Hello all! Sorry for the delay! I was hoping to have this out before Wednesday and NOT two hours before Thursday midnight, but...
Anyway, this is going to be kind of half-announcement and half-reflection; I want to be open and frank with you all regarding my point-of-view and rationale. Throughout the course of Volume 2 and these past days especially, I have been doing a lot of thinking -- cogitating, if you will -- regarding this project, its future, and the direction going forward; there are a few decisions I have come to.
There is a lot I want to cover, so this will be a lengthy thing; I have tried to organize this topic by topic.
But going straight right into it:
Writing, Writing, Writing, Writing
Throughout the course of Volume 1 and Volume 2, I have only been no more than 5 chapters ahead of publishing. This has been a persistent problem, and I was never really comfortable with this reality; it forces me to constantly keep up my backlog with my scheduling with little breaks or ability to focus on other things. I believe this has come to the detriment of this project's quality and the story overall. I am afforded little room to really think or backtrack to better stitch things together, and I believe this has left me dissatisfied with the way these volumes have been turning out so far.
I will be completely honest: I feel like I have been reduced to a ceaseless writing machine. With the way this website works, I feel like I have to keep turning out chapters at a good enough pace or risk losing the interest of the small readership I have developed. Furthermore, since beginning this project in February of 2023, by this point I have probably written more than 1.5+ million words in total across all renditions and drafts; it has been an all-consuming focus.
Now, I am not exactly burnt out -- I remain very committed to this project (and I've been actively fueled by amphetamines ADHD meds) --, but I do not believe that the current way I am doing this is sustainable for me in the long-term, especially considering this project is likely to exceed 15+ volumes by its end. There are also other things in my life I need to figure out and finally get to doing that I have been holding off for too long and have been difficult for me to balance with my current writing scheme.
So, I have decided to experiment a little and change the way I have been handling my main-content volume releases and the gap between each volume moving forward in hopes to finally better balance my focuses and time while also keeping the project moving.
Main Volumes & Releases
Main-content volumes will begin publishing (or posting, really) when they are completed or at least mostly completed in its writing or at the very, very least when I have a concrete grasp of where it is going.
This on its own will solve a lot of issues I have been feeling with the writing process so far, and I feel more comfortable and confident with this approach. It will give me time to think things through; write at a more comfortable pace; go back, adjust, refine, and all that; and time to focus on other things. It should also free up a lot of my time during the actual publishing period (instead of last-minute refining/rewriting each chapter and writing every day to keep up) and lead to a more stable, consistent scheduling. I want to keep things move along at a reasonable pace, but I also want to take my time with it.
Does this mean this story is going on hiatus?
Absolutely not. I want to keep this fiction's momentum at least moving forward, even if slower. This gap period of time between the end of one volume and the production of another will be what I will call an "interim". During an interim, I will be publishing:
Side Content, Side Stories, and Other Such Side-things
There is a reason why I call this project a, well, "project." It is not just a story, it is also a massive creative project that is the accumulation of...things that have been cooking in the abyss of my brain for... Since I was like 8. The universe and meta-setting preceded the story, this world, and the characters -- not the other way around. This project is huge and there is a lot of depth to it. There is so much going on, there is so much I have been wanting to cover and explore and highlight and finally get to but have been unable to because of the current direction and focuses, and I find myself struggling to squeeze everything into a single volume.
As such, during these 'interim' periods between main volumes and regular scheduling, I will be publishing a chapter of side content once a week every Wednesday. These will be of various forms and types, some being relevant to different stages of this project and story. These may include simple one-off chapters, few chapters-long mini-stories, side stories, et cetera. I have many ideas conceptualized; this has been something I have been thinking about throughout publishing Volume 1 & 2.
These side chapters will allow me to cover different aspects of this story that I have been otherwise unable to within the main content volumes, explore different aspects of this project, as well as just experiment in my writing a little and practice other things. I also feel that these side contents will allow me to better pace and better focus the main volumes, since I can relegate certain things to side content rather than bloat the main volume and eat up word-space (word-space being a reoccurring problem for me).
I believe that I will be able to handle a simple one chapter per week schedule of side content in addition to working on writing the main volume. These chapters are not intended to be in-depth, complicated, or lengthy. The goal with this to give me time to work on the main volume as well as still giving you all something to read, and thus keep the story active. Outside of side chapters, I also have out-of-story content: extras, cut content, and even stuff from my other writings.
Regardless, throughout this interim period, there will be something to read every Wednesday... Er, or at least almost every Wednesday -- there could be occasional gaps. Likewise, I might experiment around with the exact hour of when they are released.
But we will be starting with:
Strawberry Tales
'Strawberry Tales' is going to be a mini-volume that basically covers Antica and co's stay in Strawberry prior to their departure and fill in the time-skip between Pars 21 and 22. Again, this will probably not be anything complicated or lengthy; I want to keep these chapters shorter than my usual; and it is not intended to be a focused plotline.
The first chapter (which I have yet to write yet) for this side volume will begin next week, on Wednesday. It will likely have about up to probably five or maybe seven chapters. It depends how long I need to stretch it out, especially since the timeline for Volume 3's production is going to be...complicated.
Which brings me now to...
That Other Decision...
Sooo... Here's the thing.
You see, being the author I have special powers to see who is reading a chapter and, with my even specialer premium super powers, I can see user retention and see how many member users (people with accounts) are on any chapter.
At the end of Volume 1, I had about 23 users that were at its post finem. When I began publishing Volume 2, early on I was maintaining a pretty consistent 15-17ish member users moving on from the previous chapter to the most recently published. However, I am ending Volume 2 with 10 (9 + me), and one of them is a random who clicked on the chapter.
So... It seems that throughout the publishing of Volume 2, I have...noticeably lost a few readers, and I have not spotted a few familiar usernames in a while. Guest readers are a lot more tricky to really keep track of, but I can reasonably extrapolate this to them as well; definitely doesn't feel that there are as many keeping up as there were previously, though that's more of a vibe.
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
Now, what does this mean?
This can mean many things. I know I have a few readers who are slower to keep up and a few might have just stopped keeping track and have fallen behind. People are people, and we also have our lives; we get busy, preoccupied, and simply no longer have the time. And, of course, people lose interest, either because of the direction of the story, the change in pacing, the change in focuses, not liking certain directions or just not caring for certain elements of the story (*cough* *cough* Blossom's storyline *cough* *cough*), et cetera; or maybe another story has taken their immediate interest. There are millions of reasons
I am not going to lament about how or why this noticeable dip happened; readership loss is an inevitability for projects such as mine, especially as they become larger and girthier.
Nevertheless, one of my main milestones and goals was to have more member users keeping up with this project than I had fingers on both of my hands. In other words, more than 10. And as of right now, I have fallen below that goal, and it seems that getting past 10 is now the new struggle. So, this does signal a problem to me.
What's the problem?
Replacing them. (with new readers)
This project has a consistent and smallish readership, whom I am deeply appreciative of, however losing just two or three people is a considerable percentage of my readership. This is project is intended to go on for as much as 15 or more volumes, and I am worried about the long-term sustainability of my readership -- I just don't want to be writing for nobody by the end. This has been a concern for a while, that I will lose more readers over time than gain.
And I am not ignorant of the reality that my story and its prologue are kind of...difficult to get into. The retention in my first two chapters is...not great -- not at all, and this has always been the case and this tends to be the case with fictions on this website overall.
Regardless, all of this taken together, I was already contemplating this in the back of my head throughout the writing of Volume 2 and that is:
Prologue Rewrite
Yeah. I have decided to rewrite the prologue, which I do feel might be necessary. Now, hold your horses, let me explain.
When I began writing this project, I had no real idea as to where I was going to put it or who was going to be reading it; throughout the year and a half I have been writing this, this project has gone through many, many rewrites and redoings. The prologue is, itself, a rewrite of a previous prologue draft. The only reason why I published the prologue when I did was because I became sick and tired of rewriting this project over and over. Nevertheless, the way the prologue is written -- its style, writing, all of the funkiness, et cetera -- is a reflection of the mentality I had when I started the project pre-publishing.
However, throughout these 10 months that I have been on this site, a lot has changed both in my attitude and in my writing; I would say there is a noticeable difference between the style of the prologue and the style of my current volumes, and I think I have improved a lot; it is not as mind-searing to read, I would say. I have largely settled on the way I want to write this project.
And I do have my fair share of problems with the prologue, some being problems I've always had and others being more apparent in retrospect.
The prologue was supposed to be this textbook-like introduction to the basics: introduction to the world, introduction to the character and her mind-bugs, introduction to the magic, introduction to the adventurer's guild, introduction to the powers at be, et cetera; it was supposed to cover the essentials I wanted the readers to know so that I did not have to cover them again in the later volumes. It made logical sense to me at the time, but is clear to me now that such does not make for a captivating reading experience for the audience of this website.
The way the prologue is had made it bloated, and it really has no right still being 50% of my entire project and practically two books long -- that is one thing I always disliked about it even before publishing it here.
Now, I will admit that I have had an urge in me to do what I will call a 'hard' rewrite, which is to say: scrap, completely redo everything, and relaunch the story. There are many ideas in my head to redo the plot, such as having it so that Antica gets fired and then became an adventurer, focus more on her being an adventurer and introduce the magic system that way instead of three full parts of info-dumps as it is now, I can go on and on.
HOWEVER!!!!!!!!
I don't want to do that. Any fundamental, large-scale changes would necessitate a rewrite of the volumes I have just written, and I ain't doing that; it would be a disservice to all of you who have been reading along, and I want to carry forward.
So, I have decided on a 'soft' rewrite; the goal is not to change the prologue fundamentally and completely alter the direction things went down, but rather go back, clean it up, redo the scenes, tweak and do some reworking, remove repetitive redundancies (the prologue has a bunch), make it less info dense, refine and otherwise make the prologue's style more in conformity with the rest of the story in how it is presently written.
There are a few points in the prologue that operate as brick walls for prospecting readers who did make it past the first two chapters: they slam into them and don't move on, and I would like to address that if possible. And even beyond those specific points, given how fat the prologue is, readers just get lost in it and don't make it past it. The hope with this rewrite beyond cleaning up the prologue is to ultimately make it less of a slog to get through for new readers and make it more likely they will break past it and get into the rest of the story.
This rewrite also gives me the opportunity to inject certain elements of world building I had only figured out until after the prologue was completed, such as the calendar and months -- it is rather weird how the prologue denizens never made any reference to the months and seasons. And this also gives me the opportunity to fill in plot holes, and I have already identified a few (they're a bit silly).
For example, in Volume 2, Pars 6, I had written:
"Right, so-called ‘Far Western sciences’… [Antica] recalled being tested on such many-many months prior during that Collegium…application whatever process."
This...did not happen. Antica did not get tested on any academic subject in the current version of the prologue that I published; in the previous draft, however, she did. Additionally, I also noticed in the prologue, Antica was tipped only a single gold coin amongst three silvers by the patron who would eventually become her 'sponsor', which she later used to pay her rent, however she then used another gold coin to pay for the Collegium assessment and the narration made reference to her having gold coins. This is because in the previous draft, she was given two golds but I changed it to one and did not seem to correct the story.
The prologue and its previous drafts, you see, have merged into some kind of amorphous blorg in my head. I do believe it is in need of a major update.
The extent of the changes and of this rewrite overall will vary from pars to pars. I will be gradually replacing my prologue chapters with their rewrites on a weekly basis, starting with partes 0 to 3 which I have already rewritten (I have not replaced them yet).
I'll be honest, I do not know if this rewriting will actually help with the outstanding issues this project faces with gaining new readers and whatnot, but I am personally excited about this since it has been on my mind for awhile. I want to make this project the best it can possibly be, and rewrites might be things I will do periodically throughout its course -- it's a web-novel, after all. Let me cheat.
Does this mean we have to reread the prologue?
Not if you don't want to. The goal is to not fundamentally change the story of the prologue and the broad picture of the plot; at most, major changes would be to the manner by which some things ultimately got to the directions they had gone down. I will also make adjustments to the other volume's chapters if necessary depending on the changes just to ensure everything stays stitched together, but those will not be comparable 'rewrites'.
I will try to remain as communicative as possible, and every Wednesday as part of the side chapter publishing during this interim, I will provide a list of prologue chapters that have been replaced for the week, and I will make it clear if I feel a pars warrants a reread and keep you informed regarding any major changes.
Every rewritten chapter will have "(Rewritten)" in its title, so you can tell which is which and check them out if ever you want; it could make for a good refresher.
What about Volume 3?
For the time being, I will not be giving a precise date on which Volume 3 will begin publishing. I have not begun writing it yet, and the exact timeline will depend on how long and how far I take the prologue rewrite. The prologue rewrite is going to be a colossal task, but rewriting is easier than, well, writing writing. If I rewrite a pars a day, it could take maybe a month. However, I really more focusing on Act 1 of the prologue, and I am thinking of maybe only doing the early partes first, specifically the ones where I tend to lose people, and then switch gears to Volume 3. I definitely do not want to keep you all waiting for too long, so I could make this a long-term endeavor that is on and off.
But, for now, my focus for the next two weeks or so will primarily be on the rewrite.
Again, I will be communicative with all you throughout this process and provide updates via the note's in the side chapters or as announcements.
IN SUMMARY
- Main volumes will begin regular scheduled publishing after I have finished writing them or at least mostly finished.
- Between each main volume there will be an 'interim' period during which (almost) every Wednesday side content chapters will be published while I work on the next volume.
- Side volume Strawberry Tales will start next week (Wednesday).
- Writing Volume 3 is not going to be my immediate focus because I have decided to rewrite the prologue chapters, which will be gradually replaced and marked with (Rewritten).
- Weekly side content chapters will also have updates regarding the rewrite, the timeline for Volume 3's start, and such.
- This project will continue growing onwards, everlasting. The content consumes me more than I consume it. It controls me, shackles me. Send Help.