The Series No-one Asked For (But Has To Happen)

So I've been frustrated lately for reasons I won't retread (but have been in the recent Patreon posts). When I'm frustrated, I like to write and I often work on new stuff, because my existing series are big, complex, and require a lot of effort and thought that can be difficult to process.

In short, I still like to write for fun. One of my objectives as an author is to ensure I still enjoy writing, as lots of people who wrote as a hobby often find themselves hating writing when they make it a job and it's easy for that to happen in a genre as bloated by purely commercial cruft as this one.

The series I'm writing is much lighter than my usual stuff. Or at least, light by my standards. There's no timey wimey nonsense, complicated mysteries, figures and stats to track, criss-crossing character and plot arcs etc.

It's an urban fantasy action-adventure harem story with slice-of-life-ish elements, but with the usual twists I enjoy. It takes place in an alternate universe where the Masquerade broke in WW1, resulting in dragons, vampires etc changed the world and history over the past year and merged with humanity. So wolfgirls and dragons run companies and such alongside humans, but there's also a whole lot of complicated politics and racial nonsense, because I'm me and don't handwave this shit. Expect worldbuilding behind-the-scenes.

The thrust of the story is that the MC is a lowlife enforcer in a semi-lawless magical city on the US west coast who gets caught up with a wolfgirl mafia that is trying to reclaim their lost glory. I'm basically having fun, so there are plenty of long, slow dialogue-heavy character scenes.

The slice of life elements are what you can expect from me: long, meandering character and dialogue-driven scenes that are still orbiting the plot, rather than the directionless stuff that some people prefer. I find actual slice of life boring to write. This story should still feel like something I wrote: it's third person; has lots of dialogue; plenty of worldbuilding and a somewhat unique kitchen-sink urban fantasy setting; and the relationships move at my usual pace, such that you could probably read two normal harem books that advertise themselves as slow burn before the MC finally gets with someone.

I'll start posting this on Patreon tomorrow, with a bulk update at first, and then a chapter every day or two for a while.

Will this affect Spellblade?

I don't think so. This story is super simple for me to write. I can churn it out pretty fast, and plan to basically work on it for the rest of May, then shift back to Spellblade so that I can get it out in August/Sep as originally planned.

I do expect a fair bit of negativity about the fact I've worked on this series at all, however. I probably wouldn't have touched it if Neural Wraith hadn't tanked so hard lately and there hadn't been a fairly obvious feeling of people less willing to recommend my series because I'm updating slower at a time when releases are faster than ever for certain authors.

Something I've been trying to do for the past year is come up with an idea for a long-term but light series. Litrpg and progfantasy often run on longer serials and people love them. It's kind of weird that harem has this whole "short series" thing, but I suspect it's a kneejerk reaction to the ghostwriter farms, but the quality doesn't really improve. It just allows the shallowness it to be better hidden.

But in any case, I wanted to make a simple series that I could just write between my heavier series. Something I could churn out 100k words in under a month, then switch gears to something where doing that takes a while and much more effort. It's just taken me a while to find a series that I enjoy doing that for, as I'm very picky about my ideas and what I write.

So that's what this series might be. Initially something fun, to potentially a light series that I'll use to fill out publishing gaps between my "mainline" series. The idea is there'll be a backlog on Patreon on top of the books to prevent it from causing issues with my other series in the long run. It will, instead, make it easier to focus on my bigger books.

Access

For now, this will go up at the $5 tier. I dunno when this might get published, as I basically wrote it over the past couple of weeks and have no covers etc for it. Also, people might hate it.