A explanation for the delay!

Hello peoples!

Long time no see! I wish I had great news and could reveal a clever plan or cool new project that would explain why I disappeared for two months!

Sadly, I can't! The actual answer is very silly and also insane.

For people who are just interested in the game, here's the

TLDR:

I am not dead. I am still working on the game. The next main chapter is the Lips / Dreamer route, but the next update will be a short Doctor Shine special that will be released by the end of the month or earlier (I'm aiming for the 20th).

For people who are interested in the silly things I have done for myself - here's why I lost my whole summer!

So, last October, I got COVID for the second time, and since then, I've had fatigue problems. It's hard for me to stay asleep at night, and if I don't get really good sleep, sometime during the day, over a period of about five minutes, I will get very cold and incredibly tired. Then I have to sleep for two to three hours.

This sucks! It makes it hard to do things!

So, in an effort to improve my sleep, I started taking magnesium supplements and then melatonin around the start of July.

This was a mistake!

A huge mistake!

Holy shit!

This made the fatigue situation much worse, to the point where I was randomly falling asleep several times a day, and I never really FULLY woke up. I had maybe a couple of hours where I was mostly awake, but I was incredibly exhausted that whole time. I also couldn't sleep at night... so I took more melatonin.

You would think that I would put two and two together. I started taking sleep supplements, and then I got really tired all the time - but I cannot emphasize enough how impossible it was to think or do anything while I was doing this to myself.

I am aware this is INCREDIBLY silly. I know! Trust me!

It is ridiculous! I feel very daft to have done this to myself.

Anyway, I was trying to write the next chapter, but I could only work on it during my brief moments of lucidity. I worked on a version of the chapter before my self-induced narcolepsy got really bad. I got about 18000 words into it, but it wasn't working very well. This chapter is tricky because it's quite intense, it involves a lot of complicated mind control shenanigans, and Kasha and Riley haven't met and don't have a relationship - so conflict between them is tricky to pull off.

So, I scrapped it and started over. I somehow managed to write about 28k words of a new version in August, but those of you doing the math will be asking the obvious question, "Weren't you half asleep during all of August? Isn't it a bad idea to be making narrative decisions at that time?" and the answer is - yes! Yes it was!

I finally figured out what was going on with the melatonin and the 'not being awake ever' thing about two weeks ago. It took me about another week for the melatonin to finally leave my system so I could start putting my life back together. Many things had gone quite poorly. Cleaning out my fridge was an interesting experience, let me tell you!

Since then, I've been trying to hammer the largely incoherent version of the chapter I wrote into something that I could release, but it's just not working. I traded one set of problems for another, and these problems are kind of worse for the game as a whole than the version I was working on in July.

This means, I have to start over again a second time. It sucks, but Lips/Dreamer is a lot of people's favorite route, and I really want to do a good job with it. It deserves more than something that I banged together during a brief period of lucidity.

However, I don't want to delay ANOTHER month to get something out, so I'm going to do a SPECIAL first. It will be relatively short, and probably kinda silly - but it will be released.

Thank you, everyone, for your patience and understanding.

I'm not taking melatonin again! If you're in a similar situation where you think something is wrong but don't know what it is, consider that it's maybe the medication you just started taking! Consider that!

It might be that!

Anyway, I'm going to go write. See you!

- Squishy