Hey.

Had a lot of hospital related stuff a few weeks ago that stretched on longer than I'd thought it would at the time and it broke my writing routine over it's knee quite soundly. I let my backlog tick over while I tried to get back into the routine and I immersed myself in my notes and reread the work so far a few times but overall the work is something I'm unhappy with quality wise it terms of world building, logical consistency and definitely in my character design.

As time went on and I worked on the story with the aim to fix some of the direction the weaker elements were going I grew very unhappy with the whole thing from the notes to the work itself. The notes were incomplete and often had a lot of content still in my head instead of written down, the structure was bad and made writing harder. The story itself was too quick in terms of timescale, too fluid in it's approach to the different elements with no real anchor to keep the reader attached to the narrative and like a lot of people have said the character design is bad, workable enough if you close one eye and keep reading but still bad.

I shopped around for opinions and first thing I heard was to put it on hiatus, to stop feeling bad about not working on it as much as I was and that I was releasing too frequently for someone's first work anyway. Then I was told to keep it but drop it, rewrite the thing from the start with the learned lessons with same story under a new structure with the same but more refined character designs. Then I was told to drop writing if I wasn't enjoying it.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

But I am enjoying writing, it's just I don't like writing I know is bad. I can read bad writing and enjoy it, there's little enjoyment for me in writing bad writing.

I tried working on a new story for a while to get the juices going, a two decade post system apocalypse story about a plant focused druidic gunsmith using nature magic to make bullets and firearms and trees with gun branches and treant mechs but I was still couldn't get into the groove with IO sitting there unaddressed and my backlog gone so the story was paused. It felt wrong and I couldn't make something new like that.

I talked to some of my close friends and one suggested I drop IO, rewrite it when I'm ready and work on something different that will challenge my still newbie skills but doesn't need a total build up from the ground and suggested some fanfiction. I thought that was a good idea and here I am a little while later, so I'm going to make some fanfiction about Path of Exile, a game I like to play every little while. When I think my skills have been suitably sharpened I'll come back and rewrite IO into it's new form, no idea when that'll be but I doubt it'll be years.

Thanks for sticking around and reading in any case, sorry about the dead end. I know as a reader they are very disheartening, I won't spoil the planned ending to IO though as I really do want to come back to it and popping it here now could annoy just as much as it could soothe but as far as the next arc it was Mal heading into actual hand level work taking on local gangs and indirectly exposing a bit of the nanite's presence in the world. I'll let you draw conclusions from that, I guess.