Leaving her chair and walking around her desk, Zoe approached the vampire at the window with a long sigh. The fourth in seemingly as many minutes.
“Yeah,” she said, resting her forehead against the cool glass. “I wouldn’t bet against it either.”
Hello, thanks for reading.
Book nine will continue as scheduled. No intermissions or interludes. Tune in next time for 009.001.
As with last time, I’d just like to say thanks before anything else. So thanks to all my supporters on Patreon and PayPal. I really do appreciate your support. And thanks to everybody else for reading my story!
I don’t know about all of you, but I had a lot of fun with book eight. It didn’t cover half as much as I wanted to cover, though I’m not sure why I don’t just plan for that. Pretty much all books so far haven’t gone exactly as planned.
Next book, we will finally be getting the other schools involved and start their little tournament. Something I know at least one of you have been waiting for since waaay back in book one.
Last Author’s Notes, I said two books left. Since one book has passed, that means one book left. Except… not. As mentioned, I didn’t cover as much as I had planned. How many books are left? No idea! Probably best not to listen to me on these sorts of things.
I’ve actually been thinking a lot lately about writing and characters. Specifically my writing and my characters. I posted a Worm fanfic titled Ziz (Simurgh!Taylor), only about 30k words worth as of writing this. Depressingly enough, I’m pretty sure that story that I’ve put about twenty minutes of thought into got at least a few thousand more viewers in two weeks than VD has gotten in the near two years that I’ve been writing it. Now, to be clear, I’m not mentioning that to whine about my numbers or anything, at least not too much, but simply to add context.
Some of those thousand people made their way to VD and started reading it. A tiny subset of that larger subset actually sent me private messages with critiques of Void Domain. That tiny subset is only about three people, but point still stands. Anyway, I sent messages back and forth to a few of them, discussing writing and my writing.
One of the big things I’ve decided is a problem is the lack of real consequences. The stakes in VD are almost always life or death, which is a fairly silly thing to have on the line as I’ve barely killed anyone. Even antagonists. If I were writing Game of Thrones (which I admit, I’ve never read or watched), death would be a valid consequence because of how frequently GRRM kills off his characters.
I touched on this in the previous Author’s Notes, but antagonists are another thing I feel I’m deficient in. Gertrude and Clement and the occasional Elysium Order are probably the best antagonists in the story. Sawyer, Willie, Des, not so much.
Honestly, it is likely too late to do much for proper antagonists. Gertrude and Clement have been a good shift, but too late. Still, something I’m heavily considering while thinking about new stories to write.
While on a semi-related topic, however, I’d like to pose a small question to people.
Chapters 004.020-004.024 are, in my opinion, the lowest point in the entire work. For a refresher, those covered the fight in Willie’s domain between Eva, Genoa, and Arachne. I’ve been considering outright deleting them and replacing them with a single chapter. Probably a simple battle to the death between the three of them without all the minions and nonsense, one that still ends up with Genoa stabbed and Juliana summoning Zagan. I’m not sure that it is the best choice, but it does need to hook into the rest of the story still and would at least get rid of all the meandering about with the cat-vampires and other things that I really don’t know what I was thinking at the time.
What do you all think?
Now for some side notes:
Again,
As a reminder, I’ve posted a few chapters of a series that
As for whether or not any of them will actually become real series after Void Domain, I’ve got no idea. I went through dozens of story ideas before settling down to write Void Domain. There are only three over there. Far from dozens. Though I will admit that I’ve started and have thrown out about five other first chapters that I haven’t even bothered to post.
