LostLibrarian

This is part of a double-release. So if you went to the newest chapter, make sure to read the epilogue first.
Also: there's an announcement to make, so humor me and let me play "real author" for a minute =)

Thank you for reading The Lone Macaw!
It took a long time, but I finally finished my first volume thanks to your support.

Writing was always part of my Bucket List, and some of my followers might still know me from my old story: Mountain Shelter. A story with a great, action-packed beginning, a lot of cliffhangers and mystery, and a lot of struggles for surviving. A story where I tried to use as many of the web novel writing tips as I could. According to others, it made for a good beginning - and I hated to write it. It felt as if all the constant cliffhangers and action prevented me from writing the story I wanted to tell.

So I stopped. And during the following years, I just planned for myself, thought up worlds and ideas, made nice lists, and failed during NaNoWriMo. But I didn’t really return to writing.

I don’t talk much about my private life, because I think it doesn’t belong here. But there is one thing I want to share here: a few months ago a fellow content creator and internet friend of mine died. No illness, no drama, just a stupid accident. “See you next week” became “Here is some money for the funeral”. And I began thinking again.

The daily grind makes it easy to procrastinate on your ideas and plans. A Bucket List won’t work if you only start with it when you are dead. So I returned to my writing discords, planned out this story, and used the Adventum Contest as deadline/motivation. But on top of that, I just wrote the story I wanted to tell.

If you rate The Lone Macaw with web novel writing tips, it is a mountain of flaws. An endless monologue at beginning, long chunks without cliffhangers, only short bursts of action, a sometimes annoyingly inexperienced MC, and a rather disliked heroine. But it is the story I wanted to write.

Less of a typical kingdom building and more the story of flawed people struggling to build a place they can call home. A story about a hero who can lose to a group of the weakest mobs because there isn’t a surefire way to win. And a story so slow, it needs an entire volume to reach a starting point other stories reach in chapter 3.

When I started to write this story, I wanted to use the contest to achieve 100 readers after volume 1. When I started to write the ending, I calculated and estimated and hoped for 200 readers. Wouldn’t that be cool? Now I’m saying my thanks to 500 readers, it’s surreal to me. Don’t you have anything better to do?

In short, I just wanted to thank all of you for your support. Whether it’s your favs, your ratings and reviews, your comments, or just the fact that I see a lot of readers reach chapter x/x instead of sitting at 1/x. To write the story I want to write and to still see so much support for it... honestly, just thank you.

For the first time in forever I had fun with my writing, I finished the first volume with 60k words (a lot more than the 40k words I planned), and I even wrote my first short story for the Yuri Garden. Just because it was 5am, and I wanted to write. I don’t dread the next chapter anymore (although I still get stuck with my prose) and I even look forward towards the next little twists and turns of the story.

And all of that is thanks to YOU.

As for the announcement: The Lone Macaw will enter a short hiatus with no chapters. With the contest ending this weekend, I want to go back and edit the first chapters, adding or changing small things I collected from your comments and later chapters. Just make the whole a bit more “smooth”. There won’t be any additional chapters or major shifts in the story, so there isn’t a need to re-read the story. Afterwards I’ll also publish it on RoyalRoad and Co, so if you want to help me kick start it over there, feel free to =)

With that out of the way, I want to take a week and plan out the details for the second volume.

For this story I have a goal in mind (final two volumes) and our MC has to experience certain themes and events to arrive there. Those themes and events are planned in volumes (so far 10) and for the first three volumes, I have the overall movement of the story down (what exactly happens when and which event leads to what).

So now I have to go and plan rough sequences for the second volume, make sure I know what to foreshadow and what to leave out, which things have changed while I wrote the first volume, and so on and so forth. Just a lot of things to do... I took my time planning the first volume and I was content with the result. So I’ll do it again.

So with a glance at the cover for the second volume and its expected delivery date (sketch now available on discord), and with my private schedule in mind, I plan to publish the prologue of the second volume in ~2-3 weeks. So it’s my hope that I’ll see all of you again at the beginning of September for the second volume:

The Dancing Fireflies.

Thanks for your support!
Lost