Patreon Update 3-4-26 (Patreon)

Hey Everyone!

I was pretty excited about book 1 of escaping gravity. I went into it with another new writing challenge for myself. Given how much we care about relationships in Harem books, I used some new techniques to work on side character stories. Most of the effort went into Brick and Lily for this one.

They worked out so well that I turned back to RD 6 and am somewhat scrambling to pick up the edges of the new technique and apply it to the current book. A little hard to do if I don't set the characters up properly, but I do like the character work I did in EG.

The next EG book will feature Violet's homeworld and dig into her character quite a bit. I think the current plan is to spend 2-3 books focused on the Kikai race and a larger plot there before switching back to the Empire.

I say 'think' because I'm a terrible pantser and something about best laid plans and all. The magic for me is to always find something to be excited to write, because it will then come through in the story.

Some good news for all of you, we are going right into RD with a 5 chapter launch. I'm going to try and do RD in a month, when I've been taking 2 months all last year. I'm hoping to do 10+ books this year, so I need to keep the train rolling.

I am still behind on my overall process. About 1 week behind. That won't normally stop a release, but keeping you all updated. The goal will be to have the book completely done by 3/23 not to have the schedule slip.

My goal is to keep the monthly schedule up until June, with June as a skip month. So I gotta hold on!

I'm getting a ton of emails/messages about people asking if Dungeon Diving is over or canceled? I know I inserted the new series into the rotation pushing it back a month more than normal. But I want to reassure everyone, it is still going. I'll see if I can't get the series to go for 16 novels. I might fall over of exhaustion after that though.

As for Returner, book 5 got caught up in some Amazon weirdness where it wasn't getting reviews for a long time and seemed to not get much traction. Probably in my time thus far it is the single largest % drop from one book to the next in series.

I'm going into book 6 with the hope that the dent will sort of pop out with another book in series. However, I am going to start cleaning up threads in the series, because I feel that it'll probably end before Dungeon Diving.

People always ask what causes a series to end. My philosophy is largely that if the data is showing me that people are losing interest in a series that it's time to start a new one. Dungeon Diving has 40% of people who've read book 1 have going all the way to book 10. 70% of readers were still there for book 5. Which is actually really impressive for a series this long.

Because comparisons are helpful. Eyeballing a number of top LitRPG titles, I'm doing as good or better than many of those by reader retention.

Returner Book 5 appears to only have 25% of readers still here. I've been kinda hoping that whatever weirdness it got caught up in would pass and it would pick up since release, but I'm kinda flashing the yellow light that I am looking towards a potential end on Returner in the next few books based on the data.

I'll go ahead and admit that I set a really long runway for this series, but I won't belabor a story if people are tuning out. When I see such low reader retention numbers, it tells me it is time to start another series.

I have no idea what would be next though, I put a lot into EG and wasn't really thinking RD would end soon. But I have plenty of time for another cult like #spaceseries to start.

Dungeon Diving will be after Returner. Given that so many people seem worried about DD audio and ebook continuation, I am breaking my syncing the audiobook with the next ebook just to get them out a little faster (I had nothing to pair with EG).

Anyway. Everything else is just chugging along.

Webcomics continue to putter along. We made some breakthrough on the scripting for Ard. It has been difficult to work with the writer and translate much of Ard's banter into physical humor, because you just can't put that much dialogue in web comics. So, it's a challenge to keep the Ard humor, but take it out of his mouth and into his actions, if that makes any sense? It includes Ard putting a flower crown on Cyam and dancing through a field. We don't have artists for it yet though, so I can't share that with you. There is a horse image test in test page, so we'll do Cyam right.

RD is probably getting close to being ready for release. I'll probably push trying to get it scheduled off until April. You can never have too much buffer to avoid the grim reaper that is Hiatus.

DD is a little behind RD, but it is chugging along. The artist went absolutely off the rails, reviewing things I suddenly found Charlotte jumping forward and punching her whole body through Bogarts in the comic like some flying superhero killing a titanic monster. We then argued about how to sequence Charlotte's brief flashback for like two weeks.

Someone more organized than me would gather all of these into a lovely blooper reel alongside the first concept of Bran which was a scrawny blood mage because there was some miscommunication along the way and Blood Hegemon literally turned into 'Vampire Mage'.

I think that's most of the updates, I'll dive into the comments sometime in the next day and answer as many questions as I can.