Notice

Hello everyone. It’s been far longer than I promised to come back. Sorry for seemingly disappearing from the face of the earth.

To be honest I have been procrastinating on this announcement because it isn’t the news I wanted to give everyone. For those that don’t want to read a lengthy rant from me, I have decided to rewrite Volume One before I start posting the second one.

If you want to know more about my decision, making a rewrite was already a set decision on my mind, but I wasn’t sure about how I would proceed with it. This is the first novel I have posted and there was a lot of improvising and experimentation on it. After I finished Volume One, I wanted to look back and address all the problems it has.

Now, after a rest and a complete reread of the volume, I have made a concrete plan about what I want to do and I realized… Making the rewrite, while keeping a satisfying schedule for volume two and writing the chapters of my other work, seems like the perfect formula to burn myself.

Seelebierg is quite an ambitious and also LONG novel. I don’t see myself doing it to the end if I don’t have a solid base, that would be Volume One. I have thought about other ways to tackle this problem, like forgoing the volume and calling it Volume Zero, or radically changing the structure of the first two volumes. At the end of the day Volume One is mostly an introduction to the world and the main characters, in gaming terms it would be like a tutorial that doesn’t have much impact on the overall story. But it does have important ties with Volume Two, which is the more formal beginning of the adventure.

So I don’t have an easy solution for this conundrum. For now, as I have said, I have laid a solid plan for what I need to rewrite.

N’s side will mostly stay the same, I will do some work on the prose, especially in the first chapters, whose writing can be greatly improved. But I will only do some substantial changes to the plot at end of the first half, which currently feels a little underwhelming.

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

The bulk of the big changes will be on Simon’s side. Most of the critiques have been about the characters being plain. I will address that problem starting from the first chapter while adding a new development that begins in chapter two and spans the whole volume. This will reshape several scenes and make Simon’s side more interesting. Another thing that I will change is Simon’s personality. I will make notable changes to the way he narrates his side of the story. He will feel a bit more naive and childish, as befitting a boy that left his isolated home for the first time. The plan is for him to have a good progression as the story advances, both in mindset and ability. Growing from a naive boy to a seasoned adventurer.

This will be the general trend of the first big arc on both sides, where time passes quite fast. For example, the start of Volume Two is roughly a year later than the start of Volume One, and each volume will span from half a year to a year in the next ones.

Well, back to the original topic, I will take my time to rewrite Volume One. First I will make the changes I mentioned, and then I will address another worry of mine, which is… Volume One was quite bigger than I expected! When I started writing it, I had planned for it to have about forty chapters, and even that felt long. It was poor planning on my part and it feels like it’s taking too long for the story to progress. In comparison, Volume Two, where I did proper planning, will have around thirty chapters, and I expect every future volume to not be longer than that.

All in all, it will probably be a long time until the second volume comes out, at the very least it will take until autumn. I plan to make a quick release of the rewritten Volume One, followed by a normal schedule of Volume Two. I will give you more concrete news once the rewrite is nearly done.

Thank you all for sticking with Seelebierg until now. I hope I will see you again once Seelebierg is back!