Notice: a Discussion about KU and the story

Notice: a Discussion about KU and the story

A few things:

I’ve signed a publishing deal for Budding Scientist with Podium. I believe I mentioned in, like... February? March? Something like that? that I was working on something, and well, that was the edits for the next draft of the Volume 1 of Budding Scientist. I felt that it was important not to change it TOO much, but there were a bunch of smaller things that I felt should be changed, either for flow, consistency, or typo corrections. Volume 1 of the story WILL be coming down from Patreon, RoyalRoad, and Scribblehub near the end of next week. This means the majority of the first 62 chapters will no longer be available on these platforms. I am allowed to leave up 20% of the story, I believe? I will double check that number later, but that probably means the first 13 chapters will stay, if I'm doing my math correctly. The rest will be removed.

Now, I also wanted to discuss WHY this is happening. I was originally trying VERY HARD to push for not taking down any part of the story until Volume 3 of Budding Scientist was finished, meaning the entire story would have been available on RR/Patreon/Scribblehub, before I took it down a month later, or something like that.

Ultimately, the publishing company agreed with me, but recently, they emailed me and basically said ‘this is a really bad idea. Are you sure?’ and we got into a discussion about it. I myself eventually changed my mind.

Why?

Simply put, it boils down to financial stability.

I LOVE writing. I spend about half an hour every night before I go to sleep just laying in bed, thinking about my stories and where I want them to go. I’ll imagine scenes that haven’t been written yet and adjust minute details in them, think about how a certain world should be structured, think about how some component of the world interacts with another, or how two characters should meet and interact with each other. Every time I take a shower, I usually spend several minutes soaking in hot water and thinking about stories I want to write, or stories that I’m currently writing and want to improve. I sometimes scrap these ideas (not every idea is a good one), but writing is a passion that I’ve had since I was in elementary school. And while second-grade me wasn’t that good at writing, their heart was in the write place (heh. Puns).

When I posted the first chapter of Budding Scientist, it was during the Covid pandemic. My father had just had a stroke, I was unemployed and depressed, my cat died sometime around when I started releasing chapters, and I needed something to get away from everything for a while. I was very insecure about my unemployment, I felt awful, and I needed to do something. So I turned back to my at the time somewhat abandoned hobby of writing, dusted off an earlier draft of a story called ‘Alice’s Disastrous Journey through an Isekai World’ (I was never that good at naming stories) that I had written, and started messing with it. I rebuilt Alice’s character, the worldbuilding, the System, and basically everything to turn it from an unrefined goop of ideas to a fully fleshed out story that was (hopefully) good, and renamed several times before I settled on ‘A Budding Scientist in a Fantasy World.’ I went through a few drafts, fixing things here and there, and eventually, I ended up writing the draft of Budding Scientist you’re familiar with today.

While taking time out of my weekends is viable while I’m super excited about the idea and really really happy to be worldbuilding and imagining and writing the story, the ‘super excited’ phase of writing a new story usually only lasts a few months. After that, I transition to a more ‘I am enjoying writing this story’ kind of state, where I’m still having fun, but usually no longer invested enough in it to chop out several hours of my free time consistently to work on it and build it more. And inconsistency is never a good recipe for writing. Frankly, going into the KU exclusive program with Budding Scientist is notably more likely to solve my financial issues - and it’s also something I can do right now (well, in a few weeks, but you get the idea.)

Which is why I’ve ultimately made up my mind to take down the first volume of Budding Scientist book 1 from RR, Patreon, and Scribblehub. It hurts me a bit to do, because I did want to have all 3 volumes up on said platforms before taking them down only once I was done with the webnovel draft of the story. But at the end of the day, this is what I think is best for me and my writing as a whole. Not being stressed out and worried about whether my writing is a mistake will do wonders for my mental health and stress levels. And stress levels have a big impact on how well and how much I write. When stress is too high, I have a much harder time doing fun things like bonus chapters or longer chapters consistently, since there are some days where I just feel frazzled and blehh. (Those are technical terms that I just made up).

So this is my ultimate decision. On the 24th of this month, I will be removing Volume 1 from this platform. And Volume 2 will also be removed whenever I finish going through the editing process for it - which is still several months away, but whenever I get to that point, that will be what happens. I wish I could have given you more forewarning, but there were some miscommunications that happened that shortened the notice and forewarning I could give you.

That being said, here’s a link to the pre-order for Volume 1 of the story, if any of you are interested. It would mean a lot to me if you pre-ordered it, but you do whatever makes the most sense to you. Currently, my publisher says that it will be 'released' on the 19th of September, unless something has changed and I didn't get an email about it yet. And it has also gone through a notable amount of edits compared to the webnovel version - I tried not to change TOO much, but I fixed a lot of typos, consistency issues (there were a lot of weird bits about how much one gold crown could buy), and flow issues. There will be an audiobook and an e-book available. A link to one version is here, and I will get a link to the other up as soon as I have it.

A Small Town in Southern Illvaria

Thank you very much for reading this far, and thank you for allowing me to pursue my dream as an actual job instead of just a hobby I sometimes have time for.

~Acaswell