Hey, sorry for keeping you all waiting.

I'll start off just by saying that I'm not dropping the story, but it might be a week or two before I get back to posting.

For the sake of transparency, I'll just be fully honest about my absence. A few weeks ago, I woke up, started getting ready for work, picked up my phone and went to open Royalroad, only to find myself hesitating to do so. I'm fine with the bad reviews and negative comments--everyone has a right to voice their opinion--but I'd almost started to liken this project to a second job in my head. For something that I initially just started as a small bit of hobby writing, it just started to weigh too heavily on my mind, to the point that even most of my downtime at work was spent trying to brainstorm plot points. I found my mind lingering a lot on the criticisms people had, even if they were entirely fair criticisms to make. I'm going to be scaling back a bit to try and let myself have fun with my writing again--it's supposed to be something I do to relieve stress, not add to it.

Going forward, updates might not be happening on the 'every other day' schedule they were going at before, but I'll be trying to address some of the very valid quality concerns with my writing in exchange. They will happen though.

I'll be deleting this notice once I have a new chapter up, but I felt it wasn't fair to keep you all waiting without some kind of information as to this story's status. Thank you to everyone that's stuck with me so far.

--Maltenai