I first feel the need to have a quick rant about chapter twelve. So, for anyone planning a fun little choose your own adventure to break up the action, I have a few helpful hints:
1. Don't!
That chapter being the longest one in the story is entirely by design, even though next to nothing happens in it. I had the idea to create a few branching paths, but each one was quickly a micro-chapter in and of itself, and if you follow each branch you can begin to tell what order I wrote them in. One even flat-out admits I was tired of writing the chapter and just wanted to be done. On one hand, I'm glad I wrote the chapter, it's one of the few I'm really really proud of, but on the other hand I was burnt out writing it, marking the only time I was tired of writing afterward.
Another chapter I feel the need to sort of rant at has to be chapter fifteen, the confrontation with Linus. I thought the idea of a duel happening within Tammy's own narration was neat and it really sealed the deal for me as to how “metamancing” (the act of bending the will of the story to suit the character's needs) looks and acts, but I had to track down a whole bunch of text generators to make the effect look decent without doubling back around. There was a specific moment writing that chapter in which my word processor flat-out glitched and started making columns about 1/3 the page wide, and in that moment I decided that Linus was defeated. It was his text that was causing the issue, and the way it hung off the page and ran over itself was just interesting to me. I'm certain it was just a text rendering glitch and sure enough in both the Wattpad and Penana edits, I had to homebrew the effect with linebreaks or just leave it be. Either way, Linus' text rapidly switching around in that moment sells the notion well enough.
Looking back, afterward makes for a very easy game. Divide a spinner into seventeen sections and give it a whirl, and you can be pretty sure that what it lands on probably likely involves Tammy spending a lot of time napping and being hugged by Shim and/or her friends. Again, it's easy to tell what kind of mood I was in when I wrote most of these chapters, though chapter thirteen was a little different, I intentionally drew myself into that sleepy cuddly mood writing it wrapped in a blanket and threw myself back out of it when Memmi appeared. It's a jarring transition that feels almost scary, so it felt right in the moment. Things kind of go downhill from that moment.
Another fun game you can play with afterward is try to locate the segment that I had the most trouble with technically. It's actually a very easy game as I call out the fact that I crashed OpenOffice several times trying to write a line in chapter sixteen. The many empty boxes were originally a mix of empty boxes, full block elements, regular text, and fullwidth text (the English text you can produce with a Japanese keyboard, also the font Shim and other Lizi speak in when not used to Tammy) originally run through a Zalgo Text generator cranked up to its absolute limit. The end result was a block of text literally 900 characters across all in about three words if Twitter's character count is to be believed, but it would not paste into OpenOffice without crashing. I actually almost lost the project file and started working in a backup instead. After trying to copy each letter with their accompanying sub/superscript and crashing time after time, I eventually toned down the mix of characters to just black and white boxes with normal text, and toned the Zalgo generator down to near its lower limit. The end result still glitched catastrophically and the end result was almost entirely empty white boxes and Zalgo text. I don't quite know what happened there. At that point, I wasn't going to try to push the issue more because I was tired of crashing afterward and trying to recover it.
Calling each chapter of afterward its own self-contained story isn't really that correct, but I also can't call it that far off. Each chapter had their own gimmicks and extra bits that made them all for the most part memorable, and either way I'm glad I got to experiment with how I write and what writing can look like, and I'm sure I'll be proud of afterward for quite a while because of it all.
ns 15.158.61.20da2
