Finished a second time

On 14 August the fifth and final story went live in the browser and I marked the interactive novel complete that day. Today the same five stories are complete again, in a different form, as two books. Finishing the same thing twice, six weeks apart, is a strange experience, and nobody warns you in advance that the second time feels nothing like the first.

The facts first. Perpetūra is a free interactive novel: five interconnected stories, five different eras, and in each one a woman carrying a feeling she has never found the words for. All five are complete and free to read, with no install and no account, and none of that has changed. The stories are also published as two Kindle ebooks, each taking one route through each story and reading straight through. Book One, The Ones Before, sixty chapters, came out on 18 September. Book Two, The Origin, seventy chapters, is published today, and it carries the pattern back to where it started. Both are in Kindle Unlimited, and both are the explicit prose edition for adult readers rather than the free version, which keeps those scenes sensual by design.

What I actually want to write about is the difference between the two finishings, because it is not the one I expected going in.

An interactive story is never truly fixed. Mine certainly has not been. Since launch I have gone back into it more times than I can count. A typo corrected, a map that was calling chapters by different names than the stories themselves used, entries in the codex that looked collectible and were not. Every one of those sat quietly inside a finished thing, waiting to be noticed, and every one could be put right the same afternoon. Finished, for something read in a browser, has always really meant finished for now.

A book does not work that way, or not in the way that matters. I could send a corrected file to the shop tomorrow, and it would reach copies bought after that and no others. Whatever somebody downloads today stays the version they have, and nobody goes back and re-reads a book because its author fixed a word in it six months later. So the sentences stop being mine to renegotiate in any sense you would ever notice. That is the actual event today, and it is quieter and odder than an announcement can hold.

I did not expect it to feel like handing something over rather than simply putting something out. It is much closer to that than to the feeling on 14 August, which was closer to opening a door. The interactive version stays exactly as free and exactly as open as it was that day, with nothing held back from it and nothing taken out of it to make room for the books. What is different is that one version of these five stories now exists in a form that will not take another correction.