November Newsflash #2 (Patreon)

Happy Friday to you! If you are someone who does Thanksgiving, I hope it went well for you. I've been a bit ill this week, but I am really pleased with the progress on Honor Bound (plus a few Royal Affairs epilogue edits).

Here is one of my Honor Bound songs to listen to!

I finished drafting Chapter 6 of Honor Bound this fortnight, hooray! Chapter 6 is quite a big one: it includes some big characterful moments, especially with Fiore, Korzha, and Savarel, and some plot-thickening as well. I also submitted Chapters 5 and 6, got my editorial notes back, and have implemented them. This week, I started planning and coding Chapter 7, which is a very dramatic chapter indeed with some major peril involved! I'm nearly done with coding it now: next week I'm going to do some difficulty balancing and then I'll get writing.

Honor Bound current wordcount: 258800

Honor Bound fortnight's wordcount: 19,840

Honor Bound current playthrough length: 66,221 (longer than Creme de la Creme now!)

Behind the scenes:

Although I was ill this week, I did get to the cinema to see Saltburn last week, about which you can read some of my thoughts on Tumblr. It was a messy kind of film that I mostly enjoyed, especially the weird bits, but left me rather cold at the end for various reasons (plot, some odd messaging, and the way the film was over-eager about explaining exactly what was going on).

I keep thinking about Archie Madakwe's character, Farleigh Start. Madakwe plays the only Black character with much screentime in a rarefied white-centric aristocratic setting, who's ambivalently catty verging on hostile to the protagonist, fashionable, and a bit of an outsider himself, comments rather toothlessly on the racist and classist society he's in, and ends up, well, I won't spoil it... and he's the cousin of Ashley Madakwe, who plays an eerily similar role in the Revenge TV show which I happened to get really into back in 2011 (did anyone else watch it? there was some truly nonsensical stuff in it but some of it was good fun. Henry Czerny is a hammy delight, and I was overjoyed to see him in Ready or Not, the other other sinister country house movie that I watched this year, playing basically the same character). I wonder if the two actors chat about their roles when they get together for coffee.

Anyway, I do like some menace in a country house, and the actors were fantastic. Just rather muddled, but it was nice to watch something that made me think (even if it was making me think about TV shows I used to obsess over!)

Sneak peek:

This is a little recreational bit from Chapter 6:

You catch a few more hours of sleep before breakfast, after which Raffi invites you to come out to the gardens and exercise while the students do their music lessons. ${varenn} joins you, to Raffi's surprise, but Raffi's eager to have ${var_them} along too.

You start with jogging around the borders of the garden and up to the sheep pastures, then return to the garden for bodyweight exercises. Sunlight streams down now, having burned away any dew and mist, and it's making your head pound; Raffi, looking concerned, hands you a canteen of water, which helps a little.

My favourite bit:

You might remember Honored Lidia, who has a problem with Denario in Chapter 2? She continues being a problem at various points as the game goes on, but I've planned out something for her in Chapter 7 which I hope will make her a little more complex, and I'm looking forward to writing it.

I hope you have a good weekend, everyone!