Weekly Progress Update [27/JUL] (Patreon)

Hellooo, hope you've all been having a good weekend!! 🫶🏼

I was a bit rattled this week by the situation with Steam and Itch.io that I posted about before, but it didn't get in the way of my writing: it's just a really shitty situation that soured my mood at most lol.

I've been plugging away at the same variations and a few scenes later on in CH14 that I mentioned in previous updates. The biggest downside to having a lot of different scenes to account for different plot and relationship variables means that I'll spend a lot of time feeling "stuck" in one place. Like the opening of CH14 is my Sisyphean punishment or something, which is why I can't say much more without outright spoiling everything haha

I have also got to working on D and A's romance interactions a bit for in the latter half of the chapter. Sometimes I'll be daydreaming or even doing something else, and a scene or a moment between the characters will randomly pop into my head and I have to go write it down immediately! This is, usually, what causes all of my pre-established plans for a chapter to get thrown into chaos because I gotta fit in this new scene that I just thought of.

Totally worth it though. And sometimes I just write them out and save them somewhere else to use for later.

For A, it was a bit of cute bantering back and forth with the Crescent Blades while on the road, as well as a little romantic variation for those romancing them. Basically imagine A shit-talking (in jest) with the gang, meanwhile the Crown is on their horse watching this all with heart eyes basically.

For D, the scene that popped into my head was entirely romantic and I'm trying to decide whether it will fit in CH14 or whether it's best suited for CH15... I'm leaning towards the latter because I love torturing you guys with slow burn. But who knows, D might take the wheel and finally crash the car out of pure sexual frustration at this point lmfao

Other than CH14, I've also been considering going back and heavily editing CH1-4. It wouldn't be a rewrite, more like uh... a remaster? Instead of chucking it all out and starting over I'd just go over it again and edit the prose a bit. I recently reread it, and I noticed there's (at least to me) a pretty big difference in the writing style in those early chapters compared to where I am now.

Same for the characters as well: I feel like their voices have developed a lot over the course of the story, so going back and adjusting some of their dialogue would do more justice to them. For R romancers though I promise I won't touch R's introduction scene, I know their lines there are iconic and it's perfect as is haha.

In any case, it makes sense to me to "update" the older chapters considering I wrote CH1-4 like, 7 years ago now. I've evolved a lot as a writer during that time, and I think it'd be nice to update those early chapters to reflect my current writing style better as well. But we'll see! I wouldn't want to do it in the middle of working on CH14, maybe I'll do it right before or right after I publish the new update so I have some space to work on it.

Then again, maybe editing it now would be premature and I should wait until the story is completely finished in another 5 years before I go and edit it 🧐 I kinda just cringed after rereading it recently and was like "aghhhh I need to improve this!!!' but that could be the perfectionist in me freaking out over nothing. What do you guys think?

That's all I have for you this week! See you next time 💖