Another Update

Wanted to say something again because I’ve been doing fairly well these past few days. Before I took that break I was struggling to do a few hundred words a day and now I’m doing 1k-1.5k words pretty easily and I’m not constantly rewriting the same few lines over and over again like I was before. I’m definitely not at my prime still, I won’t be happy till I’m back at 3k a day and there’s some slight lag still, but I do think at this rate the chapter might be done sometime next week and that this is the biggest sign yet that I actually AM recovering from this nightmare. Feels good and I just wanted to talk a little about it.

I also want to talk about some shuffling around of ideas I had for the rest of the volume. From this point on will be spoilers, so don’t read it if you don’t want those and haven’t already read the current outline for the next couple of chapters.

If you’ve read the outline, you probably remember how I said that Zoe’s affection was going to seesaw back-and-forth a little so that her first heart event was drawn out a bit further away. Now that I’m working on it and writing their interactions, I don’t think that makes sense anymore, and I also think that everything that happens while they are at their little arcade date and the slight lewd stuff that happens after it’s pretty much on the level of a heart event already so I’m just going to go for it. I am going to tone down some of the naughtiness when we get to that scene, though. It will probably just be making out and heavy petting.

Ultimately I was building up to her heart event being what eventually snaps her out of being a total hermit, but I think it’s too soon for her to decide ‘okay I’m going to start leaving the house more often’. The hangout is just a taste of that for her, I was planning on having their be a meet and greet for a famous game developer and he would have to take her to it as her first heart event but I think that would serve much better as her second one now that I’ve had more time to think about it. The problem is I doubt we will reach that in this book, so I’m going to reconsider my plans somewhat.

Stacy and Tessa both have big moments planned for the next day in-story, but it still wasn’t going to be a huge focus, so I’m thinking that in order to go with my original ending I had in mind for this book which is going to be quite lewd, I need something to take the place of the time frame of where I was originally going to put Zoe‘s first heart event. I don’t entirely know what yet but I’m already thinking that I will give that timeslot for something with Stacy. Rebecca already had a big focus and there’s going to be a big cliffhanger regarding her at the end of the volume and Tessa really shouldn’t have more than one big moment a book right now when her development is supposed to be subtle and building up overtime, and for the planned ending to make sense he has to be away from Mia.

So really that just means a follow up on what was already planned to happen with Stacy is the only option that makes sense.

I won’t spoil what happens with Tessa tomorrow but Stacy is going to have an accident at work where she sprains her ankle and Oliver end up volunteering to drive her home which she turns out not to be happy about since this means he will find out she lives in a cheap trailer park outside of town to save money. He’s obviously not a judgmental person so the whole thing will be a nice character moment where he gets to know her, sees her house essentially, and they presumably talk about her apology at the end of volume one.

With her having a sprained ankle it shouldn’t be too hard to come up with some excuse for them to hang out again the day after this. We’ll see, I just wanted to share some of my thoughts now that I’m actively working on the story again and having new ideas for it.