okay so uhhhh, bad news😭 like cerus says, let me put my glasses on for this one.

I'm probably not going to finish finish this series as is. I plan on writing this up to the end of the first volume (so I can mark it as 'complete' and not dropped😈), but I think I'm gonna stop there. There are many reasons why, but I'll start with the most obvious.

I flubbed the launch. I knew that cruise was coming and it killed my traction (if you have no clue what that means, see the comments of the last post and the authors note of the one before). If I'd planned around it this wouldn't be an issue. Everything happens for a reason, though, and while I was on said cruise I started writing a second story (still only exists on Scrivener). While working on it, I started to notice a different problem with the series.

It isn't RR-ready. This is a big one. As much as I enjoy writing for fun, I'm not in a position where I can afford to do that for months on end. For the first two weeks of this story's existence, the second chapter (where Grim gets Isekai'd) was the first. While it was, the story hardly moved numbers-wise. I swapped it with the second chapter (where Grim ends up in Mephistos) and the story started getting traction. My oldest story (the dropped one ironically) starts in media res, and it got a ton of traction when I first launched it. Beyond that, that story was structured to fit into the Shonen mold and it saw success for the week it existed because of that... even though my writing wasn't really good back then. Speaking of, that brings me to my third point.

I'm better at writing 3rd Person. You can read that old story and see how bad my prose was. I've had years since then to improve it, and I think the 3rd Person chapters of ITT compared to those are night and day. Hell, it's night and day compared to the chapters of Valkyrie Cadet, and I made that like a year ago! Point is, I am significantly better at writing 3rd Person stories than 1st. This was my first attempt at it, and -- like I said -- I'm trying to make a writing career here. I can't afford to spend years perfecting 1st Person writing when I'm already good at 3rd Person.

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So, what now? I'm still going to finish Volume 1. Once I do, though, I'm moving into that other series. I'm taking everything I've learned and putting that all into it. I'm gonna plan that launch a lot more and spend a lot more time making sure it's viable so that even if it doesn't find an audience on RR it might still be appealing to publishers. As for Isekai Times Ten, I'm going to rewrite it once I'm done with that second story. ITT has legs, and I didn't spend 7 months outlining it for no reason. I plan on it being 14 books long for crying out loud! I just need to rework Vol. 1, touch up the other volumes a bit to avoid the first one's pitfalls, and write it all in 3rd Person.

I love this world, and I have so many stories I want to tell in it apart from Grim and Galerose's, but I want to make sure that I'm telling it properly -- and right now I don't think I am.

In other news, I'm gonna do Valkyrie Cadet after I finish the ITT rewrite. Hopefully by then I'll be in a position to write an off-genre story and survive. I miss Cora and Seiji a lot :( Right now finishing this up and moving into my next one takes precedence, though. For anyone that does like this series as is, though, I'm sorry for doing this. I just cannot financially or physically afford to write fourteen volumes of a story that isn't as good as it can be. I'm not a perfectionist, but I hope my more coherent author's notes prove that I genuinely want to be a good author. I don't wanna just write slop for cash. I wanna be able to write slop I'm proud of for cash. That's what this new series is. The new one is more "Shonen" than this (it's HEAVILY inspired by JJK), but the ITT Rewrite will maintain it's heavier tone. I just need to make it a bit snappier and be more clear with the story's promise.

ADHD rant over. I ramble a ton so if you need clarification on anything, let me know. Also, I'm writing Chapter 27 as we speak. It'll be out by tonight or tomorrow depending on how late I'm finished.