Next Up

I just finished writing a long and important section of the script for the first major story route in Aurora’s Nightmare. It’s always nice to write a scene I’ve had in my head for a long time. And it marks a pretty serious amount of progress on the script…at least for the first route (of three). But, before I can continue with the actual writing, I’ve got to take a little time to work some more on the outline.

As I mentioned way back, I’m making a flow chart of the story in order to keep track of how all the branches fit together. But, since I’m the type of writer who prefers to work without outlines when possible, I’ve basically been creating the flow chart a little bit at a time, rather than doing the entire thing at the beginning. And now I’m totally caught up so it’s time to expand the flowchart a bit further, which means some decisions about how I want the next section of the story to play out.

Mainly, I’ve been going back and forth on whether to include a particular section a little further ahead in the story (sorry for being vague, but I want to avoid spoilers at this point). On the one hand, it wasn’t part of my original story plan and I’m not sure it adds much to the plot. On the other hand, that original story plan was for a regular novel, not a visual novel, and that extra section would probably make the pacing and progression more appropriate for the interactive format.

Anyway, figuring that kind of stuff out will likely occupy my next half a day or day of work. Then it’s back to writing. Unfortunately, I’ll likely have a lot less time in the fall to work on Aurora’s Nightmare than I thought I would, so I’m trying to get as much done right now as possible. Well, we’ll see how far I can get…