Calling a piece of writing ‘finished’ is not something I like doing… but I’d better get better at doing it.
This evening, after a marathon 7000+ word day, I finished the second volume of Steam Highwayman. Highways and Holloways allows you to continue the open-world Steampunk journey that began in Steam Highwayman: Smog and Ambuscade. But it also stands alone, bigger, better, badder.
I’ve written nearly 140,000 words of content. There are well over a hundred quests and adventures, repeatable events, double- and multiple-entry plotlines, re-occuring characters, strongly-defined and engaging factions, a vast map of road, river and sky. Five separate airship adventures layer on top of the adventure of robbery and escape, which has been redesigned to make the Constables a more challenging and reactive threat.
There are 1481 passages
of interactive text. This number will almost certainly round to 1500 during my editing process. You’ll visit some of them many times, but there are some you’d better hope you never read. There is calamity, tragedy and terror in these pages – as well as intrigue, wealth, surprise, adventure, sky-piracy, sous-cheffery, archaeology, arson, politics, woodsmanship, poaching, exorcism, angling, burglary and croquet.
This is the kind of book I always wanted gamebooks to be.
Ben is hard at work on a new cover for this followup to Steam Highwayman I. So far, we’ve got all sorts of plans to make this a worthy successor – to match and surpass the first volume.
My plan is to launch a kickstarter later this summer to fund a full illustration and the best editing process that I can. With the magic of print-on-demand and the wind in my sales, this could be the second Steampunk Adventure Gamebook in the series available this year.