Acknowledgements
I owe a lot of thanks to many people for helping me write this story. Many of my undergrad professors looked at the first few chapters and helped me build a better foundation for the story. And several of my friends read it through and advised me. While I studied my masters, my friend Harrison told me to try uploading it here and I’ve found the readers here to be extremely kind and helpful. RoyalRoad is an amazing site and I really admire those on here both as readers and writers. The uploads helped me stay motivated in my editing process. And another friend of mine, I recently discovered, has an account called Paradigmblue (check him out if you haven’t already! He’s a phenomenal writer). Two months ago, he told me to buckle down and just finish what I started on this site. Get those last three or four thousand words written. I’m really grateful to him for that kick in the seat he gave me (also for giving me a much better title for the book). Lastly, I want to thank my readers on this site. Whether you're an accountless reader who just reads, or a commenter who points several things out every chapter. I appreciate you all so much. The encouragement from readers like TaoBio keeps my heart pumping. You readers are the lifeblood of this website and your time you dedicate is more impactful to the writers here than you could ever imagine.
Post-Script
I wrote this story when I was still a teenager in my first years of college for my undergrad degree. It was the first full length book I ever wrote and I learned more from it than any other since. It’s hardly perfect, but I’m incredibly proud of it. I am especially glad that I played around with point of views in this story, often showing the same scenes from different perspectives. I believe that decision has helped all my writing since this time a great deal. To be honest, I started writing this story for someone I was infatuated with, and, once that all ended and blew up in my face, I ran away from the story not wanting to ever look at it again. But time scarred that wound over and I returned to the story after half a decade. As a result of my departure from it, the ending was an absolute mess when I came back to it last year. One of the primary reasons I wanted to edit it was to give the story and the characters a proper ending that they deserved. And that proved to be very difficult. I scraped the last fourth of the book and rewrote it. I’ve scavenged what I could and retained the main threads. In the last year though, I moved around the world quite a bit and lost access to a computer while I was living in the Amazon. But now I’ve settled for the foreseeable future in Hokkaido with a relaxing desk job. So here lies the completed draft for Royal Road. Even still though, when I was writing the original draft of the story years ago I intended to have a sequel novel. One that went into the politics and societies of the countries across the sea. A quest for vengeance and a story about family. I still remember the plot threads I intended to write years ago. Maybe I’ll still write that book someday, but it, unfortunately, won’t be tomorrow.
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The Future
I don’t know for certain if I’ll continue posting on RoyalRoad. I’ve written two and a half other novels since writing this story six years ago. None of those novels would do well on this site. One is a story about a twelve year old girl looking for her father in a post apocalyptic setting, and the other a mess of connected short stories in an overly convoluted plot centered around the future habitation of Venus. I just don’t think they’d excel here. So they’re trunked currently. But I did recently obtain a desk job where I’m required to look busy, while not actually given much work to do. My friends and I were thinking about having a little writing competition to see who can reach 100k words first. So I’d say my odds of posting again are hardly zero. And I do have a few ideas bouncing around in my head that might do well here.
Until the time of my next writing- Thank you all!