Update (Patreon)

Alright, Wisteria is rough draft complete, and will be cleaned up enough to release to patrons within the next few days. I'm going to Seattle with my family starting Thursday, so ideally it'll be before then, but I should have time to work in the evenings if not.

I find myself in a difficult place with Wisteria, which is that I think I could make it a lot better with substantial rewrites and more words ... something that I really don't want to do and don't think that I can justify given the time/effort trade offs that would involve. It's a deeply unsellable piece, which is great for giving to patrons, but not so great in terms of commercial prospects, and I'm sure that some of you will hate it.

So my plan is to finish copy-editing Untitled Villainess Otome, and then if I ever get the bug for it, I'll do the huge amount of work to edit it into this polished thing that changes a bunch of decisions I've made. I do think it's good as is, it's just that editing would hone it into something where every part works in harmony with every other part. Maybe there's something nice in having a story whose elements aren't in lockstep with each other, I don't know. If I ever feel the push to go back and do another huge stretch of work, it'll be released properly, as Wisteria, but I made a commitment to release things more instead of just writing them and letting them sit on the shelf forever. That will be in the next week or so, and ideally before I leave. It's proper book length, ~91K words.

When I come back from Seattle, it'll be full steam ahead on Agares, which will be released on RoyalRoad and stay approximately 50 chapters ahead here. In theory, I'll keep doing batch releases, which work better for me, and then RoyalRoad can get the drip feed of twice-weekly chapters, which seems to be what they like.

In April, I'll be doing Inkhaven again, and I think the way I'll handle that is to 1) try to get ahead on chapters and 2) be doing something faster and lower effort, which might just be a continuation of the superhero thing that I started during COVID. My main focus will be on giving writing feedback to the residents, but I do want to be actively writing the whole time. It's also possible that I'll do some offshoot of Agares, or just race ahead with chapters, but burnout management is a real thing, even if I'm bad at it.

And if Agares is going to be my main project going forward, there's the question of what's to be done with Doomsday Pivot. I've lost faith that it can draw an audience, I guess, and some of that is just down to "startup" being a bad word to a lot of people, a "why would I want to read about annoying techbros" aspect that word-of-mouth and public perception would constantly be fighting against, and might age the work significantly at a faster rate than ideal. I try not to think too much about what other people want, but it's definitely the case that I don't want to entirely ignore (my perception of) what the market wants. And this likely means that Doomsday Pivot will see release to patrons, though it does at least need a copy-editing pass from me, if not more substantial editing. This is mostly because the other thing that could happen is that it just sits on the shelf for years and years, never being touched, doing nothing for no one, and gradually getting more dated, particularly with any mentions of technology i.e., AI.

My goal, moving forward, is to winnow down projects until I'm working on a single thing with no other distractions. Historically, I haven't been all that good at this, but when there are too many things pulling me in too many directions (always a self-inflicted problem), I get overwhelmed and end up less productive overall.

Also, This Used to be About Dungeons vol 3. released today! In theory, you've already read it, but it's available in ebook, paperback, and audiobook. I would be chuffed if you would go give it a review, since every bit helps.