Yahallo!

Every chapter of What Lies Beyond uploaded on Royal Road from January 10th to February 21st are now non-canon, but are being left up for archival purposes (mostly to avoid being disingenuous to Royal Road, as much as I'd like to delete these).

So, yes, chapters 1-12, uploaded in January and February of 2022, are now archived. They're now a non-canon version of the story of What Lies Beyond, because I grew disheartened and generally came to dislike them as I uploaded them to Royal Road. Why? Because, frankly, they aren't what I wanted the story to be, and I only realized this while receiving some very minimal reactions and feedback to it. Namely, what awoke me to the realization it wasn't what I wanted was several comments, both publicly readable and privately messaged on here and discord and twitter, about how painful it is to read. It took a minute, but it made me think, "that's not what this story is supposed to be, is it?"

I also received some comments from people online and real life friends about being confused about the setting and descriptions, which makes me think I'm also just not ready to tackle this sort of story yet. I think I need to get more experience in as a writer before I try something convoluted like this again. Though, part of me thinks that's because I was writing them with the wrong intentions in mind, but I'm not willing to elaborate on that right now.

For some clarity, What Lies Beyond, at the time I had been uploading these chapters, spawned from 13 years' worth of different ideas, many of which are extremely incompatible with one another. What Lies Beyond was specifically conceptualized at a time of a major shift in my interests from making an action-adventure series with dark, edgier content (and having WLB be a prequel to that series called 'Strong' instead of 'What Lies Beyond'), to making that series a shared continuity of multiple stories in multiple genres with equally heartfelt and wholesome moments as it would have darker and grimmer ones, and What Lies Beyond simply being the first story in that shared continuity.

These chapters of What Lies Beyond were written based on a plan that was subconsciously made from an extremely messy combination of various ideas for the story, including one where Rocko was supposed to become a sort of 'team leader' in the larger series (carried over by the original 'action adventure' plans, which are no longer applicable in the way they were envisioned back then) and the newer one where he was simply a dreamer who wanted to go to the stars and loved his dad very much and wanted to do that with his dad and did whatever it took to make that happen (the one which I personally, currently, prefer, and which the story was supposed to be built around... but ultimately wasn't, at least not as much as it should have been). The story I 'settled' on, and ended up partially making, tried to balance a lot of ideas that I generally couldn't make work - at least not in an inspirational, motivational, hopeful way, as I'd wanted to (pretentious as it may be, I want to make something awe-inspiring, not gut wrenching or emotionally painful - at least, for the mostpart).

In short, as an amateur at all this, I tried to bite off more than I could chew, and the result was a mess of a story plan which failed it from the very beginning - and I only came to realize that fact very recently.

What Lies Beyond is not canceled, but whatever form it ends up taking, I don't know if it'll look anything like the 11 and a half chapters currently up. If I figure out something that lets me keep the ideas presented in the next 11 and a half chapters while still capturing what I truly want this to be, especially in an emotional and thematic sense, then I certainly will. Chances are I won't be able to, and the story it will eventually become will look very different, but there are things I created for this - published and unpublished - that I won't be able to let go of, and I'll certainly try to find some way to incorporate them in whatever the story ends up being. That said, going forward, I will only prioritize telling a good, consistent story, over forcing a bunch of incompatible ideas together just because I wanted them to be there. So if the eventual version of What Lies Beyond doesn't have room for these ideas I've grown attached to, I can live with that, and leave them out. I hope I won't have to, but it'll be worth it if I do.

What I can say is that it will still be a story about a red alien frog and his father and their dream of going to the stars, probably even more strongly than it is right now. That will always be What Lies Beyond. That's the story I want to tell, somehow or other.

But the stuff about becoming Chieftain? The stuff about leadership and villages and escapism? The stuff about training one thing or another? I don't know. I literally don't know if any of that works (or even can work) with what I actually want this story to be. So, we'll see. Most, if not all of that, is just residue from the older plans that, after all the dramatic changes to the core of the story, I never really addressed, so the result was this mess.

Having read the previous paragraph, if you have any familiarity of the contents of any of the uploaded chapters, you'll probably immediately understand why I see these chapters as failures of storytelling. Granted they were only part of the first act, but... 215 pages of first act? lol what am I thinking?

Well, I'll figure it out eventually.

Regardless, I'm taking a break from WLB, as there are other stories I want to write (which I have much stronger ideas and motivation for and are actually properly thought out), and I've been stuck on What Lies Beyond for 3 years, and I'm sick of it and I honestly regret it. I did a poor job and, for all the time I've been stuck on it, I didn't spend it wisely at all. Most of that time was spent less thinking about the story, and more procrastinating on trying to write it while thinking about other stories and fretting about possible release dates and all sorts of things that I just really had no business worrying about with the state it was in at the time. Especially 2021, which was a complete waste of time for me. I didn't want to spend 2022 the same way, but so far it seems I have. I didn't want any regrets in 2022, so hopefully this will be the only one. I want to move on, but I'll come back to What Lies Beyond when it's time, and hopefully I'll have a much better story in store at that point - one which will have the heart I wanted it to have, that I feel these chapters are sorely missing.

You'd think all that would be painful to admit, but writing this was honestly somewhat cathartic for me. It feels good to address mistakes, no matter how big, and to learn from them.

Anyway...

TLDR

What Lies Beyond is on hiatus. When it returns, the story will be redone from scratch. Everything uploaded before March 2022 is now non-canon.

Though, who knows, my mind may change about this yet again.

Please keep an eye out for future stories, and for the eventual return of What Lies Beyond.