanted to update for my TTRPG audience. The updated version is now live over here, if you're interested. In short: both weighted and unweighted random selections from lists, which makes for useful tools for TTRPGs, worldbuilding, writing, etc. But I do it without the use of AI - which is (obviously) an easier method, but since some folks are super anti...

2/20 2 Comments

This is such a great idea! And I borrowed a lot of ideas from it to re-create some of the features of my bingo card generator in Google Sheets: https://tinyurl.com/bingo-google-sheet

Chris Herdt

Thanks! Also? Bingo card maker = an excellent use case - I love it!

Matt Lichtenwalner

Question for Writer Types Matt Lichtenwalner 5/23 '17

So a long time ago I was talking to a friend about doing the art for a webcomic that a he wanted to develop. When we first started out, I did some concept work while he worked on world building. All of this makes sense to a certain degree.

The problem was that this went on for a very long time. Many months, in fact, passed without our having written / illustrated a single comic panel.

We discussed it, and he wanted to keep going as we were. I wanted to get cracking on a product that people could enjoy.

We agreed to a compromise: I said "Why don't we try a 'minimum viable product'? Write up a five page comic, I'll illustrate it, and we'll put it online. That way we can see if anyone other than us gives a shit."

When it took many months more for those five pages worth of text to come my way, I bowed out.

Now that I'm working on my little project, I'm writing a lot in a lexicon of sorts. Worldbuilding. Not nearly on the level that he did, but I find myself wondering if I'm distracting myself a bit too much with unnecessary things. I find myself doing searches on late 70's and early 80's fashion. Digging up news clippings from 1979 Detroit. At best, these would be 'stage dressing'. None of it will be strictly speaking necessary for the book.

So I guess my question is this: Do you have some rule that you keep yourselves to in order to keep from spending too much time on extraneous elements of your storytelling? To keep yourselves from doing too much homework and not enough actual writing?

ETA:

5/23 '17 7 Comments

I love this image. Really really.

Jill "xtingu" Knapp

Thanks!

I'm working on a friend / fellow squatter / love interest for Patch in the book. She's the one who is smart enough to keep their little band of homeless kids from getting scooped up. She's not exactly a leader per se, but she's alpha enough to draw Patch's eye.

Ouch. Sorry. Didn't mean for that awful pun to sneak out.

Matt Lichtenwalner

nope. I go deep on worldbuilding. I just try not to let that stop me from releasing things if someone is depending on me. Really cool stuff can always be backformed.

Rabbit

Interesting. I hope this post doesn't come across as my not understanding the value of worldbuilding (I absolutely do) I just fear allowing it to become the limiting factor in moving forward.

Has that ever been an issue for you? Feeling like it slowed you down? (Even if you felt it remained necessary.)

Matt Lichtenwalner

It's the part I like best, so not really- it may be why I'm not good at doing stuff on my own, but the other time I'm doing it is for a LARP, which has built in hard deadlines. Which help.

Rabbit

Yeah. That might be the best takeaway for me - to set hard deadlines for myself.

(Thanks for the info!)

Matt Lichtenwalner

Yeah. That might be the best takeaway for me - to set hard deadlines for myself.

(Thanks for the info!)

Matt Lichtenwalner