So, it’s been around six months since my last devlog, and...well, I did finally manage to get the book specifically on Babylonian history bought and read.  I also did some further research (though a tiny bit more will be required because I need to double-check my info on Bronze Age trade routes) so the majority of the research is now more or less completed.

That’s the good news.

The bad news is that in preparing to start the rewrite of book four, I decided I’d better reread the first three books to familiarize myself with what the situation is in the final versions, versus the situation in the original drafts.  (Case in point:  in the original draft of book one, the girls never admitted to being girls, so they left Troy in book two still in disguise as Hyperborean boys, but then they return in book four as Amazons, leading to no small amount of confusion among the Trojans!)

In so doing I found all manner of problems.  Sentences that were way too long and convoluted.  (Sooooo many of those!)  Things that just plain weren’t phrased the way I would phrase them now.  Words repeated way too many times in a single paragraph when there were better ways to say things.  Actual freaking errors, including missing words, wrong punctuation, and words with the wrong ending.

Including a missing word in the very first chapter of this book.

When I saw that it was hard to stop my hand from immediately hitting the “edit chapter” button on AO3 and fixing it then and there.

But that would have unleashed the “fix it” genie and I would have descended into an editing phase instead of a rewriting phase.

So I forced myself to keep reading.

Therefore, my current position on book four is that I need to reread the current draft of book four so I can both get the exact plot fixed in my mind’s eye so I know what I’m building to and also so I can start thinking about how to fix and rework various problems.  Then I can start on the rewrite.

Once the rewrite is done, while I’m letting it sit between drafts (I like to let things be for a month or two at the least so my mind can forget a few of the nitty gritty details, making me slightly more likely to notice the errors when I return to it), then I’ll go in and fix the errors on the first three books.

Part of me wants to change book one’s interactive version over from TWINE to Ren’py like the others, and part of me figures that might be way too much work for too little reward (I mean, it still gets clicked on from time to time and sometimes it even gets browser plays, but I don’t know if anyone’s reading more than a few words of it, ya know?)…so I don’t know if I’ll end up doing that or not.  May have to do with how much I’ve forgotten about how TWINE works.

Just thought I should break my silence and put that info out there.

(I welcome thoughts on the TWINE/Ren’py debate, if anyone has any, btw.)