This update has been long overdue. I apologize for leaving you all in the dark, but I’ve been battling with the decision for the last few weeks and didn’t want to make an announcement without being certain of my plans going forward.

I’ll start with the good news: I haven’t stopped writing. There’s been a story idea in the back of my mind even before I started working on AoA, and I finally got around to working on it. It’s darker, grittier, and slower-paced (I’d place it solidly in the grimdark category, but it's not torture porn like some of them tend to be). The MC is a lot more dynamic -- as is the supporting cast… And overall, I’ve just found this type of story a lot more fun to write and I believe its better suited to my writing style.

I originally started writing a VR story because that was how I was introduced to litrpg and eventually fell in love with it, but as I progressed into the story I found myself confronting a lot of roadblocks -- primarily revolving around building tension and stakes.

It's really hard to do well in a virtual setting without using gimmicks like trapping them inside the game, and I didn’t think the characters I had developed were interesting enough to pick up the slack.

Other issues I encountered were things like spending a lot of time making up skill and spell names and their effects, and thinking about equipment and game-balance, and so on. Just a lot of things that detracted from the time I spent actually writing a story. That’s not to say these things are bad or I didn’t know what I was getting myself into, but my creativity just wasn’t flowing naturally.

Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.

Sorry for going on a tangent there; I just wanted to give a little insight into my thought process. Because yes, for the time being, I will not be updating AoA. The story very quickly got too big for me and felt off, so I needed to take a step back.

I also know you guys have probably read something like this tens of times on RR, and it sucks, and I’m truly sorry.

That being said, I don’t want to encounter another situation like this again; and therefore, I won’t be uploading my new story until the 1st book of it is done. Really and wholly finished. Satisfying conclusion and all.

I’m about 40k words into right now, and I’m estimating I’ll need another 40-50k to complete it. Something like that will probably take me until the first weeks of January (I tend to write around 1500-2000 words a day in my free time).

So until then… I’d only say to keep following this story if you’re interested. I’ll update here again when I start uploading the other story upon its completion.

For those who aren’t interested, I can only again say that I’m sorry.

Thanks for all the support thus far and I wish everyone happy holidays!