Yep, Still Sick!

Source: JK Arts on pixiv

Hi, currently writing this as my astral self feels like this—nauseous, exhausted, and possibly regretting my life choices; nevertheless, I have to be up (and in a binder) because my apartment complex is allegedly doing mandatory maintenance such as checking smoke alarms in my unit today, and I have to be on call to put my cats into their travel crates so they don't escape or get in the way of the workers.

Six months later, I am still goddamned sick from mononucleosis. My GP is of the opinion that the Epstein-Barr virus causing this is "hiding" within my cells and keeps reactivating whenever my immune system is weaker... such as whenever whatever is going on with my hormone cycle somewhat analogous to a menstrual cycle decides to throw a 1-2 punch at my lower gut and head.

It's been a miserable loop of taking 2 steps forward, 1 step back, but there are signs of improvement. I can successfully have 12-hour workdays again, and I can even have a few in a row. But more often than not, I can't expect to stay out of bed for the whole day, nor can I reliably plan a workweek when it's up to my body to decide when it's going to let me get out of bed at all.

Even if I wasn't this fatigued and overall feeling malaise, I don't think I could properly explain how frustrating and depressing all of this is. I have to roll dice to have enough energy to get out of bed, then to stay out of bed, then to have enough mental capacity to actually do work; if not, I shove an ungodly amount of coffee into me, waiting and hoping for it to fire up a stuck engine and let me do more than just brainlessly toil away at distractions (such as restarting a Civilizations V game dozens of times because my OCD is demanding me to have even a token modicum of control or because I got up to pee and forgot what I was even doing).

I don't want to keep ranting in posts like this because I should really prioritize giving my limited energy to actual work and save further explanations for when I feel like I can breathe easy again, but there is one more part that warrants saying now instead of in a more proper Patreon post.

<Author's Note: CaptainCaption is in fact going to ramble as she is on standby with the maintenance people she can hear in the hall outside, she has a doctor's appointment in two hours, and she wants to write but doesn't have a chance to sink her teeth into the game right now for reasons that she will partly explain here. I guess some of this has spoilers, but it's for stuff currently within the visual novel, so, I mean, are they really spoilers?>

My memory has been very, very bad over these last six months. Like, we're talking having no idea what I did yesterday, letting food rot in my fridge simply because I forgot I bought it, thinking about eating leftovers from something I was sure I'd cooked only a few days ago and only realizing it was over two weeks old when I opened the tupperware and saw mold, buying the same ingredients I already had because I forgot I bought them a few days ago, needing to write out not just when I took certain medications so I don't overdose but what my current medication regimen even is lest I take the wrong medications, walking away from my computer for a few minutes and then taking over 15 minutes to remember what I was doing when I get back, forgetting what I said in conversations, forgetting what others said, forgetting what I wanted to say, not realizing I was repeating something I'd said a few minutes ago with no memory of saying that, thinking I'd skipped feeding my cats and giving them more food than they're supposed to have, thinking I'd already fed them that evening, losing items constantly, having zero idea where I am when I wake up, and even having zero idea what I am when I wake up.

Now, I know mono can affect memory and recall, and I am trying to not play my own hypochondriac doctor and give attention to possible comorbidities with Alzheimer's (closer to what I have in mechanism), Parkinson's disease (closer to what I have in symptoms), and prior COVID-19 exposure, but fuck, when you're a bedridden person with a neurodegenerative disorder and severe OCD, it's hard to NOT think, worry, and fear I am going senile.

As this applies to writing, the problem is twofold:

Firstly, I can no longer get away with juggling story ideas, specific phrasing of lines, and so on in my head like I usually have. I need to write that shit down, because I will lose the entire idea or key details of it if I don't promptly write it down. Despite how much it might appear that I am a meticulous planner as you might expect given how comprehensive Britney's route outline is, I'm very much in the vein of a "by the seat of my pants" writer. That improvisational spontaneity and in-the-moment creativity is what makes me love writing so goddamned much. When I am firing on all cylinders, I can and frequently have made that work.

But that is very much not the case right now, which fucking sucks because my own metrics, some of the best moments in the entire visual novel have been spur-of-the-moment decisions:

• The entire "yandere mother/daughter" plot point, which was a happenstance of editing Zoey's sprites, realizing I could turn off the two layers on her eyes that gave them their "shine," and liking how they looked with the overcast facial gloom enough to figure out how to add them to the game in a prominent way.

• The "You've gotta be that cat, right?" line from Keisuke when Zach poses the question of who this mysterious hot girl his best friend is talking to is and how Keisuke's insane answer makes more sense than the truth.

• Zach desperately calling "time out" like a referee to Keisuke to give himself a few moments to calm down, center himself, and decide if he's going to confess what he'd been doing to Keisuke (and how the script flip of Zach not knowing that referees usually don't call timeouts as Keisuke explains the sports jargon to his misinformed best friend).

• Britney thinking her bestie in high school got back in contact with her because "she" transitioned into a trans woman, and the entire energy Britney brings to that misunderstanding as both a good queer ally and a bad queer ally.

• Zach's phone call to his dad, which is an entertaining conversation with someone who can out-ramble Zach, greatly elucidating of who Zach is by showing the other half of the equation when so much focus has been put on his mom and Zach's fears of being too much like her, and the lonely sadness of how this father-"son" talk over the phone is one of the most personal moments he's ever had with his actual father.

• The Legally Distinct Build-A-Bear visit in the mom route and turning what is seemingly an overdue mother-daughter bonding experience with genuinely touching moments into an extended metaphor of how Zoey feels like her own mother has spent two decades trying to make Zoey in her own image and is even doing that now, and all how the heavy tone of the insightful family drama and friction contrasts with the somewhat childish naivety Zoey had about how her mother's daughter might get along with her better than her son ever did.

• Pretty much the entirety of the secret lore which gives a satisfactory answer to any questions you had about the story and even some you didn't ask, but I can't claim sole credit as my best friend will in fact kill me with a laser if I do not give out an "I helped" badge for how she convinced me to run with idea after discussing it with her and lots of feedback.

And somewhat ironically, many more that I am forgetting.

That quick thinking of being able to expand an idea from a small seed into something memorable is what I believe makes re:Dreamer work as this passion project and all the ensuing quirkiness, and not having this skill I have honed over the last few years and had only really started to suspect I could someday master in 2023 feels like I am writing with one hand (and no, not in the porn way; I have standards for my own writing).

Secondly, no matter how detailed my own notes of my to-do list are, I am still going to have hazier memories than normal of what I had previously written for whatever scene I am on, and I will need to not just reread previous writing to refresh my memory of events but understand what I was doing with them.

Despite how much I just ranted about the first point of how I can't just wing it with writing as I expect myself to, this one is the more important issue of how my poor memory has affected my ability to write and lead to this massive decrease in productivity.

I ain't gonna do the extra work to strip the contents of the Ren'Py file I am currently working on of all code to only have plaintext for this calculation, but removing all the whitespace indentation as that isn't exactly typing, the file is currently 1,113,184 characters long. The average word length in English is 4.7 letters, so let's say 236,847 words; however, from previous assessments where I put the effort into being more accurate, I know that only 47.7% of the words I type and 35% of the individual characters end up on screen as something a player can read, so the true word count is somewhere in the ballpark between 83,000 and 113,000.

Truthfully, C.H.E.A.T.S. and the sheer number of micro-branches I have means that it's even more impossible to make an accurate assessment of the more usable metric of reading time beyond how everyone reads at different speeds, but from timing the new text at Ren'Py's default character display speed and auto-forward timing, it's about 2 hours of content to read, even if I would say I read at least twice as fast as that value.

Do you have any idea just how fucking much of a time-consuming pain in the ass it is to eventually be well enough to get out of bed, reread the writing up to that point to make sure I am following along, adding to the writing until I am no longer well, and having to yet again reread the previous writing as the cycle starts anew? Even with skimming or only reading the most relevant recent text, it's still an aggravating start-go-stop-restart loop, and I arguably like rereading my own writing more than anyone else does, but making this even more frustrating is that I was well over 80% done with the update before the mono and cat scratch fever messed me back up in October, meaning I had more I needed to remember (much of which I lost and had to regain) and required extra work to make sure everything could line up without being a mess of plot holes I didn't realize I was making.

This, more than any other factor, is what has made the update so goddamned late. I could barf out something that was rushed, somewhat incoherent, and even outright mediocre, but time and time again working on this visual novel has made me understand that I will absolutely give myself exponentially more work if I continue writing something I know I will need to fix later. It's not just an issue of quality control, but efficiency.

Thankfully, I can see I am getting better, slowly but surely. The writing sessions are getting longer, the consecutive writing days are getting more common, and I am able to rebound and get my head back into the game faster and with less effort. I am able to do more than just write (although it's more accurate to say the process is closer to being a director than a writer), such as adding new code functions that streamline common tasks through abstraction and creating more consistency in how I even write code from variables I can easily change and have propagate throughout the game's script in a standardized manner.

I know this is the case, but it sure doesn't feel like I am on any mend when I want to lean over a toilet and throw up.

Until next time, and hopefully with the actual release.