[TFW] A little rant (Patreon)

Okay, sorry to be doing this. You'll be happy to note, for those of you who read MFR, that chapters 141, 142 and 143 have been written and added to the queue. Chapter 142, in particular, is about 3k words in length. I'd have cut it up, but it's important for pacing that it stays like this.

But this is a TFW rant. I'll keep it brief. Try to, at least. Also feel free to completely ignore this post, this is just to offer an explanation to you guys because I owe you one at the very least. Even if it's feverishly written in the dead of night so dead there's light outside after, I believe, finally finding a solution.

The main reason I haven't been writing TFW, besides my life having a stint as a rollercoaster (and thus defaulting to MFR was easier when writing because it simply has less plot and less weight/stress riding on it for me to not fuck up), is that, to be entirely frank, I did, in fact, mess up.

Not in the story as it has been written, but in my story plan. I kind of fell into the trap of adopting a character's limited perspective as Gospel. Notably, Glarvistar.

Okay. A little background. You're all aware I deliberately write every character as having a limited perspective, and to some extent, they're all wrong. Because the fog of war and none of them are omniscient. They may draw the right conclusions, even predict someone else with amazing regularity and accuracy, but they don't get everything. It's the keystone as to how my story works.

The problem is that I allowed myself to fall into making one character right. I wrote the UDC's battleplan with basically what Glarvistar would expect them to do. Which is to say something stupid. It fit with their overall strategic doctrine, their limitations and their biases, mind you, and the UDC's military leadership is...well not exactly the cream of the crop in any capacity, especially not military competency.

But they're not idiots. Another pillar of my writing is that foes can be misguided, filled with wrongful assumptions and operating in an environment that sometimes just won't allow the right solution to be used, for a variety of reasons. But they're not fools. Or at least, they're not complete fools.

Had the UDC presented this plan to Matis, the founder of the UDC would have tossed the avatar doing the presentation out of the window, as a favor to dungeonkind, for keeping such an idiot core from wandering the world would help them all. It was, for the lack of a better word, plain stupid. Not unreasonable within the bounds of the story and the UDC, but not something that should have been seriously considered, especially with everything Alexandra has done so far, even just the stuff they know about.

So I've been spending a while poring over maps, and trying to redefine a battle plan that both fit into what I've already set up, and what is going to happen on a wider scale. It's all interconnected, but you all know that, you've read the novels. One butterfly, one hurricane, and there be a lot of butterflies in this mess. Some of those butterflies have also been flapping for a LONG time, and there's shit that's been in motion since the prologue I cannot disturb or it might cause cascading issues in the entire overarching plot and mystery.

I think I've succeeded.

The UDC's plan now is...well, honestly, it's batshit crazy and, in many ways, utterly bonkers. Not in a 'this is mad and makes no sense way', more 'this is the kind of ambitious stuff we expect out of Alexandra'. But it's also exactly the kind of crap these maniacs would try to pull, and the kind of thing Matis would both formulate for them. I have more to say about it, to elaborate on what I just described, but I'd rather not risk spoilers.

So, now that I have a better, more intelligent idea of what the major enemy in this war is going to be doing (the Sapphirians would probably resent that, but even they know they're small fry against the UDC, and also half of the archmages are actively plotting against their own damn government), I should be able to start unclogging a few things. Also the wrapup of book 11 within book 12 will probably be fairly short. As much as I hate to say it, there has to be some low level time acceleration, because armies need to move. Like, a lot. I don't like skipping days or weeks between chapters but it'll have to happen. Also after the somewhat bloated end of book 3, I try to do the aftermath of a book finale in the next book, and it can take quite a while. Here, it won't be rushed, but it will be more spread out. Which it kind of has to anyway, because it's not like Alexandra can really do anything about the bombshell that was dropped on her, at least not this second.

Sorry, I'm probably not making much sense. I'm literally about to go to sleep. Anyway, my point is, more TFW is on the way, though I'll probably default to MFR for the next few days because I have a lot of sections written I can slot in to rebuild the backlog (I love writing lore, big surprise), and in the extremely short term I'm still moderately fucked health wise so it's still the easy solution.

Nevertheless, I'm launching the gears back for TFW, and cleared my primary obstacle, so stay tuned for more of that.

Anyway. Setting up the thing for release tomorrow, and sleep now. Once again, sorry for the whole mess and the drought of chapters lately. It's not been a fun last few weeks.