Weekly update - September 15, 2025 - Burger Assembly

Hey Peeps!

Last week I said I wanted to write the rest of the chapter, and I did manage to do that! Hurray!

Or, well... kind of!

I did write the whole chapter, but not all of the words I need are written. How did I manage such an unusual feat?

Welcome to the wonderful and confusing world of variable text!

For this week, I thought I'd explain my process for writing Play Things, and how I can be done, and not-done, at the same time.

I have written a lot of words in my life, and I have written in a lot of different ways. The typical writing wisdom is that there are two types of writers - those who plan and those who wing it. George R.R. Martin called these types 'Architects' and 'Gardeners', but the most common way to refer to them is 'Planners' and 'Pantsers'.

As in, 'By The Seat Of Your Pants'.

I find this delightful!

While I broadly agree with these definitions, like most things, when you get down to the nitty-gritty details, things tend to be a little more complicated than that. The types are not hard categories but broad tendencies, and you can shift between them based on what you're writing. I'm Pantsing this post because this is a topic I've talked about a few times, and I don't really need an outline.

For Play Things, I am much more in the Planning camp... kind of.

Play Things started out as a structural experiment. I have a massive pile of wreckage on my portable hard drive, comprising various gameplay experiments, test projects, and prototypes - and Play Things is one of those.

The first thing I came up with for Play Things was the daily structure, and the choice system - seven days, seven choices, resulting in four primary paths through the story, with optional side-paths that immediately terminate. While I've added and removed characters and shifted around the choice of toys a lot, this structure has remained unchanged for the whole time I've been working on it. It's working pretty well, though Play Things is considerably larger than I expected it to be. This always happens. I thought each chapter would be about 8,000 words, and instead, they've ended up being about 30,000 words. So it goes.

My unfinished game 'Rabbit Hole', the pre-alpha of which you can play here at the 10$ support level, was another structural experiment I made alongside Play Things. I thought at first that it would be the more successful of the two, but it ended up not working very well. There are a lot more moving parts with Rabbit Hole. There is a per-body-part tf tracking, and a code generator that creates storylets that are selected randomly - it's all very clever. Unfortunately, almost all of those moving parts are invisible while you're playing it.

In Play Things, you have way less choices than you do in Rabbit Hole, but each one actually matters, and you can see how what you chose affects what's going on.

Those choices are why I am both finished and unfinished with the current chapter.

The larger structure of Play Things was solidified before I wrote anything, but I write each chapter's outline individually. My outlines, at this stage, are really high-level and usually in point form.

Here's an example of this kind of outline from this month's chapter:

• 'going to school'

  • Riley and Candy argue about whether to go to school

    • Candy already has clients lined up, and she is also naked!

  • Riley asserts her authority over you and mind controls you into wanting to go to school

    • notably - she does not order you to go to class

It's very vague on specifics, just what's broadly going to happen, what the characters are doing and thinking, and any vital pieces of information I need to get across. I have tried writing more complicated outlines, but I find it time-consuming and not particularly useful - a general shape to every scene is usually enough for me.

Part of the reason that I don't find more detailed outlines useful is that I often don't end up following the exact order of events I write down. The previous example is from my outline, but it is not how that scene really plays out in the story itself. Scenes tend to shift as I write them - I get better ideas, or I understand character motivations more clearly, or I come up with a funny joke.

This does, sometimes, come back to bite me - and it did for this chapter. I had a complete outline written that I thought would work, but when I actually started writing it, it all felt awful. I ended up revising and rewriting the outline for the current chapter twice.

Thankfully, this usually happens pretty fast, and I seldom lose more than a day or two of writing progress. This time, I lost maybe 8000 words to my revisions. It sounds like a lot, but it really isn't too bad. I would guess I've tossed maybe 20% of the total words I've written for this project for one reason or another.

I will include variants in my outline, but when I'm writing, the first time through a story, I always write with one particular character in mind. It changes per route, of course, but trying to write all the variations of hair, and shoes, and other bits bogs me down enormously - so I choose one specific character to write for, and I write through the entire chapter from their perspective.

In this case, the character for this chapter was:

• socket

• sugar

• dreamers (route choice, does not change)

• tattoo (route choice, does not change)

• plug

• good girl (primary variant)

This is the step that I finished last week. I have the whole chapter written... but only for her. It's about 23k words so far, and likely to pick up another two or three thousand words during revisions.

My task this week is to fill out the variants. Most of the work is for the 'primary variant', which is what I call the most recent choice of toy.

In this case, I have a pretty significant amount of alternate text to write for the 'Bad Girl' path. How much additional work it takes me to support the different choices varies wildly based on the chapter. Some of them, like the previous chapter on this route, required very little additional work - this time, though, it's pretty significant. I estimate that somewhere between 8000 and 10000 words are needed to support the 'Bad Girl' path for this chapter.

The big challenge for writing complex variants is that you need to write very different events, but to have the characters end up at nearly identical emotional states by the end. It can be a tall order at times!

The secondary variants tend to be significantly less impactful. They seldom lead to entirely separate scenes. It's more of a matter of going over each paragraph and making line replacements and edits.

The most significant change is probably for the first choice. While only about 10% of people play the 'stick' route, it does tend to impact things more than the spice/sugar choice. For Sugar or Spice, I usually only have to change a few words, and make sure I pay attention to how tall you are.

So that's what I'm doing this week - writing variants! Once I'm done with that, I have some editing passes to complete for spelling, grammar, and continuity.

Once all my personal edits are done, it's off to Beta Readers. I'm looking to send the chapter out to them on Thursday or Friday, with the idea of releasing the chapter to Patrons on the following Wednesday or so.

And that's how you make a Play Things chapter! Sorry for the length of this post. I thought people might be interested in how the burger gets made.

Hope you're all having a good week. Try not to let the Horrors get to you.

Love

- Squish!