Second Time Around

I finished my first redline pass of Deep Dive over the weekend. On Monday, I spent about 10 hours revising the template I've been using for these since late 2024. This was less a "change everything" move and more a matter of taking the patterns that have emerged in the writing of 40 conspiracies and codifying them. The original Devoted template didn't have a line for Forms, for example, and I have a better understanding of why high Standing conspiracies usually have multiple Hierarchical Nodes (and "to prevent them from being destroyed because the Renegades killed one Linchpin" is only part of it).

The second drafts won't be unrecognizable as updated versions of the first drafts I've been sharing with patrons for the last several months, but all of them will have significant, noticeable differences. The goal, always, is to make the best supplement i can make, and that requires a certain ruthlessness when applying scalpel, stapler, and hatchet alike. Sometimes my notes can get quite lengthy, such as:

Others cut to the chase:

I'm not especially kind to myself in these, as you can see. I know the parts I like and don't generally comment on them (that they get to stay in the next draft is reward enough). I'm more likely to shout encouragement at the other writers on the project, however - both because collaboration is so much fun and I love working with other writers (and seeing the cool things they come up with) and because I don't want to come across as a grumpy meanie or make them feel like I hate everything they've done:

I've been on the receiving end of plenty of developer comments that made me sigh heavily and wonder how I could possibly fix the problems they were pointing out, and I can tell you that sometimes those "Ha! This is awesome, I love it" notes were the only things that kept me going when the opening comment was along the lines of "this is so far off the mark of what I was looking for that there's a good chance you'll need to do a third draft after your rewrite it".

Not gonna lie. That one stung, but sometimes a first draft needs the scalpel and sometimes it requires the hatchet. And yes, that one needed the hatchet (and did not, in fact, require a third draft, thank you very much). I can only hope to wield it as sincerely on my own work as on anyone else's.