Further Beyond: Ascension

I would just like to start this off by saying thank you so much to all the wonderful followers, fellow author-reviewers, and other such people who've helped and supported me thus far. It was an arduous journey (and still is) to be sure but I'm glad I'd managed to get this far already. I won't lie and say that it hasn't been a rough ride with the random bad ratings (and I get it, the story really isn't for everyone) of one stars and half-stars. But despite that, I'm just glad this story has gotten eyes on it and people tend to enjoy it.

My first and foremost concern with writing this story besides telling my characters' journey was of course to introduce my actual real-life culture to a wider audience. It's the culmination of that one writing advice people always give. 'Write what you know'. While it's lent my story to quite a bit of what one would consider purple prose, I hope I did well enough to at least make my world feel lived in like actual people are in it.

Another issue I've been thinking about was of course the very religious nature of my story. While I tried my best to give as neutral and nuanced view I could, it's no lie that I did indeed use real world terms and religions (edited to fit an alternate fantasy world). The main reason I chose to do this was because I found it far more convenient to use already established rules to bring about a real conflict. Creating a fantasy religion from scratch would render it looking like just an obvious stand-in for obvious real world religions and that would -- in my opinion -- muddy the waters with the harsh story I was trying to tell.

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I will put my biases to light up-front and center. I am indeed a christian in real life, born and raised, but I did try my best to be as neutral and unbiased as possible in my story-telling. What started as a project to showcase my real-life culture ended up becoming a story of actual struggles that I know many people both in history and up until today have gone through.

All in all, it's been a journey both for me as an author and as a person. Now, I won't lie to myself and claim that this is the best story ever and that it'll be the next hit piece. Lord knows I've a lot of flaws here, problems with run-on sentences (which I'll be re-editing and breaking up further), a skew towards telling rather than showing, and perhaps a whole host of issues that I've yet to notice myself. But I do believe I have something beautiful here in its own right and seeing people support it through comments and follows is needless to say very heartwarming to me.

With all that being said, I do already have a massive outline for what's to come in the future. I am keen on seeing Josias' story through to the end. But, I've also burnt myself out a lot so expect a significant break after this. But don't worry, I still plan on updating on this story any later chapters and books.

Above all, once more I say thank you to you all beautiful people! As an added extra, I log on to this site everyday so I will always be checking it out and I open a QnA Session in the comments of this post for anyone who has any inquiries both regarding the story or my IRL culture.

All in all, God Bless and Have fun y'all!