Patreon Newsletter 10-5-2023 (Patreon)

Alright,

That’s the end of Dragon’s Justice. Honestly, this series has continued to be a high performer for me. The last two books saw a sharp decline, but those first three books did something very right and continue to pull in a lot of readers.

I’ve gone back and read them again and I look at my other series often trying to identify what that golden nugget is.

I think I understand a little better and hope to recreate that in future series. Right now I have two other strong series going.

So, it is time to put Dragon's Justice aside. Zach isn’t dead, he or something else in the universe could reappear in the future. But it is a nice time to stop. Most if not all of the threads are tied up. This has been the story of Zach, the human with a little anger in him, becoming Zach, the god, and restoring the dragons.

I almost put a small section in there to say that bahamut and tiamat were made my a big human with blue runes over his body to tie this into the overall universe. Canonically, in my head, Dar created the dragons in the world as he tries to solve an overall universe mana problem. In that mana and physical matter are two sides of a coin and with Pandora sealed away, much matter is being created in the world tree and mana is thinning in the universe.

Anyway, I reread DD 103 and am super excited to get to work on 104 with the terrible decision of splitting the party that the D&D player in me is kicking myself in the pants.

We’ll get into that. The biggest problem there is balancing the Crimson romance plot and making it satisfying, but I’ve been ruminating on that quite a bit. I actually started working on 104 by writing a handful of Crimson perspectives that will be sprinkled throughout the book. So the timeline and overall plot are sort of set on that Crimson story backbone.

It is very different than how I normally write, but I think it'll make sure it doesn't feel like Crimson and Ken were just making a lot of progress only to be ripped away.

Otherwise, a number of things are just churning away in the background.

Many people are asking me about the non-harem series planned to replace Dragon. Never fear, I am not leaving Harem, just as I like to rotate things to keep things fresh, rotating out of genre is an extension of that. I won’t start another non-harem series, keeping 2 out of 3 of my series solidly in harem for the foreseeable future.

There will be romance, but it is unlikely to be as ‘clean’ as harem romance. Hopefully the series is long enough for him to have some love and lose some love. Only to find it again.

Blades of Austeria (Series name) starts with a street urchin MC, but we’ll do some forward skips to get him aged up, but I have a opening to the story that I’m set on.

In my head, it is Night Angel from Brent Weeks, mixed with One Piece while flipping the script in the genre a little. The primary villains for the series will be the Isekai, framed as invasive species in Lito’s world. Multiple heroes and demon lords popping up creating wars and the normal people as Lito begins as, getting caught up in it all.

It’ll be LitRPG coated Cultivation and Lito will be a light based assassin/duelist.

Otherwise, I’m in talks with Jessica Threet, Jack Douglas and Actors Everywhere to get Jack and Jessica back for Ard’s oath and possibly get them on a 1 booking a month cycle. There are some contract terms between them and Actors Everywhere that need resolving, but I’m hopeful that I can get them back.

There were some hickups in getting started on the webcomic, but we’ve ironed them out and I’m starting to get a steady pace of character sketches. Once we have some finals there, I’ll get to test out colorists.

We’ll start making chapters/episodes before the end of the year, but to do a 10 chapter debut and have 4 in the pocket will mean we won’t launch until next April/May.

Otherwise, I’m continuing with 104. A little over halfway, a little behind my normal pace, but I am heads down working this week and next to get it done. Ard’s Oath is planned for thicker books and I’m braced for a lot of work to get it done in a month again.

I am also prepping a series of posts that are writing related. ‘Bruce’s Writing Toolbox’. I plan to share it with the community at large in an attempt to help Haremlit and indie authors in general.