Writer's Blog: The Flipside of Secrecy

Coded Demo Length: 291k

Average Playthrough: 70k

Next Demo Update: May 28th (Chapter 10, beginning the closed demo)

Late May will be Mind Blind’s one year anniversary, which officially makes this the longest that I’ve ever worked on a single project without pause! My goal is to pass the 300,000 word mark by month's end, which should be doable since the current (coded!) demo is just over 290k. End game remains to have Mind Blind’s first draft completed by December, and then it’ll be onto editing (and starting a new project, since I must be creating at all times or else I start talking to imaginary friends in public). I’m 95% sure that I’m on track for Mind Blind to be a single, self-contained book, but I’ll keep you guys informed if the plot decides to do something twisty and that changes. All my villains are in a row, and now all that remains is for Button to shoot them off their pedestals (or join them up there, your choice).

Writing Interactive Fiction takes . . . a very long time. Certainly longer than I anticipated when I first started learning to code, and I admit that there’s been times lately when I’m eager to have Mind Blind finished so I can jump into my next world. Middles are always the hardest and slowest for me to write, as I’m neither enamored with the newness of a project, nor swept away by the anticipation of its end. Mind Blind’s world and cast has been a marvelous adventure, and I can’t wait for all of the story’s secrets to be shared! Keeping a lid on all past and future plot twists (and worse, fearing that I won’t execute them properly) has been exhausting. But at least in this point of the demo, all the major players have had their first names revealed.

Mind Blind is a game about secrets, which is ironic because the main character is in large part defined by their inability to keep any. (Frustrating? Often. Useful? Perhaps.) Every character in Mind Blind must be examined not only by how they’ve interacted with Button thus far, but also by these hidden traits which drive them. For some, like Sally, these secrets are relatively easy to uncover: she has conflicted feelings of self-worth, a crush on a Wiseman, and a genuine fear of her own powers. For other characters like K, their secrets take time to unravel and have yet to be fully addressed.

For a few characters, these secrets are relatively harmless in the grand scheme of things: Percy steals candy from his mother’s purse. Others secrets are more ominous, like the fact that Dr. Amari is on Unity’s payroll, and thus doesn’t abide by patient-doctor confidentiality. And then there are some that might make you question a character’s entire ethical code, like the fact that John is willing to put aside decades of qualms over brainrange suppressors and Ment rights if a BRS might save his family.

My point: each and every character in Mind Blind has their own secrets.

Even Button's family.

Especially Button's family.

Although this post is about secrets, it’s also about my relief. Because after a year spent carefully guarding all these secrets like a dragon atop a hoard and writing them into Mind Blind’s subtext . . . I finally get to begin spilling the beans. And my oh my but it is nice to be on that flipside. I missed blurting, and now at long last I get to blurt all over the pages.

Warning: the line between heroes and villains is about to get blurry. Proceed with caution.