Progress Report: All Stories

So there's a lot to cover, I'll hit this story by story.

Friday Features: We got a Clouded prologue last week. This week and next week, we'll get new OC story chapters. Like all Friday Features, they'll be free for all tiers, Patreon exclusive unless they get picked up as full stories.

This week: second shot at The Devil's Villain In A Lewd Superhero World! No voting this time, the power escalation was insane last round, and minus the lewds.

Next week: My take on a horror-adjacent/urban fantasy/supernatural drama. Think Buffy, Supernatural, etc.

Star Jumper:
Season 3: 166k
Season 3 is almost complete. I only have a few scenes to tie everything up. It will be comparable in length to Season 2 when it's done, maybe a little longer. I'm thinking Star Jumper will go on hiatus at the end of this season. I know I tried that before at the end of Season 1, and ended up continuing the story because inspiration struck, plus I like writing it. The Season 3 finale is a perfect spot to pause the story. It's kind of wicked how it goes, but we learn so much that it might not be bad to let it digest. Check the Reasoning below.

Rogue:
I'm planning on wrapping Rogue up. My initial estimation when I started writing this story was around 250-300 chapters. But that was when the chapters were around 5k words, so roughly 1.5 million. As of the end of Arc 9 draft, it's at 1.1 million.

The new plan is to finish up with Arcs 10 and 11. The thought is that these two arcs should run around half a million words, putting me just over my initial target. Arc 10 would cover what was planned in my previous outline's Arcs 12, 13, 17, and 19. While Arc 11 would cover the previously planned Arc 21, and a whole bunch of new stuff I drew up.

Rogue just kept growing in scope. When I wrote Arc 9, I did a detailed outline first, and the draft ended up being exactly as the outline called for. Assuming Arcs 10-13, which I had outlined in a similar fashion, came out similarly, it would be 52 chapters. Another year. That means a year and a half from now, we'd still be in the middle of Phase 2, which would mean 3 years until the story is complete. I started building natural 'end-points' into the story with Arc 7. Had I not been able to do Arc 8, I could've tied things up with 7 in a somewhat reasonable way. Arc 8 was the same, as was Arc 9. I actually wrote the story conclusion, Arc 9, chapter. It's not super-satisfying, but it's closer to a sort.

This plan of finishing up with Arc 11 gives me a reasonable target to shoot for. Around 50 more chapters provide me with time to conclude this version of Tyson's story and tie up all the plots in a satisfying way. I have a new Arc 10 outline that's about halfway complete, and looking at Arc 11, I'm going to have to go back and re-read most of the story, so I can find all the plot threads I need to tie up. And there are a lot. I had a document I was keeping, but I stopped updating it during Arc 7's draft. Ugh. But if everything goes to plan, Rogue should conclude around Thanksgiving next year. I may have to slow the posting schedule at points because there are such significant structural changes I hadn't initially planned, and I don't want to screw anything up. Check the Reasoning below.

Meteor Freak:

I've got Episodes 9 and half of 10 written, and another episode, which would be later in the season. Sitting on this one for a while. I was hoping that putting out another chapter would get some reviews for Soul Taker, but it didn't happen.

Soul Taker:
Soul Seeker: 79k words

Sigh. This one is killing me. Haven't gotten many reviews, and the ones I have gotten, while positive, I had to scrape to get them, which sucks, because the release version of Soul Taker is soooo good. It has the best of the serious parts of Rogue, a better system than Star Jumper, and Tyson's voice from Meteor Freak (which I like the best). IMO Soul Taker is the best thing I've ever written. And no one is reading it. The problem is that a lot of the magic for the story came in editing. It never saw public release, so I didn't build up a readership, and now I'm trying to make it up on the back-end with marketing. For Book 2, I'm going to push the chapters out rapidly, once they're ready, to try to get attention to the story, and if that doesn't work, I'll probably drop it.

Wither:

The rewrite is done. This book is solidly in the Romantasy genre now. I'm in second pass editing. Need to prioritize this, but writing it has been such a PITA because its a departure from my normal stuff. It doesn't mesh with the other things I've written. Female MC, no system. But even in draft form, its pretty damn good.

The Reasoning:

I try not to bother you with RL stuff, since you're here for the stories, but an explanation is due. I've mentioned it before, but I have a child with special needs. We enrolled her in a private school that's a really great setting for her, but it comes with two drawbacks. First is cost, which is whatever. The second, larger part, is that it's 35 (not direct highway) miles from where I live. Since mid-July, and continuing at least until next June, I'm losing ten hours of what is normally my writing time every week. This is unavoidable. And it makes it impossible for me to sustain what I have been. This is why I've been slowly shifting toward original content. Serial fanfiction relies on constant writing. And it was great to get me to the point where I could write a complete story with themes, characters, plot, etc that all work. But for every season of Star Jumper or Meteor Freak, that's a book I could've written. And now Rogue Arcs are 2-3 books long. Sure fanfiction saves time becaus the characters/plots/setting are all pre-built, but doing something like Arc 7, which was all OC, takes just as long because I need to make sure its not only internally consistent, but makes sense within the context of the overall Marvel expectations.

I just wanted to share what I was thinking about going forward, and to be transparent with you all. And don't mistake anything I wrote. I'm super appreciative of all the support and love you all show me. I'll still be delivering regular writing, some of it will just be in new/different settings.

Cover Image: One of the trial images for Clouded, if it had ever made it to Season 2. Naruto fans might recognize the forehead protector. Haku.