Journey is complete. It was an emotional moment when I uploaded the last chapter on Patreon and it is still an emotional moment here, on Royal Road, where it all started. I began writing because I could no longer find what I wanted in the genre I preferred. Looking back, I was merely not looking in the right places, and there were plenty of stories to discover but it doesn’t matter. What matters is that it got me started. I wrote with passion on my phone in the subway. I wrote coming back from a dead-end job I was about to lose. I wrote and the story… didn’t succeed. It wasn’t this one, but another. That was fine. I had more than enough stories in my head. The next one was journey and incredibly, it took off.
After I lost my job, I started writing more consistently even as I worked on another project. That one didn’t pan out but writing did. First, I had enough Patreon money for food. Then I had a minimum income. Then I had more. I think it hit me, truly hit me, that I could write for a living when I had enough money to buy really good food for my wife who was, at the time, pregnant with our first. It took the donations of twenty people, but I could do it.
It was almost hard to accept that I could live from my passion. I thought it couldn’t be me but you people made it happen. Fans here, fans on Amazon, fans on Patreon, your continued support meant that day after day, week after week etc, I could sit down and tell you stories and weave them with words and it made people happy, and they gave me enough money for it that I could keep doing it and live. I kept reading the comments and reviews, some of which were more flattering than other, and I realized I was making a difference in people’s lives by entertaining them half an hour per week, not much really, but I was doing it. And I could keep doing it. And that is absolutely crazy.
The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.
Journey changed my life therefore you, my readers, changed my life. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that you saved it by giving me faith back in myself, but you certainly saved my soul. Anyway, enough ramblings. Just know how grateful I am and now let’s get down to business! What next?
Well, there is Bob for those of you who enjoy it. There is also Changeling which has hundreds of pages down and that I will publish in the coming weeks. Same deal as Bob: you get a chapter a day for a while and when there is enough content for some fun, I’ll reduce to a chapter a week, as much as I can manage really.
That is all. Thank you for being there until the end. As a gesture of thanks, please appreciate our earth as a fae sphere drawn by my friend Matthias.
[https://i.imgur.com/o6bJ3ZB.jpeg]