A lot later than I was hoping, but it’s up.
Getting Chapter 39 out on my now-usual monthly schedule didn’t go as planned for two reasons:
- I ran into that old enemy of enemies: writer’s block. I’d planned on fitting Lorenz and Lysithea into the story for a while, but I couldn’t figure out what I wanted to do with them. This is another “training” chapter, and one of the things I try to do with scenes like this is try to strike up some interesting banter between the characters involved, rather than just use the scene as a vehicle for making the characters stronger. The challenge comes from doing so with characters who don’t interact with each other in the source material. Outside of support conversations, everyone at the Officers Academy tends to stick with their familiar cliques (not unlike school in real life), so it wasn’t as easy for me to think of dialogue for, say, Marianne trying to convince Bernadetta that her horse Dorte doesn’t want to trample her. I figured I’d give it the old college try anyway. Hopefully, I succeeded.
- Nintendo dropped another hype trailer for Three Hopes last month that seemed to hint that, yes, Monica is alive in this continuity and will be playable. There was just enough there to show what to expect from the game in a gameplay sense, and that gave me enough incentive to place my preorder.
My next objective is to get chapter 40 ready to go on or before release week, because most of my attention will be on that once it’s out.
Until then, you can read up on the latest chapter here, or at the regular mirrors:
Scrawl Before You Write 