This is not a chapter. (Patreon)

Hello, everyone.

I’m organizing this message into two sections, so those of you who only want the facts about what’s happening can find them all in the first part. And those of you who’d like more of an explanation for why I’m doing this + a description of author work and woes can keep reading.

“Are the details of the woes juicy?” you ask. 

Afraid not. It’s just about me trying to make art and instead crashing into a wall. 

The Stuff You Need to Know:

I’m retracting Chapters 258, 259, and 260. I’m going to delete the content of those posts later today, but I’ll leave the epub files attached until the new chapters are all done, so you have a record of what was there and so if you enjoyed something in one of those chapters a lot it’ll be there for you to reread. However, I personally recommend not rereading any of them for now, so that they fade from your mind a bit. Some of that material is likely to be repurposed and become part of the new chapters, and I think it’ll be less confusing if you don’t have an old version cluttering up your story sense. That’s just how I’d handle it if I was in the audience, though. The epubs are there if you’d like to do it differently. 

I’m changing the posting schedule to a non-schedule for a while. I know many of you value the consistency of Super Supportive’s posting, and having chapter day as something you can anticipate throughout the week. But in this case, as the author, I weighed the posting consistency too heavily, got confused, and drove us in the wrong direction as a result. So as I put us back on the right track, I’m going to try something very different. 

For the next few weeks, chapters will come out when I’m a hundred percent in love with them. So that we still have a tiny crumb of consistency and you aren’t ever left wondering for too long, I’ll post an update on writing progress every Sunday morning which should give you an idea of whether you should anticipate a chapter that week, how many, etc…

One of the things I’d like to do with this section of the story (the section that spans the time period of Alden’s Christmas break) is give myself permission to write chapters of any length, or to hold off on releasing chapters until the next one is written so that I can revise larger chunks of story and make sure they flow. 

I’m currently picturing week-ish long gaps between chunkier than usual posts or double posts, but that could change quite a bit. The Sunday updates will provide you with a clearer picture of the week ahead. 

The next chapter should be released within 2-3 days. This is the kind of update I expect to give you on Sundays. This is also a real update. The next post is going to be quite a short one, and you’ve already read some of it. The new end of Chapter 257 will be the line “…to belong, for a while, on Anesidora.” The phone call you’ve already seen between Alden and Stuart will be the new 258, and I’m adding material to that right now. I have an urge to promise it to you sooner, but instead of doing that, I’m just going to sit on it and be sure about it for a minute while I move forward. 

If you’re going to reread in preparation for the new stuff, I recommend starting with 246 “Baby Blue” and stopping with 257 “To Belong”. I’ve spent the past few days doing that exact reread myself and editing as I go. There were definitely no huge changes that necessitate a reread, but if you’d enjoy one, the most up-to-date versions of those chapters are going up right after I post this message. I’ll also be making a general discussion post, with an attached epub that includes all of those chapters together. I don’t know if this is something anyone actually wants, but a designated location for rereaders to meet in the comments section over the next few days seemed like something a few people might appreciate so I’ll put it there and we’ll see.

You may request a refund or a gift link for a free month by sending me a direct message. The author asking you to pretend three chapters didn’t happen and changing the schedule on you is a new weird thing we’re doing. I’m sure people feel different ways about it. Please make this request if you need to. I understand many of you make careful decisions about your entertainment and Patreon donations budgets, and if this feels unfair or like it’s throwing a wrench in those budgets, just ask.

There’s no time limit on this offer, so if today you’re proud to support me while I run face first into creative walls but three weeks from now you wish you hadn’t…ask then. It won’t be awkward.

If you have any questions about any of this, ask them below!

Why is this happening? aka The Writing Stuff You Might Not Care About

Picture it: Sicily “Flashes,” October 2024 = this was around the time I decided there wouldn’t be a whole Kon & Lexi-centric story during Alden’s Christmas break because it would interrupt Alden’s emotional arc way too much, and I chose to weave more Kon into gym & the Here-to-There instead.

With that decided, I started imagining a new Great Plan for Christmas (GP4C).

The GP4C, in my mind, was something fresh and awesome. I wanted to write tons of small scenes from these few weeks of Alden’s life, boiled down to their most essential imagery and themes, and have them lead you like steps on staircases to an emotional high place where I would hit you with full chapters that felt like the culmination of that thematic climb. 

If this doesn’t make sense to you, that’s probably a good thing, because it still makes sense to me but I can’t execute it.

Final attempt at explaining how I imagined it—according to the GP4C, a scene like Alden overhearing Garsy talking about the Elites program in such a megalomaniacal way should be a blip presented amidst other blip-sized scenes showing how people he encounters over a three- week period think of power. And it wouldn’t be chronological, but you’d have a sense that these scenes spanned the multiple weeks, and then at the end of those blips you’d have a traditionally sized chapter of an important moment from his break, in which power was also a major theme. 

And we’d repeat that process for a few themes/chapters. 

Anyway, my enthusiasm for this thing tricked me into thinking it would be easy to do it and do it well. It is not.

And I was super confused about what to do with it not working, and it was very much time to buckle down and turn out a chapter for you guys because I do have a posting schedule, so I tried to pick apart the GP4C by selecting scenes and putting them in normal chronological order instead of “grand crescendo of blips!” order. And honestly, I think “Reindeer” came out a pretty nice chapter. I think I managed to glue blips together in a decent way that felt pretty whole.

I had this hope I was holding onto that “Reindeer” was buying me time to go back and figure out how to get the GP4C going, but no…no…I had cannibalized some of its parts to make Reindeer and now Alden was in a slightly different headspace…

And so I think in isolation “Reindeer” is nice, but it launched us in a direction I was still a bit baffled by, and my solution to correct my own confusion a few days ago was a Hail Mary in the form of Yookee-und’h.

About Yookee (rhymes with cookie)

Yookee is a cool guy. He comes with his own…probably three chapters…of good, normal, easy to understand plot. Because I made up a little und’h story back in Waves, didn’t get to use it, and have been saving it for a rainy day ever since. 

I popped that champagne cork, felt good about it because I like Yookee’s plot, it’s pretty easy to connect to where Alden is currently and get some nice emotional resonances in the story, and I think you guys would like it too.

But then I woke up the morning after it posted with Feelings of Foreboding.

Yookee’s great and all, but he does not lead us by anything like a clear route to What Comes Next on the outline.

Sorry, Yookee. I’ll see if there’s a home for you in the new chapters, but I strongly suspect you’re going back in the bottle for at least a few months.

So instead of writing for the past few days, I’ve been rereading recent chapters to reset myself. 

What the Reread Was Like

Honestly, I was nervous starting back at “Baby Blue” and moving forward, because in the back of my mind, I thought maybe I was having such a hard time here because I’d taken a wrong turn somewhere back there. I expected to find some huge mistake or boring patch in those chapters, and it was a relief to really enjoy them all the way through. The chapter where Stuart shows Alden the patient creatures has been planned for so long, and I think the flow toward it is good. Winston’s gym defeat was, of course, very satisfying to write and read.

And then I hit “Reindeer” and I was like…yep…this is where things went off the rails. A lot of Reindeer will probably end up in the new material, but we're retracting it, too, to make sure we have a clean slate to work with.

So I’m going to fix it.

How?

I came up with the beginnings of a new plan during my re-read. I think it’s good. It’s not as complicated as the not-so-great Great Plan, so I don’t think I’m going to hit another wall trying to do it. I’m going to take the time it takes to write it. The first thing you get will be that short 258 in a couple of days, which isn’t exactly part of the new plan; it’s just more everyday “it’ll be better this way” stuff. But I do think it’ll give you some good comments section fuel.

So that you can monitor my success, the appearance of 259 will be the real proof that I’ve hurdled the wall instead of smashing into it again.

Okay. Here we go. Wipe the last three chapters from your minds. 

Sorry for all of this. It seems like a pretty extreme thing to do to you guys, which is why it took me longer than it should have to commit to it (thereby making it even worse), but I do think it’ll be worth it.

Are your minds wiped? 

Good. 

When the waffle cart burns again, you’ll be so surprised.