== Thank You! ==

First and foremost, I’d like to thank you all for reading Sanctuary. If it weren’t for you guys, I would probably have given up somewhere along the way. A special shout out to DarkSpark, gary0044187 and the others who left comments every now and then. The site can show me the number of people who are reading, but it never feels real to me until I see a comment on the chapter page. That’s when realization hits me and I feel funny inside, so thank you for your comments!

== Looking Back ==

I’ve always enjoyed stories. It’s basically at the core of everything I consume, be it books, comics, movies, tv series or games. The idea of creating my own stories did occur to me every now and then, but I always told myself “I’m not a writer” and feared whatever I put out wouldn’t be worth other people’s time.

That started to change when I began to stumble upon some Japanese web novels which will not be named for various reasons. They were, in my opinion, very bad and made me want to facepalm most of the time. However, what fascinated me was that there were people translating it and thousand others reading it. It was then that I began to gain some confidence. Maybe I could do this after all. Whatever I write won’t be as bad as these, surely… at worst it will be at the same level.

What pushed me over the edge was when I saw, a few years later, some of those same web novels I thought to be really bad were being published here in the west. Those works I thought to be terrible were becoming actual books. There were no more excuses I could make for not writing, if they could do it, so could I. So I finally decided to give this whole thing a shot.

For my first work I wanted to change a lot of things that annoyed me about other stories, like:

- The MCs always meet and get friendly lightning fast, generally through some warped logic. Therefore, I made Liza and Ben start at odds with each other and had them overcome some hurdles together before they could party up. The same could be said about the addition of Fang Chu. And if you are wondering about Rudi/Eliot following Liza, that’s because she was a person, something that gave him a sense of familiarity and nostalgia after living isolated inside a forest for many years.

- The summoned person from earth is always a cheat character who accepts being kidnaped to a strange world like it was no big deal and starts to kill monsters and people like it is normal. Yeah right, totally normal procedure for humans born and raised during our current age… Thus, I made Ben a normal bloke who has no superpowers and takes his time to adapt to his new and unfamiliar situation. Plus, he hates the person who kidnapped him and doesn’t work for him “just because”.

- Wuxia/xianxia novels always have retarded sense of scale and other absurd things. I mostly wanted to include an eastern like kingdom and their martial arts in a more reasonable way. That’s how the whole thing with Fang Chu got started.

- The author treats the readers like they are five years old, constantly reminding them who the characters are and what are their objectives. I just didn’t. Though maybe I should have, at least to refresh people’s memory every now and then. Perhaps then there wouldn’t be people confused about what the story is about, but pacing probably has some guilty part in that too (more on it later).

- The author treats the readers like they are five years old (again) and explain everything, leaving no subtleness. In this I was just plain wrong. There’s already misunderstanding when people talk face to face, if you’re not clear with your written word it will fly over people’s head 99% of the time. Though I still find it enjoyable to use in cases where the information is not vital. Did you get why Eliot, although much stronger than Liza, would listen to her in the early chapters when she made a harsh and stern voice? Or more recently, when Boro was interrogating Lazul, have you noticed how he starts to have fun when referring to the others as his servants, so he keeps adding a pejorative adjective each time?

- It is always about good vs. evil and heroes vs. the demon lord. Therefore, I made my story about different individuals trying to accomplish their personal objectives. Liza wants to find her missing father, Eliot wants to recover his memory, Fang Chu is trying to not get forcefully married away and Ben wants to find a way back to Earth. Boro is a bit of a special case.

The result is what you’ve read. Maybe I should’ve taken some of those ideas and worked on them in different stories, since they end up making Sanctuary an amalgamation of various clichéd tropes. Well, it’s too late to worry about that now. Putting those ideas into practice also made the pacing suffer a lot, since I wanted to give time for things to develop. This made the story slow and bored countless people, as can be seen from some comments and reviews. It also made people hate Ben’s guts for the longest time and made them annoyed at Liza and her forceful ways at the beginning. All in all, not ideal if you want people to like your story and keep on reading.

However, I still believe the plot I came up with to be good and maybe what left it wanting is my delivery and pacing. What this book 1 needs right now is polish. A lot of editing, writing and rewriting needs to be done before I could consider it a finished product. But wow, what a ride. More than 150 thousand words, a book of 619 pages according to RR. I never thought I had it in me to write this much.

At least, that’s how I see it. But now I want to hear your thoughts. What do you think about book 1? How did your feelings about the characters develop and change from the beginning till now? I’d love to hear if you came to like a character you hated or vice-versa.

== Update & Going Forward ==

Now for the sad part: I don’t think I can keep Sanctuary going for now. Writing can be fun, but, like anyone else, I would like to see the things I put my time and effort into succeed. To spend another year and half writing book 2 to a dwindling number of readers… just thinking about it drains my motivation. I’ve been feeling down for a while now, but I soldier on to finish book 1 and, now that it’s done, I believe it’s a natural place to stop.

If you think I’m being egotistical or whining, I can understand. I don’t think is fair, but I understand, because I too get annoyed when a work I like gets axed or enters hiatus. I still hope to complete the story, since I have the entire plot points mapped out, but I’ll work on it at my own leisure and it will be done anywhere between “I don’t know” and “soon” by Valve time standards (which, for those who don’t know, is not soon at all).

For now, I want to focus on editing and rewriting book 1 and maybe send it to a publisher when I think it’s good enough. Who knows what might happen? At the same time, I want to try and expand on a few ideas I had for other stories as I was writing Sanctuary. For those I’ll try to not take it too seriously, so as not to drain me, otherwise there wouldn’t be a point to stop updating Sanctuary. I’ll probably release them here on RR after I manage to mass some chapters.

That’s all folks. Thanks once again for reading and I’m sorry for leaving you guys hanging without the completion of Fang Chu, Ben and Eliot’s story arches. But hey, keep following Sanctuary here on RR and maybe you’ll receive an e-mail a few years later with tons of chapter notifications.

See you and stay healthy,

Norlum