Update (Week of 9-1-2023) (Patreon)

Oh! Patreon added collections. That should make it easier for people to find chapters. Maybe.

So, if it sucks or not, Summon the Great Spirits WILL go on hiatus here soon. I tried getting that time-dilation thing working, but it just wouldn't. Fulltime job and all the real life stuff is compounding, and I've already borrowed enough time from the future. Also it's not doing well, but whatever.

I guess this is a thought-process/nuts and bolts post. Full disclosure on SGS. I wrote it in about two weeks. Yeah, I must have gotten into that good Stephen King stuff and just went apeshit. 100k words in 2 weeks might be my best pace, and it was super fun. But I wrote it as a stop-gap in case I couldn't sell N&D. Well, I sold N&D. Does that mean I'll never finish SGS? No, it means I have to reconfigure my approach. A publisher is more likely to buy another series in the same subgenre.

So, I mentioned writing another series. Keeping up with SGS would put me in a position where 6 days of my week would be keeping up with SGS and N&D. Phew, that's a bit much. Instead, I'll spend the next... what month is it? September? I'll spend the next 4 months workshopping a new idea to come after N&D. Then we're talking about a rapid release strategy. You know. Something actually marketable.

Workshopping! I think I've explained how I workshop ideas in a previous rambling post. The Mechanist won the poll, but it was close enough with the Practical Necromancy story. I'll write about 10 chapters from both stories, let them sit for about a month, then go back for review. At that point, I'll just combine the plots and characters from both and do a rewrite on the one I pick.

Let me give my thoughts on both story ideas here:

Mechanist

This story would be fun to write because it is very similar to N&D in approach. That comes with problems, of course. N&D is extremely cluttered as it goes on.

Building machines and seeing how they work is awesome. Water pumps, mechanized carts... GUNS? Who doesn't like guns in a fantasy setting?

Necromancer

Come on. Necromancers are awesome. Non-evil necromancers are even cooler. I was VERY cold on this idea before Azgoroth made a comment on last week's rambling post.

"I am for A guide to practical necromancy, but only if the settlement building is for Undead or Undead-related species.... That could be a good story, i think...."

Ah, man. That sent my mind into overdrive. We're all looking at the story in N&D and thinking "yeah, what happens after we get rid of the undead?" Hell, what if they stuck around? What if we got to see a clowncar of cool sapient undead creatures?

Has that been done before? Has anyone did a townbuilding necromancer litrpg with an MC that's not trying to take over the world?

This idea needs the most workshopping. I don't know if the power set can carry the story through as far as the mechanist idea. But I already have a good cast of characters to get things started.

Well, this is all just food for thought. Either story will have a heavy focus on the sapient undead that were left behind after the events of N&D. The necromancer story just puts that in the foreground, while the mechanist idea keeps it in the background. I'll get a few of those chapters written, then I'll update in a future rambling post.

SPEAKING OF N&D. It's still on track to run for the rest of the year without a break. Book 4 will wrap up around the first week of December, then we're going straight into book 5. Holy shit, for real? Yeah. For real. The train is rolling and we don't stop for shit.