As many of you would have realised, I promised the next chapter would be out two days ago and it isn't. Normally that's how long it takes me to write and edit about 1600 words for this story assuming I don't scrap everything and restart. However, over the past 3 days I barely managed to write 700 words and this isn't a new phenomenon. There has been a steady decline in my writing rate for the past two months or so.

The biggest reason for this is sleep deprivation of my own creation, where in order to not fall behind in my writing schedule I have written late into the night. Initially this worked well because I naturally focus best late at night, but it quickly started to interfere with my sleep schedule and has now hit a tipping point where for perhaps the entire past month I haven't slept more than 4 hours a night.

The severe sleep deprivation, as you might have guessed, is not conducive to focusing and getting a lot of writing done. Consequently, to stick to my schedule that I set for myself, I basically trapped myself in a self perpetuating death cycle where because I'm sleep deprived I get less writing done during the day, and then need to stay up later, thereby losing sleep, to ensure I finish my chapters on time.

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

I realised all this about a month ago but kept pushing myself because I figured, I would need to take a two week break after finishing book 1 for planning purposes anyway and could fix my sleep pattern then. Unfortunately, it has hit a breaking point where I am getting so little done when I sit down to write that even if I don't take this break I'll be posting so infrequently it will look like I'm taking a break without any of the actual benefits of taking one. So, I have decided even though I would have rather wait till I finish the end of the book, it is better for my long term productivity and health to take a break from posting now since my lack of sleep is severely affecting how quickly I write anyway.

So yeah, I'm taking a 2 week break. I'll probably delete this update once the next chapter is posted.

While I've got you here I suppose I'll plug a couple stories which have really caught my attention recently. Those being: Perfect Run, and Desolada. Perfect Run especially deserves it's place in the top ranked for being the first ever super hero story that I have loved and I'm fairly sure basically anyone who enjoys the types of stories on Royal Road (assumedly all of my followers) will enjoy it.