With the last chapter being half a year old, I thought I should put this here. There are some good news and some bad news regarding the future of "Parasite".
As this chapter's title says, Parasite is being reworked! There have been numerous issues that have popped up in the early chapters, regarding both storytelling and the general tone of the story. To continue the story as it is, feels to me like I am trying to build a tower with a bad foundation - it's inevitably going to crumble. For those who are curious, I will ramble a little bit more further down in this 'chapter' about what the issues are that I encountered. That's why I decided to take the story and start over not from scratch, but from the start, reworking a lot of points.
The bad news is that of course, this will take a while to do, which means a longer wait time for those among you who want to follow the story. I do apologise for that! Redoing the story and fixing the issues feels better to me than to apply band-aid solutions and call it a day, which has caused some writers block before. I want this to be a good story that I can write for a long time, but to get there, I want a good start that introduces the world and its concepts properly.
The good news is that the wait will be worth it - at least I hope so! There have been some major issues in the early chapters that I couldn't fix without tearing down half the chapters that come after, so that's just what I did. I hope to rework a variety of plot points to be more fluid, and to get more action in. I will also publish all chapters at once when they are ready, up to where we are in the current version of Parasite.
Also, this version 2.0 will be published on RR as a new novel! Because some chapters will receive massive reworks, old comments and reviews might no longer be relevant. In the interest of keeping everybody's comments, criticism and reviews for reference, I won't delete this fiction (feedback is extremely helpful and not something I want to let go to waste), but I will not update it anymore either. As best as I can tell, RR does not let you "un-publish" your writings, so this is the next best thing.
With that said, thank you for reading, and I will see you hopefully soon, with a new and improved tale of Parasite shenanigans!
For those who want to stick around and listen to some ramblings, those start here! There will be some plot discussion, as such spoilers may happen! This is your warning!
I have read and re-read Parasite several times, and in my off-time I read a fair few other litRPG novels from other immensely talented authors who publish their novels on here. There are a lot of points that stuck out to me that I considered "problems" in Parasite, and my attempts to fix them in later chapters felt more like band-aid solutions than actual corrections.
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One of the problems that popped up as early as Chapter 1 was the "bad" System. In my attempt to make something that was bad and broken, I have, drumroll please, created something that is bad. The System that Xyte is given was intended to be with faults (and exploits, as we have seen when he accidentally causes an infinite loop that kills Rocky) but it turned out to be so bad that it was ultimately unreadable. I find it important that the litRPG System makes is logical, easy to understand and not too complex. That's also why Parasite has no stat numbers outside of Health/Mana/Stamina, by the way! Too much number crunching for my taste.
I have decided to revamp a good chunk of the RPG System for that reason. Without going into too much detail, a lot of fat will be trimmed and ideas that sounded good in theory but didn't work out in practice will be changed. I do hope that my current idea will work out for the better.
Next comes the involvement of Gods. Those are pretty much the highest stake I can set, and I made them appear in Chapter 5. Where do you go from there? The intention was to involve the Gods as being the arbiters of the System, going around fixing issues where they appear, but at the same time it just became too much of a disparity. It would have been even if Xyte were a human or somewhat more powerful, but here it was too much, and scaling things back down to more local issues and minor villains did not feel right.
The reworked story will feature no Gods at all, for a long time. Perhaps they will never make an appearance except as figures of worship. If they do appear, I want it to be at a point where the stakes have slowly been raised to that point.
Third, and this kind of ties in with the first problem mentioned, is the enormous amount of exposition. There was too much in too short a timespan, devolving into walls of text as questions are asked. This also pushed back a lot of room for action and character development - as a proofreading friend of mine told me, the protagonist is not very interesting and felt more like they were along for a ride and barely acted themselves. The first few chapters should give a better idea of who the person we will follow is. I have tried to remedy this by typing in the first person and doing introspection and inner monologue sections, but that did not work out.
The reworked version of Parasite will feature a 3rd person view, which is what I am used to! I will trim a lot of fat here as well to make the story feel more fluid and natural. Sure, in real life if you were tossed into a foreign world with strange new rules, you would want as much information as you could get right off the bat. In a novel, that will just be an exposition dump.
All of that will take time, because I want to do it right and because the start of the new year means a load of work at my day job, which means feeling drained when it's time to write. But that block won't last forever, and when things clear up I should be able to pick up some speed again!