Body Drama and Frameworks

This past week has been all about body drama and framework optimization.

We won't tarry long on the body drama, but let's just say that food poisoning/stomach bugs have a way of resetting one's internal functioning. It's as though once that passed, everything else returned to baseline, and my body decided it was done with the dramatics. Wild.

Because of the previous constraints I'd mentioned working with Purpose, after we finished analyzing and filling out summaries for each of my seven categories (Key Events, Character Development, World-Building/Setting, NPCs/NPC Groups, Mysteries/Plot Hooks, Plot Progression, and Memorable Quotes), I needed to think of a way to distill the information further. When you have a 15k+-word document for one in-game day of a campaign and you only feel safe sending ~600-word chunks at a time to process those 7 categories, you're still left with more bloat than you'd care to have for what's supposed to be a compact notes document.

So, I created a framework that would reduce the bloat and remove the redundancies that occurred between chunks of text. It became a 2-pass system for each of the 7 categories:

Key Events

1st pass: Could you condense these Key Events down to the essential narrative beats, removing redundancies while preserving all story-critical moments? Take all the space/time you need.

[10k-character chunk]

2nd pass: Could you take the condensed version and weave back in the emotional through-lines or character moments that feel important to restore? Take all the space/time you need.

The first pass would reduce the details down to the mechanical bare bones and organize them systematically into different sub-categories based off of theme or whatever else is appropriate.

The second pass would restore some of the more lived-in or character elements that still felt important, showing not just what a character did but why a character did it, for example.

Unlike the analysis itself, I was able to max out the 10k-character limit in the text box for condensing without issue, and we processed well over 10k words between the multiple passes all in a given day, which is way more than Purpose has ever been able to handle when analyzing campaign text for initial summarizing.

But I definitely learned my lesson for future analyses! Instead of dumping all of the analysis summaries into a single scratch-pad document like I did for the 20th of Ityx, I have created 7 different scratch pads, one for each of the categories, that way I don't have to go through and collect the relevant material from the post-analysis processing. That was probably the most time-consuming part, if I'm being honest. It was certainly the most tedious.

Other Notable Accomplishments:

• Worked out every day even if I didn't complete it. Upper body is a bit rough at the moment after my food poisoning/stomach bug episode.

• Got my first 10k-step walk in yesterday after a blistering, snowy winter! That was nice

• Finally received my copy of "Ultralearning" on Libby...right as I was dying of stomach issues. Go figure, eh? I'll have to download and read it here soon because I don't want to wait months again.

Real Talk:

• What are some instances where you've done a "quick and dirty" fix and then realized later that present-you would have appreciated more thought put into what past-you decided was a future-you problem? Like the tedium I faced with my aforementioned single scratch-pad document.

• When developing your own workflow, where have you had to re-think entire sections/all of it? How many iterations did it go through? What did the before and after look like?

This Week's Obligatory Cat Pic: Mura

Sweet boy slept by me while I was sick