Status Update (Patreon)

Hey guys, been a while since I updated you on how my work is progressing and such. I've had a few setbacks this month, but things are still going smooth. I'm in a mood to get a lot of stuff done now, so I'm hoping to get things going even faster.

I want Coye vol 3 to come out mid to late next month, and things are on track for that to happen. One reason it hasn't gone quite as fast as I wanted it to was because of how I was writing the drafts first. Writing drafts like that wasn't fun, and I'm not going to do it in the future. It was a good learning experience. Next time around I will write draft and then refine it into a chapter instead of writing lots of drafts all at the same time.

The other reason it's taking so long is one that I'm sure most of you will be pleased to hear; length. Pretty much every chapter is much longer than I typically do. 5K words is the average. I'm 8 chapters through and we're already at 40k words, and we aren't even half done with the book yet. Probably like 40%. But I expect the rest to go much smoother!

The audiobook had some snags, too. My friend who's recording it has a less than ideal homelife despite being a very talented actress, and her opportunitys to record have been sporadic. She's going to have to stay up late at night and record that way to get things done, but I've been helping her look into solutions for soundproofing her room with her. It's annoying, but it is what it is.

Lastly, I have some good news.

Rise of the Guild Master has been in my thoughts a lot lately, and I'm already thinking on how to restructure the early parts and add in new content to put out a vol 1 release. I have a lot of ideas for the new content that I think you'll all really like. The only thing I really need to spend time thinking about at the moment is what to do with his eyes and where his eventual Taskmaster powers will come from. Other than that, I think one big change will be getting rid of the current first chapter being a massive 20+ page exposition dump and doing a fakeout first chapter where we start with Sam arriving to Dewhurst on a wagon, her first reaction to the town, finding the Guild, and then it'd be a fakeout because at the end it'd be like Sam is not the hero of this story, but it's the alcoholic mess who shows up and yells at her. The reason is because I think it'd be a lot more engaging if GM was more mysterious at first, and he slowly reveals to Sam the reason why the Guild/town is so fucked up as it is as he gets to know her.

I am also thinking of changing the structure from 1st person POV to 3rd person Omniscient like I write Coye in. There's a major reason for this- Amazon. I can't reuse my a lot of my current chapters without rewriting them to sound different, or else Amazon will block me from Kindle Unlimited. Beyond that, it's just easier to write in. Since 1st person is an actual person talking, that means GM was constantly spitting crap in his thoughts that I continually forgot to keep track of. Like 200 chapters in I'd have to remember if I said whether GM had ever left Dewhurst or not before, that kind of thing. Plus, I can give the girls better attention and reveal their thoughts much more if I'm not doing POV.

Since right now I'm just spitting out ideas, one thing I had in mind is for a pretty big change to Nikita. Not to her personality or history or anything, but mainly her appearance and current ability. In the old version I played off her breaking off from Ares as mostly a joke, but I think it makes much more sense if she barely escaped that encounter with her life. She'd be covered in wounds that couldn't be healed since they were inflicted by a God, and she might have some Greek-looking leg brace or a prosthetic or something. Maybe an eyepatch too.

This would solve the problem I had with Nikita being an essential get out of jail free card if only she chose to fight, and I like it a lot better than her conveniently losing her powers over time.

But yeah, I might start thinking more intensely on the reboot as early as sometime next month.