Dreamspace "Good Ending" and Cryo's old text files (Patreon)

So I found some of my old .txt files I tend to hoard on my desktop and just about everywhere else and found stuff ranging from old scripts, to Skype conversation grabs, to random streams of consciousness and things I copy pasted from the internet. It's fun to be reminded of just how cringey my writing was in the pre-Io era, but there was also some material I legitimately forgot about.

As it turns out, Dreamspace v2.02 had an alternative storyline. At the end of Dreamspace v1.01 Dan's about to cut through the stitches Lin put into his head to stop him from tripping. V2.02 rough draft had a version where he goes for it, and one when he doesn't. It's possible that I was planning to make a reader choose one of the two storylines as my friend Dmitry and I were thinking of making DS2 more interactive. At a time I found designing anything non-linear to be too overwhelming, so that never took off. Of course, in the end the draft I went with was the "bad ending" where Dan does reopen his implant:

(The rest of it is just Lin lecturing Dan some more and it doesn't actually go anywhere - thankfully it was just the first draft)

And here's the alternative draft where he "doesn't do it":

Ignoring my half-baked attempts writing, one thing that does fascinate me is how the entirety of D&W could've taken a very different turn if I went with this version - instead of a virus, our main thing would be operators getting physically kidnapped. DS ended up getting minimal retconning, so I wonder if that'd still be the case with the other version.

I actually did have a human trafficking angle in mind when writing some very early plots for D&W and Eve was still getting kidnapped in that first outline I wrote, but I'm so very glad it didn't go anywhere.  

I also can't help but notice that his life still ends up very much like it is in D&W...minus the worm. Hard to believe Dan would torture himself like that when he's still perfectly capable of VR. Seeing a self-help book in there seems pretty out-of-character for that guy, too. I suppose I have a much better grasp of his character these days.

Aside from that there were plenty of random badly written jokes, one-liners and sad things I just tweet from Dan's twitter account these days:

And while we're at it, here's the original of the driving to the Icebox scene. I'm actually surprised how little of it got changed.

 

As you can see, D&W would've never gotten to where it is now if Io hadn't interfered some 3 years ago. (it's been that long?!) I am incredibly glad I get to focus on the art and only mess with the writing when I Have Opinions or feel like making Io's life difficult. (though I'd like to think I got a little better at writing by proxy, but due to language issues my stuff still needs an Io pass anyway)

I'm still looking for some 2012 writing but it seems to be buried deep in my hard drive somewhere. I definitely remember having a piece of writing in there that was so cringey, I locked it with a password and typed in some random gibberish to make sure I may never access it again (because deleting it clearly wasn't dramatic enough)

Anyway, I promise this is the last time I'll expose you to my raw, un-edited writing, let alone 2013 era scripts, but hopefully this was at least vaguely amusing.