I am taking an extended break on Rise of the Guild Master to work on furthering my career on Amazon, but the story will return.
Since the launch of Corruption of Coye vol 2, I’ve been seeing a steady stream of success. There’s been a little bit of money coming in almost every day, and that has felt wonderful on top of being a massive relief. On top of that, it’s been no secret that I’ve struggled with a large amount of RotGM’s plot elements due to my own inexperience.
I came out swinging wanting it to be my big magnum opus, but it ended up rushed and haphazard in many, many places to the point where I’ve written myself into loads of corners that I hate having to tiptoe around.
I wanted it to be this huge clean up of the town, magic destiny, thriller, slice of life but eventually there’s a demon lord hybrid story, despite those things really, really going poorly hand in hand. I want to retool it from the ground up eventually. A large chunk of the nearly 700k words I’ve written is still usable, after rewriting, that is. I just need to excise and simplify lots of things so that the slice of life action/romance/comedy is at the forefront instead of all the other junk. Like, no faction hunting them at every turn making it hard for the characters to go for a fucking walk without having to go in groups or have Nikita babysit them or whatever.
There’d still be conflict with Pimpington and the other ganglords, but it wouldn’t be oppressive. I’d probably cut the Duke of Dewhurst element entirely if I’m being honest and just simplify it into a conflict against the three ganglords (Pimpington, Crystal Sage and Fleetfoot) one on one into its own smaller scale thing.
Ah, well. You can see how heavily this has been weighing on my mind- at this point I’m just rambling.
This is why I’ve been having so much fun doing Coye, it’s much smaller scale and plays to my strengths much better- comedy and romance- while still having plenty of action and adventure. As of right now I’m knee-deep in rough drafts for vol 3 and am talking with an extremely popular lewd voice actress about producing an audiobook of the first volume. So everything is going well on that front.
The thing is, I don’t know if when I retool RotGM that it should be free. It would be a lot of work, and I need more material for Kindle Unlimited... part of me thinks I should just leave the webnovel version as is and let people experience the original version.
Either way, I need time to think about the path forward. The Realm of Karnalle has hundreds of stories left to tell, and I need to do the flagship one the justice it deserves.
A third option for the path forward is to keep the webnovel version as is, sell the fully edited version, and keep posting the first drafts of the chapters (obviously this would require keeping up posts with bullet point type descriptions of what was changed so that you aren't constrained by the prior webnovels happenings while still posting a draft). Just a thought that, while it certainly has its own awkwardness, I think keeps the best of both choices (having a free version, while also having a significantly improved version to sell; any free readers wanting to learn how the changes happened in detail would have to pay up)
I don't think you get how different the series would be and how annoying the change list would be to maintain lol. That's just not sustainable and I do not have the time for that. Plus the main thing is that I don't want to move forward until the junk I don't like is cleared out.
@PunishedKom fair enough, your story, you know best
I wish you the best and will be picking up your books when I get an income again. 😊
Bro, it would really be hard work if you rewrite this, plus it would challenge them and help them grow if they have adversaries rather than taking their sweet time on getting stronger cuz ya know theres a demon lord strengthening his own harem. Plus the duke of dewhurst is really the only challenge they could have because of the vicinity they are in and conflicting interest's. You could really just ease it out once they beat the crimelords in the town. But i understand if you want to rewrite it, as you want the novel to go a certain way (genre). I'll support your decision either way.
Originally, I thought this way too. I thought I could just get past the crimelord stuff and I tried to move forward, and in fact, that’s what I tried to do. But the thing is pretty much every chapter has to have all this consideration over what the cast can and can’t do because of the whole gang war scenario.
I didn’t have a problem with the Dawnstead arc as that was something different and I didn’t have to deal with all the pitfalls I’m referring to. It’s suffocating. Introducing my idea for the Demon Lord so early on was a mistake as well, and it’s something else I’m thinking of mixing around.
I think you’re missing that I believe it would be easy to do this, though. I believe wide swathes of what I’ve written is still valid, it’s just that after a point I’d just be deleting the more frustrating part and toning them down. My rewriting process is quite fast, although I would vastly improve earlier stuff.
Some stuff I want to add includes changing Zutiria’s intro to be a whole book on its own instead of just she shows up and they f*ck that night, editing the 7 day trial for Peri and Cherry so that Snow does a check-in every day to help build her and her eventual joining the Guild up, establishing a lot more of the Shield Maiden lore during Meri’s intro, among other things.
And by getting rid of the Duke of Dewhurst I don’t mean they won’t have conflict in Dewhurst. I just meant I would change one united force hunting them into three separate events. There would still be tension. A lot of my original plans for arcs would still happen. It’s just that without getting into spoilers I was building into a massive headache for the eventual DoD climax, and the more I wrote the worse it got.
It’s a bit hard for me to talk about without going into really big specifics behind the scenes, but there’s a lot of reasons it couldn’t work out as it is.
Another thing that bothers me is that I wrote in Opalina and Nikita, who are essentially just nukes. I love them and have plans for their characters, but they drag the story down with how they have convenient excuses as to how they can’t or won’t fight on the GM’s behalf. If there was no giant overarching tension, this wouldn’t be an issue. They would still have their reasons not to help out, but it wouldn’t need to be constantly reinforced.
So yeah, there would still be big arcs where they fight the villains, the town would still get cleaned up, it’s just that the fat would be trimmed. The genre wouldn’t change, either, as I still want it to be my bigger series with bigger set pieces and drama than Corruption of Coye(which itself has big action and drama planned, but it’s not fate of the Realm level like RotGM is meant to be).
I hope this makes sense to you and at least shows this is something that has had a looooooooooooot of thought put into it.
@PunishedKom I like the idea, the Duke could easily still be there just as a more distant threat, honestly even the meeting with GM could stay just make it a magical hologram or something. If your gunna become a Demon Lord or overthrow a massive organization like the guild I doubt there entire plan centers on this out of the way town.
@ColtWing but he already has the demon lord as a distant threat, and if the Duke takes too much of a backseat, then it is kinda pointless for him to exist (the only purpose being a definitive final "boss of the bosses" showdown; you can explain the group goals/objectives as part of a crime lord alliance deal (just one possibility, author could make up something better))