First things first, there was a chapter before this, of you haven't read it, go do so now!
Anyway, here we are. For those of you who haven't read the pastebin, let me lay out what this hiatus is going to look like:
I'm expecting it to last somewhere in the realm of six months. It could be longer, it could be shorter, it all depends on how long things end up taking. More specifically, I'm using this time to actually finish the rewrite, and once that's finished I'll be posting it under a new series. This one will be left up as a "legacy" series of sorts, for those interested in comparing the two or what have you.
If you want to read the rewrite as it comes out, all chapters of the rewrite are available for any tier of subscription on Patreon. If you're not interested in paying money and still want to read content, then I have another series that's coming out here on SH. For these first few weeks it's coming out daily until it's five chapters behind Patreon, and will be weekly on Sundays after that. It's also Gender Bender/Girls Love, and has a larger focus on the LitRPG elements and the Girls Love elements. It's called The Outlands and you can find it here.
So, let's talk about the rewrite a bit more. I'm aiming to, at the slowest, write a chapter once every other week. I'll be rewriting until probably around the point where the system officially changes (Which I think is ~chapter 30? I haven't checked), do minor touch-ups on the rest of the chapters, and then once we hit this most recent arc I'm going to rewrite it simply because I'm not satisfied with how it turned out.
So, in the interest of making the rewrite as good as it can possibly be, I want to open the floor up to all of you to get feedback. I would love to hear what you liked, what you didn't like, and what I can do to improve.
For starters, let me list the broad strokes of planned changes:
The big ones are foreshadowing the reveal of Kali as administrator and Lilith as the reincarnation of the "original" Lilith.
I want to stretch out the original arc that's just Lilith and Vithi a little bit more to better establish character, as well as the school arc pre-society attack.
So, as I was writing the above, it just wasn't panning out. I wasn't having fun writing it, and I can't really think of anything to stretch out with it, so it's going to stay similar length (though likely shorter since I'll be cutting out some nuts and bolts explanation of the original magic system).
I'm probably going to remove the mental changes on Raphi that originally made her OK with being a girl, and just have angels be more gender-fluid as a whole. That point has probably caused the most contention of anything in the story, and it was just getting in the way of things.
Similarly, Lilith will never have any mental changes on her, either. She'll be told she has, but that'll just be a comforting lie of sorts.
Form Anchoring is going to be reworked because, once I thought about it a bit more I realized that it conflicted with a lot of things I had in my head and TBH just is not great as things go.
Less of a focus in general is going to be put on LitRPG elements in the story to match with how things are now. That means we'll be seeing remarkably fewer windows, especially around when Lilith's getting the new system and training.
We're not going to get as much nuts-and-bolts details of the original magic system because it's honestly not important.
And I'll be making sure that, especially in the early parts of the story, important things are in-story itself, not in author's notes.
Off of the top of my head that's just about everything I can think of, so...um, yeah. Thanks for reading.
Sounds like you've put a lot of thought into the changes that will be made during the rewrite. Stuff like the foreshadowing of Lilith=Lilith, Kali's importance, and the form anchoring thing needing a rework are a good start.
Have you thought of how you're going to have the whole situation of the mental conflict of Lilith wanting to go back to being Lucas without the form anchoring to keep her locked as female? I guess one option is to soft pedal it and say she could shift her base form back to male with enough experience, but she isn't skilled enough to do it at the start and by the time she is skilled enough to do it she doesn't care anymore/has found out some of her past life stuff. The transformation being extra difficult could be played as perfect chimeras having difficulty permanently shifting their base form until they are more experienced (soft version of the form anchor) and Lilith having trouble with it since transformation might be difficult for her with Carmen possibly taking up most of the transformation based magic affinity and Lilith being hesitant to experiment at first. Maybe you could even have a part where Lilith does switch back to male but Carmen (and the other parallels) stay female and they have to sort that situation out.
The outlands sounds interesting, I'll have to give that a read some time
and so it comes to this.
Jokes aside, thanks for sticking with this. I can't wait to see how the rewrite goes. Will definitely check out The Outlands as well.
As for my feedback, you covered everything I would've mentioned.
The big ones are foreshadowing the reveal of Kali as administrator and Lilith as the reincarnation of the "original" Lilith.
Yeah, this one honestly threw me off when it happened. Really felt like it came out of nowhere.
I'm probably going to remove the mental changes on Raphi that originally made her OK with being a girl, and just have angels be more gender-fluid as a whole.
This here will make for some interesting developments in Raphi's character, and through that, maybe some changes in Elenore's initial motivations.
Similarly, Lilith will never have any mental changes on her, either. She'll be told she has, but that'll just be a comforting lie of sorts.
Not too sure about this one here. I guess this'll be more of a "see it in execution before commenting" kind of development.
And I'll be making sure that, especially in the early parts of the story, important things are in-story itself, not in author's notes.
That will be nice. Once again, thank you for sharing this story. It's been a fun read from the start, and I can't wait to see it polished!
I read the outlands before catching up.... I was at the double date I think before I decided to let chaps pile up and so I came over to read once I knew outlands was done by you.. take your time and have fun
Thx for update