(This post was originally planned to go up on Patreon. However, Patreon’s limited formatting options would not have allowed me to include some critical parts of the article, such as the inline audio clips, so I decided to post it here instead. I think it’s fitting: these updates are for my supporters, and if you’re reading this at all, that probably includes you, whether or not you’re among the people who generously donate to me every month to keep these projects on track.)
Three and a half months ago, I estimated that chapter 1 of CURSE/KISS/CUTE would take about a month and a half to finish. Even accounting for the old adage that whenever a developer sets an ETA, you should expect it to take twice as long, we’re still a few weeks overdue! What happened?
Okay:
If you read the abortive comic version of CURSE/KISS/CUTE, you might recall that the opening scene features a brief snippet of a conversation between Aster and Selené (née Selene) establishing a few expectations about the nature of the story. This scene is a framing device: it lasts for a total of five comic pages before we smash cut to focus on another character, Nathan Small, who will be the subject of the first major plot arc within this universe.
CURSE/KISS/CUTE is now, as it was then, intended to be an ensemble series: there are a number of characters who will share the protagonist spotlight over its run, each with their own mostly self-contained story arcs. By design the series is open ended: it will run until I’m out of tidy little arcs to write.
For example: I already know that Nathan’s story will consist of a number of entire chapters all on its own. I’ve been developing the concept for his story for literally seven-plus years (ever since the discontinuation of a certain other webcomic featuring a certain other Nathan). I’m very excited about it: it’s “The Good Stuff” from top to bottom, and should serve as a great first run through the universe of CURSE/KISS/CUTE. That’s why I wasted no time getting there in the comic version.
This is where the nature of the roadblock begins to come into focus.
The texture of an “update” in this pseudo-visual novel storytelling format is a little different from that of a webcomic. An individual update consists of a huge amount of story content compared to the old weekly or biweekly postings of individual comic pages. That’s just how I like it! But it also leaves that original opening scene with Aster and Selené in a bit of a weird spot. It doesn’t really belong to the same chapter as Nathan’s story, but it’s way too short to exist as its own update in this new format.
Yet the scene is load-bearing. Though not often in the spotlight, Aster is the closest thing to a “main character” CURSE/KISS/CUTE has, and their story is the framing device from which all of the other characters’ stories depart, and to which they inevitably return.
So, I figured, “Well, I can just pad this scene out into about ten thousand words and have it serve as a standalone prologue chapter for the whole series.” Literally what could go wrong? Literally.
I spent the first, like, two months of this development cycle discarding versions of chapter 1 that just did not work. It was really, really boring. I thought to myself that the primary concern of this chapter would be establishing everything the reader needs to know about the universe. That way, in the future where there are multiple different story arcs that a new reader might be interested in reading, they could start with this first chapter as an on-ramp, and then jump ahead to the stuff they’re most excited about. This isn’t a terrible idea, but it put me in the mindset that this chapter 1 would be — had to be — almost entirely exposition.
I wasn’t, like, particularly excited to write a bunch of exposition. Exposition is not The Good Stuff.
Here’s some advice: there’s no way to write 10,000 words that you’ve already decided are not The Good Stuff, and have the result of that process be The Good Stuff. The Good Stuff does not magically come into existence as a reward for doing your due diligence and writing a bunch of clever words. If it’s not The Good Stuff, it’s just not The Good Stuff!
As annoyed as I am that it took this long, these are lessons I’m happy to have learned. I gave the story a soft reset and tackled it again, without preconceived notions of what was “supposed” to go here in this part of the plot. The result is a way stronger take on chapter 1 that I’m actually extremely into, containing a tidy vertical slice of CURSE/KISS/CUTE’s themes and gimmicks. I’d like to have gotten here faster, but here we are — I hope that the wait will have been worth it.
As of this writing, I’ve just finished the penultimate draft of this new version. In the next month I’ll take it to the final draft, work on the illustrations, and — the hope is — have it published before the year is out.
I want to say that the one part of this project that has been going super smoothly is the music. Who knows why, but I just never get as caught up in the weeds with music as I sometimes do with art and writing. Now that I have some experience with composing for CURSE/KISS/CUTE under my belt, I can confidently say that it’s totally realistic for me to generate the amount of music each month that this project requires (which is not a huge amount!).
In no particular order, here are some finished tracks from the upcoming chapter:
anyway thanks for reading happy halloween!!!!!!!!
(A previous version of this article was live for about two hours which included samples of unfinished writing along with the tracks of music from the scenes in which they appeared. It made me feel weirdly vulnerable, so I removed them. This is hard to explain, but there’s a reason the back of a DVD box has screenshots of the movie and the back of a book doesn’t have screenshots of the book, right? I hate showing unfinished work: I hate showing that work devoid of context even more: when it comes to prose, beyond the occasional quotable passage, I think that writing samples can be both perfectly good and perfectly insufficient for conveying what the story is or whether it’s worth your while, so I took them out. If you saw them and you liked them, that rips, though.)