TSM current thoughts and plans. (Patreon)

Hey everyone!

I hope you all enjoyed the last chapter with the crew finally reaching Mael'nerak's homeworld.

Both halves of chapter 143 took a lot longer to write than usual, because it's a pivotal part of the story that involved a lot of planning. The battle scenes always take considerably more effort to create, because there are a lot of rapid scene changes, and I have to carefully balance the threats they're facing. After lengthy consideration, I've decided to charge for this month's release, simply because of the sheer effort it took to complete.

I'm conscious of the fact that I still owe you the next chapter... which I'm currently working on at the moment. So far I've been focusing on the scenes with the rebellious Outer Rim governors, which I'll intersperse through the chapter. I thought it might be interesting to write them all in one go, so that they flow better between the scenes.

I should be able to get through the next few chapters at a much faster pace now that the dust has settled on Kythshara. Here's my current plan for November:

1) Chapter 144 by 8th November. (Already paid for and half written)

2) Chapter 145 by 19th November.

3) Chapter 146 by 30th November.

Yes, it's exceedingly ambitious, but I'm determined to stick to it!

I'm thinking about reducing the word count of the chapters, as maintaining 30k words per chapter is getting too stressful. In the early days on Patreon the wordcount was considerably lower, but they gradually crept up over time. 

As the story has progressed, the storylines have become more complicated and its taking longer to write each chapter. John and the girls are massively more powerful than they were in the early days, so creating challenging encounters is increasingly difficult. Then there's the huge cast in the story too (as you can see from the character glossary!), all of which adds more sub plots and complexity.

I'm hoping that with a bit lower wordcount, it'll be easier to do multiple releases per month, as I know that waiting until month-end for a release is a long wait. I'll be interested to hear your thoughts.

I've also got a guest author's work which I'll publish shortly, as well as an idea for a reward for the $25 patrons to thank them for their generous contributions. 

Anyway, that's it for the update. Happy Halloween!

Cheers

Tefler