Weekly Progress Update [15/JAN]

Hey all!!

Remember when I said I was going to do my best to remain under 35k words? Yeah that was an absolute lie, I'm fairly certain we're going to be over 40k by the time I'm finished because I'm currently at 35k words and there are still several scenes that I need to wrap up lol.

What I've already completed:

• The Crown's timeskip training and tutoring lessons (15k including variations)
• R and A's main story scenes, political (4k)
• R and A's romantic scenes (8k - 4k each including variations)
• D's POV & D-related romance content (4k)
• X's POV & X-related romance content (4k)

What is left to complete:

• Interviews of potential court candidates, including a political decision (~1k)
• Court meeting, including political decisions and outcomes (~3k)
• A scene with Kham, dependent on previous choices (~1k)
• A scene with Yekbûn and/or others, dependent on previous choices (~1k)
• A few codex entries (~1k)

I've cut out a bunch of the political/tutoring scenes that I'd written earlier, as it ended up bloating the chapter somewhat. Remember that talk with Master Youtab that I previewed a while ago? Yeah, I'm saving it for a future chapter; it will definitely be used, but it won't feature in CH10 yet.

I wanted CH10 to be more focused on the Crown's development and the building romance, rather than all the political strategizing that already happened in CH9. There's enough subplots going on as it is, so I had to make a choice on which ones are most pressing at the moment.

Don't get me wrong, there's still a good chunk of it present!! Just not as heavily featured as in the previous chapter.

Release Dates and January Schedule

For a release dates, I'm still well on track to send my betas the draft at the end of January/at the start of February. If that succeeds and they have enough time to proofread it, my planned release dates would probably look something like this:

Public release: February 28
Ko-fi early access: February 26
Patreon tier 1 early access: February 24
Patreon tier 2 early access: February 21
Patreon tier 3 early access: February 14

Regardless of possible delays, I feel fairly confident in stating that Patreon early access, regardless of tier, will be in February! Ideally the release dates will be even earlier than this, but I don't wanna stress myself and my betas out lmao

As for the planned bonus content in January, there's a bit of a delay in scheduling. As you noticed, I haven't posted the first character snippet yet since I've been so busy with wrapping up CH10. 

I'll still be putting up a poll for the Character Q&A shortly and post it on Tuesday, but the first character snippet will likely be delayed to Wednesday, and the romantic snippet will likely be posted next Sunday or Monday. I've decided it's better to give CH10 the priority and to get it out as soon as possible, rather than exhausting myself with making sure the bonus content is perfectly on schedule lol.

That was all for this week!

Until next time 💖