Blue Core was never meant to be this long. My original idea for it was something like one hundred thousand words, maybe one-fifty. Clearly that didn’t happen.

Looking back on it, mostly I see all the things I did wrong. There were too many moving parts, too many incidental characters and actions that demanded their own plot threads, and a weird mishmash of different styles of things. Some dungeon stuff, some action stuff, some kingdom-building stuff, and it would have benefitted from more focus.

I still stand by my decision to make the Companion thing based on sex, because it actually matters and the usual cost to those thing is pain, which doesn’t. However, I can tell you that writing good explicit scenes is a serious chore. Writing terrible ones is easy, but bringing them up to my standards was hard.

Still and all, it turned out fairly well. Blue Core is not my first finished story but it’s certainly my first finished story of such a length. Over seven hundred thousand words is a bit of a doorstopper.

I want to thank my Patrons and readers, who were the ones who made Blue Core as successful as it was. There were a number of suggestions and notions suggested by readers of various sorts that I ended up incorporating and I thought made the story better. Taelah is actually one such an inclusion – the patrons wanted a perspective from the nameless alchemist from Anton’s Village, and the rest is history.

While Blue Core is done, I am certainly not finished writing. I won’t be returning to the universe of Blue Core anytime soon, but it may not be never. Hopefully you will give Paranoid Mage a try, and if that’s not to your liking, you’ll keep an eye out for whatever comes after that.

Thank you,

InadvisablyCompelled