Okay, I didn’t expect this update to come with Chapter 40 being written. I must have miscalculated something because I was certain Breaking Step would end before I reached chapter 20.
But, here I am. Wrote Chapter 40 of Stepping Wild this morning. I have no idea how long this book will be, but the sense I have is that I am still relatively early in it.
For anyone interested in reading the first draft, you can support me here: https://reamstories.com/fantsylvain
To address some concerns I expect people might have. There is a time jump between Breaking Step and Stepping Wild. It is about 2 decades. That is not insignificant, but I don’t think it’s all that long in the scheme of things for the story. There are two reasons for it.
The primary one is that I didn’t want to continue telling stories with Tibs as basically a kid. He barely reached puberty by the end of Breaking Step. Because he has essence, and how it’s been established people with it age slower, even setting Tibs at nineteen physically meant decades had to pass.
The second reason is that….really nothing significant happens to Tibs during that time. I mean, yes, if I were to force myself, I could come up with adventures for him. Maybe how he evades the adventures chasing him. But I feel that it would ultimately just be a variation on something he’s already gone through in the first trilogy. If I do have ideas for a story during that time, I might write it as a short story and put it up here as a bonus.
Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.
Stepping Up Update
This one isn’t the positive update I’d hoped for.
My plan had been to use the money from the sales of Bottom Rung to pay my editor for the work on Stepping Up, and arrange to publish it on the first of March 2025.
I don’t think that is going to happen. While I didn’t expect the sales to be astronomical, since I’m not a great writer, based on the number of people who clamored for me to publish the book so they could buy it, I was expecting something better than what I’m getting. With how things are progressing, I am not in a position to give a timeline for when Stepping Up will be published, but I will keep you up to date on it.
Bottom Rung Audio Update.
The Bottom Rung Ebook is on KU: https://amzn.to/3ShmXzW
This one has fallen through completely. Since I can’t afford a Narrator at this time, my plan had been to avail myself of Google’s AI narrator to have something for people to listen to, but Google requires the book to be available for sale on their platform before they will allow me to set it up for the AI narrator. Since Bottom Rung is on KU, that can’t happen.
I will update you when this change.
And that’s it for updates.
If you want to watch me write, it’s on Twitch https://www.twitch.tv/thetigerwrites