NOVEL NEXT Update
Hey all!
The quick version for those of you who just want the cold hard facts: I'm going back on a break from posting Friendly Neighbourhood Goblin until I complete book two in its entirety. I should have just taken a longer break after the end of book one, but I thought continual posting would work as long as I was at least an arc or so ahead.
But no.
Turns out I'm the sort of writer that edits quite extensively after finishing a draft, and I don't trust that the story will be as good as it can be until I've polished the whole thing from start to finish. And yeah, that means there will be some major changes even in the few chapters of book two that I've already released.
The reason book one worked is because I had finished all of it before uploading a single chapter to Royal Road, and I want to repeat that formula for the release of book two.
I can't say exactly when that'll be, but I'm writing and working on it every day. I want the final product to be worth it. I want the setup to pull you in and the payoffs to deliver. And when book two does arrive again, I want it to be something I'm happy with. Hopefully you will be too.
That's all the updates I've got for you today. For those of you who are interested in my writing process and want to suffer my ramblings while getting examples of what I'm talking about in practice, that's what I'm going to do after the scene break. Spoilers for book one.
The way I write is that I'll finish a large chunk of a rough draft, and then based on what I discover along the way and what I'm planning for future arcs, I'll often go back and undertake major rewrites to align character arcs, add foreshadowing, fix pacing, properly balance tension, etc. There's nothing special about this process. It's pretty average for a writer. The good thing about it is that I don't stop until I'm happy with the result, but the bad thing is that it doesn't work very well for a traditional webnovel format of constant updates.
This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
But to give you an idea what this actually looks like, when I was writing the first major arc of book one (Stump arriving at the Knight Inn for the first time and starting his company) Borag and Boragu did not exist. There was no Dusty Taps, no getting the Jailburn from Daggan, and no party. Stump just founded his company and then went straight to Seabrace. How lame.
No Borag meant he never told Stump his story, and the idea of ascension and virtue overload never existed because I thought of it organically while writing their conversation. It meant Stump never had his explosive moment in Seabrace where he sent the ghosts back to their plane. In that early version, he and the others just escaped the prison, snuck to the boats, and headed to the temple. And my plan for his final fight with Thrung was that Stump would just... win. He'd overcome Thrung by out-punching him or whatever. That's even more lame.
I didn't go back to add in the Dusty Taps subplot until I was wrapping up the first draft of the Peaktree Manor arc fifty chapters later, only a couple weeks before posting to Royal Road. But that change ended up improving the climax of the next arc and the end of the book itself, and it gave Stump a cool twist on his power to play with, AND it opened up some cool lore implications and mythological potential. All from one conversation in a rundown inn with one side character who was part of one little subplot about beer.
Could I have just given that conversation to someone else? Yeah. Wasptongue, maybe. But the point is that I didn't even think about it as a possibility until I introduced Borag, and Borag wouldn't exist at all if I hadn't taken the time to fully complete the book before releasing it.
Sometimes I hate what I write, and sometimes I love it. Often I'll feel wildly different emotions towards the same piece of work depending on the day. But I love the feeling of finishing something, of slotting that last piece into place and seeing the whole thing for the first time.
I don't know what the final shape of this next book is going to look like, but I do know that it's going to be a whole lot better than my first attempt. I just need the time to let it breathe while I bang my head against my desk until another Borag shows up to fix it.
That's all for now.
Cheers.