You may have noticed I completely ghosted all of you on RR the past several months.

Yeah. Not exactly what I promised in the last announcement, huh?

The reason is simple. I used an alternate account to put all my throwaway ideas out there. Also did a decent amount of reading while I was at it.

However, during all that, I noticed something.

All my ideas were decent; there were plenty of ways to make them work, plenty of compelling stories to be told. The problem was, I felt nothing for them. I could barely write past the first chapter without it feeling like a chore. Vastly different from my experience with The Speck of Dust. Due to this, my attempts at writing other stories to develop my skills haven’t been nearly as fruitful as I had hoped. It kinda sucks, man.

But! It hasn’t all been in vain. Sometimes just taking a step back and looking at something with fresh eyes can help. I feel like I have a better idea now of what I want to do with this story, and how I want to do it. The latter was an area in which I’d been sorely lacking previously — I had so many ideas, but no clue how to structure them, so I rushed them onto the page.

Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

Now, I’m ready to take another crack at it. Well, I’m probably not ready, but I want to. That’ll have to be enough. Unlike earlier when I’ve revised chapters, even rewriting the prologue, this will be a full rewrite. The changes I want to make will require the beginning to take a rather different direction. For example, I want to try making Cain less emotionally constipated, and more cold, calculating, and done with the world’s shit. And maybe a little emotionally constipated — he’s a teenager, after all. I also want to make Magira less of a weird mashup of the ‘follower’ and ‘damsel-in-distress’ archetypes and more of an independent character. Probably the most damning of them all? I want to stop using the Manifestation of Order as an excuse to dump buckets of hot, steaming lore into your lap. I got overexcited to develop the world, and it felt rushed and shoddily done as a result.

As much as I want to dive right back into it, though, it probably won’t go so smoothly.

My life has gotten a lot more hectic since I left, and that’s left me with even less time and energy to write. Because of that, my ability to promise you guys dates and timeframes has deteriorated even further. My uploads will likely be even more erratic than they were before, and will probably take longer on average as well. The situation most likely will continue for at least a month, possibly several. But, when I have the time and feel up to it, I will be working on this story again. So, yay.

I’m also partially just bad at dealing with time pressure — even imagined — so I’d likely hesitate to commit to a schedule even if everything was downright dandy.

TL;DR: Sorry for the wait, everyone — both past, and future — and expect me to upload a “new” fiction on here soon.