Hello everyone! It’s been a while since my last post, and longer still since I last wrote for this story. It’s been lovely to still see some comments trickle in, and to receive your messages. To those who I responded to this won’t come as much of a surprise, but I intend to continue writing during the summer break.

I’m gonna talk about the last few months now, so if you'd like to skip ahead to my future plans, skip ahead until [future plans].

I’ve had a good long break from writing this project, and writing in general, and it’s done me a world of good. I’ve enjoyed what university life has done for me, and I feel a lot more at peace in my life now. I learned a ton, made some new connections, and even joined a research project where I’m now in charge of designing a motherboard for a lunar micro-rover despite being a first-year student. It’s been an exciting year, that’s for sure.

Aside from letting my focus on university, this break has also given me time to think, and I realized in hindsight that I’d gotten a little bit burned out by/sick of this story. Partially, this was because I was placing too many expectations on myself with too little breathing room, and another part of it was that I’d really started to dislike where the story was at.

As I’ve mentioned in comments, messages, and probably a few author’s notes, there were a lot of things about the earlier writing I didn’t like. Between my inexperienced hand and piss-poor planning, the first 30-40 chapters were quite flawed. And while not all of this can be fixed without a lengthy rewrite, quite a few smaller details could be adjusted to smooth things out.

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So that’s what I’ve done. Over the last week or so, I’ve gone through the first book and I’ve fixed up what I didn’t like. Luckily, I had a good base to work off, so it didn’t take too long. Some of you may remember my plans to publish, and while those plans fell through, I did still have the fully edited manuscript. I’ve gone over that to fix the last few mistakes, and have been uploading the fixed versions of the chapters as I’ve gone along.

[future plans]

There are now over 12.000 new words in book 1, along with tons of less quantifiable changes. As far as I can remember, there aren’t any critical changes you’d need to know about to continue reading once I continue writing, but I still invite everyone to reread the edited version while I continue going through and patching up the remaining 40 or so chapters.

I’ll continue editing about two chapters a day until I reach the end of book two, which is just before Felix and Alex return home, after which I’ll be rewriting instead of editing. I’d written myself into a corner there, and I need to fix that if I want to ensure the longevity of the story.

After that is done, I’ll work a bit to give myself a healthy backlog before I start posting again. I want to do things properly, which means giving myself the breathing room that a backlog brings. If I really do not feel like writing for a week, or if I’m busy with exams or a report, I need to be able to do that.

All in all, I think I should be ready to begin sharing my story again in 6-8 weeks, which is great. I’m not sure yet if I will end up re-opening my patreon (I’m a little broke atm) but I’ll let you all know when the time comes.