13/02/2021 Patreon Devlog

Hi everyone! Time for this week's patreon devlog.

This Week's Summary:

• Finished Lance's synopsis
• Finished chapters 1 - 3 of Lance's route
• Mostly finished with chapter 4

The Ramble:

As I mentioned last week, my main focus this week was writing, writing, writing, and writing. With a strict deadline and tight word count goals, I've been focusing all my efforts on keeping that schedule as much as possible.

If I can overshoot my early word count goals by a significant amount, I can shrink the amount I need to write each day later one. So I want to try to make the most of the fact that the early route chapters are usually the easiest to write.

That said, Lance's route is going to be more laid back than most of the other routes instead of focusing on Morgan desperately training and having to deal with everything. So maybe the rest of his route will be easier too? Is that too much to hope for???

The first few chapters are a little shorter than some of the other routes where there's a lot more information to cover but I will likely flesh them out later when I try to add in a little more conversation between Morgan and Lance. Early drafts are sometimes a bit sparse.

I did initially set aside Chapter 4 as complete, however when I was re-evaluating the synopsis for Chapter 5, I thought it looked a little too heavy on events. Meanwhile, I had been feeling Chapter 4 needed one more significant event to happen. So I ended up taking an event from Chapter 5 and moving it to Chapter 4.

Morgan experiences her first "sandflare" - a type of very powerful sandstorm known for its powerful lightning strikes and electrostatic discharges. It freaks her out (how freaked out is a matter of personality choice.) Morgan has never experienced "extreme" weather before so it's a little overwhelming for her. Lance comforts her and distracts her by telling her the full story of how he ended up in the Wastes.

Which is not a happy story. So it leads to a moment between them. No one has ever really comforted Lance for all that he's been through so to have someone moved to do that is something he finds touching.

Chapter 5 is where I start setting up some of the later plot elements and I've realised I may need to grab a couple more backgrounds for some later scenes.

Oh! One thing I don't think I mentioned is that I ended up having to split off all the routes into individual projects in Scrivener. Unfortunately, as amazing as scrivener is...it really can't handle massive projects. I think around 400,000 words the lag started becoming noticeably problematic. Things like searching or pulling a word count or project stats just froze the software - which is fair. Very little writing software is meant for projects that big.

But it did get to a point where it was just hindering my use of the software so I broke all the routes into individual projects and will be proceeding that way going forward.

So...FUN. LoL. My project is too powerful for Scrivener I guess!

Sneak Peeks and Previews:

I don't really have much in the way of artwork this week. I changed Brenin's hair a little, hearkening back to William's slightly wavy hair. I also prefer this less sleek look overall. So yeah.

And a snippet!

Ari: "And I want to practice this every session going forward. You can consider it the foundation for all our self-defence training."

Morgan: "And that is...?"

Ari: "Falling."

#curious

"Falling? Blocking, balanced stance, or anything else would have made more sense."

Ari: "More precisely, I want to show you how to fall safely."

"He took a few steps back from me."

Ari: "In any confrontation, there is the risk of falling - being thrown, being knocked down. It's unavoidable. As such, it's important that you be able to fall without injuring yourself."

Ari: "If you fall with the right amount of grace, you can get up and continue to fight."

Morgan: "Sounds almost like a metaphor for life."

Ari: "Perhaps it is."

Ari: "My mentor once said that learning to fall means learning to look at the situation objectively, thus gaining insight from each failure."

Ari: "This allows you to accept what happened, get up, and continue on."

Ari: "If you fall poorly, you could end up hurt. Worse, you'll lie where you are and lose your fight."

Morgan: "Still sounds like a metaphor."

Morgan: "Stay where you are and wallow in pain and loss, or fall gracefully so you can get up and keep going."

Ari: "There are many martial arts principles that can be applied to life as a whole."

Morgan: "But this one does feel particularly relevant. Almost like you're telling me it's time to move forward."

Ari: "Falling safely is a principle part of self-defence."

Ari: "But it would be inaccurate to say I didn't feel this lesson would have additional benefit for you, given your circumstances."

Ari: "Though I wouldn't characterise your behaviour as 'wallowing' either."

"A small smile crossed my face. His way of handling it was a little clumsy, but I could appreciate the sentiment."

Morgan: "Thank you."

Ari: "I don't believe I've done anything worthy of thanks. We haven't even started."

Upcoming Week:

So...writing. I mean, this has been my weekly plan for the last 84 years.

Though I've really blown through the initial chapters, I do expect that my writing speed will slow down as I get further in. The initial chapters, particularly in this route are pretty laid back. There's not much happening besides Morgan recovering and Lance revealing who he is.

Later chapters will have more characters, more stuff going on, so I expect to have to slow down as I write and more carefully choreograph scenes. But the more progress I can make earlier on, the more cushion I have later on as far as meeting my deadline (which is currently set to mid-April) if I continue to write about 1300 words a day.

If I continue to meet the word count goals daily, by the next post, I will have reached 90% completion of the original six LI routes for Gilded Shadows.

That's the next big milestone.

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