Notice: Royal Road Page Merge

Hello!

Some of you have already noticed, but I recently took it upon myself to merge the fiction pages of A Hero Past the 25th on Royal Road all into one.

Due to various circumstances, parts 1-3 were originally posted on their own separate pages, which became a source of a lot of unnecessary confusion over the years. Some readers complained the order of the stories was unclear, because there was no clear numbering, and some got into the series at part 4, and only picked up the first three after reading 5 or 6...

Thanks to the episodic nature of the stories, people didn’t seem to think of this as a big problem, but it was obviously not the ideal way to experience the adventure either. It became clear I was going to have to do something about this before long, but was reluctant to get started for a long time. We’re talking about moving over 300,000 words of text. But this March, I finally thought it’s got to be now or never.

Instead of merely dumping all the text from one page to another, I put it through google docs for proofreading to remove any bigger typos, and split the formerly titanic chapters into smaller parts. The books weren’t written for web serialization in the first place, so we had pleasant 10-15-thousand word chapters, which became an impassable roadblock to many readers on RR, accustomed to lighter snacks. At the same time, others would look at the pages and think, “only five chapters?” and not bother at all, looking for longer stories, entirely unaware that the series continued elsewhere.

Now the chapter length is more consistent throughout the series.

Otherwise, I only fixed a few things that bothered me before, but made no larger changes. It’s the story you know from start to finish, with its ups and downs, and the newly remastered Amazon version is its own thing.

I scheduled three chapters to upload per day, and at the moment I’m writing this, the merger nears the end of Old Empire, bringing all the chapters of all the seven parts together. I opted not to send notifications to followers about content you already know, to not trick you into thinking a new episode had started.

I believe having the whole saga in one place makes things a lot better and clearer for everyone. Now users giving recommendations won’t have to add updates to their posts like, “oh and the story also continues here and here and here…” I’m really sorry about putting you through that.

To not clutter the website and distract readers with copies of the same, I chose to delete the old pages. Sadly, this also means losing the many great comments and reviews posted by readers over the years. My apologies, but there is just no way to transfer any of it between pages. The feedback will be preserved in my heart.

Hopefully this undertaking will also bring new readers into the series, who will post lots of new comments and write reviews. Hopefully.

Well, that’s all for now!

There will be another update later this month. I just thought I’d keep you guys informed.

Until then!

PS. In other news, I’m currently accepting art commissions. As my faithful supporters, I thought I should give priority to any requests you may have, and probably something of a discount too. Just FYI.