A Little Perspective: Managing Expectations (Patreon)

So I probably should have talked about this sooner, but things are going to slow down for at least a little while.

Originally, I was split between doing We Have Come to Terms and Hereafter, so I wrote up a first chapter for each of them and considered doing both at once. In the process, however, my editing team and I had a sit down and talked about what it would mean to try that, and the conclusion reached was that it would take a lot of time and meticulous planning to make WHCTT work. It’s a mystery story, and that means planting a lot more clues and subtle nods than I ever did in Essence, sprinkling foreshadowing and hanging guns on walls so they can be fired ten chapters later, and doing that means having the entire thing sketched out and storyboarded before I actually started writing it.

Well hell, I thought. If I’m going to spend six months planning out a massive story, why not just cut out WHCTT and work on Queen of the Abyss, instead?

I’ll leave the first chapter of WHCTT up for everyone. A sort of “could have been, and might one day be.” Instead, I’ll start on Hereafter, and at the same time, I’ll also start planning QotA more seriously.

Things won’t be moving as quickly as they did with Essence, at least not immediately. I know I gave you guys (for the most part) one chapter a week, or at least tried to, as and when I could. What none of you had the chance to see back then was that I spent two months or so working out the beginning of Essence before it ever got posted to Sufficient Velocity.

That means the rest of March is probably going to be a bit slow. Even into April, especially with Easter coming up, we might not be back up to full steam, yet. There’s a lot of early-game stuff that needs to be hashed out before I start really writing chapters.

Or maybe I’ll watch the Babylonia anime again and write up three chapters in, like, an afternoon, because I loved just about everything about that show. Who knows?