I have both good and bad news to share today, so let's get the progress quickly out of the way.

I'm almost done with Sheila's scenes, and I'm still writing Eve's scenes too. My goal was to be done with the writing altogether by yesterday, and I guess that was way too optimistic. For those of you who are interested in keeping track of how many lines I've written, I'm now at 1400 (I was at 1000 last time) and I've had a few struggles that slowed me down. Most noteably, the fifth Sheila scene that I only finished writing yesterday was an absolute pain in the butt. I don't think I've re-written and re-thought a scene more since the third Stanley call (the one with all the exposition about the mayor and stuff) and it was a painful experience. Hopefully the other scenes will go more smoothly.
So yeah, one of the reasons that the writing is not finished is that I've extended Sheila's stay, and she'll have 7 scenes instead of 5. Or 6 and a half I guess, as one of them is a simple phone call.
I haven't even written much about Eve, I was just too busy with Sheila. I still wrote a scene IIRC at the beginning of the last 10 days, but not much else. I'm eager to be done with Sheila (as hot as she may be) and to write scenes for the ton of other stuff I wanna get done.

On an other note, I haven't forgotten about 0.4.5. I'm going to take today and tomorrow to bugfix and prepare the update for public release. So expect streams tonight, and probably tomorrow.

NOW, onto the good and bad news. It occured to me a while ago that the update probably won't be fully prepared for December, as I intended originally. That's the bad news. The good news are: since most of the code for this update is done (and released), I might implement the scenes first and do the renders next. Why? Because while I probably can't be done with the writing, the renders, and the implementation and sound by December, I can probably be done with just the writing and implementation and some of the renders. What that would mean for you is, you get an "alpha" update with some of the planned scenes implemented and rendered instead of nothing.

Now that's something I need to give a serious thought to. I'm mostly doing it because I really want to release something for christmas, but I might decide that it's not worth releasing a half-made update, even for the sake of spoilers and Santa in the north pole.

An other option would be to implement and render the main plot only, and release the rest of the minor stuff in 0.5.1, but even that I'm not too happy with. I just don't want to release a 0.5 update I'm not happy with. And besides, some of that "minor" stuff is actually required for the main plot, like the FRPs. So yeah, I guess we'll see.

Anyway. My near-future plans for now are to take a couple days to bugfix and release 0.4.5FINAL, and then to take an extra 10 days to write more content for the 0.5 update.

That's about as long as I want to keep this progress report :p
To the manager supporters and above, this time you do get a render! Incredible, I know. The DAZ support still hasn't gotten back to me (obviously), but I took care of Sheila's dress instead (since I couldn't do Alice's). I hope you'll like it. Also, since the DAZ support probably won't get back to me until 2025, I'll probably have to choose an other dress for Alice... Anyway, I've talked long enough, back to work.

See you :)