Hello!

So, you may or may not have noticed that I changed the title of the story slightly. I added -Old- to it because I plan to relaunch in a few weeks. The current version has some chapters left to go though so there won't be a hiatus, just a transition where it drops off and the new version begins serious posting.

TLDR: Not a Hiatus. Old Version flawed, new version improved (quality baseline not guaranteed), posting will continue until I’m out of backlog then a switch over.

Am I going on Hiatus?

No. I have some stockpiled chapters for the current version that I’m going to finish posting before switching over to the new version. I’ve also got chapters stockpiled for that one so you’ll get a couple upfront in addition to the weekly’s.

When is this happening?

Mid to the end of March depending on a couple personal things.

Why is this happening?

When I first started the story, I didn't exactly have a plan. I've always written, compulsively, but aside from short stories and poetry I never finished let alone published anything. After getting sick of wanting to be a published author and never doing anything about it I decided to make a change.

I didn't immediately start writing but after some encouragement from my brother and an introduction to RR, which I wasn't familiar with at the time, I joined up. That led to me doing some basic genera research and reading stories to try and find something outside of my normal wheelhouse.

I wanted a challenge and to write a style of story that I hadn't already spent years of obsessively failing to write unlike my high fantasy stuff. So, after a rough outlining of concepts, I dove in. This led to me actually writing the story but a lot of roughness and mistakes.

I got better as I went along and received editing help from readers, but that didn't fix as much as was needed. Band-Aids don't do a lot for broken legs. That said I tried to keep going without taking a massive break or doing too much rewriting, just fixing things as I went. Keeping my weekly deadline as much as possible gave me a sense of accomplishment and distracted me from the issues I hadn't yet noticed.

Then I got sick. My inspiration crashed to an all-time low and I couldn't write like I normally did. Despite that I still put in hours on the story but in an editing capacity instead. I took some time to read through my reviews and chapter comments again and applied the feedback in a lot of cases.

This led to a lot of changes that I couldn’t really work into the existing story in an elegant way. Some of it wouldn’t matter like trimming out accidentally dropped plot threads already buried in the chapters and long forgotten. Other bits though retained most of the old story beats but massively changed the execution.

So as things currently stand, I feel like the story was heading for a break down in the not to distant future. One of those ugly “the chapters are okay but it’s all just middle” slog fests where stuff happens but the plot limps along half forgotten.

I don’t want that, so the rewrite happened. Hope you enjoy the new stuff.