Update: End of 2025, Next Steps (Patreon)

I'm declaring myself done with Thresholder. I had a list of ideas for epilogues, and wrote the only one that I thought worked best as an ending to the serial. The final tab has been closed, aside from any editing work I need to do, and posting the chapters to RoyalRoad. I'm overall pretty happy with Thresholder, as it had a bunch of ideas I was interested in, some stand out moments, and an ending I was pleased with. There are things I would change if I could do it over again, and I wish it had been produced in a more timely manner, but live and hopefully learn, I guess.

With Thresholder done, I think it's time to take stock of where I am with writing and what I want to be doing. This will likely be a pretty boring list of which irons are in the fire, along with which order I'm planning to tackle them in.

Break

I'm going to be taking approximately a month off serial writing, starting last week. Rather than publishing regular chapters, I'll instead focus on finishing up some open projects, aiming for ~3K words a day but slowing if I feel burnout coming on. There are a few projects that I think will be the beneficiaries of this effort.

First is Wisteria: Memories of Tomorrow, which is my take on a villainess otome story. An otome game is one directed mostly at teenage girls, and a villainess otome story is one where the main character gets reincarnated as the villainess in one of those games, but it has its own genre conventions that are distinct from the actual otome games they're ostensibly descended from. This story is essentially me writing my own story from base principles, having had very very little interaction with the genre. You can read the public version here, though I'm currently writing to a different copy than this one, and am ~28K words ahead. Ideally, I would love to finish this one before sharing it, and expect it to finish around 80K-120K words (currently 62K), which would represent about a month of work at optimistic rates of productivity, and a week at very optimistic rates of productivity. I'm mostly aiming to have fun with this one and get it out the door. Very likely that it goes out to patrons in some serialized format after an editing pass or two, maybe on RoyalRoad though I think it would do terribly there, particularly because I, uh, made some choices.

Second is some writing work on a movie script, about which I won't be saying more, but I expect this to be maybe as little as a week of intensive effort.

Third is Untitled Romance, which exists largely as an excuse to stretch some muscles in terms of hot-blooded, embodied writing. The pitch is that a woman goes to a mage academy where she has to publish a new spell every week for a year, and there she meets an infuriating man she's nevertheless forced to work with. He's a biomancer who wants her body, she's a mind mage and wants his mind. For research purposes. I have 21K words written of this already, but I want to go back and do editing in order to up the embodied aspects of the writing, as well as to work on better descriptive language. This is an extended craft exercise for me, or at least that's my framing on it. I have stopped calling this "romantasy" as I was getting irritated with people taking that to mean things that I didn't mean, or that I was adding in pieces of poop to my writing in the interests of chasing a market I'm not chasing. Estimated completion would be 80K words, meaning I'm one fourth done. I'm not prioritizing this one at the moment, but am keeping the tab open to contribute to it, and am trying to keep it simmering. If I get to a month "off" and this isn't done, I'll reassess how near this is to completion, and if it's close, just finish it. Also probably released in some serial format to patrons after an editing pass or two, but I want to be doing more editing here on a line-by-line basis for evocative imagery, embodied sensory details, and massaging the focal romance.

The final one is Kensuke Fucks the World, my answer to Erogamer. It's erotic existential horror satire. It's sitting at 103K words, and it only needs another 10K ... but I'm not convinced I have the ending, and it's in need of editing, possibly major editing. This one will probably be dumped on QuestionableQuesting and get an epub here, on the assumption that it's too pornographic and unsellable to publishers. I wrote this one for me, and early reviews of the unfinished work are positive. It's possible this one will go under a paper thin pseudonym, and also possible that I'll skip Patreon altogether in order to avoid the watchful eye of the payment processors, even though I think it's more art than smut. This won't be released as a serial, except maybe on QQ. There's a good chance this gets no attention during this month off, but it is sitting there, not far from completion.

Serial

In terms of what I'm doing when I'm off this "break" (wherein I'm still writing a lot)? The thing that will ideally occupy most of next year and maybe years beyond that?

AGARES is the clear frontrunner, and I need to do a reread, get it to Book 1 Complete, then evaluate its prospects as a long term project for the next year or two, which I would only do if I felt like it had the sauce. Otherwise, I would figure out whether I can wrap it up with a second book and see how long it would take to get it there. My version is 13K words ahead of the last release, and I think only needs another chapter or two to get to the end of "Book 1", but I'd prefer to do that while I have the whole thing loaded into my head, and then just keep working on it so I don't have to deal with unloading it again. I'm also not confident that this is a 5-book kind of story, and am not willing to compromise by stretching out a plot that I feel has run its course. Might end up being two or three books instead, but I need to go do the readthrough and look through what I have planned.

Doomsday Pivot! is still on the table, but it's looking grim. The rough draft of Book 1 is 105K words, and it's only rough draft complete, still in need of editing. I'll probably release this one on RoyalRoad and dump the entire epub onto Patreon, when it's ready. I'm not sold on spending 2+ years of my life writing this, in part because I worry that it's going to prove unpopular for one reason or another. It's a system apocalypse book, which is a crowded genre, and it's about a tiny startup, which immediately turns people off, and I'm trying to take the startup ethos seriously, which ... I don't know. It's tough for me to articulate what draws me to this one, which is a bad sign, and I wish that I had a better pitch for it that got people revved up. This is the best I have:

Our heroes have learned lessons working a startup: speed over resources, iteration over planning, willingness to pivot, accepting breakage as a cost of velocity, a manic devotion to solving the problem, actually trying, and not taking no for an answer. They're going to fight an army, and they're going to win. Probably.

I'm going to try not to sit on this one forever, but really do think that it could prove popular. I'd just need to hard commit to it and convince everyone along the way that I'm right and this book is great, as well as all the other planned books after it.

Words

If you add it up, that's a lot of unreleased words (270K!). I have two New Year's resolutions:

1. Continue to keep up high output, which is mostly an issue of mental health and staying in the right headspace. Depression and anxiety are the most likely ways to fail here. Identifying and managing spirals or bad patterns of behavior is probably the biggest thing.

2. Post more stuff to Patreon, even if it's work-in-progress stuff, as I think I end up spending too much time on things that I just sit on.

Then I also have a bunch of relatively boring things to do that no one should be too excited about, like getting more stuff on RoyalRoad. In theory, I'll also be getting Worth the Candle set up for print-on-demand paperbacks. This Used to be About Dungeons 3 and probably 4 will come out, Thresholder 5 will come out, Worth the Candle 5 and probably 6 will come out ... but these are words you've already probably read, so just a shift in what's available, and some uninteresting work on my end.

I am hopeful that my output for the coming year is high, and that the stories are good and worthwhile. Thanks for reading, I'll try to do right by you.