Violet Memoir Dev Log! VERY IMPORTANT!

Hey, just wanted to let everyone know I've been doing some serious re-evaluating of Violet Memoir over these last couple of weeks and realized that I've been approaching the story in a rather flawed way. While I don't regret it, there's a lot of fluff in my story which has really bloated things up and I realized that with the way the story is going, I would essentially be another 4 years away from finishing, which just doesn't seem reasonable on anybody (and that's under the assumption I would do 20-30k updates which is double my workload).

I'm wanting to ask you guys what you think would be best about this. The easiest (and likely ideal) solution would be to cut and streamline very hard. That means the story's pace is likely going to pick up immensely and the romance will lose a lot of its filler. I still plan on finishing each character's arc but there likely won't be any dates or anything like that. Some of that romance will have to be left on the cutting room floor. A lot of the romance will be scenes that directly tie into the plot.

This is a pretty radical change and would remove essentially a third of the game as I did intend to go to 21 days each initially but I figured out that even if I cut down the size of each of those days to the size of an update. It would still take me nearly 4 years to do unless I released multiple days at once, which would require me heavily increasing my workload or massively reduce the size of the days (which would cut fluff anyway).

Even with this change, it would still likely take me a little over 2 years to finish Violet Memoir, which is still a decent commitment but not 4 years long. This would, however, mean that Leigh and Oscar's routes are basically a third done already, and Lucas is just under halfway. Which is still plenty of time to do their whole stories.

The only other solution I could really think of, that didn't require me abusing the hell out of myself by increasing the workload, would be switching Violet Memoir back into being a singular story instead of diverging routes. This was actually how Violet Memoir was in its initial conception where we would jump between everyone's nightmare sequences but I scrapped that early in favor of a route-diverging system, something I very heavily regret now. The main issue with this is that it would require such extensive rewrites and still basically just be route-based just with a lot of shared scenes.

Please, I'd love any and all kinds of feedback for this. This is a pretty radical decision that will be determining Violet Memoir's future.