Friday Updates (Week of 4-14-2023) (Patreon)

Short update for this week.

3rd tier patrons got more advanced chapters, 6 releasing today. I'll have to update the tiers to reflect this, but I anticipate this happening again in the future.

The writing for N&D 3 is coming to a close. I'm taking my time with the ending, trying to set up the events of book 4 well in advance. I'm at a point where book 1 & 2 feel more like a prologue than anything else. A honking big 300,000 word prologue lol.

Final length for book 3 should be around 200k words. 65-70 chapters, depending on where things go. I'm just feeling out the ending for now, trying to get everything in a position of stability before I blow it up.

After finishing 3, I'm going to take a short break (which will not interrupt the release schedule). Of course, when I take a break I go off and write other stories. Most of them aren't worth continuing, but it's a way for me to experiment with different ideas. Also helps me keep in form for writing.

So, lessons learned from writing book 3.

I learned how to take my time more. It feels plodding to me, but that's the point of the "Slice of Life" genre, right?

I've taken in all the lessons from book 1 and 2, and rolled them into this book. Reader expectations in the genre are specific, especially if you want to break tropes.

My process got even better. I've been working on my writing process for years, but I might be at the peak for this one. My biggest advancement was taking detailed, searchable notes.

That's it for lessons, but I'd like to talk about the problem with N&D. Too many characters. Too many upgrades, Too many skills... Well, those aren't really problems. If you want to write a litrpg that has tons of progression, that's the way to do it. The problem comes in when you think of how to track that stuff. The doc for items in this story is 12k long. Even the doc for characters is over 1,000 words. Creating a file that keeps track of the chapter-by-chapter events was a great advancement on this front. Every part of my writing process got better because of it.

Anyway... I said this was going to be short, but look at it. Oh well.

Thanks, once again, for your continued support.