Preamble:

  Hello! I know it's been a while, so first and foremost Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! I hope the last month or so has been treating you well and that January isn't making you all too sad.

  At the end of the last chapter I said that I was hoping to get back to posting regular updates, which I think is something I probably shouldn't have said just before all of the chaos of Christmas, and going on a fairly long family holiday where we were pretty busy all the time (it was really nice though in case anyone cares lol). I did spend a good amount of time thinking about this though, and I'd definitely say it was productive and worthwhile thinking, which is good.

  The situation:

  Firstly and most importantly: I have not stopped writing this story!

  I have more written that I am nearly ready to share, and will keep writing more after that, so if you've been kind enough to read my rambling and would like more, then don't worry, you will have it :) I'd like this story to get to a natural ending, and I have something in mind for that. Therefore, there will be plenty more to come.

  All the above said, there are some changes to come, though nothing that will be too impactful for this story. From revisiting my writing, thinking about where I'd like to be in my writing journey, and how this has gone so far, I've realised that there are changes I'd like to make. To that end, I am treating this story a bit like the first draft of the book I'd like to write. There are bits I like, bits I'd change, etc. Life is a learning process apparently, and I suppose this is part of it lol.

  Over the last year or so, I've realised more and more that I have this massive tendency to over-explain everything, either in speaking or writing, and even this post is a pretty clear example of that! It mostly comes from this urge to make sure I'm perfectly conveying the point I want to make, but I've found that I can often make the same point in fewer words. What this results in when I write, as I'm sure you've seen, is long passages of description, where not much really happens. I think that's fine if you're Tolkien, but I'm not really at his level (yet...), so I think it just sits there taking up space. My desire to hit arbitrary word goals has also reinforced this behaviour, because it's easy to just keep adding layers of descriptive writing instead of adding plot progression or strong dialogue.

  If I can give an example, I've written about 69k words of this story (nice), and during this time I think there have been like 4 major events. The entirety of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone was about 77k words, and I think we can agree that quite a bit more happened.

  Part of the reason for things happening like this has been (I think) the fact that I've been writing this without a proper plan. I got a bit overconfident because I do have a broad plan, I know the major events and beats I'm going to hit, but I didn't dive down into the specifics enough, and didn't have a proper idea on how I was going to string these bits together. I'm not sure if I've mentioned this before, but this story is ultimately based on a D&D campaign I was in, and one of the mistakes I've made has been trying to stick to the story of that campaign too closely, and not giving myself a bit more freedom to write something that works better as a novel, which can't always match the free-form nature of an RPG campaign like that. It's a story I'm going to keep telling, but I'll probably re-imagine it a bit.

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  So what's next?

  Simply, I'm going to finish this story, and then I'm going to start it again, but better. I have somewhere that I feel will work as a finishing-point for this story, which is another thing that was complicated by this starting as a D&D campaign - they're designed to weave a nearly-continuous narrative, flowing from one session into the next, which meant that there weren't that many places that really ever felt like an end. It's probably obvious from what I've written so far that there is more to the story than we've seen, and when I do end this story, that will still be the case. It's designed to have sequels.

  Once this is finished (no timeline), I'll take some time to do some hardcore planning, doing my best to properly deep-dive the story I want to tell, where I want to reveal things, introduce characters, etc. If anyone is still reading from before I deleted half of the cast, you might see even more how I tried to tell the story 'of' the campaign, instead of a story 'about' that campaign, which meant things really suffered because I had like 7 MCs from page 5, which did not work haha. There was a pretty hefty revision which I think was for the better, and this will be like that again.

  What are my goals?

  To tell a better story, and write it better. It's pretty simple. I want to plan it better from the beginning, which I'm hoping will let me stay more concise in my writing style without sacrificing the tone or depth. You might start to see this in the next few updates, so this will be an experiment for both of us. There is quite a bit of planning that has been done now for how to get to the end of this story, so we'll all see how that goes! If you hate it then please let me know!

  Thank you all for being so patient with my weird updating schedule. I hope you've enjoyed what has been written so far, and what is to come :) If you have any comments at all about the style, the story, my writing, anything like that then please let me know; I'm always fascinated to hear what people think, and I really value getting any feedback at all.

  Once again, thank you all so much for sticking with this so far. I really appreciate each of my readers; it might be a bit shallow of me but seeing the numbers go up is genuinely rewarding and has helped me keep going. It's been a blast writing this, I've learned so much about my own style and more than anything else it's a story I've enjoyed telling.

  TL;DR:

  Story is still going, style might change a bit in the next few updates, you're getting a re-write before you get a sequel.