TL/DR: I am going on an indefinite hiatus for sake of my health, education, and creative integrity. I intend to move to a volume based schedule that will allow me to write and edit far in advance of actual releases. In addition to that, I will be rewriting portions of The Golden Princess that no longer support what I have planned for the story. As usual, open to questions in comments.

The past year or so, I have endeavored to forge my imagination into something material, taking the vague fragments of my hypnagogic thoughts and hammering it into a work. For me, this has taken the form of the written word, and in this process, I have taught myself to read and write anew. Through this process, what was originally a story I didn’t initially plan to be much more than an eventual retread of the events of canon with some light romance has turned into a work of dark fantasy that takes Princess Renner and rebuilds the story of Overlord around her. That rebuilt story has gone from (frankly boring) high level conflict between the greats of the world to a much more personal story about suffering and the people who enjoy causing it. It is a story that I now suspect (with the aid of some back of the napkin math) will go somewhere north of 800k words, or, perhaps at the extreme, a million.

While I am proud of what I have made, enjoy the story I have told and wish to read more of it, I have indulged in certain unsustainable practices to do so. I am a full time student, and while I have never prioritized writing above my schoolwork, I have prioritized those two things above everything else, including my physical health, mental wellbeing, loved ones, personal growth, and future prospects. These neglects have finally caught up with me in earnest, and I am now sufficiently behind my peers with regards to tomorrow. My work on The Golden Princess was done not on top of, but in place of those tasks, and I now find myself (quite literally) run thin by it.

I am going on a release hiatus. A long one. This does not mean I will stop writing. Though my pace will most likely slow significantly, I will continue work on both The Golden Princess, She of the Breach (working title), and stories for The Ladder (working title). Rather, I will not be releasing. I will instead keep my work in reserve, revise and edit it to a degree of reasonable competence, and release it when it is more suitable for your eyes.

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While I understand it is the artist’s urge to hate what they’ve made and desire to “scrap it and start over,” The Golden Princess has unfortunately outgrown itself, with some fairly gorey results. My planned midpoint, climax, and conclusion for the fic have all changed drastically from how I set out, and much of the early setup I’ve done has been left aimed at nothing as a result. Several plot threads now hang dangling in an extremely unsatisfying way; specific examples include the: cryptography manual gifted to Renner by Jircniv (which would have lead to the original version of Renner’s initial Nazarick contact through encoded letters), Evileye’s employ of Greater Teleportation (something which was to serve as the beginnings of setup for the cut second climax), anything relating to Keveleos (a character I have so thoroughly butchered he isn’t even worth salvaging), Lakyus’s struggle with the sword, and some more minor points that are never resolved. At the same time, several elements of the characters on screen and the Kingdom itself worthy of exploration have been left fallow. Suffice it to say, I need to clean these things up, and in order to do that, a fairly significant amount of text needs to be overhauled.

I say the above because I want to finish The Golden Princess. Rather, not The Golden Princess as it does exist, but as it ought. It is not merely enough for me to drag the story out of my head and slap it on the page. I must write it, and I must write it well.

Further, I am increasingly coming to grips with the fact that I want to be a writer; as someone who went out of her way to avoid liberal arts classes for most of my education, someone currently in the throes of an engineering degree, I’m sure you can see why this is a bit of a shift. At the same time, I am not going to shift priorities to that end entirely. I desire the security and safety-net that an engineering career will provide, and feel the need to take a more serious and focused approach to my education.

I do intend to finish The Golden Princess . Intentions mean little, but I hope my actions (and word count) thus far speak to my ability to do this task. While the specific details of every chapter and their scenes is not something I have yet ideated, the story is essentially complete, in the sense that I know exactly what I am working to, and what themes, lynchpin scenes, and delicious agonies I wish to enumerate. Push comes to shove, and I am for whatever reason unable to or unwilling to finish the story, I will release my notes and outline, or perhaps AI generate some abomination in the vein of what I wish to write.

Renner deserves to be brought to life on the page. She and her kingdom deserve a more fitting ending than canon. I just need a little more time to make that happen.