Another retrospective, big news, and going forward

Another retrospective, big news, and going forward

Hey friends, Sov here. Been a while since I’ve done one of these, but I’ve got some stuff to talk about.

This has been a pretty wild journey so far. I’ve been a web fiction author for going on eight months now, most of a year. After spending 6-7 years trying to find the right project to do a web story with and failing, this feels kind of incredible. Bonus points that I didn’t expect Alken’s tale to be the one I stuck with.

I just closed out arc 4, Bind, which ended up being my longest so far, and I think also my best. This one was weird, because I expected to get through the entire “summit and tournament” section of the story and wrap up the major events in the city all in one arc (some of you might have noticed that I changed the arc’s name partway through). Turns out I bit off a lot more than I could chew with this leg of the journey, and I ended up deciding to split it into two arcs. I hope to wrap up this section with arc 5, which I’ve already started working on.

I expect Garihelm might end up becoming a central location in the narrative that we return to on occasion, with Alken now in a position as a lord and peer to the realms, but we’ll see how that plays out. Things definitely won’t be easy or simple from him from here on out.

But that’s author thoughts about the narrative, and I’d rather keep my plans going forward vague to avoid spoilers. I have another bit of news to share, which is a lot bigger.

Not long back, I had a publisher reach out to me after finding my fiction on Royal Road. They seemed to just be poking about my future plans, which I gathered is pretty normal after talking to some other authors in the same spaces. Long story short, after meeting with one of their agents, some emails, and a long think, I ended up signing with Podium.

Oathbreaker is going to be published.

But I’m not getting any younger, and after consulting with friends and family, I decided to take the win. Part of this is because I won’t actually have to change much about what I’m doing — Podium is going to take care of pretty much all the work, while I get to just keep working on the story. It felt like the best of both worlds, far as I could tell.

As for the heavier changes... I’m on the fence about how I want to handle that. It’s all my own work at this point, with the pubs own editors only coming in after I’ve gotten a manuscript ready, so I don’t feel any need to keep those hidden. That being said, I don’t know if I want to fully release my revised version of arc 1 on Royal Road before stubbing so those of you who’ve stuck with this through its run can see the differences first (this is what I’d most like to do), or if that would be annoying since it almost feels like obligatory rereading.

The other option is to make that a potential patreon benefit, which I am expecting I may set up soon — this is because the pub has told me I’m allowed to keep my original versions of the story behind a patreon even if kindle unlimited rules compel me to remove the published parts from Royal Road. Since I don’t tend to be far ahead of you folks and have held off on a patreon mainly because I don’t really want to do advance chapters, this could be one benefit I can have there. Let me know what you think in the comments, for now I’m on the fence about how I’ll go about this.

Other than that, the saga continues. Arc 4 was a doozy, and arc 5 I expect will also be pretty heavy. I’ve been releasing 3+ chapters a week for most of a year now, and while I don’t feel any need to stop or slow down, I’ve got a lot of work ahead of me. I want to have my revisions of arc 1 done by the end of December, and I need to have an action plan firmly in place for arc 5.

So I’m planning to take a little break from posting. This is NOT a hiatus, not really. I don’t expect it to last more than a couple of weeks while I make sure I’m not overwhelmed, and I may have some posts in the meantime, possibly more lore blurbs and map updates if I can find the time.

And that’s basically it. This is just the start of things, but I won’t deny it’s kind of a life changer for me personally. I am just some rando on the internet who had a story he wanted to tell, and this all came at me really fast. My writing is a real job now... that feels weird, but good?

If you’ve gotten this far, thank you for reading my work. The regular comments, the number of readers who jump into each new chapter within hours of me sharing it, the discussions and reviews I’ve been left, they’ve all been far more than I expected when I started this. We are still in early days, as far as my journey as a writer and for Alken’s story, which I intend to make an epic saga spanning many arcs and a number of years of my life. Thank you for being part of that.

With much gratitude,

Sov