Welcome to the tracker.
Welcome to the Bride of Shadows progress tracker.
I’ll be updating this each day for those of you who want to keep an eye on what I’m doing and also understand a little more about what actually goes into producing these chapters.
I know from a lot of the emails and messages I get that you guys are frustrated with how long it takes for new chapters to come out. I think a big part of that is definitely me putting out "aspirational" launch dates that don’t really conform to the reality of what producing these chapters is actually like.
A big part of the problem is that, up until this summer, I really hadn’t sat down and started crunching the actual numbers or analyzing how long the different stages of development take. Instead, I would outline the chapter, give a projected release date based solely on the estimated word count and my writing speed, and then watch things become increasingly complicated once I got into drafting, writing, coding, and everything else.
As someone who can pretty comfortably and consistently write around 2,000 words a day, the prospect of releasing chapters that average somewhere between 15,000 and 25,000 words in two weeks doesn’t seem especially daunting.
What I frequently fail to take into consideration are the conditionals, the branching narratives, and all of the things that make the game a game. Those are also the things that make your character feel like an individual and keep the story from feeling like you’re just being dragged from one plot point to the next without any agency.
Another thing that makes writing an interactive novel complicated is that every time I introduce a new special variable, that variable can ripple through future passages in ways I don’t necessarily anticipate.
For example, in the most recent chapter, you have the option to reject Serax. A choice like that doesn’t just affect one scene. It can change dialogue, reactions, branches, and entire passages later on. I might go into drafting Night VI thinking I have a fairly linear episode, only to realize that I need to write an entirely different branch because of a decision someone may have made back in Night III.
If I were only managing one story route, I don’t think it would be nearly as complicated. But managing three different routes and keeping all of those decisions, variables, and branches straight can be a challenge.
Over the past few months, I developed a web app that I call my Atelier. I'll post screenshots of it as I work through Dark Maiden. It’s a custom app designed to help me take each chapter of Bride of Shadows from the earliest outlining stage all the way through forking into Twine and playtesting.
In it, I create outline cards for each scene of a chapter, then I expand those outline cards into first-draft story beats, and finally expand those story beats into full prose.
At each stage, I reference the previous stage so that the chapter becomes more detailed and more complex with each iteration. Most importantly, the Atelier allows me to track how much time I spend on each phase of development, what my progress is, and update my projected release date accordingly, and it's now synced with this site. Projected release dates will be displayed once the drafting phase of each chapter is complete.
The alternate POV chapters work a little differently. Those are more of a “when I have time” project. I treat the alternate POV scenes almost like a mental break from the main storyline.
As much as I love the main story, it can be pretty taxing to constantly think about all of the branches, variables, conditionals, and past choices I need to account for. The alternate POV scenes are much lighter on the mental load because they’re basically linear narratives.
I’ll be adding an official tracker for the alternate POV scenes a little later. For now, you can keep an eye on the Tidbits section if you want to know how those are progressing and when you might be able to expect the next one.
My hope is that this progress tracker gives readers a better way to see what I’m actually doing day by day.
There will obviously be days when I can’t work. I do have a personal life, I have family commitments, and part of living in a multicultural household is that there are always a couple of holidays to celebrate each month.
But on most days, I’m working on Bride of Shadows from around 6 a.m. Mexico City time until around 1pm when I go pick up the kids from school.
So if you’re ever wondering what I’m up to, or anxiously waiting for the next update, you can come here and take a peek. I’ll post longer development logs here from time to time, and I’ll also share those on Patreon and Itch.
The Tidbits section will be much more casual. Those will just be little daily notes about what I’m doing. Sometimes they might include a quote or a small snippet from an upcoming chapter. Sometimes they’ll just be a quick update about what I worked on that day.
Thanks for your time, and thanks for following along.
-Mortish