March '24 Situation Report (Patreon)

Greeting patreons and friends,

I hope this March is treating you well.  If there is a particularly horrible situation in your area, then you have my sympathies.  I heard some advice from an old boss of mine... 'No matter how bad you have it, don't let it get you down.  Eventually, it will get better.  And if it doesn't, feeling bad about it isn't gonna do much anyway.'

Yeah, he wasn't what you'd call a 'happy' person.  But he always refilled the coffee maker after he emptied the pot, so I always liked him.

Anyway, on to the situation report.

I've heard your concerns, and tried to fix a few things that people didn't like.

The discord is up.  There are a bunch of people on it, although no one actually uses it at the moment.  There will be a separate post about it after I finish this one.  So, if you're interested, check that out.

I've changed the way I've been showing the stat panels.  Hopefully from now on they'll be easier to read.  Before I was just cutting/pasting them, and however they turned out was what they were.  Now I'm manually tweaking them a bit to be more readable.

I haven't missed any deadlines, so that's good.  In fact, that's the main reason that I haven't had a chance to do this situation report.  Real life has gotten in the way, as it tends to.  So, I've been struggling to stay ahead of the schedule.

Until the end of the month, I'll do everything I can to stick to the five days a week releases.  I might end up going to M/W/F next month, like most of the other webnovels of this type that are out there.  It would give me time to address some of the earlier chapters, and maybe do some other writing.  At some point, I'd like to explore some of the other stories that are freaking stuck in my head.

The one with the farmer kid heading off to the space empire is so Star Wars meets Warhammer that it makes my head hurt.  I really want to see him go all Vader on the Moraceens, which are a hierarchical group of elves and their slaves that serve their former leader who ascended to one of the higher planes and is currently at war with a planeswalker association that conscripts the main character into being a one-man wrecking crew.  But who knows if I'll ever have time to write it.

Getting back to my point, my biggest problem is that it takes a while to get my headspace back into the story.  When I write, I do my best not to let anything influence what's happening.  I treat it kinda like a D&D campaign.  I know generally what big events are happening, then I let the characters drive the story.  Sometimes what happens surprises me, and that's one of the reasons I enjoy writing this so much.  It's fun to see Nero do something unexpected because it pops into my head and I start chuckling.

That isn't to say that I don't like hearing your feedback... I love it.  Just please don't feel bad when the story moves in ways that you didn't expect.  There is so much background in my head that is already written, I'm mostly just letting Nero move through the world exploring it.  So, I hope you'll stay around and see what Nero finds.

Which brings me to you guys, my patreons.  I'd like to once again thank you for your support.  This page is growing slowly, but surely, which is awesome.  One day, I might be able to actually do this for a living, which would be great.  Until then, I'll keep doing what I'm doing, and trying to get as many chapters of Nero Walker out as I can while making sure to work on improving my writing.

Thank you all for joining, following, and reviewing my story.  As more people see the story, I get to see other people loving the world that keeps me up at night.  Seriously, thank you.

-L.S.