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49 ch...uh, wow. Chapters are helpful for organization, but I feel like you really don't need anywhere near that many unless you're planning your story to have somewhere in the neighborhood of five million words. Maybe you should use just three or four chapters for now, and then create more only when you start having trouble keeping track of pages. You definitely don't need seperate chapters just to swap a few pronouns around in otherwise identical text, for instance, a lot of the others you have seem to be likewise just based on the character's gender if I'm guessing the abbreviations right. The story looks very ambitious, it's awesome you're getting so into this, but usually it's recommended that newbies spend some time reading a few stories and browsing the articles, and maybe start out with a smaller scale story just to get a handle on the editor and structuring of a CYOA. It can be really easy to bite off more than you can chew, and epics are easy to burn out on if you go in without knowing what to expect. (It already looks like you're planning to make it all a hundred times harder on yourself by not bothering with scripting, and even if you do wind up with some massive word count, at least some readers are going to notice that a lot of it is copy and pasted filler...)

I actually wrote a how to on setting a gender choice the other day if it helps: http://chooseyourstory.com/forums/advanced-editor-forum/message/25020 I'd really REALLY recommend reading a few of the help articles though, remember there's no rush on finishing your story and you could save yourself a lot of tedium later on by learning some of the basics first. When you say that it will all be different after the character is established, do you mean that once the actual story gets rolling a gay man is going to have completely different paths than say, a straight woman? By that I mean are you just changing a few lines now and then based on gender and sexuality or will there be entirely different plots available? The former means there's still going to be a lot of copy and paste and unnecessary padding of the word count, while the latter sounds like you might as well just be writing several separate stories about completely different characters.

Well it's definitely easier to pick up once you spend a little while clicking around. I'm kind of similar, I always had a test game just to try different things on my own when I first started and then I'd check the articles for reference or just ask a specific question if I ran into a specific problem. But you have your Variables tab and creating the variables themselves is pretty self explanatory, all they really need is a name to reference. You set scripting to advanced in the Storygame Properties and then it's just a matter of opening up the scripting box and pasting the script. (And at any rate, with a test game you can do all the hands on stuff and experimentation you like, the worst that can happen is you get an error message or something doesn't work exactly like you expected.) I avoided learning scripting for a long time for similar reasons as you and in the end what pushed me there was the need to do a really simple thing: have a choice the player made not have a consequence till later. (In this case, the choice was whether to kill another character or not.) It wound up taking two lines of script that just boiled down to 'if the character was killed, move the player to this page. If the character is alive, move the player to this other page instead'. IF %KILLED = 0 THEN blah blah. The other option would've been copy and pasting about fifty pages of text and linking them up all over again just to make that single change and offer a new path. And this was just for one choice...a second one that also had to account for the first would've been a nightmare that left me with a story that was 70% padding and showing up as a false length. Anyway I usually just figure people need to learn a method that works for them and that can only be done through trial and error, but the reason I'm pushing for it so hard in this case is because your game does sound REALLY ambitious and you seem to be so into it, I'd really hate for you to get buried neck deep in it all and sink a bunch of hours in just to burn out or get hung up on issues that could've been avoided with a little more planning and preparation. Best of luck either way though, and remember there's always the Writing Workshop and yes, Advanced Editor boards if you have any other questions or are looking for feedback or advice.

I might humbly suggest this article for your reading pleasure.