I’ve got a lot to say about the journey to finish Volume 4: Annihilation. Gonna split this one into sections so as to keep things on-topic for myself.
1. Annihilation
2. Feedback
3. Change
4. The Road Ahead
Annihilation
Have I lost the plot?
I’ve asked myself that question over the course of writing Annihilation, and I’m still not sure I see the answer. When I began writing this story, the quintessential point of it all was to keep my antagonists human, or some approximation thereof. The very description of this story here on RoyalRoad says this outright. (“[…] with a particular focus on human villainy, rather than of exterior threats.”) The Hestian Quartet was human. The Phaenonites were human. The Iron Warriors may not have been strictly human, but their origins are of mankind’s devilry. And Ouranos was human.
Cronos and the multicolored quartet that lurks in the Warp, now freed from Ouranos’s prison, are not human. And so I wonder, have I lost the plot? How did we get here? Is this…wrong, does it detract from the quality of the story?
I can answer only one of these—the how of how we got here. It is on you to tell me whether this change in narrative style and direction is wrong or lessens the quality of the tale. And only time will tell whether the plot is something lost to me. But as to how we got here, well, that’s easy. You see, it’s pretty simple to kill a character off. If I wanted Callant Blackgar dead, as his author I have all the power to do that on a whim. But I wanted more than that—killing characters is too easy and unimpressive. No, I wanted to destroy Callant Blackgar, which required deeply, truly understanding my own character, and deciding how best to oppose him. And this goal of mine manifested in the form of Ouranos, who shared this ideal and belief, that death was too inconsequential and that Annihilation necessitated a deeper wound. From this, then, I engineered the great tragedy that precedes this Afterword, across the 100+ chapters that brought us here. Throughout this tale, we have seen glimpses of the end, bits and pieces of looming calamity.
And now the end is here.
I admit, this would be a natural stopping point, I think. It’d be very fitting for the grimdark universe to cease the storytelling here, with Cronos on the cusp of attaining material awakening and Ouranos’s prisoners on the verge of freedom, to wreak unknowable havoc upon creation anew, all with our protagonists ruined on fundamental levels. This story, a 40k tale, cannot have a ‘happy ending.’ It will not. If you’re here for that, I’m sorry to say that you should look elsewhere. So the question, then, is do I continue? Do I take this story further, or do I let my readers’ imagination suffice?
But that’s getting ahead of myself. We’ll loop back to this later in this Afterword.
Feedback
While working on the last few chapters of Annihilation, I got into a conversation with a passionate reader of the earlier story of Cronos. There was a lot of back-and-forth discourse about the style and contents of my writing. Suffice to say, this reader did not particularly like the way I was handling things. And that’s fine! People are allowed not to like things, even if I’m the one who made those things in question!
What isn’t fine is this:
image [https://i.imgur.com/sUwnPbN.png]
I’ve said in prior Afterwords and Author’s Notes that this story is not a LitRPG or some community-influenceable piece of fiction. The story of Cronos is set in stone and not going to change much. However, that doesn’t mean I am not open to feedback and am unwilling to make changes to things that feel out of place or don’t work for the story as a whole.
For any creators out there, I’m gonna let you in on a little bit of wisdom when it comes to feedback: people are pretty bad at providing solutions to problems, but they are very good at pointing out what and where those problems are. When you receive (negative) feedback from your audience, it’s OK to push back on their suggestions and stand up for yourself and your work. (In fact, you should always stand up for yourself) And for any readers out there, when an author is pushing back against your feedback, it is not because they think you’re wrong for having it. Instead, they (the authors) are probably trying to tease out why you feel the way you do about a certain subject. When they know that, they can then act on it to the best of their ability.
If I, or any other author, just accepted every bit of feedback at face value, not only would the story at hand probably be incoherent, but it’d look like a mish-mash of a bunch of different writing styles and means of storytelling. In fact, it probably would not be far off from an AI-generated piece of work. (Because that’s very literally how the modern consumer brand of AI functions)
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
All this is to say, for Cronos in particular, I welcome and invite any and all feedback you (yes, you!) are willing to provide on the story. I cannot guarantee I’ll necessarily implement your suggestions, but I can guarantee that I will give due consideration about doing so.
Which brings us to our next section of this Afterword.
Change
The user above who wrote me the screenshotted message inspired me to make many changes to Cronos, particularly among the first few chapters of the story. Yes, I appreciate the irony. The form of these changes may result in a few rewrites of earlier chapters or even the addition of a couple preliminary chapters to kick things off. However, a good friend of mine once wrote this to me on Discord:
(SB/SV = SpaceBattles/SufficientVelocity, other fanfic sites which I am (as yet) not contributing to.) [https://i.imgur.com/Zvp17qO.png]
And I cannot fathom this outlook, true or not.
I’ve been a hobbyist author for five years, and a hobbyist writer for twenty. Two decades ago, when I first started really writing, my parents, teachers, and peers constantly drilled into me that “Writing is rewriting.” Your first draft isn’t it. You get to iterate, you are allowed to improve. Much of what is here on RoyalRoad for Cronos are my first drafts. And many of these first drafts deserve to be improved to the best of my ability—my readers deserve my best, after all. Why would I not put in the time to give it to them?
So yes, I have changes in store for Cronos. These changes are not all going to be new chapters, so I get that it might look like this story is a bit “dead” or not being updated. (Which is largely ironic, as just the opposite is true!) But if you’re a longtime reader, I first of all appreciate your dedication to the story, and I encourage you to keep an eye on some of the earlier chapters. Structurally, narratively, and content-ly, I have many changes to make to bring things up to a more capable, deserving quality for the tale at large.
One of them, for instance, is a reduction in smiling. Did you know that there are 83 ‘grin’s and 36 ‘smile’s in Penance alone? Clearly my characters are happy campers. For a grimdark story set in the forty-first millennium, this cannot stand! More seriously, I have gotten more than one instance of feedback about this apparent over-smiling. I intend to go back and at least trim up some of the verbiage involved, if not altogether pruning the mood.
Another point of feedback I’ve gotten is that I mention, by name, too many characters too quickly in the earlier chapters. This isn’t really something I’m passionate about—I don’t particularly have difficulty with letting characters develop themselves as needed as a story progresses—but more than a couple of my readers, beta readers included, do care about this. To that end, I am planning on adding an entirely new ‘Prelude’ chapter to Penance to set the stage for the setting and ease in some of the crew sooner, and to then limit the exposure of names mentioned in Philosophy, the original first chapter of the story. I think this may help alleviate some of this issue for future—and returning—readers.
Finally, when conversing with the aforementioned user above (who thought I wasn’t listening to their feedback), I found myself needing to continuously quote myself from other, prior Afterwords about lessons I had already learned. It occurred to me that, to some extent, it might behoove me to write a Foreword for Cronos, too. I suspect it will be fairly similar in scope to the Afterword of Penance, the first Volume. So that’s on the horizon, too. Speaking of the horizon…
The Road Ahead
I had long periods of burnout while writing Annihilation. It sucked, in short. I did not enjoy my time writing it during these burnouts. I think the big issue for me was keeping to a schedule. That’s just not how I write, yet it’s what I said I’d do for the story. I had said I’d aim to publish one chapter a week, aiming for Fridays, but releasing as soon as they are done regardless. But some weeks, I cannot get a chapter out of me. Some days, I can cram out four back-to-back. Penance, for instance, was written in a month. It’s 10,000 words longer than Annihilation, yet Annihilation took 6 months. That’s just how it be sometimes. And yet, despite this awareness of my natural writing habits, it still felt really shitty to miss a week - or more - which compounded upon itself to further delay and inhibit my writing. It began to feel like I had to write, not that I wanted to.
Add on the fairly negative discussion with the above quoted user, who—while I’ll decline to mention specifics—did flash in my face my story’s lower viewer/follower count than their own works, and I almost felt like willingly being bullied out of writing my own story. Listen, I’m mature enough not to give a shit about popularity, but that doesn’t mean a relative lesser amount doesn’t make me or the story I’m writing feel unwanted.
So, yeah. It sucked.
I’m not asking for sympathy here, I’m just letting you know where I’m coming from.
All the same, and even though Annihilation is a perfectly viable stopping point, I don’t want to stop. The problem for me is that I know where the story goes. I know what the characters do and what becomes of them. I know who the new characters are. (Spoilers! New Characters!) I’m not just going to wake up tomorrow and forget about the existence of the whole story. I am one day, be it tomorrow or next week or next month, going to write this stuff out. And I figure I may as well share it when I do.
With that in mind, I invite you all to join me in Volume 5: Renascence, to see if a different kind of protagonist can overcome the horror that is Cronos and thwart the machinations of the Cataclysm. Or, perhaps, this newfound protagonist of ours may prove to be but a pawn of those she is sworn to defeat. And no, her name is not Bliss, nor is it Zha. Even so, rest assured that we have not seen the end of Callant Blackgar or his remaining retinue.
I would hardly be so merciful.
* Ceno