Great job continuing to grind forward even when you've been sick. Very inspiring. Love the idea of a "free-skill" engine! I'm definitely interested in reading when you're all done.
Good news! I'm almost finished! With the first draft. With the climax having passed, I'll say that there's about 5,000 words left, if that. Word count: 90,410. I can already see what needs to be added, changed, and removed entirely. I'm definitely considering writing a shorter story (maybe 50k words?) that can ease me into the whole system while this story cools off. Reflections: Everything turned out better than I had hoped. I'm angry that there's basically a two week period where I got virtually nothing done, though I did figure some new things out and finally worked out how the rest of the series will go. That said... Goddamn, do I hope that this is not one of those stories that debuts/peaks at #50,000 on Amazon. I just don't know how to get a strong launch. I'd even accept a debut/peak at #5,000. Book 2, aka Week 2, is going to have a much tighter storyline. If there's one thing that I can really tell about the book, it's that it's very scattered in plot. It's still based on The World Ends With You heavily, so a lot of the exact same story beats occur— Day 1 is the confused series of battles against enemies and figuring out who the hell you're partnered to; Day 2's the initial climax of emotions and tensions where one of the MCs is forced to and very nearly kills the other; Day 3 has the MCs amend with the friends and seemingly go forward in good spirits; Day 4 is the ambush that kills one of the friends. Up to that point, it's basically an American retelling of TWEWY. Day 5 is the big divergence and Day 6 is actually the big battle. Day 7's more of a rest/segue into the sequel. If you've ever played TWEWY, you'd know that the first week of the game has the MCs just trying to survive; there's no goal other than winning the missions and surviving to the end of the week. An actual concrete goal besides survival doesn't start really coming into focus until the second week. Every series has something like that— the first installment has everything played straight, with the MC merely reacting to this new big change. The second installment has to change things up; things that happen aren't typical; third installment might try to play things straight again to prove that the second entry was an aberration, but there are just so many new events that things can't be the same. I first noticed this with Harry Potter, with how only Book 1 (Sorcerer's/Philosopher's Stone) featured a school year at Hogwarts that did not involve the school nearly getting shut down, taken over, or having events focused on something major. Ever since, it's uncanny how often this keeps reappearing. I don't know what the trope is called, but the point is always to establish that the protagonist has answered the call of duty and the world as it exists can no longer remain the way as when he or she began their adventure. Same trope inadvertently happens here. The first week of the Game is purely typical: Players grinding, completing the Mod's Challenges and other quests, learning about the world, trying to survive, things of that nature. The second week is the dangerous twist. Funny thing to note, I think that Week 1 is functionally more like an MMO, despite the feeling that what just happened on Day 6 feels like an actual boss battle (it's technically a dungeon boss, but in a university while playing Kill the King of the Hill, so there's that?). Leveling up happens easily and often, Players are abundant, you get to figure out what kind of build you want, all the old shebang. Week 2, though, I haven't even fully plotted out and yet I can already feel that it functionally bears more in resemblance to old school style arcade games. Technically the world is defined as being open world, and in Week 1 there's a lot of wandering around to figure out what the hell needs to be done. Week 2 is a lot more focused— the MCs go here, do this, follow the clues to here, do that, follow the McGuffins to here, do these, etc. etc. Unlike Week 1 where there is no really clearly defined enemy, there is a defined archnemesis in Week 2, though she's not the enemy of the Game or anything. I think that this assists in the sense of progression. In Week 1, progression was more in the vein of "what the hell are we doing?" > "holy crap, we actually know what we're doing now, I think!" > "I guess we have to do this now" > "we can still win" > "We won!" Whereas Week 2 could translate very well even to an NES game. 4 Gangs plus 1 hidden one and the final boss, you can't defeat the Gangs willy nilly because how and in what order you defeat them determines if you'll get the item you need or not, and taking them out brings the MCs to the end of the plot. So the current book is very character driven, I'd say. There's a lot of talking and relating, even during the action scenes. Day 5, the day I got stuck on (99% due to being stricken with the flu), is... well, you'll see. Book 2 is a lot more plot driven. Still making decisions in character and still developing these characters— it was kinda odd to deliberately not fully flesh out the MCs by the end of the book because they still need to grow and no one realistically changes that fast— but the plot's got a lot more focus.
Word count: 95,127 Functionally, the novel's completed. But I need to do an epilogue to actually tie it up. That should be another 3,500 words. When I finish that epilogue (probably tomorrow), then I'll finally be able to truly rest and relax. And I can't believe I've gotten this far for a story that'll probably fail up my ass. But it was fun as hell, and fulfillment of a nine-year-old dream. It's gonna be hell editing it, though. Because I used Write Or Die, most of the story (at least 2/3s of it anyway) is a garbled mess of broken English and possibly other languages. I'll likely spend a week just fixing all those spelling errors. But here's the important thing, the reason why I did it that way in the first place— I have a bad problem where I use the wrong word when writing. No, it's not dyslexia. It's just rushing. I might say "The thunder roar across the sky like an atom bomb". First look, there's nothing wrong. Then you notice "the thunder roar? So the roar's thunder?" And that screws up the whole meaning of the paragraph. Or I might have "he belated went to the store." Adjective plus verb usually should fuse into an adverb, but here it fuses into a monstrous piece of linguistic hell. Sometimes I do it the wrong way: "this is now functionally." When the sentence looks like "he blaeted wnet to the staerore", I'm gonna comb through everything so that it's fixed when it otherwise wouldn't have been. And this isn't just using Spellcheck— there are a lot of times when I may have written the right word— "he bleatedly went to the stare" for example. Then comes the rewrite. Now, once the story's functionally again, I can read through it and fix it from the ground up. I'll likely rewrite 80% of it at this rate— there's only a single chapter or two in the story that actually looks close to what I want the story to look like. Most of it's just functional stuff. Once I tear it down and rebuild it from itself, things'll start fitting together. And the crazy thing is that a lot of it already fits, so I'm happy about that. ALSO: It had to happen. It can only be one week long. And as it happened, the titular 'Black Saturday' rose only makes an appearance at the very end rather than being a major plot point. So "Astral Falls: Black Saturday" doesn't make any sense. It's like the NES Metal Gear. Or Charlotte's Web 2. One of my life's most pathetic dreams was to have a second installment just so I could put a "2" in front of it. This dating back to my nostalgia with Sonic Adventure 2 and Destroy All Humans! 2, oddly enough. And I respect Yahtzee Croshaw enough to realize that it takes some AC/DC-size balls to use a colon when this "series" is entirely unproven and it's possible that it can't go on past the first installment. So as of 24/11/2017, the first book is titled Astral Falls. That's it. Nothing more, nothing less. Just the series title. The titular Astral Falls does play a role in the first draft and it will play a larger role in the second draft. So it makes sense. It could be The Astral Falls, but forget it. The jury's still out on whether I'll do something like Astral Falls (A LitRPG Adventure). But I dunno, it just offends my eyes. Not that I'm against using such a tag. I just prefer Sonic Adventure over Sonic Adventure DX: Director's Cut. The latter sounds overburdened with extraneous bull ass. Then comes: Astral Falls 2: Black Saturday Oh, that sounds so cool. That's why I do things. Though I guess it also sounds a bit overburdened. Imagine if the album were called "Led Zeppelin II: Whole Lotta Love". Not nearly the same straightforward punch to it.
Forgot to update this on Saturday. Word count: 96,513. It's done. I overestimated how many words I'd need for the epilogue, though it'll likely double to around 3,000 words during the editing/rewriting process. The arduous rewriting process has technically already started. Way back when I had the flu, I dedicated a little bit of time to figure out what needed to be changed, added, removed, replaced and whatnot. But then I stopped being a human being for a while and lost my sapience, so I didn't do as much as I wanted. Nevertheless, there's still quite a bit to add to the story. Most of the time, when you edit, you reduce your total wordcount by up to 1/3. The opposite might happen here because so much has to be added. I really don't want to still be explaining how things work in Book 2, for example— maybe new things that come up or going in depth on things that couldn't be fully explained in the first book, yes, but it's the fundamental stuff that I want to get out of the way. If a game is still teaching you how to play the game— like, say, how to jump— when you're on the second to last level, then it's not a well-refined game.
IT'S ANOTHER DAY, MOTHER F**KER. It's actually a bit of a character moment in Book 3 with another character, that he grew up on pen-and-paper and tabletop RPGs, and then MUDs, and then old-school RPG games. Free-form action didn't come until much later in his life, and by that point, he had already pretty much either stopped playing or stopped discovering games. So when the 2030s came around and VRMMOs became common, he was dissatisfied by the lack of old-school RPGs, but it was just a bit hard to really implement such a thing. But then he eventually had his wish come true with an RPG that was turn-based and traditional. "But how can you possibly have such a thing in a fully immersive VR game where you control everything?" Simple: the game registers specific attacks! Like, let's say you have the option of a basic attack, heavy attack, special attack, and defense. You can slash, cast a fireball, or cast flames on your sword. But you're being a smartarse that day and decide to try to create a Pillar of Fire attack by raising flames. That's a much higher level ability that you don't have. So if you try manually creating such a thing, the game literally registers it as "Cast Fireball". Doesn't matter if you manage to create a devastating-looking pillar of fire that becomes a pyrotornado and just lays waste to everything— it's registered as "Cast Fireball" and that's the damage it's gonna inflict. Be happy it does damage at all! The funny plot thing being that he's grown used to that sort of gameplay and yet he's been thrust into this world on short notice without having time to adapt. I might use that sort of mechanic in a future story.
I’ll toss my hat in the ring to help with editing and polishing, too. Sometimes it’s hard to see the forest for the trees, especially when you’re standing in that proverbial forest. Toss me a PM if you’re interested, yeah?
Sure, but first I need to actually clean this up. The spelling errors are unreal (by design!), so it might take me a few days.
Until the end of 2017 I’m throwing in free copy editing (a $50+ value) with the purchase of any other service. It’s sort of an introductory special, as it were.
Funnily enough, I've been doing very light editing ever since I finished about a month ago just to give myself a little time to relax before the heavy editing starts. I might need to take that up! Another funny thing: I've changed the female main character's name. Something (i.e. a new story idea) came up and I decided to use the name 'Enekai' there. This might be another big reason why I haven't done much editing for Astral Falls— just imagining how this new story will go. It's not LitRPG by a long shot, but it's definitely inspired by several stories I've read in the genre. Among many others. With that in mind, there does also need to be a bit of rewriting. Actually scratch that— I've got to rewrite a good chunk of the whole novel, so a February release date sounds about right. Luckily, I've figured out how the second book would go. HOWEVER, I decided that I'd pin my choice on which book to write on how well Astral Falls performs. If it makes more than $2,000 in its first month, I'll do the second book. If it makes less than that (a vague area below $2,000 will be the cut-off), I'll do the new story. Chances are high that I'll be working on a new IP next year because of this self-deal, but I'll eventually come back around to Astral Falls 2 just because I've been dying to write this story for the sunny side of a decade. With that said, you can probably imagine why I don't get much done when I'm not high on prose— I can get very motivated, but then that motivation wanes and I think of a new story/return to an old one and focus my attention there. Repeat. This particular story is very new by every metric, but aspects of it have been around for a while in my little world. Actually, let's stop beating around the bush: it started as Dragon Ball Z fanfiction and then spiraled out of control from there. I have an extra plan where I try my hand at a shorter LitRPG story, one that's around 50k words (I've proven I can do that in four days), using modified mechanics I created for Astral Falls but in a new setting and being a bit crunchier. This I might do in January just to lube it up. I'd have a better shot at making $2,000/mo if the story wasn't my very first because there was already an established reader base. It would also help me tighten up the gameplay mechanics for the next few books. I can see how they work in different settings, how other personalities might adapt to them, and how they affect the larger world. I don't wish to brag, but I think it sounds awesome too. And I know why it sounds awesome— it's exactly the kind of thing I always wanted to see in a video game. The kind of thing that would make someone dream "I wish that were real!" and then grow up and actually make it real. A lot of LitRPG I've read goes the other way, instead replicating (and enhancing) already-existing mechanics that the writers loved seeing in video games. When I was a kid, I used to fantasize about a lot of non-existent video games. One of my favorites was a very-wide open-world war game of incredible-though-variable realism where you could even construct battlefields and set down items and choose between leading units or fighting alongside them (in real time, without having to restart a match to switch the mode), sort of like Sim City meets Arma 3 meets Command and Conquer: Generals meets Call of Duty. The only problem was that, once I came up with these fantasies and hyped myself up over them, obviously nothing in real life would come close. I think I may have actually inadvertently killed my interest in military shooters and RTSes for many years precisely because of that. Similar situation is the reason why that DBZ fanfiction became an OC story. Maybe I'm just damaged as a person (which is certainly true), but I wonder if I'd kickstart a whole bunch of other people's fantasies about future gaming possibilities.
Current 2018 predictions: This will be seen as a YA LitRPG story even if that wasn't my intention. I bet it averages between 3.5 and 4.0 in reviews. The publication date will likely be sometime around Valentine's Day. Depending on circumstances, I can see it peaking at either #1,200 if I put in a little effort to network with others up to possibly >#100 if I can get a BookBub et al. I can see it hanging around these heights for a short while (i.e. roughly a week) before rapidly falling. The tail might be longer, however, if I write and publish the side-story in time. Neither will be posted to Royal Road, though Astral Falls 2 very likely will be. In an optimum scenario, the side-story, Nightmare Online, will come first and be published by ~January 25th. Then comes Astral Falls by ~Valentine's Day. Depending on how well it sells, I'll either start on the new story or Astral Falls 2 in March. Depending on how well the side-story sells, I might do a follow-up to it, just so I can have the excuse to use the name 'The Clash at Demonhead' in the title of a story of mine. Astral Falls 2 would be done by Walpurgisnacht in a perfect world but it'd likely take until May 31st. By that time, I might be doing something in the realm of romance again. If sales aren't up to snuff, I'll be doing the new story during this time. But will I really? I don't even have a name for it yet; just a concept. Hard times would spur action. As for what happens during and after the summer: can't say if I don't know. It all depends on how well Astral Falls and Nightmare Online do. If it all goes well, 2018 could be a great year filled to the brim with stories. Astral Falls at least proved to me that I can write 50,000 words in less than a week if I put my mind to it (even if those words are sloppy), so if I really cranked it up, I could be putting out a novel every two weeks. The only problem being that these would be pretty uninteresting novels if I didn't have enough time to really work on them and were instead setting down a plot stencil and filling in the words. You know, prolefeed and all that. These would also not be the novels that I have the most personal investment in— they'd actually be the sell-out stuff, books made purely for monetary gain with only bits of creativity, whereas the books like Astral Falls and 58th State would be much more lovingly crafted. I dunno, that's what's what F. Scott Fitzgerald did— wrote for money so he could pay the bills in order to write what he wanted. I figured I'd follow that path. It was by staggering coincidence that both of those aforementioned stories (alongside a few others) were already LitRPG or GameLit.
All that shit didn't happen for a variety of reasons. That said, I've decided to post a few short bits from Astral Falls. They'll be coming soon. Like, later today or so.
And here it is! 1,244 words of pure Astral Falls. ___________________ DAY ONE Mir woke up on the corner of First and Amistad. Pedestrians ignored her. When she stood, alertness filled her muscles. A tingling chill sweetened the salty air. Cerulean light shone and fell on her, bouncing off the buildings’ aquamarine and cyan glasswork. That brought panic upon her heart. “What the hell?” Her hands fumbled in her pockets, and then she pat herself down. Her breathing became heavier. “What the hell!” It hurt to talk— at least, with a cheek still numb from laying on bare concrete. Hair frizzed and vision thick from the morning mental haze and still without her phone, she swallowed her reservations and pat a passerby on the shoulder. And she knew immediately she had tapped metal. The man walked on. She saw the back of his sepia fedora and similarly colored suit, and her ears picked up his distinct tapping footsteps over the rest— tap, tap, tap, tap! He looked normal. That fine shape of his bore no suspicions. Yet that was not flesh she felt. Even if only for a second, her fingers felt his body beneath the clothes and warned her mind that something was different. Her grimace lifted as she let loose several little gasping chuckles. I’m high. I’m having a trip. She looked to the distance and gawked as the skyscraper peaks seemed to erupt past the edge of space. Then came the drones. Long lines of glitter in the sun, sparkling as they entered the white-blue shine. They moved on with only a faded hum, which she deduced would have been louder if not for the ground-level noise. Except only the tires’ motion across the pavement made any noise. That and the occasional conversation. Did I… Did I get drunk last night? Where the hell am I? She didn’t drunk— she hated the taste of alcohol. Someone spiked my drink. Once the thought occurred to her, she felt around her crotch and stepped into the shadows to check herself to see if she had been sexually assaulted, but found no signs anywhere on her body. She felt no soreness, no pain, no sloppy attempt at cleaning her body— and as her lucidity came to her, so did the lack of any hangover. No, I have to be on some sort of crazy peyote trip. I did not go to sleep anywhere near downtown. She trembled as she felt a buzz in her right temple. An unclear string of characters filled her eyes. Focus grew. Those characters, unhelpfully colored neon white-blue, were words. Mod's Challenge: December 1st. ‘Survive to Midnight.’ Failure State: Die Sub-mission: 'Get to Dursley Park, Elon City. You have 60 minutes.' Failure State: N/A Amen, Have Fun ~Sevedy Mickette Oh wonderful, it's spam. Wait. Spam from where? This message is in my eye. Where's it coming from? How is it there? She looked up and saw that it followed her vision. And she saw people stood by and felt the strangest vibe from them. A vibe she decided was her own nerves. She heard a roar. A cute little roar. She turned around to find the source and saw a wolverine in the street. As she checked both ways of the lane, she instinctively went “Aww, it's gonna get run over!” Yet as much as she wanted to help it, the reality of her situation froze her legs and she still didn't want to draw attention to herself. Then she forced herself to step towards it. Then came the attack. It lunged at her. At her neck. The thick pain felt as if she’d just taken a knife to the throat. She backed up, grabbing her throat, and fell to her knees. When she checked her hands, it was not the blood that alarmed her— there, at the top of her vision, was a rectangle with a white outline and two-thirds filled with yellow. What happened?! What-what is that? The wolverine kept jumping at her, and she tried swatting it away. She screamed. Her legs too over and put her in a full panicked sprint. ‘What's going on? Why is this happening?’ She pushed away passerbys and broke off into an alley. She turned her head to look back. Horror filled her heart when she saw more wolverines running beside the first. All were covered in unnatural jagged insignias and tattoos, and they all had black eyes with red pupils, though she couldn’t spare a second to make sure her eyes weren’t filling in false blanks. When she faced forward again, more words filled her eyes. The words “Make it stop” fell from her lips, whittled by terror. Killer Wolverines. Level 3. Feral little gits. They will mess any starter up, but they're not much good for one who's sufficiently advanced. She ran her fingers across her chest and throat, wiping blood across herself. She kept running. One appeared in front of her. She skid to a stop, unsure if it had materialized or jumped out from cover. Oversized black and indigo fangs jutted straight up from its jaw— she was sure wolverines had nothing of the sort. What’s more, the fangs moved like antennae, a slow and deliberate left-to-right-to-left motion. All of it too uncanny for her. And it stomped her way. She threw her hand out, but her swing missed. She had luck, for it missed as well. She stumbled forward and ran on again. ‘It's hopeless.' The thought of her end slowly came over her until she began to accept it, and she could scarcely push herself any further. She rushed to a new area, begging for help. A university's insignia adorned every nearby house, while Greek symbols were given physical blocks in yards. People watched, and no one came out to help her fight off the wolverines. “I need help! Stop looking and help!” A psychological tip flashed across her mind— she pointed to a woman to help her. Yet the woman did not move. Another man shrugged. “Aggh!” She fell forward as her brain registered three cold-feeling slashes to her back. The bar in her eye drained, leaving only a third of it colored red. ‘I have to make it somewhere else!’ flashed through her mind, though the words never formed. She ran blindly. In an alley, she climbed over a fence and kept on towards a half-pipe sewer. Every so often, she zigzagged and ran from one spot to another and back again. None of these tactics worked— the wolverines matched them all, their ravenous lust for her life powering them on. She vaulted over another fence. The entire time through, another bar far to the left of the red one gradually began to deplete, itself changing colors. More words in front of her eyes tripped her. x1 Sprint! Keep practicing, and you'll run like the wind Beginner Level 1 What on Earth is happening? Where did that come from? Why am I here? She rushed down the street, passing back to First. It was there she saw a red-haired young man who also ran from similarly marked creatures. She waved him down. He stopped and said, “You’re a Player too?” “I don’t know! I don’t know what’s happening!” He turned back and then saw the creatures chasing her. “They’re not stopping. Okay look, we gotta do something to get this over with. They’re only after us. You with me?” He held out his hand, and she hesitated. Then she grabbed it. YOU HAVE SYNCED!
This is a tiny bit later into the book. ________________ Despite everything that had just happened, Mir couldn't stop walking away. Every fiber of her being desired to be alone. She needed at least ten hours alone. She stopped, only because Ken grabbed her shoulder and turned her around. "Look, I know this isn't making any sense, but we've gotta stick together for right now. Just until we can figure out what's going on. Then you can go." Mir wanted to scream. So did Ken. He had a bad feeling about this new 'Synced' person, a sense that she was going to be precisely what he didn't need that day. Mir mumbled, "Okay." Then she quarter-heartedly moved her arm as to tell Ken to lead the way. He looked from street to alley and twisted a shock of hair when he felt unfamiliarity win over his mind. He bit his lip and crossed his arms. "Where the hell are we?" He turned to her, exasperated. She stared at him for a moment and then looked away. Ken threw down his arms. Then he shook his finger and turned back to her. "What did the message say? Something about going to Dursley Park?" Mir rushed to her pockets but there was nothing there, and she remembered that she had to pull up a HUD. When she pulled it up, she saw that there was a map app available. Apps? She thought that it looked like they have tons of apps to choose from, but she was confused by their prices. The map app is free. But one of the apps below it, which looks like a heart and says 'HP' on the cover, costs ₿500. 'What on Earth is ₿? Bitcoin? Okay, fair enough, but why would that be this game's currency?' She jumped when she heard, "The mission just says to be at the park in an hour." Kennedy didn't see her jump. When he turned to her, he said, "We've got 25 minutes left." Then he looked back and forth. "So where's Dursley Park? Do you see it on your map?" Mir couldn't believe how passé the man was being. They're being attacked, can't remember anything, and are suddenly beholden to video game logic, and he is actually following the orders? 'Forget him.' She said sorry and goodbye and then tossed off. The man sighed and shouted, "You're just leaving? That's it? Are you for real?" She ignored him. 'He'll talk about you,' said that negative voice in the back of her mind. It always spoke in her voice, and it wasn't really speaking. She just knew what it was saying. She briskly walked with her hands in her pockets, crossing the street and hearing cars blare their horns. She then looked at them and realized that she hadn't even looked as to where she was going, nor was she caring about her surroundings. Her HP still looked like it was down by three-fifths, and she wanted to do something about all these cuts and the bite wound. She fooled with the torn skin, trying to tear a dangling piece off even though it hurt. That's how she knew this couldn't be video game— this really hurt. If she hadn't already, she felt she should've soiled herself when her whole vision went red at once, and giant red numbers filled up her sight only to shrink and hide in the upper right corner. YOU HAVE 60:00:00 TO RETURN TO YOUR SYNC PARTNER She grabbed her chest and fell to sit. Of everything that had happened, this was the thing that scared her most, perhaps because everything else had lubed up her senses for this overload of the mind. Then she heard approaching footsteps. Rapid, thundering, and getting closer. Horror filled her heart. What if it's another monster? She ran. Then she heard skidding, and the red-haired man from before appeared before her. Ken skid to cut her off. As he had, the red numbers vanished.
To give you an example of how messed up all the words were, I pretty much had to rewrite all of that just to make it legible. That rewrite happened in December or January, IIRC. And then I had to rewrite parts of it again just before posting it here yesterday. That's what happens when you write 50,000 words in 4 days! And note, this story's 100,000+ words long (after the rewrites). English professors declared a state of emergency upon seeing the piss-soaked wartorn pandemonium of spelling errors scattered about the later chapters. But if you fix them, the story's still functional, so that's wonderful. There are so many spelling errors, I may have created ten thousand new words by accident. I thought I could make life easier on myself by doing a find > replace of some basic errors, and a few of them (like name misspellings, awkward capitalization errors, etc.) had literally hundreds of pingbacks. But there were dozens of other errors for the same words that I've never seen before. I don't even want to think about how many ways I misspelled "Mackenzie". Some of them were so nuclear-altered that I didn't recognize what it was I had written until I used context clues, realized I couldn't fathom the context clues either, and eventually said 'Effe it, here's my guess', plugged in the name, and realized it all made sense. Hence why I decided to drop the story for a while, because f**k me. You know, I think I might just take this to RoyalRoad because that would definitely force me to rewrite it much more professionally. Plus, if I post 1,000 words a day (or every other day), I could keep it going for several months.
Alrighty, it's going up on RoyalRoad as we speak! Just have to wait for it to be accepted. So what are my feelings on this story now?
Just so I can also have the link here, here it is on RoyalRoad. Right now, I've only put the first 1,200 words up. I figured a weekly or biweekly release would be fine.
So I'm reading this over again and here's more of my thoughts: Oh my god, the angst. It's beautiful. It's perfect. This might very well be the cringiest, most 2000s-emo friendly litRPG ever written. I love it. In fact, I'll even get a playlist going full of 2000s nü metal post-grunge emo AMV-ready buttrock to complete the experience. Papa Roach - Last Resort Linkin Park - Crawling SR-71 - Goodbye Sins of a Divine Mother - Broken Linkin Park - In The End Jack Off Jill - Strawberry Gashes 3 Doors Down - Kryptonite Three Days Grace - I Hate Everything About You The World Ends With You - Transformation Hoobastank - Crawling in the Dark Breaking Benjamin - Blow Me Away Evanescence - Bring Me To Life Linkin Park - Numb Crush 40 - I Am All Of Me Eminem - Till I Collapse Red - Already Over Anna Blue - So Alone OW. I'm bleeding. Because the edge, it cuts quarks!
