no chapter :(

Hey yall, Elessar here.

Sorry to be coming out the gates with some bummer news today, but there won't be a chapter this Tuesday unfortunately. Yall've been giving a whole lot of support, and I've seen a ton of comments on the last chapter that's made me feel really happy and confident in myself, so thank you for reading this far.

To get straight to the point, the TLDR of this post is that I won't have an upload this Tuesday, and the next chapter will come on Saturday instead. This will be for both RR and Patreon, and is largely because I am unsatisfied with some of my past writing and I haven't been able to fix that with my 2/week schedule.

If the TLDR is all you need from this post I just wanna apologize again and let you know the next one is a fuckn banger and is worth the wait (in my biased opinion). But ya'll have been literally supporting me on here lately, and I'd like to provide a degree more transparency for those who want it. Which, as it tends to, lends itself to a rather more long-winded post.

(just as an aside, this is somewhat of a more personal post for me. I don't feel obligated to share my heart out, nor do I believe that it's something that supporting me on here somehow warrants a right to, it's just something I feel like doing atm. Some of you are just here for the story, and I totally understand if you'd rather not get to know too much about the author behind it.)

In a way, this post is kind of the spiritual successor to my last apology. Or perhaps it's what I wanted to do back then but didn't have the strength to do. But before I get there, I'd like some insight into who I am as a writer. Or to be specific, my struggles with perfectionism.

System Reset is my first book, and the farthest (not even close) I've ever gotten into a story, but I've actually been trying to become an author for many years. Perfectionism has always kind of been the bane to any real forward progress for me, and until very recently that was a battle I've always found myself on the losing end of.

I'd write a paragraph, hate it with every fiber of my being, rewrite it, move onto the next, finish a chapter, then maybe finish a few more, before ultimately scrapping the series and moving onto the next. Rinse and repeat a few years and that's how you end up with dozens of projects and nothing much to show for it. We'll suffice it to say, it's not a particularly fun experience, and it's what eventually led to me cowriting this story with Krazekode who's helped break me from that cycle.

And we'll also suffice it to say that I've made a lot of progress on that front in the last year, self evidenced by the fact that ya'll even got a story to read rn :)

Now to steer this post back on topic, if you read my notes at the bottom of chapter 14, you'll have known that it's the first chapter in the series thus-far that I've been able to write on without constraints. Nothing to revise, no previous version that needed rewriting. It's been very therapeutic n'all for a launch that has for the most part been a hectic scramble to revamp my writing to a level I'm satisfied with, while trying to match the speed of a train that cannot and WILL NOT be stopped baaabyyyyyyy.

Ahem, I've mentioned this before with my patreon announcement on RR, but for those still unaware, SR's launch was much more impromptu rather than a meticulously planned event. I had some sudden financial strain, was going to have to get a second job, and Krazekode suggested I just post what I have in that case rather than shelve my writing. And it's thanks to ya'll that I'm even able to continue writing right now, and my gratefulness for that is what's brought all this on. But this launch also had another purpose, and that was to reinvigorate my writing after what felt like too long without forward progress—which again, it has COMPLETELY succeeded at!!

What makes me so happy about chapter 14 isn't just that it's some of my best writing, but it's that to me, it feels like the ultimate proof of how far I've come on my personal journey. It's not perfect by any means. It has the occasional typo, sections that could be clearer or more stated, prose that could be more evocative, but it was one of the first chapters that I felt 100% satisfied with after writing.

Anyways, more to the point of this post...

After I finished chapter 14, I went back and read chapters 11 and 12, the subjects of the last post I made. And I mentioned there that I hadn't been completely satisfied with them, but after experiencing the pride from writing chapter 14, I think my feelings on the matter have grown much more intense.

I've since warmed up to chapter 12 a bit. I think the changes I made to it made me feel secure in that the story in my head was being accurately represented, even if not told as well as I'd prefer. And a large part of coming to terms with my perfectionism has been understanding when good enough really is good enough. The fact that ya'll seemed to have enjoyed that chapter has really helped with that.

For chapter 11 tho...

Aight, this part might be a little confusing for some of you, cause I know that a lot of people enjoyed that chapter. I'm not one to shit on something people enjoyed, and I objectively do think that it's a good chapter in many ways. But it legitimately haunts my nightmares because it doesn't match the story that's in my head.

And to be clear, this isn't so much a retcon issue like the one I had with 12. All of the events that happened in that chapter canonically happened, they played out the way things played out in my head. But the way its told has felt off to me for a little while now. And more importantly, the way Jun comes off and reads to me on that chapter doesn't entirely match the way I envision him, and that's just as much on a prose/voice level as it is on an emotional one, which is why it's been hard to quite place what's wrong.

I think that in my battle against perfectionism, and with the stress of an unplanned launch, it eventually became harder for me to ascertain when something was 'good enough' and when a chapter actually encroaches on what I value in my craft. To me 11 is the second one. It seemed fine when I first posted it, but as I've started moving forward with the story again, the thought of people reading a story different from the one I've envisioned has become more and more terrifying.

So yeah, the moral of the story is: I'm super excited for what comes next, got some absolute bangers that I'm excited to get to writing. But in order for me to move forwards, I gotta fix this up real quick.

Sorry for the delay, and thank you for the support :)

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floof: "Me?"