DAY11.SCENE03

Belated merry Christmas and a happy new year, everyone. I had intended to post this scene around that time, but, well... travel, family gatherings, and all that came along with it just took up too much of my time.

In any case, regarding the scene, it's about the after-effects of her walking in on you. I tried to showcase the tension that is inside the boy's head, his worry about the future, and how to fix things. And also the guilt Julia feels and the resulting awkwardness between them.

And then, in the end, the whiplash of her emotions when she's once again reminded of how much he loves her—and how happy that makes her (and how this will further solidify her guilt, shown in the next diary scene).

The editing took a little longer than I expected to finish up, for a couple of reasons:

I kept yo-yo-ing between a couple of ideas, changing my mind over and over on the way I wanted to approach the scene in two different places.

The first of which is the cooking scene—did you expect an entire, detailed, much dreaded full cooking scene once again? I thought about it but decided against it, removing it entirely at first.

But, I then missed some of the elements that happened during it (the passage of time for the pacing of the scene, watching Julia training through the window, plot continuity about meal changing due to the nutritionist's advice, and also the lingering worry over Sarah not having responded yet).

So, I decided to add it back in, in an abridged sort of way, which hopefully is not too meandering, unlike previous ones.

The other part of the scene that I was very unsure of, and kept going back and forth on, is whether the boy should bring up what happened earlier that day during dinner.

In my original outline of the scene, I had him bring it up, and I wrote the dialogue for it. But I didn't like it. So I kept tweaking it, and tweaking it, and finally, decided to just remove it entirely and to just have them pretty much gloss over it, not knowing how to fix the awkwardness between them—which is especially important since it's still in the build-up phase, and will only really rear its head in my expectations in the next full scene, in which you will be making a choice between Sarah and Julia.

What's next, in terms of progress toward the next full update, is that I have mostly finished the writing of the fourth and final scene of the update.

There is still a portion of the scene I am unhappy with. But I've recently had some ideas on how to fix it, which I just need to put down on paper now.

Then I still need to edit the scene... which I'm not looking forward to, and I expect it will take some time because it's a long scene with a lot of hard dialogue.

After I am done with that, I need to do the finishing touches on the first three scenes, which for this scene would be to add more dynamic inner thoughts which differ based on what route you are on (Sarah / Julia).

I've written some of that already, but not all of it is included here because I still need to ruminate on this dialogue a little longer.

(I need to also let you choose which path you are on for these individual scenes since right now you are locked to the Julia route's version.)