Greetings Readers!

It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these, the last being over six months ago, all the way back after Chapter 28, which was the big “montage chapter” for the first day of training, and I thought it was a good time to reach out and check in with everyone. I’m going to try to be spoiler-free in what I write, but it’s possible spoilerish things could fall through.

First, hope you enjoyed the April Fool's joke. I left the chapter in place (changing the title and adding an author's note) for historical posterity (and because the comments were fun).

THE STATE OF THE STORY

As it stands today (April 2, 2024 when I wrote this), I have just completed Chapter 58 in draft, and have started my first brain-dump of Chapter 59 (which then gets rewritten to draft status). Total story length I’ve written at this point is 567,569 words, so I’m well past the half-million mark! There’s about 120,000 words between the ends of Chapter 46 and 58, so amazingly I’ve somehow managed to maintain enough of a backlog to keep content flowing to all of you on a regular basis. Given some things that I’ll talk about later, this is a good thing.

So far, I’ve managed to largely stave off burnout, although I did have some “brownout” after my mad scramble to rewrite Chapters 1-8 (plus sizable edits to 9-12) during NaNoWriMo, which carried through into January and February, dropping my pace lower than I would have liked. Now that the weather is improving, I feel like I’m getting back on track as the winter doldrums burn away.

Storywise, while the pace is quite slow in terms of time passage, I’d like to believe there are enough things happening to Callie and the other colorful characters to keep things fun and interesting. CH has become as much about the journey as it is the final destination, and I try to always keep some new twist waiting in the shadows to provide a thrill. That many of you have commented how invested in the secondary and even tertiary characters you have become, actually means the world to me in terms of how I want the story to feel.

We had one big fight scene, which I think you all enjoyed, and obvious fallout from that affecting multiple characters, most-notably Thorn and Jesca. That fallout will continue, obviously, as the story progresses. The lessons learned by Callie from defeating the Bogwump nest will continue to shape her as she learns and progresses towards leveling to Silver Tier. I think you’ll like how her powerset expands when we reach that point (as well for many of the other characters).

My goal is to complete writing the time at the training camp by the end of the summer, which essentially will be the end of the first grand story arc as things move forward. I have an additional goal of completing the entire story by the end of 2025, which may be a bit aggressive, but might be doable. You need to aim high to hit high, though, right? We’ll see.

SOME PERSONAL THINGS

So in addition to real-world responsibilities like a day-job and such, some things have changed that have made me reevaluate my world. A couple months ago, as part of a routine physical, a lump was found, which has turned out to be a small, non-aggressive lymphoma. Surgery is planned to remove it in mid-April, and recovery should be quick. Assuming there’s no signs of further spreading after six months, that will hopefully be the end of that. I’ll just take a quick moment and say, see your doctor regularly and FUCK CANCER!

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

But, this has also put some things in my life into a bit of a new perspective. As I walked into the oncology department for the first time, masking my own fear with stupid jokes and not-very-witty banter, things in my life started to reshuffle a bit. They say we all have a bucket list, even if we don’t have it written down. Well, I started to write mine down right there in the waiting room.

#1 on my bucket list was “Finish Callie’s Heroes”

#2 on my bucket list was “Get Callie’s Heroes recorded and on audible”

#3 was to visit Hobbiton (and the other LotR sites) in New Zealand.

Finish Callie’s Heroes, though. Literally, I realized that was the most important thing in my life to me. And even as the prognosis went from scary to become the least bad of all bad options, finishing the story has remained as #1.

So, I’m going to finish it. This I have decided (thank you Tazrok)! But, I did take stock of my overarching plotline, and removed two novella-length side-quests that didn’t directly serve the narrative, as well as put a big question mark on another as a likely-to-remove. Once the main story is done, they can always be written to go back and fill in gaps if needed or wanted.

I’m also going to start looking at options for getting it recorded. That will be a longer road, especially given my dream of who I want to narrate it (I know she has a sizable backlog), but I’m still going to start looking into it. If I can’t find a publisher to front the narration costs, I’ll have to find a way to pay for that myself. As an aside, if anyone here has an in at SBT, please reach out.

This also means I’ll likely need to hire an editor to at least go through the story and clean up things like grammar, typos, punctuation, etc. Unfortunately, an editor won’t be very cheap either. I might (not particularly leaning that way, but it is a theoretical option) try a Kickstarter. Stubbing this work on Royal Road and publishing on Amazon is a possibility, but I’m not sure how well that will work given the slow-pace/slice-of-life nature of the story. Time will tell.

Oh, maybe somewhere in all this I’ll take a few weeks and go to New Zealand. I might get a one-way ticket. Hobbit holes have WiFi, right?

Now please, do not shower me with sympathy comments and well wishes. I am doing okay. As I said, it’s very likely this is just a brief scare and all will be fine after the surgery is completed. If anything, kind comments, feedback, and story-related banter as chapters are posted will do far, far more to support me as I keep writing than anything else possibly could. Nothing motivates a writer more than knowing their work is being enjoyed, along with positive feedback. I’ll also add the obligatory ‘please follow, favorite and review'.

ROUNDTABLE/Q&A

I’d like to consider this update posting to be an opportunity for us to talk, author to audience. If you have any thoughts you’d like to share, or questions about the story, characters, plot (within spoiler-free reason), etc, I’d love for us to have that discussion as a group. Please, fire away in the comments below.

FINAL THOUGHTS

I do want to thank you all, as I have so often, for being readers. If it wasn’t for you, I would never have been able to reach this point in the story, nor would I be able to keep writing it. You mean the world to me and I hope the story can continue to live up to your expectations.

RAH