Weekly Update #48

Important news regarding Steel Glory and Lazy Dragon Queen this week, but mainly the former.

Also, three memes this week!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMFH1V8o9fs&feature=youtu.be (this one is required watching)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k17HsNwchtw&feature=youtu.be

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWEouyWYPb4&feature=youtu.be

Weekly Worksheet: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1Pz0nnUgLQxv7dmuxLqczeVkx0Ough26p

Part of me is like, "it kinda sucks that I haven't had a full, proper day off in over two weeks." The more dominant part of me is like, "fuck yeah! 53 hours and a total of 30,932 words this week!"

It does kind of suck, but seeing those numbers at the end (really, the start) of the week is so encouraging and awesome and prevents me from burning out despite being the result of more work.

The True Endgame

Not much to say once again. Eva is doing Eva things and we're going to have a bit of action this week as well as some more worldbuilding!

Ero Dungeon Evolution

It's finally happening. The system is finally being modified so that it's actually manageable.

The tables shall return this week!

Steel Glory

Here we are. Those of you who actually read my weekly updates will know that I've struggled a lot with this story for a long time now. It was my second attempt at a more mature and serious story with ASV (blegh) being the first attempt.

Is it a bad story? No, I don't think so. I like the characters, I like the drama, I like how the characters work with each other, and Naomi is absolutely precious. I also love Shitger for being the "protagonist" without actually being the protagonist.

But is it anywhere near as good and successful as I was hoping it would be? Absolutely not. One, it's just not turning out as well as I hoped it would. I feel like I don't really have a solid direction for it to go. There are a whole bunch of awesome plots that I have planned for the story, but I have no idea how to connect any of them and it's not supposed to be super slice of life like my other stories. Plus, the action and war and training stuff that has happened so far just... isn't anywhere near as good as I hoped it would be. I'm happy with the characters and their interactions with each other, but that's it. Two, I thought I was being conservative when I was hoping for 300-500 followers after a month over on RR. It has now been four months and the story is only at 298 followers. Furthermore, as far as I know, only two people since the story's inception have pledged primarily for this story.

In other words, the story is neither good nor successful by my standards. It was another story outside of my comfort zone and that has been showing. It's still better than ASV at least >_>.

Anyways, I have no intention of dropping the story as much as it may sound like that. However, I have no idea what I want to do with it. I want to complete it, but I'm not happy with it. I don't know if I should rewrite it, change the focus (which I came extremely close to doing before), or just take the good parts of it (the characters) and basically do a completely different story with them. There is also the problem that a serious mecha story doesn't really work with my newest style that I absolutely love and really want to write more with.

Writing this story each week has been a huge amount of stress on me because I've been forcing myself to write it when I really just didn't want to at all. I was usually happy or at least felt okay with the finished chapters, and I probably still would be, but that's not good enough for me. And, because of how much I didn't want to write this story but felt the need to write it before LDQ, I kept on procrastinating and pushing it off until the last possible moment each week which is why it and LDQ have been coming out so late. It just hasn't been healthy for my writing schedule and muse at all.

There is one more reason for this that I'll talk about in regard to LDQ below, but aside from that, Steel Glory is being put on hold until I figure out what to do with it and so that I can focus on writing the stories I'm really dying to tell right now and having a ton of fun writing (AKA literally all of my other stories). I'm sure this is going to disappoint some of you, and I am sorry for that since I absolutely hate having to put stories on hold, but I really think this is the best for both me and the story. I just really need to focus on the stories that I'm dying to tell the most that are also able to actually bring me more success. 

The Queen's Hound

I gave this a huge discussion last week so I'm keeping it simple this week.

I'm really curious about how free readers are going to react to the entire end of the first volume and beginning of the second volume once they get caught up to it. Also, yay for detective chapters, and no the story isn't going to turn into a detective novel.

It was a really fun chapter to write, though. I feel like it might have been a bit too unexpected for people and really got into some kind of darkish things right off the bat considering it's the start of the second volume, but I'm happy with it!

Lazy Dragon Queen

Alright. So, the other reason why SG is going on hold is so that I can put more time into this story. LDQ is now up to 11 chapters which means that I could post it to Royal Road and all the tiers will be the proper amounts of chapters ahead. However, posting daily (or twice daily) for the first month of a story on RR is extremely important to having good chances with Trending (which gives the most visibility/followers/patrons). So, I'm going to start doing two chapters a week at least in order to build up more of a stockpile. I would have to get up to like, 36 chapters if I wanted to be able to post one chapter a day for the first month on RR without screwing up how far ahead Patreon is. So, you can expect more chapters of this story in a quicker amount of time!

The other option would be to split the chapters up into multiple parts for RR, which might work for some chapters, but would decrease how good they feel since the chapters were written with the intention of being full chapters in one go. Everybody I've talked to about this in the Discord has had either negative or very meh feelings about it, so I do think it'd be better to just get a big stockpile first. Plus, because of the volcano story, I won't be posting this to RR for at least like 50-60 days anyways. I still need to wait for Volcano to have its time on trending and then wait for a cover for this.

The Volcanic Dungeon

I've already talked about this a bunch in the first post for it. Anyways, I'm going to continue posting short chapters to RR for the duration of the contest/trending and then, depending on how successful it is, it very well might get turned into a main story which means I'll have to try to quickly type up 10 3k word chapters for it for Patreon. Until then, though, I'll post dumps of short chapters here to Patreon every few days - whenever I have at least 2-3 chapters to post.

In Closing

I'm going to bed. Then I'm writing up commission details for the volcano dungeon cover. Then I'll try to write a chapter or two of it. Then I'm going to write woof for the day.

Good morning/night, I hope that we all have a great month this month, thanks to those of you who are still pledged (you're all awesome), sorry about Steel Glory but I genuinely think this is the best for both me and the story itself, and I hope that you continue enjoying my stories!