Upcoming Timeline

After running the poll, I’ve come to a decision on what I’m going to be working on moving forward. The Bond of G’yel and Man has gotten more interest than I anticipated, and even though the story is a jumbled mess which I will rewrite one day, I’m going to finish it while planning the Mark of Amulii novella. There are only about 5-6 chapters remaining, so I may as well get that out of the way before starting a new project.

That being said, I’ve already begun the skeleton of the upcoming visual novel. Forge will be working on getting me the sprites, backgrounds, assets, and scene images as I finish formatting the story, gathering background music/sound effects, and laying out the scripts. This is quite a bit of work as I not only need to finish, edit, revise the script in VN format, but I’ll need to put every line of narration/dialogue in code with sound effects, music, transitions, etc… It’s not difficult, just a lot of busy work and thousands of lines.

Needless to say, it’s a big undertaking for two people, and this first visual novel will be broken into two or three parts, depending on how long it takes. It’s also not going to be a huge story, just a bit of a teaser of a possible much larger, multipath VN in the future. All of that depends on the interest and feedback we receive, so if you want all want to see more of this stuff, I’m going to be looking for feedback.

Forge and I will be using his Neutron-tiered patrons as ‘beta testers’ as I release each chapter. So if you want to get in on that, you will need to sign up for his Patreon. HOWEVER, if we get enough interest that we do more of these, we will create a dual Patreon account solely for the visual novels. People who sign up to support this Patreon will be given early access to releases. Because visual novels take a lot of time and effort to make, we’ll be releasing acts one at a time a month in advance on Patreon before they go live to the public.

This is by no means set in stone. Much of this will depend on feedback and interest in future projects. We may start to turn different stories into visual novels as well, which brings me to The Mark of Amulii novella…

I will be writing this in narrative format, and if there is enough interest, we could perhaps turn this into a VN as well. Time to put my years of object-oriented programming and novel writing to the ultimate use!

Timeline for the months ahead in order of importance:

• Finish The Bond of G’yel and Man (October)
• Plan out The Mark of Amulii novella (October/November)
• Finish the last revision of The Varcross Key/Send it to editing. (December-January)
• Visual Novel Beta release (December-January)
• Release of individual chapters of Novella (January-March)
• Publication of The Varcross Key (March-April perhaps earlier depending on editing)
• Begin work on Trials of Terr’volk (the second book of The Mark of Amulii) – TBD next year. This will depend on how well the visual novels take off. If that makes more money than regular books, I will shift most of my focus to doing those releases.

As always, this timeline is subject to change depending on what I deem more important/has the most anticipation behind it. I may also open up a Telegram chat in the future as well for further interaction and requests. This is very tentative because I won’t really have time to moderate or manage a chat, and may keep all interaction to polls on my website.

The big fat IF:

If by chance the visual novels and my regular novels take off in such a way that I’m able to make the same or more than my current salary as a software developer, I can terminate my contract and start doing this full time. Writing full-time means working on visual novels, short stories AND books instead of having to divvy my time between my full-time job and my writing career. So, we’ll see what happens in the future. I’ll give this my best shot, but it’s not going to happen overnight.

The Partnership:

Many of you have probably deduced by now that the artist Forge and I have been collaborating for months, testing the waters of a potential business relationship. I’m happy to say that we work very well together, and we’re both eager to see what wonders we can create by joining forces. We will both be putting our talents and skills to the test, and I’m sure this is going to be exciting for most of you as well.

This isn’t going to happen overnight, though. We’re both busy with our jobs while also working together in our spare time. We’re not able to drop everything to start pumping out new stuff right away, but we’re both pretty excited about the future.