Important announcement.
I'll be going out on a break from the 13th of September to the 13th of November.
This is a scheduled break, and I'm mostly announcing it this early (over a month ahead of time [August the 5th.]) to not disappoint or wrong any of my current or potential patreon followers.
As mentioned above, the break will last 2 months, and by the end of it, I'll go back to releasing chapters as usual. Of course, chapters will be released normally until the 13th of September.
Thank you all for your amazing support! At first, I was extremely insecure about uploading any of my work, and I wouldn't even consider believing my work could actually have loyal fans, much less patreon supporters.
Thank you!
Long author blabber below if anyone wants to read the rest of my thoughts.
It's been a year of uploading my work. I'm both very content with it, and a bit tired of having to follow it constantly... and edit... and make sure every chapter is good to go before releasing it, then realize I still missed out on grammar and other minor things...
If anything, it taught me that no one's perfect, nor any work can be perfect, even edited 9-10 times, especially when edited 9-10 by the same flawed person.
I need to learn how to stop trying so hard to get things perfect, because they won't ever be perfect, and get back to creating my content without a worry, and I worry a lot... constantly. ROFL!
I've been dreading the idea of taking a break, since I'm afraid I'd lose all of my readers etc etc. I unwillingly agreed to a break of a single month since it's "reasonable." And upped it to 2 months because I'm too afraid of taking more than just a single month off (Therapist's idea). Yeah... it's terrifying for me. ROFL! I found something really dumb to worry about. Yeah... I have worse fears, but I'm learning to deal with my fears and this is one of the ways to do so. Just like how I have to kill a character and see that nothing bad happens, I need to take a break and see that nothing bad happens.
Along with the fact that there is a family event during this timeframe, when I probably won't have time to attend or upload for a few days. (I originally planned to leave scheduled uploads, but I'd constantly worry too much and rather have my mind free to enjoy myself with my family.)
This is a perfect time for a break too. It leaves both R&R and the patreon readers with a sufficient cliffhanger but with nothing that threatens Marisha's life in any direct manner. I'm quite happy with the timing as well.
Hell... there were a lot of things I didn't believe will ever happen, turned out they did. Considering I never believed any of my work will ever be uploaded, it's a little funny looking back. Thank you all for proving me wrong!
*
A longer and incoherent author babble below.
Thoughts and fun facts about Myrsha and generally my fictional work for anyone who's interested to read more. This is mostly me being nostalgic about my work, recollections of behind the scenes events, and things I feel like I wanted to put on paper rather than just keep them in my head. I'm also afraid to upload it all since it's not polished and a bit personal... but to hell with my anxiety, I'm not touching it or changing a single thing beyond putting it under another spoiler tag.
I expect it'd be quite boring to read for the majority of you, but if you want to dive into my crazy nostalgic mind, then this is for you.
I originally started writing with a self-insert OP mc fiction that I just wrote for myself. It was called "Violet."
I had this whole idea of naming book 1 "Violet." Book 2 "Indigo." Book 3 "Magenta." And yes, it had context in the story. The amnesiac MC's picked the name Violet for herself, her familiar black cat pet was named Indigo. And well, the last one I'll keep for myself due to spoiler reasons in case I'll eventually heavily edit and release that as a proper fiction one day. (Already edited 13 chapters of that, so might happen one day.)
I wrote 610k words in draft into that project. I've been just enjoying writing whatever I wanted. I mostly used a homebrewed TT world I created with my siblings for our weekly TT games that lasted for a few years now. (We sadly stopped recently due to both a lot of fighting with each other and one of my siblings hopefully getting married soon.) LOL on our first campaign I literally spread single words of random languages around the dungeon they were trapped in, and they had to come up with spells by combining random words in the mysterious languages they found... Fun times... and yeah, I have a sister who speaks fluent Nim.
The world is well developed as you can tell from Myrsha, and has been a few years in the making. But yes, I still make some errors here and there I believe, as mentioned above, no one's perfect.
It was a mixture of the dark world you see in Myrsha, although a few thousands years after the events of Myrsha with different technological development compared to earth. (For example: They use a car that have a gravity enchanted lead inside it that is magically falling forward at all times. The enchanted lead piece is in the car's front, causing the car to move forward due to gravity instead of fuel, and a gear system that is meant to slow the vehicle down. I have a funny gunpowder law in my world which will be revealed later, no spoilers there.)
That draft was horrible by the way. It didn't have a single comma or period, nor paragraph separation. Not readable by any standard... I was just, enjoying myself getting lost in my fantasies on the page. At first I actually wrote in my native language, and later started writing in English because I was afraid my siblings might sneak a read... ROFL! None of them but two speak English, and those two don't have the patience to read long English texts like full books, a webtoon/comic/manga is a big maybe for one of them.
(For context, my native language is really really far from English, we don't even use the same letters etc, most people where I live don't speak more than a few words that they learned online and the accents are horrendous-my own accent included. Think along the lines of how far Japanese is from English. [No, my native isn't Japanese, but Japanese is commonly known due to anime and is a good example.])
Anyway. I started to receive some family pressure to publish this stuff, and I jokingly said that if I ever reach 1 million words in draft, I'll start uploading my work... Yeah well... that happened eventually and here I am obviously. Never believed I will get here. Never believed anyone will like my work and never believed anyone will ever want to support little nobody me... Thank you for proving me wrong!
I worked on Myrsha with the intent of writing something that wasn't as personal as Violet, nor was it a self-insert. (LOL I think I've been "blamed" by a reader of Myrsha being a self-insert just a single time, back when I was a whole lot more insecure about my work and I was both hurt and greatly offended... nowdays I don't think it'd bother me much. People are entitled to their biased opinions. That being said, I'm not a masochist to enjoy fantasizing what Marisha is going through for Marisha to be a self-insert... also Marisha is more bossy than my mother ROFL! if any of you know your MBTI, I'm an INFJ/P, Marisha is an ENTJ... Though I'm not a huge MBTI fan, I have my own weird system to sort personalities, plenty of people use it and it's easy platform to convey personality difference.)
Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.
It was something that I meant to upload from the get go, something I won't have a second thought whether it's too personal to upload or not.
I wanted a progression story weak to strong. (Something I didn't have with Violet who was OP to begin with.) And I wanted something that made more sense than just a senseless chase of power for the sake of power. Marisha needed to have a proper goal (going home atm) that drives her forward for a reason to get the said power. I also wanted deep philosophy and thoughts inserted in it, something I'm trying to put more of when I feel like it and generally in the divine quotes at each chapter. It needed to have "more" I needed it to feel "special." Because otherwise it'd be just like any other book out there, right? (Yes, yes, I know, this is just like any other book out there, I'm just fooling myself. Moving on.)
Marisha physical looks had been decided based purely on a dice throw. I wanted a character that wasn't a self insert of myself, and everything I imagined back then was some sort of idealized version of myself-looks wise. And since no one actually chooses how they look, I decided on a dice. (I do this for every single one of my characters unless I have a reason for wanting specific looks like the Maven of Mysteries for example.) Once I threw the "white girl" dice, I had used the table for coloring. Eyes: 1,2,3=brown eyes. 4=green eyes, 5=blue eyes, 6=gray eyes. Hair 1,2=black, 3,4=brown, 5=blond, 6=red. Marisha threw double 6 for that one... which I was a bit shocked for a moment, saw it as a weird sign that thing are natural 6-6 (allow me some silly superstition), and started writing your fav red headed menace from there.
Marisha's personality has sort of been developing as I wrote her over and over until it became what it is today. I didn't decide on a personality, nor did I pick any quirks from a generator ahead of time like I sometimes do when I get lazy with my characters creation...
The first early drafts were horrendous. In the first version Marisha actually escaped from her home and her abusive father to learn magic, and got sexually abused by a mage a lead a group of young people to the Sapphire Tower like sheep. Also story started way before the Tower... Marisha was also fully human in that version and 16 years old. (Something I changed later as you can all see.)
I started giving my work to a few people online to read. Random people I met and talked to, other authors or people who write. Started talking to people online. (I was avoiding people entirely both online and IRL back then and it was part of my self improvement work.) The first feedback I got was a little uncaring but encouraging.
The second feedback I got broke me entirely. The woman who critiqued it was an author in the making, someone I looked up to back then, and it was harsh to me personally. Maybe not that harsh to anyone else who read it though, and I don't fault her. Some of her critique was also politically based (doesn't matter which side of western politics, we all know what kind of cesspool that is.) I personally had no idea of westerns politics back then, not how they work nor function. I thought I knew, but I really really had no clue. Well... everyone knows how opinionated people get with their politics... and I took that heat personally as if it was directed at my work.
That broke me. I went from writing 20k words a day on average to 0. I couldn't touch my keyboard for months. But honestly? In hindsight it was good for me. It gave me backbones. Every bad critique I got afterward-while it sometimes hurt-only made me much stronger in the long run, and it never broke me again... though, I never went back to writing those crazy hours of 20k words a day either. It used to be 8-12 hours of writing a day. Nowdays it's 3-6 hours of work, mostly editing... + My life changed as life does and I have more things to do in my life today that I didn't back then.
Anyway... in the first version of my work Marisha became a 1st level mage... and everything changed when she met Kolag, Lezere, Jenara, Purson, and Nurum (Sina who used to be a male gnome originally.) The chemistry there enchanted me... and then the party started dying one after the other in this dungeon and it was gut wrenching...
Well... if you've been reading this far, I'm extremely flattered.
If you care that much about my work, then a little thankful reward in a form of a foreshadowing hint toward future events. The Gods are a lot more important than you'd think. There's a good reason I've been putting quotes from the gods in every single chapter, it's meant to introduce them as a part of the world because of the role they play in the main plots.
So... with that fun little party in mind, I started over the next 2 tries, trying to implement that party dynamics somehow into the early stages of the Sapphire Tower... also nerf everyone... my 4th attempt is actually the final form that you've read. With that done, I continued with other events that actually happened in the 1st version such as the Maven of Mysteries etc... and what lead onto the main plot which you currently only have vague hints of...
At the 4th version I also added other elements to the story. Such as Marisha's elven heritage... which also allowed me to modify her age along with everyone's. (One of my earliest beta readers pointed how inappropriate it was for a 16 years old to experience and do all the things Marisha does, and since I didn't like the implications, I decided to move everyone's age by 5 years because it didn't really matter much to me. At first Marisha was meant to be 21 during the Sapphire Tower's events, then I moved her 10 years up and everyone just 5...
I first uploaded it on another platform... and that was another disaster that broke me again. In short, I got banned for something silly and took it way too personally.
Took another break for a few months, took my work off the said platform, and started working again.
This is when I added the colors...
The colors had been an idea that's been on my mind ever since I saw it used on one of the many internet fictions I was reading at the time. I don't even remember which it was, but I believe it was Beneath the Dragoneye Moons that featured colored levels back then. (It was also in a rather early stage of Mango Healer not even becoming a ranger yet.) I just went "Hey... what if emotions were colors... and what if ____ ____ ___ ___ ___ were all colors? in my MC's mind. How would she operate and function as a person and she'll probably think that everyone else think in colors too because she thinks that way... I also came up with the silio race on the spot due to that... which you'll all see some silioes later...
I started to work and modify every line of internal monologue from there. Considering I needed to go over them anyway to change them to italics (the previous platform didn't allow italics and I've been forced to used [brackets] for internal monologues.) I added color and font to it too.
Originally I used more fonts. A different font for the Toml'a and Sinteo languages for example... but R&R is a bit limited on font selection, and I've been forced to lower my font variety. Colors though... colors can be added manually. That being said, it's limited to 10 custom colors and I have more, so I've settled on a few of R&R default colors to make my work somewhat easier. Would love it if there was an option to increase the amount of custom colors, but I believe I'm very much alone in this opinion. xD
It's a weird experiment. Partially driven by my constant need to be "special." Partially driven by how much fun I had coloring and fronting every internal monologue and inserting foreshadowing elements into them knowing no one is likely to find them without understanding the context and how vague they are... In a sense coloring everything gave me a lot of motivation to go over my work again and fix/edit it to a tee.
I've been doing that for a year, along with more writing, adding more content, preparing a massive backlog... then went to R&R to upload, all nervous.
And from that point you can more or less read for yourselves. ^;^ Though it didn't stop there for me... editing, and editing, and more editing... and I just need to stop editing and focus on actual writing instead. I managed to make a few writing breaks, but not as much as I'd like, and it's really been bothering me. So this is another reason for the break I'm taking...
Thank you for reading. <3 Thank you for any form of support you've given me whether it was a simple rating or follow click, to Patreon and being actually interested in my work enough to ask me questions. It helped more than you'd ever know!