Whew, it's been a while. But I'm back to work on The Seventh Swan, and even found someone to draw actual art! I abandoned it for so long because I was trying to make my own character sprites, which was an obvious exercise in failure when I can barely do edited photo backgrounds. In the end I decided not to have character sprites at all, but there will be some very pretty CGs.
On a somewhat related topic, I read another fairy tale-based VN recently, Li'l Red, and loved it. Interesting twists to the original, a nice use of the frame story, and it's given me some ideas on how to create distinctive visuals.