Hi everyone, I hope that your weekend went well.

Today's announcement is before the chapters because I have a little surprise in store today. We've reached the end of the double chapter sprint week event, but I still have enough backlog to do another, slightly more restrained event. And what could be better to pair with a week-long sprint than a week-long marathon?

Here's how this week will play out. Sprint week was a straight doubling of the chapters released, getting us through the book at about 225% of the regular speed. For marathon week, we'll be pulling back the throttle to around 140% of our normal words per week. Each day will be centered around one extra long scene. For the duration of the event, the daily word minimum will be going up from our usual 1600, to a staggering 2k+. But that isn't enough to justify calling it an event (and wont take us to 140%, for those of you who did the math). So on top of that, we will also be getting chapters released on Saturday, for a minimum of 12k words this week.

If I can stay ahead and keep writing fast enough, I might be able to extend the marathon event, but I'll have to see how it goes and play it by ear. Other than keeping things moving along at a steady clip, my other goal in setting this up is to place the arc's major events all in the same (or occasionally two) day(s), so that each group of linked chapters feels complete. But the end result is that we will be moving through the story faster than normal and I hope that you enjoy what is coming down the pipeline.

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With that out of the way, it's time for the end of arc wrap up. Today is the end of the downtime arc, and yesterday was the culmination of the Bandit/dreadbeast war side arc. I just wanted to acknowledge that the downtime arc had a few issues. I know that I changed up the pace of the arc quite a bit from the arena arc, and that it was too slow and too long for some people.

To everyone who enjoyed it, awesome, I'll have more content like this in later books, but not nearly as much at the same time. To everyone who did not particularly like the changes, thank you for being patient. Going forward, the pacing will be much more consistent from arc to arc and I won't stick you in the same place for multiple weeks in a row like that again.

Tomorrow is the beginning of the bog arc, it will take a few chapters to ramp up (about a week), and then the action will be intense the whole way through to the end of book two and beyond.

Have a great week everyone, I'll check in again at the end of the marathon event.

-Magnus