Hello, whoever is reading this!

Holy crap you're still following this fic? You're amazing and I'm sorry. So, the short version is that after messing up in a few ways which included abandoning Leftover Apocalypse for two years, I'll be rebooting the story in August. Why a reboot? Because there have been a lot of changes and trying to do that retroactively would be silly.

The long version? Well, here's the breakdown:

1. First I had the normal life problems. Work got busy, family had illnesses, things like that. I won't be going into detail because it doesn't matter. This normally would only cause a brief gap in posting.

2. Then I realized that I was rapidly approaching a part where my plot outline was not just loose but practically non-existent and if I just plowed ahead without fixing that I risked just totally ruining the whole story. That meant I had to stop and plan some, which meant re-reading and making notes and maybe tweaking some things. Not a big burden, but something that means I couldn't just start posting again the second things calmed down.

3. When I did go through and re-read and start trying to plan... well, I realized there were some serious structural issues and some plot problems that were very very hard to fix without retconning stuff which I really didn't want to do. Each thing I needed to fix led me to think about another thing, and it snowballed.

4. This felt so daunting that I wasn't sure what to do, AND it had already been embarrassingly long since I posted a chapter. I'd actually sat down and written two more but not posted them, because having seen all the problems I needed to fix and not knowing how I was going to do that it felt like posting more chapters would just make everything worse. The weight of it added to the voice in my head telling me it wasn't good anyway and everyone had surely already unfollowed and moved on.

5. I had an epiphany. And then another one. And another one. I guess I just needed some distance? Listen, I'm not suggesting I became a genius and this plot is now going to be the best story ever told or anything. Of course not. But I kept thinking of ways to fix plot holes or improve the story that not only would work but would in turn let me do other cool things, and those cool things would - just by coincidence - fix OTHER plot holes. It was great. This took place over several months, as I daydreamed on my daily walks.

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So yeah, it's time to try this again but now I have the story all figured out from start to finish. There's wiggle room and holes still of course, but in the "which of three ways should I take to the grocery store" sense rather than the "oh no the bridge is out and I forgot to fix the brakes" sense. Right now the biggest challenge is that I'm re-writing whole chapters and adding new ones but there are still big chunks that don't really need to change much and it's hard to decide if I should re-write those too or leave them. There's a possibility that re-writing even the parts I don't need to would improve them or make the writing and tone more consistent, but there's also the possibility that they'll be worse or that it'll just be more work for no benefit.

There are a lot of changes but many of them won't show up right away or are to things that I hadn't actually written yet. In some cases it won't be clear why I changed anything until thirty chapters later. The core story is the same and the characters are the same (mostly). Thing that have changed include some big stuff - there are some changes to the list of magic you can select, and which ones the characters have, there are changes to when some things happen, where they happen, etc. There's a WAY bigger focus on some stuff that was going to come up later, which means it needs to be talked about from almost the beginning. There's a much much much much more solid and sensible chain of events in terms of what happens BEFORE chapter one. Stuff like that.

I'm going to be posting it as its own thing and not on this page (unless Royal Road says I can't for whatever reason) and have archived all existing chapters because I don't want people coming here and getting stuff spoiled. Likewise I'm trusting any of you that check out the new version to keep your mouths shut about anything you remember - not only because it's spoilers but because things are going to in some cases happen differently or to different people or earlier or later and so they could spoil things more than you expect OR just be wrong.

Thank you, anyone that's still following and reading this. I don't believe that writers or artists or anyone like that has an obligation to keep creating things, but I do know it sucks when a story you're reading just stops getting updated and for that I'm very sorry. I promise I am really dedicated to finishing this thing.

I hope to see all of you in August, I will post a link here when I publish the new prologue and chapter one!