2 Year Anniversary and Some Updates |
Hey folks. Sorry for the radio silence, though as you all know by now (unless you just caught up recently) I tend to take breaks between arcs.
Well, this time I’m not taking much of a break. I’ve already started on the next arc, and am a handful of chapters into it. More on that below.
Today marks the 2 year anniversary of Oathbreaker! Hard to believe. It’s been a pretty crazy ride these past two years, with many ups and downs and uncertainties. I got a publishing deal, a lot more of a following than I expected, and have settled into what I consider a new era of my life in which I am writing and sharing that writing weekly, something I wanted to do for a long time before finally pulling the trigger on it.
Overall? I’m incredibly happy with where I’m at. Considering I really didn’t know what I was doing going in, both in terms of the story evolving as I was writing it and with not knowing how the “game” of Royal Road worked, things have panned out much higher than any of my early expectations. Hell, I didn’t even have proper cover art on the fiction for the first couple months. Finding Tofuyi was a stroke of luck in that regard. That’s discounting the story being niche for the space, as a high fantasy non-litrpg with an older protagonist — not dissing on the more popular genres, just something I’ve been told is true about the site. Have I told you all that when Podium originally reached out to me about signing a contract for the series, I thought it was a scam and almost blocked/ignored them?
Anyway, here we are now. The first book released in audio, paperback, and ebook in January, and the second book is releasing at the end of this month. The third book will be out later this year, and from there I think we’ll start seeing progress on getting the rest of the series adapted (I hope, not sure yet how things are going on that end but I’ve heard book 3 and on is where you can start to tell with indie pubs). If anyone is interested in checking all that out, links should be visible in my bio to my book’s pages on Podium’s website, which also links to all sellers and formats. I’d only encourage that if you want to support me or get the early parts of the story with professional editing and revision or want to listen to the narrator for audible do a Welsh accent for Alken.
But that’s all what’s happened already. Arc 7 and 8 were both doozies, especially arc 8, which was my longest segment so far at over 200k words. Counting everything I’ve released so far, I have shared 1,120,391 words of Oathbreaker in the past 24 months — this is not counting all of my scrapped, revised, or unused material, or the occasional side projects I’ve dabbled in. Having a posting schedule really does build up that page count over time… this places us squarely in the middle of Volume 3. Arc 9 is, as I said, already in progress. This is where some changes are going to occur, so bear with me here.
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Due to life circumstances, encouragement from some of my readership (you folks), nudging from friends, and my own stubbornness about it being loosened, I’m going to start doing advance chapters on my Patreon. This is something I should have started doing a long time ago, but I truly had no expectations going in and thought it would be better to wait to see where things went, then I just put it off, and put it off, and now we’re here. This is, I will fully admit, partially inspired by financial needs. I’m going to be cutting down on my day job hours soon in order to make more time for my writing career, so I need to supplement the lost income with something. My plan is to start posting chapters for the next arc on April 9 or 10th, then share two chapters a week there at the same rate I’ve tended to do for the public story — this will last for some weeks, and then I will start posting arc 9 on Royal Road beginning May 15. For most of you, nothing will change — it will seem like my normal inter-arc break and you’ll be getting chapters at the same pace and consistency, but you will be several weeks behind the patreon. I would only encourage you to sub to that if you want to support me and get an early look at material that will be free eventually.
Arc 9 is going to be a bit of a wide swing. I don’t know how it will be received, it kind of ended up evolving an idea I already had and becoming its own whole thing. Arc 9 was originally going to finish Volume 3 of the saga, but I have instead moved what was the original premise for this part to Arc 10, which will finish the volume and act as a major turning point in the series overall with some big shakeups to the dynamic going forward. I would like to avoid spoiling, but I will say that it will expand on the setting, history, and certain characters in ways that I hope will make future events more impactful, and also develop the world in which Alken lives in ways I’ve not been able to so far. Hopefully it works out and people like it.
And that’s pretty much it. Sorry for the long winded post, and thanks for reading all.
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