Weekly Update - 18 December 2023

Hey everyone!

This week has been kind of a weird one. On the personal side of things, my holiday travel was delayed after I spent over ten hours on a train on Saturday (on what was meant to be a five-hour trip, but stopped partway through for some rain to pass and then had to go back because the storm dropped a tree on the tracks and they outright broke apparently). So now I'm back at my place, and the trip has been rescheduled for Wednesday, this time by car with a friend. Here's hoping that goes better!

But writing-wise, everything seems to be running fairly smoothly, actually. I've mixed around the order of my to-do list a little bit, but I've already got most of the things done that I wanted to do for December, which is great. I'd much prefer to be ahead of schedule going into the new year, because the chunk of work I have planned for January is quite substantive. 

This week, I:

• Finished the design of the personality system, which will also play a key part in the romances;
• Decided what I wanted the key beats to be in each of the subplots as well as the main plot of the next game;
• Combined this information into a rough, chapter-by-chapter outline of the next game; 
• Got started, using the outline of the next game, figuring out what extra groundwork I need to lay for those plots in this game, and what additional scenes will be needed for that. 

As you may have noticed, this is not exactly what I planned to do this week, but I've elected to take the "get all the ducks in a row, then rewrite chapter by chapter" approach, which I think will turn out to be the best one.

So what I have to do next before I can get to that part is the following:

• Repace and restructure the romances as needed;
• Decide on the approximate placement and topic matter of new friendship scenes with each of the ROs; 
• Make a new and improved outline for FoA;
• Write up a list of what I need to be checking for and changing as I go through text I've already written (as opposed to adding new things).

Then, I think, I'll finally be ready to rewrite properly. I'm hoping to finish all of the above by Jan 1, at which point I'll be ready to go full-tilt ahead in the rewriting part.