Happy Valentine's Day 22!

As the title says! 

It's the day no one who has fallen to watching anime can ever forget. 

Hope you got lots of handmade, heart-shaped chocolate from your special someone—and everyone else too.

Thankfully, the White Day is less known in the west.

Then, with the mandatory greetings out of the way, let's move on to excuses.

Since the previous update, I've been busy with polishing Verse 1 of AHP25 for its glorious print release. We've been steadily getting more new readers on RR as of late, which sort of adds to the pressure to get this done. 

And yet, as you can tell, my original estimate on getting it out by today turned out a tad too optimistic. 

The book has demanded more effort than I first assumed and there have also been various unpredictable irl distractions to further stall the progress. 

I'm sorry to keep you waiting.

I won't bore you with the convoluted technical details, but even though many superfluous passages were cut from the original web novel script, the word count as a whole has still increased by almost 18,000, which might give you some idea of the scale of the editorial work involved. It wasn't a very short story to begin with.

But we're already near victory here and I'm increasingly pleased with how it's looking. Can't wait to show it to you all.

I'm going to do one more readthrough to check everything flows nicely and we have a clean, painless, quality product that you wouldn't be ashamed to recommend to your friends, and then it's time to party. 

Once the manuscript is finished, composing the print file should go fairly quickly. Been there, done that. The cover illustration, logo, and other visual elements are ready and waiting. All that'll be left then is to get my proof copy to see that it looks as it's supposed to.

It's difficult to predict how long it'll take for the proof copy to arrive and for me to implement possible fixes, so it might be better that I don't give new dates just yet. 

I'd hate to have to push it back again. 

But I'll make every effort to get the book available by the end of this month, or in early March at latest. So we're talking about a delay of some weeks not months.

What happens after that, we'll see when the time comes. 

I'll keep you guys posted!

I'll try to increase the update frequency in general this year. Last year was almost all writing from beginning to end, the stories just kept getting longer and longer, but I want to get more active drawing stuff again too. 

Let's see how it goes!

For now, I'll thank you for reading this and for your continued support, and hope you'll look forward to what's soon coming.

Stay safe, spring is almost here.

Until next time!