Plans for the demo going forwards, 12.8.2025!

-Recap of writing Chapter 3-

Hi all,

It has been a few days and I think it is time to reflect. If you have all been following the blog, or even the itch.io page, you will note that Chapter 3 was a bit of a struggle. That is an understatement, not so much in terms of writing. No, it was not the writing though even that did slow down at times. It was the massive task of coding, editing and proofreading the long chapter after it was done. For example, the original draft of C3 and the following interlude was 73.5 k+11 k = 84.5 k words total. That is of course including code inside the text and all branches. I think normal novels have something like 250-400 words per page, which means that this C3+interlude was around 338 to 211 pages long if it were a part of a novel. It is of course longer now. The average length for a fantasy novel is around 90 k to 120 k words, based on a bit of googling... So yeah, IF authors usually deal with absurd chapter lengths. I know it is purely a problem of our own making and in my case the code of course is included in this, but still I giggled a bit after realizing this little bit of truth :D And of course, my editing and proofreading is bad so the word count would probably drop a lot if I was better at it.

The thing is... I like long stories. This is not traditionally published novels, it is closer to a web novel if we are to compare it to something, updated regularly... Or it would be if I was better at doing it :D And there was no real life to deal with. The Wandering Inn? Wonderful, I love that story, one of my all-time favorites. And it is like 14 million words long in 2025...

Ok, back to my own writing. This project is massively ambitious, and I have said several times, I refuse to hurry it along. That being said, I feel like I ran out of steam with C3 due to the not so fun side of writing, ie. editing and proofreading and the rest of that stuff. And it could always be done better.

This lead to me making an early access demo available on KoFi. That helped keep motivation up, and with my more organized bug reporting form, things were looking up! Which helped me write some more, and make a rather large C3, even if everything about the story feels so slow. What can I say, as a first time writer, I am self-indulgent and bad at self-editing. Despite the amount of time I spend on it. There are lots of unnecessary words.

Still, none of that diminishes the amount of work it took to get the demo to the state where I could even create the early access. There are solutions of course: Beta-readers, or an editor. I even got one offer for a volunteer editor . At that I point, I was already aware of the nightmare that getting C3 somewhat presentable was going to be... But I refused. Why?

It is rather simple really. I work like a chaotic gremlin, always jumping between things. Sometimes I just write directly into twine, at times in Word... At times I code at the same time, and times I just write "CODE THIS LATER". And btw. Tales Of The Past is written originally in LaTeX (if anyone is familiar... I sort of wanted to do it all in LaTeX, but since coding is involved, it really does not work well directly writing into LaTeX. So yeah. I cannot subject another human being to how I have been working on the demo :D Is this approach partially responsible for how much of a nightmare C3 was to get coherent. Of course it was, and I am fully aware of it. Will I change... Probably not that much. Why? This is supposed to be fun! Not work.

Of course, I will admit that the proofreading and editing reminds me of work a tad too much. That is bad for my motivation, hence things being very slow.

So what is the solution? Well, I have sort of liked this KoFi early access demo thing. I have not really made any promises on KoFi or anything like that, but I liked feeling like I had made progress, even if it was only available for supporters. And of course, getting some money is great! Who knew. I am not denying that. This brings me to the plan!

-The plan-

For Chapter 4 and hopefully beyond, I will try to do the following: KoFi will serve as "early access" and will be updated with smaller updates instead of a whole chapter. This I hope will make things more manageable for me, doing what I imagine will be like 5k-15k word updates there, and the bug reporting will help me sort those out easier. Then the public demo will be updated the same way it has been updated so far. One chapter at a time (maybe interludes too). Unless there is a push for shorter updates here too?

Of course, as I have admitted, I am fairly chaotic in how I work. So, the early access demo on KoFi will likely live a lot during the process of writing. My plans are always fairly rudimentary, and live a lot during actual writing. But I hope to be transparent about this, so it does not come as a surprise to anyone.

OK, that is all :D Let me know what you think!

-TLDR-