Weekly Update #38 (Patreon)

Reminder that no chapters will be up today. Once today and Christmas have gone by, you won't have to worry about me taking any extra days off for a while =P. I can't really see anything worth taking time off for until Easter, maybe. December has just always been a loaded month for me. The rest of the year is much less busy!

Speaking of Christmas, my current plan is to skip taking this upcoming weekend off to write chapters during it (but not release until the week). I won't take Christmas Eve off either, so this way I'll be able to take the rest of Christmas week off while still giving you all some chapters during it! I don't want you lot having to go a full week without any updates, so I'll probably post on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday next week. I might post on the other days as well if I can write enough chapters in advance to do so.

Then, I'm back to posting Mon-Fri every week!

Anyways, here's this week's meme: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bESLyTIFTMk

Weekly Worksheet: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1kkqaVTrJPAR8N3qlWq1A3J3j3lOqUiLN

Only 41 hours last week. While I might have met my minimum amount of hours for the week, it was still disappointing that I wasn't able to get everything done that I wanted to get done. Damn brain. Fortunately, I have a good feeling about this upcoming week. Giving up and taking Saturday off when I originally wasn't planning on it really helped me to feel recharged, and today is helping me feel that even moreso. I'm ready to go on a writing spree tomorrow!

The True Endgame

Alright. I keep saying this, but we're actually about there now. As soon as this scene with Azawaza is over, we'll be getting into what I consider the "main" plot of this volume.

Though, at this point, I might as well just start calling it volume five. Hm. Should I? Yeah, maybe I actually should be doing that. It'd be kind of silly to have a volume that's twice as long as all the others, plus the main plot of the volume doesn't even start until it's halfway over, so I think I might just wrap up the current slice-of-life-ness and move onto volume 5. And don't worry, there's still going to be slice-of-life-ness in the fifth volume as well.

Ero Dungeon Evolution

EDE is sort of in a similar situation, though I won't be starting a new volume for it. We'll be wrapping the scene up with Sophie, and then I believe that Anna has a scheduled meeting, and then into the main plot of the volume we go!

The Queen's Hound

Thankfully, this story has been hugely successful (compared to most of my stories) on Royal Road so far. While it's still not beating EDE in terms of raw followers and views, it's already got twice the followers that TTE had before it hit Trending and is my highest rated story. It's actually managing to stay in the top 50! Right now, it's sitting at an average of 4.7 stars with 177 ratings. It's getting closer and closer to being on popular this week as well, and it should definitely hit that once it gets onto Trending sometime within the next 5-7 days. Anyways, if any of you would like to and haven't yet already, now would be a great time to help the story out with some ratings/reviews.

Steel Glory

so how about those updates

hah

hah...

But for real, I do have plans for this week and have been thinking more about this story lately. I've got a few major plot arcs in mind, probably enough to easily cover two more volumes, and then the rest after that is sort of vague for now but I do have some general ideas. I'm definitely in the mood to write more of this, though.

A Slave's Voice

OH BOY LOOK AT WHAT STORY IT IS

For those of you don't know about this story, it was my very first one and... yikes. Let's just say that it suffered from a ton of different behind-the-scenes problems that I've since learned to avoid. So, let's go over these problems!

1. I had a massive idea for a huge series in mind for this story, but within the first ten chapters, I decided to completely move away from that to make something more edgy and grimdark instead despite me not even really liking grimdark. Why? Because at this stage in my web novel career, I was worried about what people on RR wanted. I thought "well all these popular stories right now are super edgy and grim, so I should do that." Do you want to know what ASV was originally meant to be? A romantic harem featuring a tragic MC. What did it end up being? A torture fest that I had no idea what I was doing with. A lot of what I wanted to write into ASV actually ended up going into TTE in various ways. Anyways, this first problem is just that I betrayed my own idea for the story to instead write what I thought people would want. And, some people did want it. The story was relatively fine during the grimdark and edgy parts, but as soon as it switched to a more romantic/recovery theme, those who liked it all lost interest.

2. I had no idea what I was doing. Right now, I've got another 5-6 volumes for TTE mentally planned, I've got 3-4 more volumes of EDE in my head, I've got 8-12 volumes for The Queen's Hound actually written down and somewhat outlined, 2-3 for Steel Glory, and for ASV, I had... nothing planned. I was going with the flow, trying to force in worldbuilding (which meant a lot of expositional infodumps with no purpose), wanting to make it emotional and deep and dark with no planning, and just... yeah. It became especially obvious by the "ending" that I was just asspulling random shit to try and make the story more epic, and let me tell you, it didn't work. Never again.

3. When I had absolutely no idea what to do with the story, I forced myself to write and include things rather than just taking some time off to think about it. While I haven't had this problem with any of my other stories, if I ever do come to a point where I'm just not sure how to proceed, I'm going to take time off from that particular story to think about it rather than force myself to write just for the sake of writing. That's just a shitty practice that results in a bad story.

Anyways, I think that those were the three biggest problems that resulted in ASV being such a bad story.

So, why am I bringing this up now?

Because I promised people that I'd start the rewrite before the end of the year, and I'm runnin' out of time to make good on that promise.

Now then. Honestly, it's going to be almost a completely different story. Alpha/Hero (best boi), Fara (best girl), and Albert (worst piece of shit) are still going to be in the story, but many of the themes, settings, and plots are going to be completely different.

For one... I'm going to stick with what I'm good at and tell the story how I was originally planning on telling it: that's right, a harem. A fluffy, romantic harem with a pure, tragic MC who's a complete and total sweetheart and gentle giant but also a fucking raging badass when shit goes down. That was my original idea for the story, "what if there's this absolute unit of a lad who's a total badass and a fucking monster of strength but has a really dark past which has led to him having lots of psychological issues and is actually really sweet and gentle which makes all the waifus thirst for him."

Honestly, people who originally liked this story have a strong chance of disliking it now. It's not going to be as dark, it's almost definitely going to have a harem, and a ton of people liked it because the MC was an edgy "bad guy" even though that was never supposed to be the point nor what people were supposed to like about him. I wanted people to be happy when he turned "good." Instead, people were very upset =P. That's my fault, though, for not knowing what I was doing and giving them false expectations without meaning to.

Every Other Story Idea

Everything else, aside from my rambling story, is pretty much on hold until I get ASV's rewrite underway. I can't be thinking about starting other stories up when I've still got ASV here to work with.

In Closing

Last week kind of sucked, but I'm coming into this week with high hopes for myself. I'm refreshed, on a good sleeping schedule, had my birthday and next week is Christmas, etc.

Furthermore, and this might shock some of you who have talked to me, but... but...

I read.

That's right. I actually read something.

I bought a ton of light novels recently, and I've actually been reading them.

For now, I'm only reading Bakemonogatari, but I've got about 15 different series to read. So, I guess we'll see whether or not "the best way to improve your writing is by reading more" is actually true or not.

Anyways, I hope that you all had a good weekend, and I hope that we all have a great week! Thanks again for your continued support, and I look forward to getting back to writing tomorrow!