Hello everyone. Apologies once more for the interruption to the novel for an author's note.

For personal reasons related to burnout and issues with the upload schedule, Soil and Stars will be going on a short hiatus. I expect the story to return in early January. Thank you all for reading so far, it's been great seeing people enjoy it, and I hope you will stick around for when it comes back.

If you are interested in more detail as to why this hiatus is happening, you can read it in the spoiler below:

I feel as if it is important to explain that I have been writing these chapters week by week up until now. I started this project with the intention of going with this schedule for as long as I could, but considering the sheer word length of my chapters, I have quickly tapered off in my ability to write such large chapters on a weekly basis, and I am quickly beginning to see the symptoms of harsh burnout taking over.

I do not intend to stop my work on this novel anytime soon, far from it. However I will need time to reevaluate my approach to writing in conjunction with my release schedule.

Admittedly my recent trip out of state threw a huge wrench in my routine, and I've been struggling to get back on track in the intervening weeks. These past two chapters have been the result of crunching thousands of words worth of writing within the last two days before they go live, staying up all night trying to focus entirely on writing for the sake of keeping the schedule, but even someone addicted to the writing process and sharing my stories as I am recognizes that this is nowhere near sustainable and needs readjustment before it becomes a much worse problem, far deeper into the story.

Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

Either I need to compromise my longer chapters and change my writing style to fit Royal Road's promotion of daily uploads and shorter chapters, or I need to compromise my weekly upload schedule so that I can give myself more time to plan things out as I write it. Currently I believe the latter is the option to go for. I don't much concern myself with the usual procedures for boosting a story's popularity, so the current idea is to move Soil and Stars to a biweekly upload schedule. I intend to return to uploads on either the 7th or 14th of January.

I apologize for how unstable this story's current production may have appeared this past month or so, that was simply a symptom of how truly unstable the production had become thanks to my insistence on keeping a weekly schedule.

Regardless, when it comes to my readers, I can only hope that this does not kill your enthusiasm for exploring my world and experiencing my story. I have big plans for Minoru, Ashe, Hana, everyone. But to see these plans through I need to be more careful going forwards in the work I take on.

If you have anything you would like to say about the story's current state, I highly encourage you to do so now as I begin this restructuring of sorts. Additionally, I simply love reading comments and feedback.