Yes I know what it means. I was forced to take French for six years in public school. I just like the joke. Deal with it.

... That is probably a bad way to open our little fireside chat, huh?

Lets try again.

For starters, this is not a chapter. Your new chapter arrives on schedule at 8:33 in gods own CST as usual. Don't want to listen to me ramble, that is okay. Push the next chapter button. For those of you who are sticking around I have some fun data!

First off, we're 11/50 on Rising Stars. For a first fiction with minimal ad buys this is crazy. Bonkers as a bearded British man might say. This honestly accomplishes my primary goal, which was to get in the top 20 (since those appear on mobile) but I yearn for that top 10 like the children yearn for the mines. Unfortunately, most of the top 10 are stable stories so I basically have to wait for one of them to fall off at this point. Since any solution to this would be a ToS violation, I'm just going to have to wait.

But honestly, for me? That isn't even the best part.

Remember how I was bragging the other day that we'd hit #271 for our overall rank? Well that was two days ago, and past me is a chump. He was satisfied with a mere 271, while I, the more sophisticated future Guy Incognito get to bask in being #130 on on Royal Road's best rated.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

And now I'm going to get sappy.

I am floored by that rank, because of what it represents. Out of ~80,000 something stories, Orphan is already one of the most well reviewed stories on this site. I've been maintaining a 4.85 average rating going on about five days now, and while I have no doubt some douchebag will eventually come along and kick that number in the knees, the actual number isn't the thing that matters to me. It is the breakdown research I did.

I looked at the percentage of five star ratings on the top 20 novels (excluding myself) and found that the average story had 65.34% of its ratings as five star. Orphan has 87.4%. My story isn't maintaining such a high overall rating because it isn't getting review bombed (though that helps), but because all of you mad lads are hitting it with the full five stars. Because apparently you like it.

And really, that means everything. And it has given me confidence I didn't think I'd ever have in my work.

So what does this mean for you and your family? Well happily I've got good news.

I'm all in on Orphan. I will keep writing this through to the very distant future. Expect daily chapters until I keel over. I'm also in the process of scheduling a week off with my day job. I was going to go to sunny Mexico, but I have decided instead I'm going to lock myself in the office and drill down on editing and chapter writing to provide myself (and you dear readers) with a proper anti-sick/patreon approved backlog.

That is basically all I have to say. You are all awesome and I'll see you on the page and in the comments.

In the interest of not inundating you all I'm going to keep these fourth wall breaks to a minimum going forward. But thank you for reading.