I just wanted to take the opportunity to inform you all that, regrettably, I’ve decided to drop this story. Turns out, I really do not like writing action/combat scenes. And despite my best effort this past week, the more I tried writing, the more I started to hate what I’ve been putting out—to the point where this is the first time in a while that I’ve logged back in to this account.
To everyone that has been reading my work, supporting me, and those of you that have been commenting on my chapters, I am really, really sorry. I do wish that I could go back and reply to all your comments and feedback, but at this point, I’m too ashamed of my work to go back and read through it all.
This isn’t the end of my time as an author however. For my next work, I plan on making a Kingdom Building story to avoid this same issue with action scenes. I’ll be releasing it in the first quarter of 2025, so if somehow I still have your trust, I do hope you check it out.
I’ve made a lot of mistakes during this first story of mine, so I will apply those and make my next story even better. To that end, here are a list of things that I didn’t like about this story, and things that I wish I did differently.
- Pacing issues - In hindsight this was a massive problem of my story, and led to a lot of people slowly dropping it over time. While I did start off with a really solid start (an 80% retention for my second chapter is insanely good), I unfortunately followed off that start with a lot of meandering. Rather that write something interesting, or something that would advance either the plot or the character development, I instead only focused on what is the logical sequence of events to have happened, which absolutely killed any decent pacing I might have had. Perhaps I should have instead had a timeskip to the start of the academy, or perhaps I should have started in medias res, maybe when the group had already known each other for a while and had already gone through a lot together.
- The group size - The amount of characters in the main group was far too large for me, a new author, to handle. In addition, the group nearly always showed up together, meaning I had to make every conversation include half a dozen people, each with their own thoughts, ideas, and personality. As a result, I feel that aside from Jeremy, and maybe Andrew, the rest of the cast wasn’t well developed. I should have started off with less people, and changed the school schedule around so that they only see each other occasionally, so that I had more time to focus on developing fewer characters.
- Character age - I don’t know what I was thinking with making the characters 13 years old. While it did make for drama that would have otherwise not existed with more mature characters, I was not consistent at all with their mental ages. Worse, everything I was writing, I had to double check if this was something a ‘mature 13 year old’ would say/think, which made writing scenes even more difficult. As a beginner author, I just added unnecessary complications to my writing process.
- Not enough backlog - I originally planned on starting posting chapters in January 2025. However, I noticed that the writeathon started last November, and for some reason I wanted to join in. This resulted in me posting chapters when I only had two weeks of backlog, which definitely wasn’t enough when I was releasing seven chapters a week. Maybe if I had a larger backlog, I would have realized that I don’t like action scenes earlier on, and rather than trying to prolong this, I could have pivoted much earlier.
Anyway, if you read through all of that, thank you. Once again, I’m sorry for this story, and I will make my next one even better. Happy holidays everyone!
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