Don't worry — new chapters are still releasing on schedule! Chapter 14 releases on Thursday the 13th of February 2025.

Hello everyone,

Have you ever finished doing something, only to figure out how to do it better, just a little too late? That was me, a week after I launched TEWWBAD: I suddenly realised a simple and profound improvement I could make to my writing.

In fairness, I wouldn't have realised it without you. All of you kept reading through, and – according to the Royal Road stats – you've been enjoying the story.

But, according to those same stats, there were a significant number of people who were bouncing off the first chapter. Why? What gave? Was it just not to their tastes?

A little testing later, and it seemed like the answer was no, the story as a whole worked for quite a lot of people, there was just a considerable number of people who weren't being grabbed by the first chapter. I actually managed to get ahold of a reader who'd bounced off the story on another platform, and asked them to do me a solid and read through to the end of chapter five, then tell me if they still didn't like it and why. They reluctantly agreed.

Intriguingly, they then did a complete turnaround, and told me they loved it. Genuinely! They're caught up, and hungry for more.

Then I got my first written review on here (thanks StarryRazi), and the pieces clicked into place...

I'm a pretty good author, but until now I've sucked at selling my stories to people. I don't mean selling commercially — I've just sucked at convincing people to invest their time into my stories.

Enjoying the story? Show your support by reading it on the official site.

You know what a first chapter needs to do? It needs to tell and show people exactly what they should expect from the rest of the story, setting their expectations appropriately. It also needs to, by the by, give an indication of what makes the protagonist interesting, usually by having them proactively do something, however minor. Finally, it can't be too much of a downer when you're just getting started.

TEWWBAD's first chapter didn't do this. In fact it didn't really get going until the end of Chapter 4, when Saphienne's character started to burn through. The old first chapter didn't tell people what the story was really about, what was going to feature in it, and didn't show them the sort of things to expect. I was holding back too much.

So, I've rewritten the first chapter. And I've redrafted all the other chapters in light of it, adding a few details here and there, and giving it all a general polish.

If you can't be bothered rereading the whole thing, don't worry — only the Prelude and Chapter One are greatly changed, and only in that I've reworked the introduction to be more explicit about the subject and added two new scenes to Saphienne's childhood with Kylantha. All the other changes are really minor, and proceed from the extra scenes added there (for example, a short flashback at the end of Chapter Two was removed, and the surrounding action rewritten). Still, I think the new revision is a sharper read, and some of the key emotional scenes land a lot harder because of it.

Spookily? A lot of content in the later chapters didn't need changing, in that it made more sense with the first chapter's new contents than it did without. Maybe this version was somewhere in my mind all along, lurking under the surface...

So, that's it, really. I'm just letting you know that it's there, and suggesting it's worth a reread.

If I ever compile this work as a novel, I'll probably sit down and completely rewrite the first eight chapters to interweave Saphienne's confrontation with Almon (end of chapter 4 through to chapter 8) with the content of the first four chapters as flashbacks, threading the mystery of why Saphienne is so angry and traumatised and what happened to Kylantha throughout. I don't have time to do that right now, alas.

I hope you like the changes, and please leave me your comments, ratings, and reviews to let me know how you're getting on with the story. It makes a huge difference to my day, believe me.

Thanks for reading!

Best,

- LJ

P.S. This is a temporary message — I'll be deleting it in a week or so.