Hey again. An explanation on my end has been long overdue, so here goes.

So, I haven't really posted anything on TSoH for a while, and I just wanted to lay everything out on the table as for what's happening on my end. It's the least I can do for those've you who've been reading along and following the story up to this point.

As the title gave away, I'm putting The Shape of Home on indefinite hiatus. There's... a lot of reasons for this. Real life stresses, a lack of motivation, a desire to try something new, not having the energy to finish the story, and... an admitted lack of planning.

I have a general idea for how I want to end the story, but I've put too many different elements into it. There are a lot of minor and side characters in the story that I didn't have a real conclusion or purpose for, and it led to everything feeling a little... cluttered. Before I started writing Arc 6, I did a structural overhaul of my story writing notes to get everything into a better order and allow myself to write more efficiently.

Which... admittedly worked! I'm pretty happy with what I ended up with, and intend to update it again before I work on anything else, but the update and overhaul of my writing structure made it abundantly clear just how many extra characters and plot threads I would end up leaving untied. It would take a lot to wrap everything up neatly and concisely given that I've primarily planned the main beats out. Some of the side characters had small bits and pieces going on, like Shafu, Blaise, Canary and a few others, but a lot didn't really have much of a purpose despite being extras. The story feels... loose to me. Built upon a wobbly foundation of wanting to write a long form story and see where it took me.

I've learned a lot from writing this web serial up to now, and I'm relieved at that given how much I've written for it over... what, maybe a little less than a year, total? I wrote a massive amount in that time, and learned a ton about writing in a ton of different areas thanks to that experience.

But... I want to try something new.

I started writing this web serial to grow and learn as a writer, but now it feels as though I've grown bigger than the shell of this story can hold, and that I'd need a lot of restructuring to get it to a point I'm happy with and could make into a cohesive and satisfying full tale.

I'd need to alter it from the ground up and change the foundation, and the thought of rewriting this story in a very different way after having gone so far... I'm just not up for it.

So for now, I'm laying TSoH to rest. This hiatus may lift at some point, or it may be indefinite. If I do find the enthusiasm and inspiration to come back to TSoH, it'll be after a lot of retstructuring. Maybe a soft reboot or something of the like. That being said, I want to get back in the saddle and start writing again.

Instead of TSoH, I intend to write short stories that take place in my setting, Alvelotyl. I'll be posting them all here when they're done, so although the upload schedule might be a little loose and unpredictable, the quality of writing will (I hope) be even higher than that of TSoH.

This might be the last TSoH post, but it's been a lot of fun. I'm ready for new and exciting stuff, and if you enjoyed my writing, I hope some of you would be willing to stick around and see where else I decide to explore and what stories I want to tell.

On that particular note, if there's anything in the setting that piqued your interests and would like to read more about, let me know and I'll see about doing a short story set around it!

Thank you all for taking this journey with me up until now, and I hope that if you decide to stick around that my future stories will catch your interest in the same way TSoH did.