Blue Core was never meant to be this long. My original idea for it was something like one hundred thousand words, maybe one-fifty. Clearly that didn’t happen.

Looking back on it, mostly I see all the things I did wrong. There were too many moving parts, too many incidental characters and actions that demanded their own plot threads, and a weird mishmash of different styles of things. Some dungeon stuff, some action stuff, some kingdom-building stuff, and it would have benefitted from more focus.

I still stand by my decision to make the Companion thing based on sex, because it actually matters and the usual cost to those thing is pain, which doesn’t. However, I can tell you that writing good explicit scenes is a serious chore. Writing terrible ones is easy, but bringing them up to my standards was hard.

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Still and all, it turned out fairly well. Blue Core is not my first finished story but it’s certainly my first finished story of such a length. Over seven hundred thousand words is a bit of a doorstopper.

I want to thank my Patrons and readers, who were the ones who made Blue Core as successful as it was. There were a number of suggestions and notions suggested by readers of various sorts that I ended up incorporating and I thought made the story better. Taelah is actually one such an inclusion – the patrons wanted a perspective from the nameless alchemist from Anton’s Village, and the rest is history.

While Blue Core is done, I am certainly not finished writing. I won’t be returning to the universe of Blue Core anytime soon, but it may not be never. Hopefully you will give Paranoid Mage a try, and if that’s not to your liking, you’ll keep an eye out for whatever comes after that.

Thank you,

InadvisablyCompelled