Weekly Update #3 (Patreon)

Regarding A Slave's Voice

Blllllaaaaaaaaaaggggggghhhhhhhhhhh.

That about sums up how I feel. I won't lie, I'm having a ton of trouble wrapping up ASV which is why I haven't been posting daily updates for it. I keep on writing, revising, deleting, writing more, deleting more, and so on. I have ideas on how I want to end it, but at the same time, I'm struggling pretty hard doing so.

There are two reasons for this:

1. I have never ended a story before. This is my first attempt at seriously writing a story from start to finish, and so this is my first time actually reaching the ending of one. I want to make sure that it's good, but I'm struggling. Sorry for it taking so long for me to update it! I'm going to focus all day tomorrow on writing it and hopefully finish it within the next two days.

2. I never had a clear focus for it in the first place which is also why it has so many issues. ASV was, from the beginning and to the end, a massive experiment. I have never written anything dark before or anything nearly as serious as it is. I do feel that I learnt from it such as portraying the aftereffects of psychological and physical abuse, how to properly portray rape in a negative light and show just enough that people know what happened without going into enough detail that it looks like smut, and so forth. Aside from that, though, ASV was originally a cliche harem story that was supposed to have a MC with a tragic backstory that turned into an actually serious non-harem story. Then halfway through I wanted to switch paces from it being less about actually going through an abusive grimdark setting and more about learning how to cope with everything, which I did to some degree, but I wanted to continue the story past that. Basically, my vision for ASV changed about three times before I even uploaded the first chapter, and then it changed another two times during the actual writing.

That might worry some people because you may believe "Well if it happened to ASV then whose to say it won't happen to your other stories?" It would be fair for you to be worried about that, but I promise that I have clear visions and plots set up for TTE and my upcoming stories.  ASV is just a massive exception from what I'm used to. For example, I could talk for hours and hours about what is going to happen with TTE, but if anybody asked me about ASV when I first started writing it, I would have been able to sum it up to "uhhhh tragic guy in a grimdark setting gets a cute sheep waifu and adopted slime daughter."

I am definitely going to revisit ASV someday when I have a better vision for it. First, I am going to give it an ending and then focus on other projects. Hero, Fara, and Sloo are characters that I love to write and tell the story of, so they are going to get more love when I am able to properly give them the writing and story that they deserve.

A more in-depth analysis will be given once the story is actually over and be posted on RRL.

The True Endgame

Alright! While I'm struggling greatly with ASV, holy shit I have so many great ideas for TTE. First off, I'm going to write a bonus chapter this week for TTE where Cassandra didn't walk in and interrupt what Serra was about to do with Ryouta.

Second off, after the 10.0 series of updates, I think that I could officially consider the first volume complete. I'm honestly considering cutting it off maybe a few chapters ago to keep the page count down to like 300 instead of around 450, but that would require me to revise it a bit for publishing so that it has a more natural ending.

Now, don't get worried. The story is going to continue with daily updates for a long time. It's just that we'll be moving into "volume two" territory. With the money that I get from Patreon this month, assuming nobody changes their pledges or unpledges at the last minute, I will have enough to commission the same artist for a cover for the second volume. Furthermore, I will not be publishing on Amazon Kindle Unlimited. I know that it's stupid from a financial perspective to not do that since I could make a good chunk of money assuming it gets a decent amount of views - probably way more than I'd make via sales, but I don't feel that it would be right to take down something that was originally free to read. It's just something that I morally disagree with. Instead, the chapters will be revised, have bonus content exclusive to them added in, and so forth to hopefully encourage some of the current readers to pick up the kindle version. I might look into getting paperback versions of it done, but I have to do more research into that.

Also, volume two is going to have more of a focused plot while still retaining its slice of life elements. Those of you wanting an actual arching plotline that lasts for more than a single patch series should be happy with it. You can also generally expect one to two new harem members being introduced per volume for these first few volumes. So over the next 300-450 pages or so, there will be at least one new harem member and at most two. I think that's a pretty fair rate of introducing them and building on them. Oh, and don't worry about leaving Serra and Cassiel behind. They will continue getting just as much time as they currently do, and they will have their own relationships with all future harem members. 

Now, you don't have to take my word for it, but get hyped for volume two because it's going to be fun. If this were an anime, the story thus far is only like the first 5-7 episodes at most. Now is when the real fun gets going.

Future Projects

1. I guess you could say that I've started reaching out to visual novel studios. By that, I mean I followed an absolute fuck ton of them on Twitter and got them to follow me back. I would love to begin working on either my own or somebody else's visual novel by the end of this year. Yeah, that's my goal now! By the end of 2018, I want to work on a visual novel.

2. Future stories! When ASV is done, I am going to begin work on two more stories. They will update daily for the first month and then move to updating every other day on different days. So TTE will be updating daily, then EDE (acronym for Ero Dungeon Evolution) will be updating on like days Monday, Wednesday, Friday, whereas the other novel (name pending) will update on Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday. Get what I mean? By doing it this way, I won't have the stress of having to update three stories every day while still getting to have 3 ongoing stories at once. More details about these stories will be posted in next week's update, perhaps with a teaser!

3. Something I've recently been super interested in delving into is making music. A lot of famous indie games have made their own music. Touhou, Undertale, Cave Story, To The Moon, etc. It's probably going to be horrible, but it's something I think would be fun to try out.

Closing Thoughts

That's all for this week! I am extremely appreciative to each and every one of you for giving me your continued support, and I look forward to continuing to earn that support to the best of my ability. The Discord has also gotten lively as of late, and we've even set up a D&D game based off of TTE to play with the Discord members! The slots are full now, so I apologize if you wish to join in and are only just now learning about it. I want to give a special thanks to AquamanIV for setting the whole thing up. 

Also, Jericho (if you're reading this), I keep on reminding people to go and thumbs-up your review of TTE every time it drops down from being the current #1 review on RRL. I think we've had your review up there for like... 3 weeks now? Great job! It's definitely a great review.

And a special thanks to the rest of you! Some of you only subscribe for the stories and don't really participate in the community much, but that's okay. I'm still extremely appreciative of you even if I can't thank you for anything other than your support!

Oh, I also saw Pacific Rim Uprising and the new Jumanji. They were great.

Anyways, that's all now. I hope that you all have a wonderful week!