I have a gif of someone patting a cheetah. The cheetah is meant to be a were-cheetah, which I sent to the model for the were-cheetah's human model, for fun. So this human person looked at the gif of a cheetah and his response was...."I look a bit chubby."

Brutal is right! And I like it. If we're going to use timing at all, it's better to commit to the realism and truly torture people.

Maybe. A bit. (I'm losing my nerve so quickly! What a wimp!)

Although 10-15 hours... yikes. I think I'll go 8-10 hours or so overnight, as a way of clearly saying to the reader, "Go to bed. See you tomorrow."

And I definitely put delays in with any youtube video links. It's like saying: yes, you really DO have to watch this (even when it's Taylor Swift... that's brutal, right?)

We should make sure each day has a significant amount of content. It would be so annoying to have a day with just a bit of what felt like pointless filler with maybe a pic or two when the rest is super long and exciting and dramatic.

(Glances at own story, swears.)

I'm working on giving each of my main characters a distinct texting style (without it being annoying...). I can't stand leaving out punctuation, though, so even the character who never capitalises still uses apostrophes perfectly. They're college students, not savages, dammit. I figure anything "hip" (that's what the kids say these days, right?) I try to do will be dated by next month, but anything stylistic I make up myself will be an individual character quirk.

I think there's a forced rhythm in Sequel stories, which have to be broken up because of the size of a phone screen.

So I think it works better to have a more elegant rhythm, like a symphony rather than an essay, where "long" is only perhaps three sentences. Something like, "short-click-short-short-click-medium-short-short-click-short-long-click" and then at the climax you can built to "short-short-click-short-click-short-click-short-shortdelay-short-click"

Or whatever. I strongly doubt my own story reflects this. It's all just thoughts :)

I sort of have magicians, but not that kind.

I have shapeshifters (werewolves, but various animals) which means a lot of animal pictures. Always fun, especially when they look pissed off. I happen to own an especially photogenic cat, and have a model friend. At a certain point the penny dropped and I realised they are absolutely the same character. See?

This probably only amuses me, but it amuses me a LOT.

I'm really enjoying searching for just the right stock photos. It takes forever, but it the perfect useful procrastination.

Oh yes please! I've emailed you, and anyone interested in trading with me (mine is paranormal romance, FYI - I specialise in fantasy but will read anything that doesn't deserve a trigger warning for sexual violence, horror, or excessive gore) can email me at fellissimo@hotmail.com

Just came across a trigger warning-y scene in "Black Wolves".

I've found as I changed my other character names that the tool very cleverly altered the node-character name in all the other nodes associated with that character (terrible sentence sorry - I mean when I changed a name from "Manny" to "Amir" all the nodes designated "Manny" automatically changed to "Amir"). Will that work for self/player? And can we then tidily delete "Self"?

Another question: I sometimes edited my text to look better or to have better rhythm based on the simulation screen. How accurate is the sim in the sense of individual words making a different to the shape of a paragraph or (more importantly for timing) the number of lines in a node? Does it vary from one device to another?

I notice the player-decision text expands and contracts in order to fit in its box. That looks good and works well I think.

I write entirely inside sequel, with notes on the story, character, canon, pics, links etc all in word documents (so far I've managed not to put things on bits of paper, but the temptation is strong to surround myself with notes). When I want to check phrasing/spelling/grammar I look at the node, and when I want to check the flow of the story I use the simulator, often playing the same section over and over.

It helps that the tool looks so pretty. It also means I can see instantly when a bit of dialogue looks like a wall of text.

That means it's VERY useful to be able to click on a node and then play from there, and quite frustrating when I lose my place. It would be useful to be able to "bookmark" a node in some fashion eg. I'd bookmark the beginning of each day, almost like chapters, so I could find the bits I needed more quickly (ya know, three seconds instead of all the hassle of ten seconds. I got things to do), and maybe bookmark scenes that I knew would need extra attention. Or pictures that weren't de-watermarked yet.

I can do this manually just by adding the text of "XXXXX" and clicking "search", of course. Just gotta remember to take it out later. I also use the clock as a marker between days (I put minor delays inside nodes, and major delays in their own place). The profile pics are super useful for finding my place too.

I REALLY hope sequel is all backed up somewhere very safe, because I have no way to back it up myself. At all.