A Project in Need of Time

A Brochure in Time of Need was a project intentionally limited in size and scope and written in the short minutes between rolling into bed and rolling over to sleep. 

I wanted to explore a story about an AI who was overly friendly and sometimes competent in the midst of a Time Travel Machine breakdown. I've been thinking about this setting for a while - I think it'd be one that would be a lot of fun to explore for an escape room setting - but I wanted to start small and didn't have a ton of time to work on it. So a choose your own adventure brochure seemed to make sense; each option could be written in a few minutes (in the aforementioned rolling into bed) and a brochure limits how much I could write before getting the project done. 

And I did want to finish the project before too much time had passed. I start to lose steam and get distracted more easily if my projects take longer then one month. So I did about 2 weeks of writing and then took a small break before the hard work of layout began. Unfortunately I wasn't able to do that in the short minutes of settling into bed so I took a bit of personal time to source art, edit, and do rewrites. And then having friends look at it, edits, revisions, edits, etc. 

I'm glad I took the short route. It was definitely limiting but allowed me to finish something and actually let me experiment with a very short story form factor, which I probably wouldn't have done otherwise. I will probably attempt to write the 2nd brochure in much the same way as it was overall a good experience. I would definitely encourage others to explore settings and story in a small form factor first to experience and experiment in a manageable way.

I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed writing the brochure!

-Adam