Well, because of that promise I made last month, I’ve spent the last week incongruously interspersing beautiful experiences of immersion in the infinite love of Christ with huddling near one of the few available power outlets, inventing awful stuff about being tortured to death or ripping throats out with teeth. (Plus a fair few hours of QT bug- and typo-bashing.)
And as a result…I’m only slightly late with that promised ready-or-not update. There are a lot more words up on CoGDemos today.
As you’ll see, a good while back I jumped ahead to write a few endgame sections, to help me get a sense of some of the directions the story was going…then jumped back to write through the closing sections for all the specific pathways through Irduin. As a result, for the very late-game sections, you might find yourself speaking to a character who ran away or died in your playthrough. All ghosts will be purged when I catch up to those scenes in the full write-through.
Now, normally before I release a section, I’ll have played through it a few times to be sure I’m happy with how it reads. I have not done this yet with a BUNCH of stuff you can see in this update! Code readers in particular will be able see my process in pretty much every stage of half-assed incompletion. If something feels incredibly lame or poorly-paced to you, please do feel 100% free to comment on it…and don’t be surprised if the answer is “yep, that’s very much first-draft dialogue; I mean to massage that into more readable shape when I read through that whole story strand.”
You’ll also be able to more or less see what I have in mind for the shape of the rest of Game 2, albeit without a lot of the stat checks that will determine e.g. whether Heud’s powder goes off killing Seichareis in the manor (with several de Irdes) or the Chesnery (with Maurs) or whether the Theurge survives to kill Maurs and (maybe) be killed by you.
So, yeah, I hope you guys get some enjoyment out of it – along with a no-doubt less enjoyable sense of how much is left for me to write! August will I’m afraid be a less prolific writing month, since I’ll be volunteer teaching at my kids’ school again, for more classes this time. (And in Geography rather than English.) But I should pass the million word mark; and the teaching is, again, a limited-time gig, not a full-time job, so by late Sept (or October at the latest) I should be back in full swing on finishing Stormwright.