Well folks, the wait is over. I am so sorry it took longer than we thought it would. There were a few delays, all of which are totally normal in the publishing world.

Reborn - The Jade Phoenix Saga, Book 1 is out on Amazon!

So, now that it's out, let's talk about the differences between the original Royal Road posting and the final version:

It wasn’t all on me. I partnered with a publishing house, Portal Books, which is the pretty good and growing name in the Cultivation and LitRPG world now. Length: The original story was about 155,000 words. The final version clocks in at over 213K. That’s a 25% or so increase in size for you mathians out there. (Avg is about 120K) What does that mean? A LOT more Jade Phoenix of course. How long does it translate into? 500+ pages in the ebook version. 21+ hours of audio. A really really good bang for your buck. The narrator is Emily Woo Zeller, by the way. She is bloody brilliant! Rarely can a narrator bring to life characters the way she does. A consummate storyteller. Ok, so what added so many damn words? Brand new scenes called “Interludes.” They bring an entirely new dimension to the world and characters. Improved depth of characters. So, I wrote the original JP1 in about a month, which is really really fast for 155K words. The downside is that it was rushed, which means the book was missing certain things, the largest of which was character depth. So, hopefully we are able to connect better with Yu’s family, teacher, and especially friends. Yu was aged up. So what age did end up at? Our brave and determined MC started at 13 and ended at 15. The story spans just a bit over 2 years. Why? Before I answer, I know there was a great deal of mixed responses on this, both private DM and public comments. Thank you for all of it. So why? For a number of reasons, but the primary one is because of a mental cognitive dissonance. She was just too mature for her age and the mind has a hard time with it. What else changed? I won’t spoil it, except to say that we gain a little bit (not a lot) of insight into Yu’s friends, which were almost entirely skipped over originally. Improved alignment. This means that all the inconsistencies were caught (hopefully). For example, numbers didn’t match up a few times, the plot just plain broke a couple of times, etc. QoL Fixes. You readers and commenters provided a ton of valuable feedback and I read every single comment. I can’t say I incorporated everything, but I certainly listened, and the story is better thanks to you.

So there you have it. A longer, hopefully better, Reborn is up for pre-order here. You really get a lot of content for the same price as a much shorter book.

So what’s next?

I am getting back into Invasion book 3 at about ¾ of my time. I know it’s not what you wanted to here, but that is an absolute must. It is my primary writing income stream. ¼ of the time I will be working on JP 2. What is the order of operations. First, I will be editing the 175K words that are done. Second, I will be writing new content. After I have a backlog, I will be posting on RR. Do I have a timeline? Not really. I’m just catching up on sleep after finally getting JP1 out. I’ll try to be more communicative now that I’m out from under a release. No promises though. Sorry.

Do you have any other works in the works?

Yes. Any other fictitious free time I might have will be spent on a third project. Here’s the deets:

First draft is like 165K word piece of work called Soul Warrior It is sci-fi and takes place 500 or so years in the future. Has a male MC Is a LitRPG, but the system is unique in the genre as far as I can tell. It is a pretty serious story. Not very humerous at all. Not dark per se, but certainly not a happy go lucky story. I’m really really excited about it. It’s already copywrited And it is probably to be staying on the backburner for a while until Inv 3 and JP 2 are at least out of the copy edit stage. Sadz ☹

Before I go, I wanted to thank you all. I never would have been able to produce as good a quality product without all of you. Your comments were interesting, encouraging, challenging, and honest. And the fact that you read it, makes all the late nights and hair-pulling worthwhile. So I THANK YOU!

Love you all,

D.I. Freed (a.k.a. Freedcats)