TL;DR: I'm slowing down chapter updates due to real life matters and to improve story quality.

Hey guys,

To cut straight to the point: I'm not happy with the state that Shapestealer is in right now. I just feel like there's too many parts of the story that I could have done better and there were, quite frankly, some chapters that I rushed to keep up with daily updates. In hindsight, I probably should have waited to build a longer backlog of chapters before posting, but what's done is done.

While writing Shapestealer was fun at first, as I got more feedback and posted more chapters: I grew to realize how lacking my writing was in certain areas. For instance, I believe that my character work could be a lot better and a lot of my dialogue could be improved as well.

To improve my writing, I'd need to take a step back and do read some actually well-written books. As well as do additional research on what make good stories work the way they do.

But that takes time, and I don't have a lot of that at the moment. As of writing, I'm about to graduate from university and that means I'm only going to get busier in the next few months as I finish up project submissions and prepare for my final exams; and... I also have to find a job, which isn't exactly the most exciting activity in the world.

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I know there are authors who are both busier than me and manage to pump out good books at a fast pace; but I'm not them, and I probably won't be for a long time. I was and still am learning a lot about writing a good story and how to best present it to an audience: though evidently, I still have a long way to go.

So, moving forward, I'll be cutting down Shapestealer releases to twice a week for the foreseeable future. Hopefully at this pace, I can provide you all with higher quality chapters and bring the story in a better direction overall.

To end things on a more positive note, I'd like to clarify that just because I'm slowing down Shapestealer's chapter uploads, it doesn't mean that I'll stop writing the story anytime soon. I still want to see the story through to at least the end of the first book (about 100,000-120,000 words) so we still have a long way to go.

Plus, I'll be working on a new story as well. This one won't release anytime soon as I plan to take my time with it and plan it out properly. Because if my experience with writing Shapestealer taught me anything: it's knowing what not to do as an author.

If you made it this far, thank you kindly for reading up to this point. I hope that you will continue to follow both Maya's journey through the Tower and my personal journey as an author over the next few months.

Best Regards,

VerilyEvil