Hello. I’ve brought several informations to share with you today.
1. The link for you to click
First of all, if you click on this link, you can read the first six and a half thousand words of CURSE/KISS/CUTE chapter 0. Please note that this series will include a lot of adult content, though this chapter in specific only gets about as risqué as “a pantsless cowgirl on a bicycle.” You may each decide in your own hearts whether that counts as safe for work.
→ CURSE/KISS/CUTE - Chapter 0 ←
You can read it now, or you can read the rest of this post and then read it, or you can do anything at all, on account of I’m not your mom! I hope you like this deeply silly thing I’m making, and I’d love to hear your feedback on it.
Note, by the way, that this is in fact just a link to a page on my website. It’s not a page that’s linked from the main pages of the site, so in that sense it’s currently “secret,” though there’s nothing in the way of DRM preventing you from sharing this around. I’m not a cop or a narc. Just use your better judgement.
2. Hey, what is this, though?
If you’ve been keeping up with these increasingly-sporadic Patreon updates, one thing that might leap out to you immediately upon your clicking of that link is that this looks very different from both of the previous iterations of this project. You might be thinking, “Now hold on just a minute here. Did she scrap and rebuild the entire engine from the ground up a third time?”—to which I suppose I’d have to reply that technically this is the fourth or fifth time, but who’s counting anyhow.
The point is that, uh, immediately after posting the last news update, I looked at the engine I’d created and shown off, and thought, “This seems maybe a bit overengineered.” (That’s because it super was.)
I started out wanting to make “a lightweight visual novel engine that runs in a browser,” then progressively pared away features that felt superfluous or time-consuming for me to work with given my creative process—this is where I was as of the last time you saw screenshots of The Engine. From there, and after reading and writing a bunch of prose in my off time, I came to realize that the thing I want to make here really is just, like, a pretty standard web novel? I just wanted to write some words and let the words do the talking. This was only complicated in the first place by the fact that I also want to draw some pictures and let them do the talking, and write some songs and also let them do the talking. I spent quite some time figuring out a way to let all of these things sit nicely together—mainly the sound, really—but I think what I’ve come up with is about as straightforward and user-friendly as it gets. It’s also very fun and easy for me to work with, which matters too.
3. Hey, why’d that take so long?
The short answer is: creative burnout. Specifically, drawing burnout.
I know what I said last time. I was having some trouble writing the dang thing. This was not exactly a lie, except in the sense that it was probably me lying to myself, believing it, and then writing up a thousand-word-long post-hoc rationalization (as one does). It did in fact take me a little longer than it might have to write this chapter—once fully released it’ll be about twice as long as I’m aiming for—and I did in fact have some creative struggles with it. But the main difficulty was and had always been that at some point I was going to have to illustrate it, and this thought alone was enough to crush me at the bottom of a Marianas trench’s worth of dread.
About two months ago I wrote a post on Cohost in which I explained exactly what it was that I was feeling. This post would be a foot longer and a mile more morose if I were to repeat the details here, so you can read the original if you’re curious.
To summarize the timeline here:
I had clearly developed some kind of complex about drawing, likely a reflex of the same creative burnout that was the subject of that “Confession” comic a while back.
Writing words and music is fun, and I love to do it. If this was a “words and music” project, we’d be on chapter seven by now. But the art was holding me up.
I had grown to be, like, deeply embarrassed about this fact, and had taken to hiding it from others and even from myself.
I wrote a big post about it on my obscurest blog just to get it off my chest.
...
As a result of no longer Having All That On My Chest, I mysteriously finished the illustrations for the first half of chapter 0 within a few weeks.
Hang on. Do brains work like that? Is this why people go to therapy? For fuck’s
Anyway, uh, drawing is fun again?
4. When’s the next update?
All of the writing and music for chapter 0 is already done. The engine is also, as you can see, (mostly) done. So, it’s just illustration left to do. There are six more scenes to go, most of which are much shorter than the lengthy Scene Two you may have just read, and I’ll be posting updates here on Patreon as soon as I finish each one. When the whole chapter is finished, that’s when I’ll release CURSE/KISS/CUTE to the public.
As for how long it’ll take before you see the next update... that’s a secret! I’m going to say it may be some time in the next thirty days. I’m feeling good—great, frankly—but I also don’t want to give my burn-ward-bedridden brain anything like a specific deadline to fear, so I’m not going to be more specific than that.
My goal has been and continues to be that once the production line is fully in swing, one chapter of CURSE/KISS/CUTE will take me about one month to write, illustrate, and soundify. This chapter happens to be about twice the size of a typical chapter, so even in the best case scenario it wouldn’t have been done that quick. But based on my experience over the past few weeks, I’m leaning towards “one chapter a month” being... “basically plausible.” But give me some runway to work up to it.
5. Changes coming to the Patreon
I haven’t had time to think very hard about this, but I’m probably going to want to shuffle the tiers around again at some point. CURSE/KISS/CUTE is going to occupy most of my attention for the immediate future, and given that it’s an adults-only story, this would in theory mean that 100% of my Patreon posts over the next several months will be going in the 18+ tiers, which seems lopsided? Seems not ideal? What do you, the reader, think about all this?
6. Okay that’s all bye
Seriously, I really really hope you enjoy the story coming your way, and I’d love to hear your feedback. Okay, see ya. Bye!!! Goodbye for now!!!