Progress Report

Yeesh, I really am my own worst enemy. And I'm about to prove it with a post longer than the god-damn bible. Praise be.

I had hoped to make Day 17 more concise, both to move the story along a little quicker with less unimportant fluff and to make the writing process more manageable, not just for Day 17 but going forward in general. So far, that has been an abysmal failure in practice although it has prompted me to take a closer look at my output and the processes which lead me to that point which in turn has unveiled a definitive culprit as to why we end up with shit like Day 16 with it's 73274 words...

The culprit is my relatively newfound knack for 'riffing'. Often when I go to write a sequence, I will have the core sequence of events planned out. Conversations are generally not preplanned to any great extent unless they're plot critical. There's also generally a lot of white space and empty air around those key events. 

In Diego's route, I wrote his scenes almost like a grocery list, checking off certain criteria and constantly pushing towards that next checkbox. The white space remained almost universally unfilled. This resulted in scenes that felt contrived and uninspired. Rigid sequences that would move at a breakneck pace before ending with little fanfare once they had served their purpose. I was never happy with the content I was producing in Diego's route, but I was producing complete days in as little as single  8 - 12 hour sessions! That was nice! Now, 80 - 120 hour sessions would quite literally be an understatement...

Here's the zany thing. It all coincides with my much belated ADHD diagnosis and, perhaps more importantly, the point where I began taking medication. And the first piece of content I wrote while consistently medicated was Day 11 of Tai's Route. It's no accident that we want from a relatively standard and pedestrian Day 10 to the grandiose epic that Day 11 seemed to be at the time. These days it seems rather quaint in contrast. One thing that really helped Day 11 to take off like it did was the significant open forums given to the characters to just... chat. There was no major crisis, no big dilemma, just a group of friends going camping with all the time in the world to get to know one another... 

And that was where my superpower was born. But make no mistake... it's as much of a curse as it is a blessing. 

Specifically, my superpower is what I previously referred to as riffing. Essentially I approach the days with the plan in place as I always did except with one new trick up my sleeve. The difference between a scene feeling contrived and only there to advance the story as opposed to a genuine, entertaining and fleshed out sequence packed to the gills with comedy, exposition, hidden meanings, carefully placed hints and breadcrumbs, returning gags, heartfelt character moments and so much more... the difference was riffing. But do you know what the difference between a nightmarish several-hundred hours in the making sequence and a more manageable, 1-2 session sequence was? Yeah. It was riffing as well.

To finally explain what the hell I mean by riffing, largely it means that I have found an almost superhuman ability to turn absolutely nothing at all into a massive, multifaceted piece of content with purpose-written exposition alongside all of the other things I listed before. And I mean it. Literally nothing. Give me 2 characters in a blank room with no content and I guarantee I could somehow spin a ridiculously complex route from it and it would be easy as brushing my teeth. The problem? It would take an incredibly long time. Typically when I 'riff', I have a series of key events to follow and the riffing largely takes place primarily through dialogue with the occasional idea tossed in here and there. But sometimes I have a free space left open for some purpose or another, and I've started to dread those. Because with those free spaces comes the riffing of everything that constitutes a sequence. And what I've been calling the 'scratch' version of a route is usually just the plot beats and necessary details accompanied by constant, excessive and unrestrained riffing.  

And this would not be such a problem if the output were a mixed bag - take what's good, scrap the rest, right? Problem is, I'm creating sequences where I feel like every single riff is worthwhile and deserves to be kept. The first third of Day 16 which released last month here on Patreon is a perfect example. Do you know what I had to work with? 'Wakes up at Axel's house in Summervale. Axel and Adrian return to Woodcrest. Adrian goes from place to place looking for Tai until Lukas point him in the right direction.' Yep. That's it. And so we ended up with a zany nightmare sequence, more back and forth from Axels crazy parents, the horrific dialogue with Eric (and subsequent mean spirited joking with Lukas), the chat with Diego and Russell at the bar, 'shattered knees', oh, and the entire crisis that Axel is presently facing. Do you know what's worse? That specific riff formed the basis for the current iteration of Axel's route. And do you know what started all of that? That little mention right at the very end of Day 15 which was never intended to be more than it was, a small tease and a possible hint at more behind the scenes. Nothing was actually planned for it. And it spawned an entire route, along with all of the drama which surrounds Axel, Dom and Russell towards the end of Tai's Route.

Am I glad that happened? Hell yeah. It was a lot better than what I had before! The current iteration from Lukas' route was born from one of these mad riffs as well and again, I'm thankful to have such well realized and fleshed out ideas prepared for those routes. But once again, riffing is the very thing which slows progress to a crawl, turns simple sequences into gargantuan monsters and pretty much drives be insane constantly. 

And this month, though I have failed to be concise as intended, I have clearly identified the culprit. Nothing makes this clearer than Chapter 2 of Day 17 which was originally an open block slated for a romantic date with Tai. I literally had no specifics planned for it. And so, I did what I do best. I started riffing. And I riffed. And I riffed. And I couldn't stop riffing. And now Chapter 2 is packed full of so much stuff that's so very much worth keeping in all the while being overlong and demanding too much of my time, so much so that I haven't made a start on Chapter 3 yet! Thankfully at least the events of Chapter 3 are very well defined. If I can somehow convince myself to keep riffing to a bare minimum, it might just not be a total nightmare. But this is me we're talking about... I'm not holding my breath. That being said, having a conscious awareness of the specific piece of my process that has caused everything to balloon as much as it has puts me one step closer to developing new processes in order to keep that under wraps. At it's core, riffing is a good thing and quite an incredible talent. It is certainly something I could not have imagined being capable of back when I was writing Diego's Route. But there's such thing as too much of a good thing, and my next objective will be to figure out strategies for keeping it in moderation.

Now, as for the actual 'progress report' part of this overlong and partially riffed post (oh god please help me, I cannot escape it even here), Chapter 2 is making slow but steady progress. It's still an unfinished 'scratch' version right now but as seems to be the case these days, so much of it is genuinely great which at the very least means that once the scratch version is done, it won't need a total rework to bring it to fruition, just some significant polish and perhaps even some careful pruning. Chapter 3 as mentioned before should hopefully see a much quicker turnaround, and Chapter 4... well, I don't have a lot of details, so god help me there. Chapter 4 is what used to be 5, we just folded 2 and 3 into just 2 and moved the rest forward so the plan hasn't changed, just the chapter numbers! And yes, Chapter 3 is still planned to be an absolute doozy, can't wait to sink my teeth into that monstrosity. I am still expecting everything to come together on time touch wood, but there's a lot of work left to be done so I'd better get stuck in!