Belated Weekly Update (Patreon)

I'm in an extraordinarily good mood! It's not wise to get your happiness from external events, but gosh darn it if it isn't nice when things are going so well on multiple fronts. ^-^

Just for fun, Annikath made a "smash or pass" quiz with TLS characters. Check it out if you want to participate:

https://freeonlinesurveys.com/s/CneIQBy5

The Last Sovereign 

Feedback from $1 backers is beginning to roll in. Though I still worry about the finer details behind the scenes and tweaking the final battle so it works best for everyone, it's great to see that so many people are enjoying the conclusion to many arcs of TLS!

I play a lot of games, so obviously I have personal opinions, and this is my best shot at a big climactic sequence that balances narrative and player choices. As I mentioned earlier, I was concerned about a ME3 issue, so I'm relieved that players have largely enjoyed the climax. Obviously I'll keep fixing bugs and polishing, but the core mechanics were built into months of work, so if people had rejected those, that would have been rough.

Instead I think the event managed to serve as the grand conclusion I wanted, both of all the work I've put into the characters, world, and mechanics over the years, and hopefully of everyone's intellectual and emotional investment into my little game.

As I spend less of my time on bug fixing and wrap up other work, I find myself increasingly eager to dive into the rest! More information on that is probably better suited to a later post, but there's still fun stuff in store. ^-^ I've spent this long on TLS and I absolutely want to finish everything right.

The Weirkey Chronicles

The normal pattern for book series is that the first book sells the most and each sequel sells less. Well, TWC has been doing the reverse: the first book didn't sell terribly well, but each subsequent book has done a little better. Of course the first book has still sold the most total, but new readers in between books have pushed the launches higher and higher.

Wakespire was an exception to that trend, which worried me, but now I'm inclined to attribute that to the different promotional methods I was trying. Deathseed has not just done better, it has blown past my previous records, peaking here on the Amazon rankings:

This might not be much to the big deal authors, but it's huge for me! Even though the competition only gets tougher from here, it no longer seems unfathomable that one day I'll have a book hit the top 100 on Amazon.

Of course, part of this success should be credited to the massive free sale, which gave out more than 34,000 free books. I managed to peak relatively high on the free charts as well:

Given that this promotion caused a measurable boost to Deathseed's sales, I may not be able to repeat this performance next book. Still, I feel encouraged that TWC is still showing strong interest and hope that people will be on board for everything I have planned in this series! Thank you so much for supporting me in all my creative projects. ^-^

A Word on Buses 

Just before the book release, I made an ironic remark about hypothetically getting hit by a bus and received a considerable number of concerned comments and messages, so I wanted to circle back to that and urge people not to worry about me.

My health is overall pretty good. Take all the Surgeon General's recommendations on the stereotypical healthy habits (exercise, diet, sleep, dental, sunscreen, etc) and I do a pretty good job on them, as I've done for my entire life. However, given my disposition and pitch black humor, I've long joked that this guarantees that I'll die of something congenital or, the classic, get hit by a bus.

This is just a wry acknowledgement of the uncontrollable nature of life, not an expression of depression or self-abnegation or anything. Obviously I hope that I'll live to a ripe old age and be capable of doing what I love for decades to come!

I really feel extraordinarily fortunate to have the life I do. When we hit the ten year anniversary for TLS, I actually intend to post more in-depth thoughts about it, but that will come later in the year. In any case, I hope this has given a little insight and hopefully calmed any concerns. Thank you all for supporting me this far and giving me a career that is truly a great source of joy in my life!