A Personal Message to all Patrons...

Writing this LitRPG novel— Stranger Than Fiction has been a novel experience for both of us authors. It has taught us many things— the difference between writing quality fanfiction and quality original work, the difference between using a known character and creating an original that people would love/hate and so much more. But more than anything else, this work of fiction has brought us close to such wonderful patrons and readers who have supported our work every step out of the way— monetarily, intellectually and creatively.

This message is for you, our dear patrons.

STF taught us many things, and most importantly, we have learned from the mistakes we’ve made during its creation. Some of that might be a result of our own inexperience with original work. Some of it might just be our author bias, or our inability to have not considered alternate avenues for plot and character development. Some of it was probably because of the rush itself. Such causalities have led to major issues in character developments, fleshing out proper plots, causing what could have been a masterwork to have become a fragmented aggregate of well-intentioned but poorly executed ideas. Not something that our dear audience deserves.

It is a poor author that does not do his best to engage his reader’s attention with every chapter. It is a poorer author that does not do his best to rectify old mistakes.

We don’t want to be the former, and certainly not the latter.

This is why, The BlackStaff and NightMarE have been working diligently over the last two months, reworking the old chapters, rearranging plots, writing better and finer quality lore and bringing overall betterment to the novel-in-progress that was Stranger Than Fiction. However, the more we wrote and fleshed out characters, the more we noticed irregularities and deficiencies in the existing version, and the more our RE: version diverged. As of Chap 10, the story is well diverged from the original and is a completely different tale, not to mention an added 10,000 words in the first ten chapters itself. The diversion begins as early as Chapter 6 but the ripples are visible from the Prologue itself.

In light of the above changes, we will be posting the chapters as a new story on Royal Road come November 1, 2020.  We plan a consistent update of 1 chapter every 3 days for several months. All patrons will continue to receive advance chapters on Patreon like they are used to. In our humble opinion, this new story will be to your liking, but we look forward to receiving your comments and reviews on the story.

As such, it is our dear request to our patrons to keep supporting us the way you have. With the increased chapter update rate and the new chapters with new and fantastic content that will surely keep you turning pages. We’re very sorry for the inconvenience this might have caused but that is no reason for readers to get sub-par content from us authors.

Looking forward to your generosity and support for years to come and hope we continue to provide you with quality stories.

The BlackStaff and NightMarE

P.S. The advance chapters will be posted on Patreon by October 28, 2020. The Re: version of STF will hit Royal Road on November 1, 2020.