Hey Guys,

It's been a hot minute.

Sorry for the lack of communication over the past... geez... two years, but sometimes shit happens. In this case, that shit was life, and what happened was it got busy.

I started Ideascape right at the start of the COVID pandemic when I had just graduated from college and had essentially limitless free time. Mostly due to unemployment.

Unfortunately, I couldn't keep going due to a combination of burnout on the story, compounding issues with plotholes, and a rapid change in schedule due to a new job.

It was just too much for me to work a 40-hour week, then pile on 16+ hours of writing. It made writing feel more like work, and less like a cool new hobby.

So here it is.

TLDR: I'm doing a rewrite of Ideascape called Wild Thought: System Update Pending (for the tentative first "book", at least). The new name is a work in progress technically, but I think it's fun, and helps encapsulate what made Ideascape entertaining and unique to begin with. So don't just go back and reread the story (unless you really want to, I'm not your boss, and it's still right here) because things are a-changing.

What's Changing:

The pacing: The pacing, oh, the pacing. I'm going to work on getting more plot lines going much faster, so hopefully, when I reach chapter 100, it doesn't feel like Vic has only done one or two things.

The system: For reasons tucked into a spoiler blurb below, the System is going to need a rework. The spirit of it is the same, but my hope is the changes will help me avoid some of the problems that developed later in the story.

The Characters: If you didn't notice from the number of cool characters in my story, I love building new and interesting people that have their own quirks. Unfortunately, due to my, *cough*, shitty writing early in Ideascape, that characterization didn't come into play until much later. Not anymore, I say!

Chapter Length: Every chapter of Ideascape was 3000+ words. That's... quite a lot more than it sounds. They would take me typically between 3 and 8 hours to write, a piece, and that was not a sustainable release rate for three chapters a week. What's more, as my writing got better, I could convey more meaningful information with fewer words, so the content exploded wildly out of my control. In the updated story, I'll be releasing chapters with a length of between 1200 and 2000 words a couple of times a week, which should hopefully help keep me more accountable.

What's Staying the Same:

The Plot: The basic outline of the plot will remain the same, with elements popping up that should seem familiar when you get to them.

I hope everyone enjoys it! I'll have the link to the new story coming out shortly, but I'll leave you with a prologue for the rewrite here to wet your whistle before then.

Thanks for Reading,

Falcon

The problems with Ideascape:

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

I was crippled with the first thirty or so chapters.

When I started Ideascape, I had no idea people were going to want to read the story, let alone follow it through 70+ chapters. Basically, I only started drafting the major plot points out on paper after I got around 30 chapters in. By that time I had already committed to writing the story as it stood. I couldn't exactly go back and rewrite the whole thing from there with patrons waiting in the wings, even though I'd given myself some nasty plot holes that didn't really work in later chapters.

It was ret-con city, and those issues just got worse as the story got longer.

The system was a royal pain in my ass, and Vic's character sheet gave me nightmares.

I made the system waaaaay too complicated to start out with, and even in its tentative "finished" state, the system still didn't work for me.

Ever wondered why there's so many LitRPGs on RoyalRoad? I have a theory.

The benefit of a litRPG, especially for serial releases, is that the reader can get a quick update on the character's status page, and then they have a good understanding of where they are in the story. You can SEE the growth of the character, and it doesn't rely on past knowledge to help you get caught up. Even if you only catch a chapter once a week, you still don't have to backtrack and re-read to understand where you are in the story. That's the big win with using a LitRPG as a narrative system. It works REALLY well for a sequential release, kinda like a comic book.

The problem with a LitRPG is the exact same problem you have with MMOs like Destiny 2, or WoW. (Especially Destiny 2. Just... yikes)

Namely, that's Feature Creep, and Power Creep. Before you know it, you have an entire textbook instead of a status screen and then you're in a hole, especially if you've designed your narrative around the system. Like, oh, every LitRPG that exists.

This is why you have authors starting to consolidate skills in their trees later in the story. Why they throw in a little comment about turning off system notifications. Why you start to only see the status screen once every ten chapters. Basically, keeping up with it is a surprising pain, and you need to build your system with sustainability in mind from the start. The system in chapter 150 needs to work just as well as in chapter 1.

I just threw stuff together to start with, and then was left regretting my life choices.

The characters grew into different people.

Now, don't get me wrong. When I wrote Ideascape, I had an idea of what each character needed to do and what their narrative purpose was long before they were introduced. Unfortunately, as I got better at writing, those purposes shifted and changed as the characters grew into themselves.

For the new characters, it wasn't so bad. But for the old ones? Yikes.

There were parts of their development that took a huge turn. I wanted to go back and rewrite most of Cindy and Donny, for example, from the very beginning. The sad part was, though, that if I did that, I'd need to explain those changes to my long-time readers, and in most cases, it marked such a big difference for the characters that I'd basically have to rewrite the story from the beginning anyway.

So here we are.

I'm a better writer than I was when I started.

It's pretty impressive how much better you can become at something just by doing it. I started writing in the first place because it was a skill that I wanted to improve. And improve I did. If you go read chapter 70 side-by-side with chapter one, the differences in style and clarity are remarkable. I got more done in one paragraph in the later stuff than in a whole chapter earlier. I just had no understanding of narrative pacing, what was important for the reader, and what I needed to do to get the ideas out of my brain and onto the page.

Going back and reading some of my old stuff is genuinely cringe for me, now. I spent so much time explaining what the skills and abilities do that I forgot that just about everyone knows what "flying" means. Show, don't tell, indeed. This compounds the character development immensely. I should have explored more of the main characters' emotional sides way early on, and not ignored it in favor of action. Both are important. One moves the story along and engages the reader. The other makes the reader actually care.

Go figure.

All of this to say...

I can do better. I really liked the world that I built, and I felt bad for abandoning it. Not letting you guys see some of the bigger plot points later? A travesty!

What's the point of imagining and coming up with all of these cool things if you just keep it inside your brain where no one can access it?

I have a feeling that there's been enough time between when I left and now that I can bring the story forward in new and exciting ways, hopefully better and brighter than ever before.

Feel free to drop a comment if you have any questions, and I look forward to hearing what everyone thinks.

Thanks Again,

Falcon