Image is a fan art Christmas gift drawn by my friend Cai. I thought:

Ashton and Pequeño (my two cats) fighting with red and blue lightsabers on my desk (and over my keyboard) as I'm trying to work on re:Dreamer. Ashton's back foot is kicking over a sloshing coffee mug (this), Pequeño's whole body is blocking me from using my mouse and he's practically sitting on my right hand, and I've got a goofy expression of some kind (overwhelmed but also tired) as I reach for my coffee cup.

was going to be a simple request, but he put way more effort into it than I thought and drove himself half-insane from trying to do the most complicated perspective angle he'd ever done up to that point. I don't actually like Star Wars, but when your brain is out of starter fluid and you're lying in bed in a half-vegetative state and trying not to think about how hard thinking is at the moment, it helps to have a droning voice explaining a massive IP's dumbest lore, such as why Count Dooku isn't a fallen Jedi political idealist but Space Hitler, Yet Even More Racist or how Darth Plagueis is such a goddamned edgy atheist in a universe with a proven afterlife that he literally met Sith ghosts who told him he was a loser pretender yet wrote the thing off as a hallucination.

He also made one with my cats as they normally are (much bigger than I expected and smart enough to realize I will give them attention if they stand between my monitors and me).

So, this stuff above was new to itch.io, but as before, I've posted this verbatim as public posts on this game's Patreon page, but are putting them here since some of y'all might might never check that as this game is ultimately free, I figured I should explain the delays here too; plus, it helps me trick my brain into feeling like I did work.

From November 29, 2024:

There's not much to report. The mono felt like it was on a bit of a rebound, but then the hormone cycle kicked off and the fatigue was just so much worse. I've been entirely confined to bed for the majority of the two weeks since the last update and it's a complete gamble for any given day if I'll be able to stay up for more than a few hours.

This is pretty miserable and I just really want to be healthy enough again to write.

From December 12, 2024:

Source: Caithiel, referencing Melonenbrot on tumblr

I swear I don't commission these or ask Cai to draw them; he's just based and does it on his own. I'm still not sure if I've become a mascot or not, but transposing one's creative identity onto an "authorial persona" seems to carry that risk and I've already resigned myself to some degree of being an unintentional chuuni.

So, I'm still not 100%. Mono aside (which seems to be starting to go over the over the hill after a rebound last month from hormonal bullshit), rough shit's been going on with my mental health. I blog way too fucking much on these posts (to say nothing of the Author's Notes), but broadly, being genderfluid still sucks, I'm having dissociative episodes, my OCD has been on a resurgence, and the, uh, "moon sickness" has gotten quite a bit more intense.

A fair bit of this can be explained by my endocrinologist giving me progesterone to try and get my slipping estrogen levels and runaway testosterone levels under control (53.5 pg/mL of e and 547 ng/dL is awful, especially when I'm about 22 months into the HRT I can't get off of because life is a fucking nightmare of my partial making).

I'm very much not interested in socially transitioning, and even more so now that the unclothed wannabee emperor is going back to Washington to turn the next four years into political theater that is exhausting yet necessary to keep up with because I'm legitimately convinced I'm gonna be fucking dead if a HRT ban happens and I'm not able to get an exception from a gender dysphoria diagnosis or my CBS need case and I don't have a stockpile to rely on; I'm not a "death before detransition" advocate, but I am sympathetic beyond what my words could ever convey for those of you in that camp and I'm hoping incompetency once again proves to be the enemy of maliciousness.

Despite the "risks" that come from getting on progesterone in America as the calendar year prepares to change to 2025 (I'm already feeling some growing pains again and I did not miss their absence), these dogshit hormone levels were something I needed to fix sooner rather than later as it was something negatively affecting my neurological health. That medication chance has been doing its job on that front as I have more hand coordination and less right arm pain than I've had in at least three years, but it's come with a fair bit of moodiness and the better antidepressants I've been on for about three months have had their work cut out for them compensating for this.

In the future, I'm going to try much harder to be quieter on my health issues as I do regret how much I've overshared my plethora of very private health and life details even if to some degree that paratextual context enriches the overall story I tell with its own stories of how and why it's made the way it is. But like, c'mon, I'm my own character study of a concept of person and the genderfluid writer of a gender bender visual novel getting on "the dumb horny bitch juice" hormone is a development I find fascinating for how it will affect the development of that weird story about gender.

But in all seriousness, I will be doing as much as I can to stay aware of this "second puberty" getting a turbocharger as it applies to my mental and physical health and will reevaluate my prescriptions as needed, because I'm not an authorial persona, or a mascot, or unintentional chuuni, or a character study, or a concept of a person, or a deconstructive gender psychoanalysis, or a quasi-journalist ghost writer who feels like they're chasing the scoop of a lifetime, or a tragic autobiographier, or a tortured artist, or a performative act, or a comedy routine, or a drama queen, or a gossip girl, or a diva writer with a rock star ego, or "the Hideo Kojima of gender bender visual novels (not because I am a widely-respected and innovative developer, but because I desperately need someone like a producer around to tell me "no" and reign me in when I go off the creative rails with an absurd attention to detail)," or a medical specimen, or a mad scientist, or a volunteer guinea pig, or really anyone but myself. No facetious "Sam-I-Am" lines, no hot redheaded anime women disguise to hide behind. Just me, and if I want even a snowball's chance in Hell to find out more about who that person is and be able to look myself in the mirror without flinching from mental whiplash, I've got to take myself seriously and get real. As I so often and worryingly forget, I'm a real person, one just as real as you, and one who needs to stop treating myself and my existence with indifference because every indication I have is that this life is the one and only chance of being alive I'll ever have yet I've started to take that life for granted.

But for now, I'm considering the tradeoff with this medication of stronger and diversified emotions for much greater overall functioning to be worth it.

And no, those changes with my mental health issues I've mentioned in this update predate this medication change. I've only been on the progesterone for about a week and a half and haven't noticed it affecting me in such a drastic way, and I'm attributing the mental health shit to being stuck in bed with so little to do as I run out of energy in a few hours. Introspection is healthy, but not at the levels that this OCD/ADHD/SAD/OSDD worrywart has been having. Rumination is an ouroboros that consumes itself, and I'm clearly in need of a snapping myself out of this stressful rut of going in circles and going nowhere.

...

I was gonna write some cringe pun here related to the "all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" aphorism as it relates to gender and how I treat my work almost as play, but I need to learn to not do crap like that and force a bad idea through as if a clever-enough execution will excuse it. I'm desperate to appear witty, but I'm not that desperate.

Anyways, the point I am trying to make is that despite still being a mess of a person and still being at least somewhat sick with the mono and will need more time to truly shake it, I've been going fucking crazy from stepping away from making this visual noel for this long, so come Saturday (as I have some errands tomorrow), I'm getting my ass back to work.

I'm still only able to spend at most 12 hours out of bed at a time without collapsing into exhaustion unless I shove a full pot of dark roast black coffee into me, so a few of the first days back are going to be dedicated to artist design documents I'm late on and a few other smaller-scale tasks, but I'm itching to write so badly that I've even started to get artsy-fartsy with my private journaling to keep tabs on my mental state and find what makes those different sides of me and the all of me truly tick. It's partly that I am always my own audience that I am desperately trying to impress and partly the joyful regainment of enough of my mental faculties to enjoy playing with my returned but misdirected creativity and writing skills that I reveled in it.

To that end of getting back to writing the current pending update to Keisuke's route, I did my long-overdue yearly re:Read of re:Dreamer on my Android and came away pumped to keep what I saw going. 

I reread the entire route, and it's clear how much better the newer writing is than a lot of the Day 3 stuff.

I think my dying primary monitor's color correction is fucked, but ignoring how that desaturated these screenshots, I really try to stay humble about my writing abilities as I see any creative developing an ego is a gateway to a boorish dismissal of feedback, arrogant overconfidence in what you're cooking up even when it doesn't have that kick to it, and just a general holier-than-thou attitude of getting high on your own fumes, but if I can break that modesty for a minute...

I am fucking GOOD at what I do for a job, I like doing this job, and I am goddamned proud of how much and how often this dumb gender bender visual novel I make with focused seriousness, obsessive perfectionism, flippant sardonicism, and oblivious self-awareness has affected its readers on a deeply personal level, even if I still don't understand how I got here and I constantly doubt myself despite my awkward attempts at boasting.

Honestly, I didn't know how to end this post, so I started adding a bunch of "I-am-a-clever-writer-wow-look-upon-my-skill-and-be-awed" to it before I realized over three hours later what I was doing. I might be a lot more cringe and even pretentious than I'm comfortable realizing, but if I'm able to slip into that impassioned writing fugue state/flow state hybrid again, it's a good sign that I'm well and ready to channel that energy back into re:Dreamer.

From January 11, 2025:

Stay positive!

Last time I checked in, I mentioned that despite not being 100% back to "normal" from the mono (keep in mind my "normal" is likely very different than your "normal"), I was going to get back to work even if I couldn't do all that much because my energy levels were still pretty bad.

So while I have gotten a moderate amount of work done (keep in mind my "moderate amount of work" is likely very different than your "moderate amount of work"), yeah, uh...

I'm probably way too cooked to write this post and I don't have the ability to cleverly word things, so I'll just get to the part where I say how I've spent the last 4 days almost entirely in bed. I had no energy, I couldn't even hold a Nintendo DSi XL in my hands for more than 15 minutes without feeling completely fatigued, my brain was in a nearly-constant state of confused overwhelmingness whenever I tried to talk to people from my phone and I could barely even listen to a conversation let alone take part in it, my body was achingly sore as fuck (likely a mix of bed rot + my normal hormonal cramp fest but supercharged on progesterone (which I am taking for a complicated reason (look, just look at the last health update I explained it better there than I can here))).

All I could really do was the bare minimum number of tasks required for survival for my cats and myself and lie in bed motionlessly either thinking too much, barely being able to think, trying to sleep, and watching YouTube videos no more complex than Star Wars lore videos (I don't even like Star Wars very much but I need background noise and this was a plentiful option).

Last night was the first time I'd been in front of my computer in three days, but I think I only lasted 4 hours. Today, I woke up at 2:30 PM-ish, but I was so brain-dead that I kept fucked up making a pancake mix (not even the DIY flour and baking powder one I like to do, but something as brainless as a ready mix pack) until I just gave up in frustration and had a bowl of cereal. I've been up for less than 4 hours and halve downed have a pot of coffee, but I'm falling asleep or just otherwise running out of steam after answering some questions about re:Dreamer lore people were asking on Discord and writing this post.

Not all days are like this. I've had days where I've been up for 12, 14, and even 16 hours straight, but those aren't as common as I would like and my average time in bed is much lower than I would like. I hate being held down by a sickness I've had for over 3 months now, and the recovery has been agonizingly slow.

I'm still trying to work when I can, but like, keep modest expectations for the next release date. Okay post done going back to sleep bye bye.

From March 12, 2025:

Hey y'all,

Yes, I am still recovering from the mono I got a bit over 5 months ago.

It's finally been on the mend since mid/late February, but my energy levels are still unpredictable and my memory has been full of a worrying amount of holes.

I'm in a good-enough place mentally that I have still kept writing down ideas and snippets of outlines for the visual novel (which you can check out as pinned spoiler messages in the the #redreamer-chat channel of the VN's Discord server (invite)), such as how to resolve certain plot contradictions for Britney's route to give Zach realistic motivations for ending the route on a male gender identity but a female body and further detailing how much Zach hurts himself when he finally realizes he's got feelings for Keisuke, but typing stuff on my phone while stuck in bed to expand upon ideas I want to get to isn't the same as being able to be up and do all the juggled tasks I have on a daily basis (e.g., writing, coding, composing scenes, finding and editing music and SFX, making design documents for artists and contacting them, checking art, editing art for consistency, checking discord, checking sites this game gets distributed to).

I have still tried to work on the game as much as I can, but progress within the release has been a bit slow as I build up steam to really get cooking. I can now have those 14-hour days again which gets that ball in motion (I am hoping for that today even if I can't stay up late because I have to report for jury selection tomorrow; yes, I too am surprised my health hasn't permanently disqualified from service, but in times like these, I need to actually do what little civic duty I can to make the world less crazy), but it's just very hard to plan things right now. I don't like that we're now on 5 months of me thanking you all for patient, especially since this update was already 90% finished before the mono started. Yes, I can either work and produce subpar stuff I'll not only have to redo later as it won't be up to my standards and which I will likely have foggy recollections of, or I can just suck this up and ride out the storm to write as well as I know I can and not botch the writing at the last stretch.

Until next time.

From April 28, 2025:

Source: JK Arts on pixiv

Hi, currently writing this as my astral self feels like this—nauseous, exhausted, and possibly regretting my life choices; nevertheless, I have to be up (and in a binder) because my apartment complex is allegedly doing mandatory maintenance such as checking smoke alarms in my unit today, and I have to be on call to put my cats into their travel crates so they don't escape or get in the way of the workers.

Six months later, I am still goddamned sick from mononucleosis. My GP is of the opinion that the Epstein-Barr virus causing this is "hiding" within my cells and keeps reactivating whenever my immune system is weaker... such as whenever whatever is going on with my hormone cycle somewhat analogous to a menstrual cycle decides to throw a 1-2 punch at my lower gut and head.

It's been a miserable loop of taking 2 steps forward, 1 step back, but there are signs of improvement. I can successfully have 12-hour workdays again, and I can even have a few in a row. But more often than not, I can't expect to stay out of bed for the whole day, nor can I reliably plan a workweek when it's up to my body to decide when it's going to let me get out of bed at all.

Even if I wasn't this fatigued and overall feeling malaise, I don't think I could properly explain how frustrating and depressing all of this is. I have to roll dice to have enough energy to get out of bed, then to stay out of bed, then to have enough mental capacity to actually do work; if not, I shove an ungodly amount of coffee into me, waiting and hoping for it to fire up a stuck engine and let me do more than just brainlessly toil away at distractions (such as restarting a Civilizations V game dozens of times because my OCD is demanding me to have even a token modicum of control or because I got up to pee and forgot what I was even doing).

I don't want to keep ranting in posts like this because I should really prioritize giving my limited energy to actual work and save further explanations for when I feel like I can breathe easy again, but there is one more part that warrants saying now instead of in a more proper Patreon post.

<Author's Note: CaptainCaption is in fact going to ramble as she is on standby with the maintenance people she can hear in the hall outside, she has a doctor's appointment in two hours, and she wants to write but doesn't have a chance to sink her teeth into the game right now for reasons that she will partly explain here. I guess some of this has spoilers, but it's for stuff currently within the visual novel, so, I mean, are they really spoilers?>

My memory has been very, very bad over these last six months. Like, we're talking having no idea what I did yesterday, letting food rot in my fridge simply because I forgot I bought it, thinking about eating leftovers from something I was sure I'd cooked only a few days ago and only realizing it was over two weeks old when I opened the tupperware and saw mold, buying the same ingredients I already had because I forgot I bought them a few days ago, needing to write out not just when I took certain medications so I don't overdose but what my current medication regimen even is lest I take the wrong medications, walking away from my computer for a few minutes and then taking over 15 minutes to remember what I was doing when I get back, forgetting what I said in conversations, forgetting what others said, forgetting what I wanted to say, not realizing I was repeating something I'd said a few minutes ago with no memory of saying that, thinking I'd skipped feeding my cats and giving them more food than they're supposed to have, thinking I'd already fed them that evening, losing items constantly, having zero idea where I am when I wake up, and even having zero idea what I am when I wake up.

Now, I know mono can affect memory and recall, and I am trying to not play my own hypochondriac doctor and give attention to possible comorbidities with Alzheimer's (closer to what I have in mechanism), Parkinson's disease (closer to what I have in symptoms), and prior COVID-19 exposure, but fuck, when you're a bedridden person with a neurodegenerative disorder and severe OCD, it's hard to NOT think, worry, and fear I am going senile.

As this applies to writing, the problem is twofold:

Firstly, I can no longer get away with juggling story ideas, specific phrasing of lines, and so on in my head like I usually have. I need to write that shit down, because I will lose the entire idea or key details of it if I don't promptly write it down. Despite how much it might appear that I am a meticulous planner as you might expect given how comprehensive Britney's route outline is, I'm very much in the vein of a "by the seat of my pants" writer. That improvisational spontaneity and in-the-moment creativity is what makes me love writing so goddamned much. When I am firing on all cylinders, I can and frequently have made that work.

But that is very much not the case right now, which fucking sucks because my own metrics, some of the best moments in the entire visual novel have been spur-of-the-moment decisions:

• The entire "yandere mother/daughter" plot point, which was a happenstance of editing Zoey's sprites, realizing I could turn off the two layers on her eyes that gave them their "shine," and liking how they looked with the overcast facial gloom enough to figure out how to add them to the game in a prominent way.
• The "You've gotta be that cat, right?" line from Keisuke when Zach poses the question of who this mysterious hot girl his best friend is talking to is and how Keisuke's insane answer makes more sense than the truth.
• Zach desperately calling "time out" like a referee to Keisuke to give himself a few moments to calm down, center himself, and decide if he's going to confess what he'd been doing to Keisuke (and how the script flip of Zach not knowing that referees usually don't call timeouts as Keisuke explains the sports jargon to his misinformed best friend).
• Britney thinking her bestie in high school got back in contact with her because "she" transitioned into a trans woman, and the entire energy Britney brings to that misunderstanding as both a good queer ally and a bad queer ally.
• Zach's phone call to his dad, which is an entertaining conversation with someone who can out-ramble Zach, greatly elucidating of who Zach is by showing the other half of the equation when so much focus has been put on his mom and Zach's fears of being too much like her, and the lonely sadness of how this father-"son" talk over the phone is one of the most personal moments he's ever had with his actual father.
• The Legally Distinct Build-A-Bear visit in the mom route and turning what is seemingly an overdue mother-daughter bonding experience with genuinely touching moments into an extended metaphor of how Zoey feels like her own mother has spent two decades trying to make Zoey in her own image and is even doing that now, and all how the heavy tone of the insightful family drama and friction contrasts with the somewhat childish naivety Zoey had about how her mother's daughter might get along with her better than her son ever did.
• Pretty much the entirety of the secret lore which gives a satisfactory answer to any questions you had about the story and even some you didn't ask, but I can't claim sole credit as my best friend will in fact kill me with a laser if I do not give out an "I helped" badge for how she convinced me to run with idea after discussing it with her and lots of feedback.

And somewhat ironically, many more that I am forgetting.

That quick thinking of being able to expand an idea from a small seed into something memorable is what I believe makes re:Dreamer work as this passion project and all the ensuing quirkiness, and not having this skill I have honed over the last few years and had only really started to suspect I could someday master in 2023 feels like I am writing with one hand (and no, not in the porn way; I have standards for my own writing).

Secondly, no matter how detailed my own notes of my to-do list are, I am still going to have hazier memories than normal of what I had previously written for whatever scene I am on, and I will need to not just reread previous writing to refresh my memory of events but understand what I was doing with them.

Despite how much I just ranted about the first point of how I can't just wing it with writing as I expect myself to, this one is the more important issue of how my poor memory has affected my ability to write and lead to this massive decrease in productivity.

I ain't gonna do the extra work to strip the contents of the Ren'Py file I am currently working on of all code to only have plaintext for this calculation, but removing all the whitespace indentation as that isn't exactly typing, the file is currently 1,113,184 characters long. The average word length in English is 4.7 letters, so let's say 236,847 words; however, from previous assessments where I put the effort into being more accurate, I know that only 47.7% of the words I type and 35% of the individual characters end up on screen as something a player can read, so the true word count is somewhere in the ballpark between 83,000 and 113,000.

Truthfully, C.H.E.A.T.S. and the sheer number of micro-branches I have means that it's even more impossible to make an accurate assessment of the more usable metric of reading time beyond how everyone reads at different speeds, but from timing the new text at Ren'Py's default character display speed and auto-forward timing, it's about 2 hours of content to read, even if I would say I read at least twice as fast as that value.

Do you have any idea just how fucking much of a time-consuming pain in the ass it is to eventually be well enough to get out of bed, reread the writing up to that point to make sure I am following along, adding to the writing until I am no longer well, and having to yet again reread the previous writing as the cycle starts anew? Even with skimming or only reading the most relevant recent text, it's still an aggravating start-go-stop-restart loop, and I arguably like rereading my own writing more than anyone else does, but making this even more frustrating is that I was well over 80% done with the update before the mono and cat scratch fever messed me back up in October, meaning I had more I needed to remember (much of which I lost and had to regain) and required extra work to make sure everything could line up without being a mess of plot holes I didn't realize I was making.

This, more than any other factor, is what has made the update so goddamned late. I could barf out something that was rushed, somewhat incoherent, and even outright mediocre, but time and time again working on this visual novel has made me understand that I will absolutely give myself exponentially more work if I continue writing something I know I will need to fix later. It's not just an issue of quality control, but efficiency.

Thankfully, I can see I am getting better, slowly but surely. The writing sessions are getting longer, the consecutive writing days are getting more common, and I am able to rebound and get my head back into the game faster and with less effort. I am able to do more than just write (although it's more accurate to say the process is closer to being a director than a writer), such as adding new code functions that streamline common tasks through abstraction and creating more consistency in how I even write code from variables I can easily change and have propagate throughout the game's script in a standardized manner.

I know this is the case, but it sure doesn't feel like I am on any mend when I want to lean over a toilet and throw up.

Until next time, and hopefully with the actual release.

So um yeah, once again tl;dr mononucleosis is a fucking nightmare. No, worse that that, it feels like being in Limbo. At least Hell is interesting and full of interesting people.

Thanks for reading, folks. I am going the fuck back to bed.