Well.
It's been quite the year, hasn't it?
When I first started writing The Way Ahead, I was about to graduate from college, figured that if I were to ever write I'd need to do so before I started working full-time, and gave it a go. Since then, I graduated, moved twice (once across the country), got a full-time job, got married, and ended up with one book published, another on preorder, three others in varying stages of publication, and almost half a million words written in the largest writing project I've ever done.
Basically, it's been an eventful year.
There are, of course, plenty of things that I would do differently were I to do it all over again, but ultimately none of them would have happened because TWA is a serial and not a published book. Plenty of it is just because of how much I improved as a writer over time, part of it is because looking back The Way Ahead is obviously about Edwin's journey of self-discovery, though I didn't really realize that until midway through book 3.
Ultimately though, I am content with how it ended, and that's all there is to it. I set out to write a story, and a story is now written; what more could I want?
The answer is to write MORE.
My next novel is still quite a ways out, and is only really now starting to be legitimately planned, because I learned firsthand how important a plan is for me while writing The Way Ahead.
Though the premise could still change as I scope things out, the basic idea is that it's a story written from the perspective of the Evil Overlord bent on conquering the known world, and all the struggles that come with actually ruling huge swaths of the known world. Still loads of magic, adventure, and heroes with just absurdly unfair powers to deal with the whole time, of course.
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In the meantime, I'm fulfilling something of a dream of mine and writing a fantasy encyclopedia, The Encyclopedia Arcane. If you really enjoyed the worldbuilding of Joriah, or Edwin's chapters spent doing nothing but trying to figure out the properties of a given material, or how to make a certain potion, this is the 'story' for you.
It is not set on Joriah; there will be very little in the way of Skills and Paths discussed (though perhaps not none), but it is set in the grander cosmology. Joriah is just one tiny little corner of an infinitely large multiverse, and so there's a lot more out there to see. Anything which is stated in the Encyclopedia does hold true to some extent on Joriah, however. Elves have the same biology, it's the same cosmological structure, magic is the same (though used in different ways), it's just not limited to just Joriah.
If you're still reading this, you're very cool. If you aren't, you're still cool.
If the Encyclopedia Arcane sounds interesting to you, it's currently up on RoyalRoad with two entries- On the Biology of Elves and On the Structure of Reality- and releasing a new entry every day this week. After that, it'll change to a weekly release schedule. If you check it out and enjoy it, giving it a rating or a review is huge, because I have no clue how popular this idea might be, but I want to give it as good a chance as I can, and ratings and reviews are very helpful with that.
[https://images-wixmp-ed30a86b8c4ca887773594c2.wixmp.com/f/df3fe5b7-53fe-46db-9501-67beda3903bc/df9klqy-11d7871a-2a78-4408-9422-60384a04bb22.png/v1/fill/w_1280,h_1921,q_80,strp/the_encyclopedia_arcane_by_norskdaedalus_df9klqy-fullview.jpg?token=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJzdWIiOiJ1cm46YXBwOjdlMGQxODg5ODIyNjQzNzNhNWYwZDQxNWVhMGQyNmUwIiwiaXNzIjoidXJuOmFwcDo3ZTBkMTg4OTgyMjY0MzczYTVmMGQ0MTVlYTBkMjZlMCIsIm9iaiI6W1t7ImhlaWdodCI6Ijw9MTkyMSIsInBhdGgiOiJcL2ZcL2RmM2ZlNWI3LTUzZmUtNDZkYi05NTAxLTY3YmVkYTM5MDNiY1wvZGY5a2xxeS0xMWQ3ODcxYS0yYTc4LTQ0MDgtOTQyMi02MDM4NGEwNGJiMjIucG5nIiwid2lkdGgiOiI8PTEyODAifV1dLCJhdWQiOlsidXJuOnNlcnZpY2U6aW1hZ2Uub3BlcmF0aW9ucyJdfQ.v3K61__dPgOGilqH-J7uM7QDYxVcn84OP6DBmsaw6cc]
Regardless of if you check it out or not, thank you very much for reading The Way Ahead. It's only thanks to your support that I ever managed to complete it.