6/13/2023

6/13/2023

CHAPTER TWO UPDATE!

I am officially done with chapter two! Between family issues and my wisdom teeth getting yanked out of me, I thought I would never be able to get chapter two finished, but it is! Half of why it is so late is on me, due to the fact that I wanted it to be just enough lore explaining of this world that I created, which is hard when all I want to do is scream it from the roof tops like Rafiki introducing Simba for the first time, but I think I got the perfect mixture down to let you guys know enough while still having a hint of mystery.

Chapter Two:

roughly 24,332 words

Introduce another RO in the weirdest way possible.

Join the "book club" on an important discovery about you.

Meet a bunch of more characters that live in Lockwood.

Be able to stand up for your aunt.

Watch your familiar battle it out with a giant snake.

A deeper look into your family

Meet the princes and princesses of hell.

This interactive fiction is amazing! The author is so talented. I just love the plot and the characters, especially Mia. Who wouldn't love a passionate redhead? This is one of the interactive fictions that inspired me to make my own

Touch of Lies (WIP)

Synopsis: As a child, growing up in the slums of Hvinir without any guardians, you believed you would not live to see 30. Until Haven, a thief guild, took you in and taught you how to survive. Facing hardships, the guild leader tasks you to sneak into the castle with the mission to take.

Game Features: Will you get caught? Will you get the honor of learning secrets behind the royal family? Will you successfully solve a murder?

Play as male, female, non-binary.

Choose the genders of seven different romance options.

Romance a flirty prince/princess, the snobby sibling of the prince/princess, your protective childhood friend, a playful knight, one kind noble friend of the castle and finally a mysterious servant.

Pick from five different personalities; stoic, soft, fun, elegant and hot-headed. Choose options that contradict your personality to see how others react.

Will you learn the history behind the mysterious valuable? Will learning the history cause you to change your mind on stealing it?

Will you be able to save the guild?

Can you save the one’s you love most or will you be the one to cause their deaths?

Check out the romance options!

Updated the demo, now at 56k words.

Links: demo

We hit 1k! Here's your treat! Play the public demo of The Unseelie here now!

Return home to Nipa Beach for the summer from college...and discover far more than you ever wanted to.

🌊 Meet your mother and old friends.

🌊 Try and fail to deal with your grief.

🌊 Meet a very adorable yellow tabby cat named Waffles and a loveable german shepherd named Luna!

🌊 Decide your past relationships. Did you have a partner that was tragically taken from you too soon? Or were you entangled in a now-failed friends-with-benefits relationship that's bitter with regret? Or neither!

This is the first part of Chapter One: The Beginning of the End. It currently sits at around 13,800 words. 

As always, if you come across any errors or typos, feel free to send me some screenshots!

Unsolicited Writing Advice

Completely random reminder to back up your work, especially if you're a writer, IF or game developer, coder, or creator of any kind. People sometimes ask me what my advice for other writers is, and I always forget to include this one, but it's one of the most important things, especially if your career, livelihood, or long-form projects hinge on writing in any way! Take it from someone who just had two backup methods fail unexpectedly and only the third backup prevented me from losing a solid month of work, you need to back up your work in as many ways as you possibly can. It may seem like a pain in the ass at the time, but I've seen a lot of games or stories stall or fail completely due to a catastrophic loss of data that utterly kills any drive to keep going with the project because of the need to start over. I'M BEGGING YOU, BACK UP YOUR DATA.

I recommend having at least 2, ideally 3 methods of backup:

Automatic cloud storage. I personally prefer working with Dropbox, where every change I save is automatically synced and backed up to a cloud server as well as natively saved on my own device. It also has robust version history, so if you figure out you've done something horrific and unknowingly saved over something important or rewritten a section you weren't supposed to, you can rewind everything in a folder down to a specific minute (over the last 30 days): a feature that has saved my hide just a few too many times for comfort. A free Dropbox account gives you 2 GB of storage to work with. Working within Google Drive works just as well, and the free version gives you 15 GB of storage (though that's shared between your email account and other Google apps, as well)! However, I don't believe it provides automatic syncing and backup the same way Dropbox does: you either have to work directly within a Google doc for your work to be automatically saved to the server, or you have to manually upload the files to your Google Drive to back them up each time.

Physical storage. Every few weeks or months, I also take the time to back up my important files to an external hard drive or thumb drive. Again, it's kind of a hassle, but if the day ever comes that you lose your passwords or find that they've been changed, a company's servers go down or they go bankrupt, they decide to start charging you to access your data, or whatever crazy circumstance you can think of, it's always good to have a physical backup somewhere. A basic 1 TB thumb drive is somewhere around 20$ USD (though it can be slower at that price point if you're transferring a large amount of data each time), and it's even less if you don't need that much storage. A 1 TB external hard drive (which has a much quicker transfer rate) is around 40-50$.

If all else fails, email. If you can't get access to physical storage devices and cloud storage services don't work for you, consider setting up a free Gmail or what-have-you account specifically for backup purposes, then email a copy of your most important files to it every time you make a significant change to them. This may seem sort of primitive and simplistic, but it works, and you can even use it as a little journal or diary of your progress!

Again, you may think this is overkill, but I am convinced that writers are especially prone to proving Murphy's Law and have seen way too many projects, friends, and colleagues fall prey to this oft-overlooked issue. I can count at least half a dozen times where -> my primary device like my laptop broke, failed, became corrupted, had water spilled on it, etc. -> I then turned to my secondary device (hard drive or thumb drive) only to find something was wrong with THAT (broken, outdated, incompatible with currently-owned tech, corrupted, not up-to-date backups) OR I turned to my cloud storage and found something wrong with THAT (unknowingly saved over data and didn't realize it until 3 months later, meaning not even version history could save me) -> and it was only the THIRD method of backing up that saved my ass.

Anyway, this is just your friendly neighborhood writer reminding you to back your work up! It's a necessary part of the job! Thanks for coming to my TEDtalk!

My friend sent me this and I just had to post it for Rosie's birthday. 

 PICREW

Progress/Personal Update: 6/8/2023

Hello everyone! Just a little personal update. I have been dealing with some family health issues, and on top of that, I have gotten my wisdom teeth out, so I am taking a small break so I can get all healed up. However, don't worry, I am still writing, just more on the weekends than weekdays. I am hoping to get the demo out sometime next month, which will be chapters one through three, so wish me luck! It is taking a little longer due to the large amount of coding that happens in Chapter 3, but I am still so excited! Thank you for listening. Have a nice day and drink some water.