Demo one year anniversary update! 23.8.2025

The demo is now 1 years old!

As promised, the demo has been updated with the following content in honor of this anniversary:

A new interlude (Sheo, 7k words) has been added. It is located right after where the C3+interlude update left off.

Part 3 of the Tales of The Past (Havard, 13.5 k words) has been added to the demo, accessible from the starting menu.

This brings the total demo wordcount to ~205 k words, and the Tales From the past bonus content to ~35.5 k words.

Thank you all for all the interest and support shown to this project!

As always, some bug fixes etc. have also been done.

Quick vote result 21.8.2025

By overwhelming majority, a Sheo interlude (about 6.8 k words) will be made released in a few days.

Quick vote 18.8.2025

For one year anniversary of the demo, do you all want a Sheo interlude, even if it does not fit into the timeline yet, happening a bit later. But not too much later. It sort of could even fit...

It would be incorporated into the demo later, and Tales Of The Past Part 3 will be coming no matter what.

I am asking because I cannot decide, and I forgot the anniversary so I have only "pre-written" stuff to offer :D Since I am not hurrying to write something completely new.

Voting here does not seem possible so please do so on the blog: here

Voting lasts for 3 days from now.

Blog anniversary, 16.8.2025!

It's the 1 year anniversary of the blog on Tumblr 🥳 So... the demo will turn 1 years old in about a week or so...

The blog is of course here. There are tons of snippets there, probably 50 k words (including the asks).

I have nothing prepared.. Wait.. Let me... Ah shit, I can't really release anything already written beforehand since I am not sure about using any of that... And they are planned to be a part of the demo...

Hmm.... Hmm.... Fine. Information regarding some far away future stuff! And the third primary character. This is not really a good one year price... but I assume the Tales Of the Past Part 3 will go live around the 1 year anniversary for the demo so at least that is good.

All of this is far away :D

If you do not want to know any far away future plans, stop reading now!

Anniversary announcement: Have some info!

There is a certain establishment that is planned to be relevant to the story called the Velvet Veil.

Codex:

A high class brothel near the orphanage. This particular establishment is known for the wonderful massages it offers. In fact, almost a third of their customers are not aware this is a brothel at all, thinking it is the premium massage parlor and spa in Firgrat. Their list of services contains both innocent options that are just massages, and coded options where the opportunity for brothel services occurs.

The most expensive of these services is the Velvet Hour: A euphemism for full brothel services, offered only to known and vetted patrons who have visited before. Discretion is absolute, and the Velvet Hour is not available on the list of services. One needs to know enough to ask for it. It includes private chamber, including spa services. The service includes a “veilkeeper” assigned to tailor the experience to the customer's desires.

The Velvet Veil's madam is Marelith Vonn, a dark haired woman with generous curves. She wears only dresses, always cut low enough to reveal the upper swell of her bosom. She was once a courtesan there, but unknown events lead to her taking over for the whole place. There are rumors she manages the place for a silent owner, but the truth of these rumors is not widely known. What is known, is that she has complete control over the day-to-day operations of the Velvet Veil. Her voice is low and velvety, with just a faint rasp. A very distinctive voice.

Aside from the courtesans, there is plenty of security at the Veil. The head of security (the "veilguard") is Grath Morrow, towering, broad-shouldered with stone-colored skin, long dark braids, and gold rings piercing each ear. Grath is exceedingly calm, and rarely speaks to the customers, but when he does, even the rich listen. He has however ripped doors off their hinges on several occasions when someone tried to do things not allowed to the courtesans. Worst comes to pass, and Grath carries a halberd with him he is not afraid to use.

Plan for the Velvet Veil:

Near the nearest market to the orphanage, where MC will eventually get to visit, without knowing the true nature of the place of course. Not a sleazy and scummy place but a high class establishment that will... efficiently deal with anyone unwilling to be respectful to the professionals that work there. There could be a bit more to the place than what meets the eye with some odd clients they get occasionally as well.

This brings me to the third planned primary character (the twins being the first two) of the story: The child of Madam Vonn. A kid who knows more of the city, and can show the kids from the orphanage around a bit once they are allowed out of the orphanage. Therefore, the kids (MC and twins) will spend at least some time at the Velvet Veil, and I am hoping it will be hilarious.

However, once MC is older, I have some ideas about what role this establishment could play (or at least one scene vaguely in mind/in my notes).

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-