Afterword

Hey everyone!

This feels like the end of an era for me. I've been writing Magnus since 2018 - about three years - and it's been serializing here on RoyalRoad for almost one and a half years now! Crazy! I've certainly learned a lot about the craft, and I've met a lot of amazing people during this endeavor. Turns out writing is hard! And it takes an enormous amount of effort, but that feeling of accomplishment after putting out a completed book is hard to beat. Also, reader engagement is definitely one of the strengths of web fiction serialization, and I've thoroughly enjoyed interacting with all of you. Of course, the stress level's significantly higher, too :-)

In book one, I was really trying to get my bearings as an author. I started out writing the tale of a single character and put him in various scenarios to get some practice with writing. That's one reason for why you saw Magnus start in a jungle and only later did he meet other characters.

In book two, I wanted to explore more complex plotlines and expand the cast of characters. Sounds like that was reasonably successful, though I certainly have a lot of room for improvement in that area!

With book three, I really wanted to write the story of a truly OP MC. At least, OP at the tactical level. It's a fact that narrative tension is incredibly hard to achieve with an overpowered protagonist, but I figured I'd take the training wheels off nonetheless. Of course, with the unique adversary that Ubiquity Prime was, Magnus's powers, while helpful, weren't an 'I win' card. That said, I'd really love to write something like Overlord where there really is no opposition, and yet the author manages to maintain tension in the story(at least, that's how it feels to me).

Fun fact! Ubiquity was the internal name of the service I work on prior to its public launch. It's a distributed, worldwide service, and served as an inspiration for the character :-)

And I think that it really is all about the characters; if your characters are interesting enough, there are any number of ways to tell a compelling story.

Future Plans

Alright, enough of my rambling! What's next, you ask? Is Magnus truly over? Well, maybe... maybe not. Depending on how well this whole publishing gig goes, if there's sufficient demand for Magnus, I may very well continue the series eventually. Kinda kept that door open with the ending there. Humanity's bold entrance into the world of interstellar war and politics? Or perhaps Magnus: Origins - the tale of Magnus the mercenary before he was isekai'd to Kelruhn? MikeWe even put together fake covers for that one... Drop a comment if either of these ideas sound interesting to you!

Regarding publishing, book two is scheduled to publish in August of this year, and book three will likely go on amazon in October or November. So if you have friends that want to read these books for free, go and pester them!

As for my next project, I've got a 3, maybe 4 part fantasy series I've been cooking up. Still don't have anything I'd call an outline, but I've got the major plot points and overall story in my head. In a nutshell, it's a pure fantasy litrpg/gamelit story about best friends becoming the worst enemies. The MC is of a demonic race who has ascended to something resembling a god. His ex-friend/archnemesis is the only entity in the world who can defeat him, but she's regarded as a high saint in human society. If he can defeat her, his people would be able to take over the entire world. To accomplish that, our MC will go undercover, disguise himself as a human, and infiltrate human society for the sole purpose of framing the perfect assassination. As to whether or not he is successful, or what happens after, you'll just have to wait and see!

There'll be some magic academy aspects to the story, esp early on. While it'll definitely feature action, it'll be a bit slower than Magnus, diving a bit deeper into each scene, with much richer worldbuilding. I'm hoping to create a rich and deep universe, and will probably be writing a bunch of one-pagers/short stories of random characters just to get a feel for the universe, the people, and the factions.

Tags are going to be overpowered lead, male lead, secret identity, weak-to-strong, sealed powers, litrpg/gamelit, character driven. That said, it's gonna be a while. I want to take the next 6-8 months outlining it, then I'm going to write the entire series and blast it here on royalroad all at once. So don't hold your breath! But if you're still around at that time, consider checking it out!

On that note, make sure you hit the 'follow author' button under this chapter to be notified of future releases. Also, friend me on facebook! https://www.facebook.com/vowron.prime

I'll be putting a wiki together that'll contain the info in the World of Magnus chapter here on royalroad(which admittedly needs an update). Feel free to contribute to the wiki if you'd like! It's pretty empty as of now: https://magnus.fandom.com/wiki/Magnus_Wiki

Lastly, because I gotta, here are the links to Terra Nova on amazon. If you liked the series, please do consider either purchasing the ebook(or downloading the book if you have kindle unlimited - counts as a purchase for ranking), and/or leaving a review! Especially early on, the story can use every good review it can get!

Kindle: https://mybook.to/magnus1

Audible: https://www.audible.com/pd/Terra-Nova-Audiobook/B08ZT2H587

Well, it's been a wild ride, and I hope you enjoyed reading this story as much as I did writing it. I feel like there's a little of all of you in the story as well; your constructive feedback has strengthened the tale far past anything it'd have been in isolation. So, thank you! Thank you for reading. Thank you for being awesome. And thank you for giving me the motivation to complete this series.

Onwards and upwards!