Here’s my first monthly update for Exit Through the Gift Shop
- Wrote my first chapter (ever) in ChoiceScript
- Learned how to post it in a WIP thread and at CoGDemos and began to attract feedback (can I really have had 3,000 people view it in just over a week?)
- Discovered that I should have been doing this for decades and still don’t know what took me so long
- Wrote 8,600 words
- Began work on my second chapter.
- Discovered this amazingly supportive community of all of you!
- Finished collecting the majority of online content about my subject, reviewing all of it, and mastering the content produced about the subject in the 1930s (and reached out to request permission to use the small amount that, currently, is not in the public domain).
I am taking MUCH longer than I wanted on my next chapter. It actually made me wonder if I should just expand it further to BE the entire game, then decided instead to go in the other direction, to pare it back. I also recognize in this chapter I am creating code and mechanics that will then be repeated multiple times in each chapter, and across all chapters (taking photos, choosing the next exhibit), so I should just BE PATIENT when I have to slow down my story writing to build all of that out.
At the same time I find it tremendously satisfying even if it takes two hours to code ten seconds of a reader’s experience if it means they have a personalized experience of their particular constellation of family members, genders, names, and exhibit choices. It’s like painting cells for an animation: painstaking, but potentially exquisite when executed.