IWSG - I feel exhausted

 

    So NaNoWriMo--or, in my case, rebel status of doing NaNo without actually using the ruined NaNo website--has come and gone.  I did well:  122k written, encompassing one full novel's rewrite, a new prologue for a later novel in the series, and the prologue and roughly a third (or a bit more than that) of the first chapter of the script for a visual novel.

    This was the second big rewrite for that novel, and I think it's finally approaching the form I want it to be in for initial online release.  I'll probably want to fix it up more even after that, but...it's been quite a while since I released the first one, and just in case anyone out there wants to read book two, I do want to put it out there for them.  (It's hard to judge how many have actually read book one based on view counts on AO3 and itch.io, but there may be as many as four or five people who have actually read the whole thing.  Maybe it's even possible that there could be as many as six or seven.  That's probably the max, though.  And I don't know if any of them care about the rest of the series; no one has left any feedback one way or the other.  (Well, aside from one anonymous comment on AO3 that I'm 99% positive came from someone I know on Discord who just left it in a misguided attempt to be supportive.))

    The new prologue for book four in the series (I wrote all seven of the novels years ago, but they all needed massive amounts of work before anyone else could be allowed to see them) is a vast improvement over what it had, but it doesn't quite tie into the novel as well as I'd like, and it's possibly a little too risque, so it still needs some work, but I can worry about that when I get to the rewrite of book four! :P

    As to the visual novel script...wow, I've bitten off a lot with this one, as usual.  I've often tried to explain visual novels as "like Choose Your Own Adventure books but with pictures," only in this case it's more or less accurate.  Normally, in a visual novel, your decisions have a limited amount of impact:  maybe it sends you to a new scene or two, but after a while you get back to the old story.  (Unless it's a dating sim, in which case eventually you're deciding which love interest to go out with, in which case you do get sent into a separate path from the other love interests.)  But a while back I picked up one of the reprints of the Choose Your Own Adventure books from the '80s, and I was struck by how it worked:  every time you chose to do a and go to page x or to do b and go to page y, you were off on a new course, and the courses almost never overlap or rejoin each other.

    So, this time I decided to do that.  It is challenging to write, to say the least.  And, as you might expect, it sends you to a lot of dead ends.  (I'm going to have to put a warning on the game along the lines of "you're going to get a lot of game overs" so people won't be too frustrated.  Or will at least be expecting the frustration.)

    It's really making me question my decision to do it this way, I have to admit.  I can see why people don't usually do it.  There's a lot of extra text I have to write that I wouldn't have to if paths just reconverged after a while.  (Okay, admittedly, they do converge again, but only at the start of the next chapter.  It's not like every one of those branches led into completely different later chapters.  That would be a truly insane amount of extra writing!)

    Where it stands (18,165 words in the game script so far), the prologue has two successful outcomes and five game overs, of which three are fatal.  What I have of chapter one has one successful outcome (there will be at least two more), and four game overs, of which only one is fatal (there will be a lot more of both of these).

    It's an experiment on my part, and I think the main thing I'm learning from it is "don't ever do this again."  But it's important to try different methods, and I can put make this script another notch on my belt, as it were, consider it another tool to pull out when necessary, just not to make it the central mechanism of advancement again.

    It's funny, though:  writing standard fiction can make me long for the simpler mode of writing a script (no need to describe things, no need for dialog tags!), but writing a game script often makes me long for nothing more than the simplicity of writing straight-up fiction!  I guess the grass is always greener.  Or the words are always flowing smoother?  (Eew, that didn't work at all!)