Hey!

I hope you guys have been well :D I thought it's been a while since my last update, but I wanted to give a general life update and an update on the book. First: the book.

Here's where we're at so far (the first prologue is what I shared in the last update/preview):

Contents [https://i.imgur.com/S2X7zzf.png]

EVERYTHING THERE IS SUBJECT TO CHANGE!

But I'm really making progress on the story now. The reason it's taken so long (I know I don't really have to give a reason but I wanted to anyway) is that I've been focusing on finding a permanent job. I went through an apprenticeship and, finishing that with top grades, got made permanent last week. With that, I felt I had the stability to carry on with the things I love.

In other words, I was too stressed to actually focus on my creative side, but now I can do that because I don't have to constantly worry about finding a permanent job!

So! I literally just finished writing 'The Mirror: A Fateful Encounter' and just came up with the last chapter name (so it's REALLY subject to change, I change chapter names early a lot), but most of the chapter names might change, or none of them will, it really just depends on how I feel about them after a while when I come back to edit those chapters.

I've already done a LOT of editing on the chapters through to 'The Mirror: Mimic', but the rest I wrote on a roll over the last week or so, meaning they'll have to go through a lot of editing before I'm happy to publish them. The foundation of those chapters is there though, which is what I focus on in my first run-through.

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If you'd read much of the story before, then you'll probably have an idea of what some of these chapters will contain. HOWEVER! I've changed the story a LOT. I've also got a new name for the book series that I want to run with, but won't announce that here just yet.

Also... I don't know how I want to approach publishing chapters, or the structure of all of that just yet. Right now, I'm just re-immersing myself in my world and falling in love with my characters all over again.

Some notes about story changes without going into detail:

- The story is WAY more detailed now. When I was writing as a daily/weekly serial, I felt a need to rush a lot, which left little time for me to flesh out the story/world or characters as I wanted to.

- The general flow of the story and character ages are, respectively, very and slightly different.

- There's a lot more focus on characters that didn't get enough exposure as I wanted them to in the original serial. Considering their position in the later parts of the overarching story, I feel that this would've been a big detriment if I continued the web serial as it was.

- I've slightly altered some character personalities that changed through experiences that you get to see.

- Some of the story made me cry a lot while I was writing it. I don't know how those parts of the story will come across, but I hope at least one person who reads it will love every moment of it. It's gonna be hard to go back and edit those parts.

- Some things that some people theorised in the comments were correct ;)

Currently, the book is around 60-61k words. With the other things I've planned to include in this book, and for how the overarching story is intended to go, I think this first book will likely reach 90-100k words, making it a fairly sizeable novel.

For the record, from what I've been thinking about the overarching story, I can foresee the series reaching 10 books of roughly equivalent size.

And with that, I'll start finishing up this update.

I HAVE NO ETA! Honestly, I don't know how life is going to go, but right now I'm getting back into the stride of writing (writing three whole chapters in one go after doing an editing pass on the whole story as I came back was a good sign, I think). But, in the end, I want people to read my story.

To that end, I'll continue writing and hopefully drop another update much sooner than a year from now.

Like always, thank you for reading. I'll talk to you all soon :)