It was twenty months.
I want to apologize for not posting a single thing.
I am sorry.
You can say I kept delaying and delaying until simply not thinking about it became easy enough. I kept thinking 'my reader base is not that big, it's fine'. The truth is, I haven't written a single thing in these nearly two years. Not 'The Age After', nor anything else. I had some real-life problems, but who didn't with pandemic and all. Nothing life-changing required me to get lost from the radar.
It was (still is) a writing crisis. 'The Age After' was my first consistent work and it grew too complicated for that. I attempted to build multiple plotlines and introduced a wide arrange of characters while keeping tabs on my system mechanics and cultivation system simultaneously. From a reader's perspective, it might have been not noticeable, but I'd really lost the vision of my novel even before I stopped writing entirely. It is purely a newbie mistake.
Seriously, I came to hate my system. No wonder most writers in lit-RPG keep them narrative-driven and don't build complicated tables: it's just so pain in the ass. I never realized that until I built one with real numbers calculation and tried to keep calculating, calculating, calculating those numbers. Swiftly I fell over the point economy, exp tables, skill economy, and other things I hadn't really predicted would ever come up when I started writing...
But I'm digressing.
The Announcement.
I am resuming my hobby of online writing, but I also put – well, leave – 'The Age After' on a hiatus. I won't come around to it until I get some experience with less complicated work and until deciding what to do with the system I've brought into being, up to erasing it entirely from the setting or, most likely, from the main character Alice.
Either way, it all might take a really long time: recharging, planning, rewriting. Again, I am sorry for my inadequacy.
In a few days, I will start post another work with a single plotline and a simple premise. The main character dies and comes to life in a different, unstable world where she must fight, die and start again, a very Souls-like premise you may guess. I very much hope to build up my fighting spirit with this new novel.
I cannot quite ask you to check it out since frankly, I am ashamed of myself for this ghosting period but still announce it with a tiny hope.
Till we meet again.
It definitely looks like you broke down during the ‘marathon in the middle’ part. I haven’t gone through the process but commonly there’s different perspectives or flashbacks that makeup the ‘marathon in the middle’ part of writing. I liked the idea of claiming a home and fortifying it though. There were enough other actors that probably had hidden agendas to be told. The current narrative had a somewhat okay amount of tension but there could always be more. If there’s one thing myself and other readers will like it’s tension. It’s just got to be believable.
It was twenty months.
welcome back
I'll read your next t story! I still remember this one as fairly good, wouldn't have guessed it to be your first project. But, yeah, keeping it simple is probably a good idea.
The only encouragement I can give you:
<3
Dont be ashamed, everyone has incredible ideas sometimes but realizes midway that to realize the idea is more complicated than initially imagined. But i imagin you have learned a lot writing this novel. So take it as an expirience that improved your future writing. And its totally normal to have a writing crisis, but ists important to communicate with your readerbase and dont just disapear. Just saythat you have a crisis and need a month or to to collect your thoghts or something. Nobody is gonna blame an author that writes as a hobby and not for a living when say dont post new content because they struggle. Its your hobby not your job. So write as long as you enjoy writing and dont pressure yourself.
I am not really ashamed of trying and failing (I have a dozen of 1-5 chapter concepts from way back, it's fine to have one 50+ chapters long), I am only ashamed of hiding in a closet when I stopped writing instead of communicating through it.
Thank you for the work
All is fine, creating a stable, well functioning, hard and fluid sistem is realy complicated. I know from experiance. I'm building one at the moment. You need to make the story compatible with the sistem and incorporate it flawlesly into the worls so that it doesn't seem out of place, and so that it doesn't complicate the storytelling too much. I myself am constantly at the moment changing and adjusting both the sistems (I have multiple planed which each need to be balanced with each other and with worldbuilding elements) and the worldbuilding elements and the rule of my created world. So I fully understand whit what you had to restle, as such a sistem requires (to be able to write without additional anoyances) a solid story with a single plot at a time (at least for the start of the story).
Ps. The one that I'm writing myself right now is my second story (the firs one was a dissaster, that I won't ever release) that I'm writing, and I hope that I will be able to publush the first chapters in the neerest month's (month). And I also recomend to create a scelleton for your story with the story points that you want to included before starting to write.
Yeah, it would have been one thing to build a system, even a complicated one, but I introduced too many things too fast without thorough planning and lost track of them.
I'll check out your story when you post it!
@Kiriima Yeah, introducing too much too fast was one of the things that made me drop my first story, also including pacing, main suportive character being much more interesting then my protagonists were (I was intending to kill him of later), my protagonists being flat (because I started them as children (had problems with balancing personalities of children as main characters), and many other problems.
About my new story, I dont know how long it will take. But thanx!
Sorry for the slight rant about my first work. I will read your new novel when it is release.