Progress Report Archive: Week 1 Content

4 January

So, first time in a while (since college) giving myself a creative writing project. First time publishing something here. First time writing smut?

I read through most of the branches here and thought it would behoove me to have a convenient running update page to help people decide whether or not they want to commit to reading my little writing exercise. I can imagine the length and breadth of this style of story becoming daunting to continue. On the off chance someone likes this, I wouldn't want to disappoint by leaving the story hanging.

At the moment, I plan to publish in multi-chapter batches; this may change once I get to the point where I'm stuck until I see how votes go. First 8 chapters (which covers the traditional "character intros" section) will be pending approval at the same time as this particular little report. For those that are interested, that would be the first 17 pages of my primary LibreOffice file. I have everything up to the midpoint of Week 1 in some fashion of a pre-final draft, with about half of the pre-challenge back half of Week 1 in a looser rough draft (the primary file just broke 113 pages). So, it's not the lack of pre-writing that will hold me back for a while. I'm launching now because I can see myself rapidly getting to the point where I need an audience participation poll result to continue (I got one date and most of the first challenge day left to write before I need to see what a vote will look like).

Hopefully, some of y'all will enjoy my musings.

A couple of (spoiler-free?) notes before I start hitting the publish buttons and see how long moderation takes:

I am (maybe heavily?) leaning into the multiversal aspect that some branches have. Our protagonists are coming from an alternative history world from our own. Most differences between ours and theirs will only be mentioned in passing. Watching my brain play the Turtledove game of how to start at normalcy and end up with aliens controlling Poland as a buffer state in post World War II Europe (I haven't read that particular series, lo siento) might be fun, however. If there is enough interest, I can write some background alt history pages as side-branches. The one big difference that will end up as a big plot point will still end up being a big plot point (the wackiness of how that happened may actually be fun to put to digital paper). Hints of it is already in the first published batch, if you want to guess at it.

I will be slower than what is normally expected to start running the ol' audience participation polls. Partially this is due to wanting to get a good chunk of writing done before initial publication. Partially, this is because I haven't actually seen a "still in progress" poll and have no idea how one is expected to be set up. They will happen (first one is scheduled at the halfway point of Week 1, as hinted at above) but I want to make sure I do them right. Hopefully, someone will DM me here with the poll norms if none of the branches I have bookmarked for continued reading get to a poll section before I do.

5 January

Learned a couple of things.

1) Moderation was way faster than I expected!

2) I probably should have included the rest of the "opening ceremony" chapters to the initial publication batch. It wasn't my intention to mislead, but not getting the season theme (found in chapter 10) up may have done so in some cases. Still not your thing after that point, totally understandable. There are branches that aren't my thing either.

4 chapters pending.

15 January

Doing this on my phone, so sorry for any weird formatting.

So, the 4 chapters I posted on 5 January are still waiting in moderation. If they are not approved by this weekend, I am just going to assume that the moderators just don’t want my branch to continue. If that’s the case, I plan to just delete the branch as that seems to be the sensible thing to do for branches that fail to launch.

19 January

Hey, I'm back. Spent some time editing (and a little time writing) this weekend. I just finished publishing the rest of Day 0 (3 chapters), plus the requisite post-transformation character sheets. After reading through my Day 1 stuff, I feel that I need to add another scene or two (the "afternoon" felt pretty barren). I'm going to strive to have everyone not on that night's date have a least a little time to shine during the day (even if I don't write a section from their perspective). I still need to work on that balance (and figure out more fine details about some characters' arcs, at least until subsequent transformations twist ideas around). Expect another drop sometime next weekend?

25 January

Spent quite a bit of time writing this week. My primary project file is up to 134 pages at this point, and most of the growth from the file occurred this week. In fact, I started working on the first challenge day chapters. Still a ways to go there (and there are gaps in the rough draft where I need the results of the mid-week vote), but decent progress. If I keep up this pace of writing, I will hit the brick wall of "need to wait for votes to come in" too soon. Therefore, this week's publication push is rather large (10 chapter, covering all of Days 1 and 2). Things happen. Here is my plan for the next several publication batches:

1) Next weekend, I push Day 3 content. That has the mid-week vote towards the end. The plan gives me this week to do some final bits of editing for Day 3 and figure out how to do a poll. Then run the poll for like a week?

2) Weekend after that (approx. 8 Feb), I probably take a publication break, as I'll need time to fill in the gaps from not knowing the results of the mid-week vote. I am planning on NOT doing the seemingly traditional "vote results come in within minutes of the contestants hearing the vote options due to time dilation and transformations happen immediately after" thing, so, depending on how I feel about the space of time between poll start and poll results, I may have a small (approx. 1 chapter) publication push instead.

3) Week after that (approx. 15 Feb), I hopefully have a completed Day 4 to push. Then I get back to a more normal a day a week cadence until 1st challenge day; more audience participation votes are planned for challenge day ("Best Girl" poll, challenge winner poll, and, of course, a round of transformation votes).

I'm going to start publishing now. Thanks for listening.

1 February

Kept plowing forward in rough-draft writing this week. The big file is up to 159 pages. First challenge is probably about halfway drafted out at this point. This week's push is a much more reasonable 5 chapters, plus a couple of side things (the first audience poll and a "show your work" page for the weird pop-up challenge thing).

So, this is the first time I'm actually interacting with an audience poll (never saw one pop up in the branches I'm following last month), so hopefully I have everything set right. I did remember to turn off result visibility. Check out the poll chapter for the link (and some notes before you vote). Let me know what settings you would recommend I change for next time in the comments there (or here, I suppose).

As a side note, I really need to update my big file to reflect how chapters get published here. Day 4 starts on Chapter 31 on the site and my big file Chapter 31 is where the 1st challenge starts. When I split up my singular Night 3 date chapter into more manageable chunks for the site, the first poll got stuck to the last chapter. So, in an effort to help readers be able to skip over the will be eventually unnecessary voting chapter easier, I pushed out the first bit of Day 4, which would have been the small push I would have published next weekend. I did end the poll early enough in the weekend for me to maybe get another part of Day 4 out. So, I might be skipping a publication push next weekend.

Time to start last-minute formatting checks and publishing.

8 February

Thanks for all who voted in my first audience poll. It was so immediately one-sided that I started filling in the Day 4 gaps on Monday. If you got feedback on polls and whatnot, I'd appreciate it. Next ones will happen, starting with the expected "Best Girl Poll", around Challenge 1. So, I got a couple of weeks to think about poll iteration.

Between getting Day 4 done and some Challenge 1/Post Challenge 1 writing, the big file is now up to 184 pages. I still have a couple of in-story Days worth of gaps to fill (now that I know which way the vote went), but I may get a couple of weeks worth of writing break at this rate (since the end of round transformation votes can go wild; kind of hard to determine which of the 25 transformations I wrote are going to win/be relevant). I have limited ability to start on Week 2 in earnest until then.

4 chapters soon to be published.

15 February

Day 5 chapters (all 4 of 'em) just published. I bet if I wait to the end of the day to push this brief update, my big file will be over 200 pages long (currently at 198). My story gaps are all in Challenge 1 Day at this point. I might have to take a writing break, depending on how many batches it takes to get through the 1st challenge. We'll see.

22 February

Day 6 just published (5 chapters), plus a couple of side things I really should have pushed out last week, but forgot. I also officially ran out of stuff to write as of Thursday. So, for the challenge day, I'm going to try something different. Instead of doing the weekly push of several chapters, I'm going to try to dribble out a chapter or two closer to a daily basis starting on Monday. That will hopefully mean I get vote results faster (so I can more accurately write Week 2 stuff).

I haven't plotted this out yet, but expect "Best Girl" vote to start by Wednesday? For that poll, I'm going to try out the ranked choice feature. I'll monitor the first few days of results and, if I like it, I'll use it for other non-transformation based votes.

I'm not going to update this page every time I publish a chapter next week (and am probably going to be moving all of this back into another chapter when I start Week 2).

25 February

Between last night and tonight, got 3 chapters and the Best Girl Poll up. I'm going to let the story sit for a couple of days to see how the ranked choice poll is going, then push another chunk out closer to the usual weekend publication. Let me get the prep work for that started.

28 February

A smidgen earlier than my usual weekend publication push, I just got out the latest bit (4 chapters and the challenge poll). Give it a read, readers. Don't forget to vote in both the challenge poll and the Best Girl poll if you haven't yet.

4 March

After assembling 8 different polls, I got the last of the challenge 1 publication pushes done (4 chapters and the transformation poll votes). How big of a weekend push will depend on how obvious the votes are going, but there should be something. After this, I get to return to a more normal feeling publication cadence.

As a side note, the free analytics from the polling site are not the greatest for ranked choice voting. Would have been nice to break it down a little more.

8 March

Between last night and right now, I got the results chapters up (4 chapters). Sorry if some of the "editing" veto formatting went a little cattywampus. Forgot that the site's style pop-up thingy doesn't support strikeout formatting. Hey, at least in my mind, Week 2 content is officially beginning. I'll do the notes shuffle next publication push. Big file size now up to 242 pages (and 228 of them are pushed onto the site). My reserve of pre-writing has shrunk to basically zero. I'm also holding out a publication push for the character sheet pages, partially because Francis and the gang are finally going to upgrade some transformations like he was planning during the next set of chapters. Makes sense to get those in before prepping the (probably 3 pages of) character sheets.