Chapter's End: The Aliquet Press Monthly Digest (August 2025)

Ah, August. The hardest month of the year for me, as I grapple with the reality of completely shifting the focus of my life from full time creative person back to a gainfully employed member of society. While I absolutely adore my job — especially the school district I am currently employed by — and there is very little in the world that I would give it up for, this transition is always a little rough for me emotionally. I believe you will see that reflected in my update from the month…

📚 Currently Consuming: Screen & Scene 📚

Reading: Only one fiction book to update about here this month, and that is Love Theoretically by Ali Hazelwood. I picked this one up to continue my research and hopefully stop my existential genre spiraling because “no one writes books like me in romance!!” and trying to figure out if I was the problem, or if the genre just wasn’t the right fit. I chose this one because her work (specifically this series) came highly recommended for romance books with a single, female POV, rather than the more traditional split between male main character / female main character. This has been one of the things I have been most worried about in terms of fitting in with the genre expectations, so to see her doing it (well) and still being firmly labeled as contemporary romance brought some relief. The book itself was pretty okay! Which I know is not exactly a glowing review by any definition, but there were just some things about it that I didn’t love. At its core, the book is about Elsie, an adjunct professor struggling to make ends meet, who picks up a side hustle working for an app called Faux, where people can book fake girlfriends (and I assume boyfriends, though that is never explicitly mentioned) when needed for events or social gatherings. She ends up interviewing for a tenure-track position at MIT and one of the people on the hiring committee (Jack) just so happens to be the brother of her one and only long-term client through Faux. They — naturally — have some chemistry between them, and once Jack manages to get over the idea that Elsie has been lying to his brother and living this whole second life, he is able to admit he’s actually had feelings for her from the first time they met… and then the last third of the book or so is their relationship and resolving the academic drama plot points. Overall, it wasn’t bad, but I honestly didn’t love Elsie as a character. But what bothered me most was that I couldn’t tell if I was supposed to like her or not. I don’t mind an intentionally unlikeable main character (hello, Holden Caufield, anyone?) and have written my fair share of them, but if I can’t tell if they’re meant to be unlikeable, or if they’re just grating? Not my favorite. I also didn’t love how the first 60-70% of the book was super focused on character development and story… and then as soon as anything relationship started to happen, all of that was out the window, and the only thing that mattered was sex. Again — not against having that in the book at all, but the huge tonal shift from zero to the only thing happening across several chapters? Not exactly riveting plot / character development. Definitely not a bad book, and it definitely helped me feel better about my own genre labeling, but also not an automatic recommend, either. 8.5/10

Playing: There’s also not much to report here, but…

• I’m still working on Psychonauts, but with my going back to work, my friend I’m playing it for also potentially making the transition into full-time employment from his internship, and just the way the game is structured, we haven’t been able to make a whole lot of progress here. In August, we did manage to get in three sessions of approximately 2-3 hours each, completing a level in each session, but we still have a bit of a ways to go with that. I don’t know that we’ll finish it in September, but we’ll hopefully get a little further along, at least. I have still be absolutely loving it though — the comedy is still SO good. We were playing one level where you are helping a descendent of Napoleon Bonaparte beat Napoleon at a strategy board game and he says the line, “generations of royal inbreeding down the drain,” just out of nowhere — so perfectly dryly delivered that both my friend and I had to stop and take a moment because we were laughing SO HARD. Between that, and the “not ALL milk is enriched!” or the conversation about acorns vs. nuts (among several others), I think I’ll be quoting this game for quite a while.

• I’m also still working on finishing up my picture in Proverbs. I’m up to about 70% complete now, so I have made decent progress on that this month. I might actually hit the 100% in September, if I put my mind to it!

• I still have a handful of games on the docket to play that I need to make time for: Parallel Experience with a friend, for one, but I also just picked up LEGO Lord of the Rings while it was on super-sale. I have been feeling the itch to finally play Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep and maybe finally giving Kingdom Hearts III another attempt, but we’ll see if that lasts more than a few days / weeks. If it does, I might pick it up this month. I’m also really wanting to complete another playthrough of Super Mario RPG. Not like I haven’t finished it like 73 times previously, at least. I think at this point, I just want to escape into video games so I don’t have to think about all of the other real world things I’m putting off.

• It’s also free log-in time for FFXIV until sometime in September, so I’ll definitely be picking that up for ~96 hours sometime over the next month or so. I’m thinking next weekend, when everyone is busy playing Silksong instead.

Watching:

• Episode 6 of The Amazing Digital Circus came out mid-month and was amazing. It might’ve been my favorite episode yet. It definitely got me thinking a lot more about why these characters ended up transported into the circus (which, I’ve always been vaguely curious about, of course, but prior to this the main quandary had been more focused on how instead). This episode helped me put some pieces together and draw some connections between several characters that might potentially be a hint? I’m kinda hoping this is some sort of virtual reality / simulation of like, group therapy / EBT for some sort of experimental inpatient treatment center, and they’re all characters who embody a certain mental illness (Gangle is MMD, Jax is BPD, Kinger is PTSD / dementia, etc.) and the circus is their journey through their treatment. If you’re unfamiliar with the series, highly recommend starting from the Pilot and giving it a watch. Not only is it funny, but it’s also well thought out and surprisingly deep, but the animation and voice acting is also absolutely top-tier. Plus, it’s only going to be nine episodes total, so it’s not like a super huge commitment or anything.

• On the complete opposite end of the spectrum, I am absolutely dying for a rewatch of Game of Thrones. I haven’t started it yet, since I’m also trying to coordinate at least the first season with my friend (he’s never seen it and is convinced he’ll hate it. I highly believe he’ll love it. But, since I watched Lord of the Rings with him, he promised me to at least watch through until Sean Bean dies at the end of season one with me, and if he doesn’t hate it, he’ll keep going, but if he does, he has an out at that point), so that has been a little challenging. I’m really hoping we’ll at least be able to get one episode in during the month of September. We’ve at least been talking about it a lot in August, so… we’ll see.

Listening: I know this doesn’t normally have a category here, but until I can do a full write-up on the album, I’d be remiss to not mention that my absolute favorite band (with leading lady, ⋆.˚ ☾ . CASSANDRA . ☾ ˚.⋆) just dropped their new album at the end of the month: I’M LOOKING OUT THROUGH THESE EYES BUT I’M IN HERE ALONE. It’s brilliant and heartbreaking and maybe my favorite thing they’ve ever done to date — the jury’s still out if it’s ousted Dear Adeline quite yet, but… We’ll see. Give them a listen; you’ll love them.

📝 Tales in Progress 📝

I heavily edited the first four chapters of Emo Coffee Shop at the beginning of the month, and sent the first two over to a prospective editor. I got her feedback back — and loved it — but unfortunately, our timelines don’t match up, and I don’t think I’ll be able to utilize her for this project. At least not for this stage of editing. I might reach back out for line edits / proofreading once the big content edits have taken place.

That being said, I’m also very on the fence over whether or not I need / should use a developmental editor for this particular project at all anyway? I have a few friends who are willing to beta for me, and I trust them to rip apart any of the big, glaring errors. But then also, being an editor myself, I kinda know what I’m looking for in the editing process. And with this novel in particular, I know I followed the typical romance beat sheet, so I don’t think it’s going to need any massive structural overhauls (despite not fitting neatly into any genre cleanly — which I’ve been mentioning offhandedly throughout the month / this post and is an upcoming Substack post you can look forward to). But I do know it needs a fair amount of line edits, and there are elements that I really want to bring out in the next draft (I really want to lean into the mid-2000’s nostalgia, for example)… And it’s currently sitting at 110k words, when my goal for this series is between 85-90k, and that is 20-25k extra words, so… I need to make a choice if I’m okay with that length (probably?) or if I want to try and cut that many words.

Once I’ve done my edits, I’ll have a better idea of which route I think I want to go, and then I’ll also be able to take my betas’ thoughts into consideration with that too. I think I’d prefer to max out around 100k, rather than 110k, but we’ll see how that all shakes out.

🎮 Pixels & Side Quests 🎮

Shockingly, this has been the thing I have been most consistently working on in August, likely because I’ve been spending almost every Saturday coworking with two of my dev friends, so I’ve been forcing myself to make time for it. And when you spend 8 hours a week doing something, you’re bound to make progress.

Last month, I’d mentioned I’d been really focusing hard on the demo, and while I’ve still been doing some of that, this month, I actually scaled back out to do some more bigger picture work. I was really wanting to help solidify some of the pieces I hadn’t been feeling super confident with in regards to the overall narrative of the game, especially in the way that I was keeping track of all the moving pieces.

My game, All the King’s Men, is very large. If I’m being honest, it’s far too large for me to be tackling on my own as a solo dev. But I’m stubborn, and I’m going to do it anyway. Part of that, however, has been the extreme learning curve of how to keep everything straight so that (a) development continues progressing (b) the game isn’t riddled with inconsistencies, unfinished ideas, and bugs and (c) I’m not completely lost the entire time, but especially when I go long periods of time between working on it.

Ironically, the part of this I’d been struggling with the most is the narrative / story parts of it. I’d tried several things to try and get the story down on digital paper in a way that makes sense, and just hadn’t settled on anything that was both easily traceable (to check for good spread of things like plot beats, character acquisition, difficulty spikes, required vs. optional content, the ways that all of those things impacted the narrative, and more) and also making sure each of the playable character had their fair share of the screentime and a purpose in being there more than just “because I want them to be.” I’d tried several different methods and pieces of software from a notebook to a spreadsheet to multiple word documents and charts to fancy things like Articy. And nothing stuck.

This is a cutscene in Articy — a VERY detailed program that I quite enjoyed using. It breaks down literally everything you might need, including tracking variables and switches, while allowing you to incorporate visuals like the portraits as well. VERY cool, but too much for me. It had become a big distraction to actual progress.

Mid-month, however, a friend suggested that I try a very basic flowchart, using a software called Dia that they had learned when studying computer programming in University. I wasn’t sure it would work, especially since he introduced it as something used for writing the flow of coding and storytelling is about as far away from coding in my head as possible… but I’m open to trying most things long enough to give them a solid shake.

And this… This worked! I honestly think this has been the best thing I’ve done for my narrative development in years. It forces me to go back to the basics and focus just on the points in which plot WILL happen. How do you get from Point A to Point B logically, and how many moments in between will it take to actually get there that make sense and fit into the journey. It’s made me look at the REALLY big picture of the game, rather than getting lost in the details and trying to write the scenes. Instead, I’m looking at where and when the scenes will happen, where the player could branch out away from the intended path, and how exactly doing things out of order might impact how the story is told.

I know you can’t actually read what any of these nodes are saying at the moment, but once it’s fully finished, I’ll share a version that can be opened at full-sized and zoomed in on to be read. But this is the “critical path” of about half of the game.

It’s also given me the opportunity to make sure each character joins the party for a purpose. Because if they don’t have a distinct purpose and reason to join the party, they need to be reconsidered as a party member and made into an NPC instead. Some of the areas in that flowchart are barely more than “intro scene,” but it tells me that something has to happen there.

There’s still a lot of work left to do on the flowchart. The pieces that are kinda floating up at the top are the main locations that I have yet to incorporate, and I still need to do a LOT of work on the details of branching paths

A little more zoomed-in, so you can get an idea of how the demo might go… and just how many moving pieces there are, even at the limited demo-level.

This has been what I’ve spent the majority of my development time working on this month. It’s absolutely one of those things that feels a lot like I’m not making progress on the game at all, since it’s not necessarily “in the game,” but the work I’m doing to put all of the pieces together, find the holes, and just generally get a start on the writing? It’s been huge.

🧰 The Craft Table 🧰

Outside of learning the syntax of the flowchart and how to apply that to a narrative sense, not just a coding one, I haven’t done a lot of learning this month. BUT there is something coming up that I’m looking forward to this week, and that is the Worldbuilding Festival!

I haven’t fully decided if I’m going to think about these sessions through the lens of my game, or through my Wizard School universe (or both?), since both need excessive building-out to become real, I am very excited for these sessions. Writing mostly realistic fiction my entire life, world building isn’t exactly one of my stronger, best-developed skills, so I’m hoping this will help me in becoming better at it.

I have also tentatively been looking into masters programs again this month because the extra $3k salary bump annually would be really nice. But also because I just genuinely love school? And getting my masters is the next, logical step… after my three bachelors’ degrees. :)

💌 From the Desk: Substack Scribbles & More 💌

The first post I’m going to suggest here is something horribly niche, but I think might appeal to a handful of people who read / post here on Substack. As someone who is getting ready to launch a full-length creative nonfiction piece here AND a full-length fiction piece (eventually) AND regularly posts short fiction… this post on Serialized Fiction on Substack by Rebecca Rocket had a lot of interesting points to consider. Even if you’re not planning on posting fiction like that, some of the tips on formatting and directories are universally applicable for all Substack posters, so it could be a beneficial read for a lot of people (especially if you’ve been inundated with the “Notes are the way to grow your Substack!!” propaganda).

The second, and final, Substack post I found very insightful and interesting this month was by Helen Higgins titled “The Erotics of Intelligence.” This post title says as much as I think I need to say about it. This concept resonates deeply with me, and I’ve said so much any time anyone has ever asked me about “my type.” Physical attributes are not what interests me about a person, but rather their mind, their drive, and their ability to utilize both in living their lives. Highly recommend this post.

Elsewhere, I have another reading video to recommend, this time about How to Read Critically. Not sure how much this one will be of interest to people who are not studying literature or wanting to actually dive deep and analyze the things you’re reading, but I enjoyed it a lot. And have actually shared snippets of it as a resource for my AP Lit students this year.

💪🏻 185 Insane Updates 💪🏻

Lowkey, I really fell off of this in August, so I’m not even going to post my graph here (mostly because I even stopped tracking for 90% of the month). But, I’m picking back up starting today, so it’ll be back on the docket for the final four months of the year!

How did everyone else’s Augusts shake out? Share your wins and struggles in the comments! Anything exciting coming up for you next month? I know I’m looking forward to a far more productive September, as I settle back into my schoolyear routine again.