More Concrete Plans on What's Next

Okay, I'm feeling a lot better today and I have some more news specifically about the story I've been mulling over. As I said in the last one, I'm putting a wrap on Write What You Know. Maybe in the future I will take what I did and then make things go up to the third girl and release it as one big book, but for now, I'm more interested in taking a lot of the advice that was given to me by my more experienced peers and running with it. What I wanted to do is make a story in a more marketable genre and had been vague up till now but I don't see the point now that I've put about three thousand words into coming up with lore and basic concept stuff for the potential project. I really like how it's coming along, so I'm going to remove the curtain and say that I'm interested in doing a cultivation/xianxia story.

I've said before that Cradle has become an obsession of mine as of late and I'm halfway through book 10 now and it's at the part where I can tell this is far and away one of my favorite stories of all time. I've also been playing Amazing Cultivation Simulator for research purposes, and that's also pretty fun. Admittedly I have not read any actual xianxia stories outside of Cradle, but as soon as I finish Cradle that's a big goal for me. Fortunately, my editor is a gigantic fan of the genre and has wasted far, far more time that he's proud to admit reading this kind of shit so he's been a massive help so far. I've always been a big fan of martial arts shit and Eastern mythology anyway, so this is a pretty good fit.

I hope you'll give whatever I come up with a chance even if it's not the Western fantasy I've done until now. It will have the same comedic tone as all of my other works, the same emphasis on fun characters and deep relationships, just set in not-China this time around. The cultivation stuff should also be pretty simplified and easy to understand, and I've already come up with a pretty cool power system that I think you guys will like.

Another reason for my interest in doing this is that I did some research into how damn easy the genre is to write for and I believe some of the tried-and-true formulaic format would go well for me and give me a lot of tools to play around with in my usual style. It's very much a dopamine farm of a genre. Train, fight strong opponent, get reward, get girl, repeat. That's basically shounen manga, which I was raised by. Easy. Also, like I said before, I wanted to plan out the entirety of the next story so that I'm working towards a definitive ending. This would give me a good method for planning out a 'soft' ending, as I can end the story after the first big tier up and after the protagonist completes his initial goal. Then we would see how the sales are and if it's worth continuing on to the next tier in a sequel series, while still giving me the satisfaction of knowing I 'completed' something, even if it ends on like the first of nine ascensions. Maybe 3 to 4 books worth of content, unsure, harem limited to three girls probably.

Also, I know I talked about it some, but I'm not going to go the webnovel route. That was more of me being desperate and thinking overly hard about things. Neither of the authors I talked to told me not to, but I figure if I follow all of their other advice, it will just be better in the long run to do it straight to Amazon like I've been doing. No use complicating my life by having to deal with any of that crap again.

I'm not ready to talk about the plot of the actual story yet, I have a rough image of the early stuff and the main character in mind but I'm still I'm workshopping a lot of things with my editor and I'm focused on creating the power system, the cultivation system, and then moving on to some of the world and lore right now. When I finish that up I'll refine things and get them to a place where I can start showing them off. Because of my inspiration, the lore stuff is going by pretty fast. I will probably start posting some basic documents soon to show off what I'm working on. No idea on a rough estimate of when I will actually start sitting down to write the story, but like I said, I'm going to do all of the outlines at once for the entire thing. We'll see how that goes.

I'll eventually need help getting designs for the characters and figuring out a cover artist, but that's way later. Hopefully by doing it all at once we'll have enough time to get the resources for that. Overall, I'm really looking forward to this project. I think it will be nice to work on something with a definitive ending in mind and the whole thing planned in advance and I'm looking forward to putting to use all of the things I learned from my peers. I'm optimistic, and I hope you'll join me for this next adventure.