I've had quite a few people misinterpret what I was saying in my previous Dev Log, so I thought I should clarify a few things just so everyone understands where I'm coming from. 

Firstly, a lot of people were under the assumption that the additional 4 years were on the table as an option. I wanted to make it clear that I don't intend to work on Violet Memoir for another 4 years. This was never meant to be a story that long nor was it supposed to take up that much of my time. I don't want to spend 6 years of my life working on a story like this as it will be stunting me as a writer. The options were ways to avoid that, with my preferred (and most likely best option) being to really tighten up the story from here onwards. I feel the other two are just not viable as I likely wouldn't be able to handle a triple workload increase, nor would the story be better if I condensed it to a single route without heavy rewrites. 

That's what I wanted to clarify next. A lot of people were under the assumption that I was cutting the entire romance or routes entirely. That's not what I was saying. I was saying that I was cutting the additional romance scenes that weren't necessary, stuff that's purely for filler you'd see in a slice-of-life story. Violet Memoir isn't that story. That doesn't mean all of these scenes are going to be gone, if the character arc, tone, or pacing calls for them, they will be in there.

Lastly, I think people misunderstood the original length of the story. The way I worded my post seemed to have given people the impression that Violet Memoir was always meant to go for 3 weeks in-universe. This isn't the case. Violet Memoir was always intended to be a shorter story, a thriller like this basically necessitates it. If I was going to make it that long, I would need to find a way to lower the stakes to keep the slice of life going (it wouldn't be very believable if characters were worried about their lives and then go to a movie or something).

The reason I brought up the 21 days is that's where the story length would have gone if I kept going as it was. After I had my wake-up call a few dev logs ago, I started to seriously sit down and fully plan out the scope of my story. I came to 21 days before realizing just how much that genuinely entailed. I thought it would be best to cut down and refine the story but you're not losing any important elements of the story, just the additional fluff that doesn't matter. For example, one of my days I had planned just had a note saying, "Meet with everyone and discuss things". There were plenty of days like that and even some with nothing at all which were just there to be slice-of-life filler days. So, I decided to cut the days that had nothing and merge days together to cut down the length to 14 days instead. I've only done this refining for Oscar's layout so far and even that still has spare room for additional scenes if needed. 

A strong story is a tight story. All these additional scenes would have been just meant to separate the mystery (often to the detriment of the mystery itself since you were barely drip-fed a piece of single relevant information) and would have likely killed the pacing. So far, I haven't cut a single important plot point from my original layout that I had for the characters, only bonus stuff I thought would be neat, but I've come to realize would only bog my story down.

Violet Memoir's mystery isn't meant to be some long-winding storyline you piece together from scraps of information. This isn't a murder mystery. It's a relatively simple mystery that's meant to complement the character's individual journeys. I wouldn't benefit from spamming for nearly three weeks, all that would do is make me give you less information over a longer period of time.

Lastly, everything isn't set in stone. Things can still change. I might decide that an additional couple of days might be better for the story or I might go back to certain scenes later and add something that I feel it's missing. This is still my first major product of this nature and I want to do more but in order to do more, I need to finish this one first.

A finished product can be fixed later. An unfinished product will never be done.