Happy New Year, Everyone!

First of all, I wish you all the best in the year to come. May it bring good fortune in each and every single one of your endeavors and relief in every struggle that you face. I hope you’ll become as happy as you ever wished.

Second? Love you all, guys.

I’ve made no secret of how many things went wrong through 2023, a year that I optimistically greeted with a post titled “2023 Is Here, and 2022 Is Thankfully Over,” in which I detailed my plans and hopes.

Optimistically.

Yes, it bears repeating.

Out of all the things I set out to do this past year, I fell short of many. Wake-up Call, All Right! Fine! I Will Take You! and Wordsworth all have survived to see 2024, and I had to give up on editing Zaimokuza Gaiden into an original novel until I got both my head and schedule in better shape.

So, what did I accomplish?

To the surprise of my overly critical self, plenty of things. I finished Ginosko, my first fully original work of that magnitude, and I did it in a way that makes me proud. I still feel the need to revise it thoroughly before publishing it or trying to bring it to an editor, but… Well, there’s another thing I finally managed to get through my thick skull this year:

What makes a story good is not its lack of faults, but its virtues.

And Ginosko had plenty of things that went right. The setting, while still being traditionally cyberpunk, had a few nuggets of worldbuilding that resonate with me in a way almost like a fairytale, the characters had soul, and the story had a point.

And I can see many of the same things in my other stories.

So, yes, Wake-up Call has dragged on for too long, given how I spiraled when I hit Colin’s near-death experience right as I was told that my father wouldn’t make it (something that ended up not happening, much like Colin finally recovered). All Right! Fine! I Will Take You! meandered when I dithered on finally pulling the trigger on an arc that has overstayed its welcome with an overly bleak tone, and Wordsworth’s latest chapters were too rushed to properly capture the spark that shone when Wordsworth sat with her father in an empty room that stank of stale beer and spoke of the setting sun shining through a waterfall.

There are many words that I would add and many more I should cut if I ever were to edit these and my other stories.

But I also wrote about an elf getting over grief in the most unhealthy way possible; I also had Orczuma develop his hatred of feelingsinto something I can smile at; I got as raunchy as I could ever possibly be (until I go even further beyond) with magical monstergirls of the switchblade futa variety, and I added a few more members to the gallery of people living inside my head after the Valentine’s and April Fool’s specials had me build a few more lives for you all to bear witness to.

So, yes, I’ve done… quite a bit more than I thought I did at my lowest points. Which makes sense, because sleep deprivation is known to mess up your perspective in ways that I really should take into account whenever I pull yet another all-nighter at an age at which I’m told they shouldn’t be a thing.

Wanna know what I’m most proud of out of all of it?

That you’re still all here.

That I keep miraculously managing to write things you consider worth reading. That I brighten even a little bit your days. That I can tell you about people you care about and worlds you want to learn of.

That I am… well, a writer.

And that I’ve got you as my readers.

I really don’t know how to repay you.

Doesn’t mean I won’t try, though.

Because, now that things seem to have more or less settled down in the chaos that is my life, now that most of my issues are self-inflicted rather than external, I think it’s time to make some changes around here.

The first is that I’m going to strive for more transparency. There’s a WIP thread in the Discord that I set up so I wouldn’t clutter this page with useless updates, but that’s also not the best way to keep myself accountable. I’ll be posting a poll this month to ask you all about some things, and one of them will be precisely how you’d prefer I go about this.

For starters, though, I’m going to include in every title from now on both the wordcount and the appropriate NSFW tags. You all deserve to know at a glance what I accomplished in a given week, and the number of chapters posted is… kind of misgiving due to my propensity for wildly varying chapter lengths.

The other is that… well, both Wake-up Call and All Right! Fine! I Will Take You! are going to end soon. WuC is extremely likely to end before the month’s over, and I think that, at the rate things are going, the worst-case scenario would be for ARFIWTY to end in March. The freed weekly spots will be taken up by Wordsworth, but that, as well, has just a last arc remaining, and I can’t see it lasting for more than six chapters, no matter how over the top I go with what should be an action-packed finale.

What comes after that?

An original.

To start with, what began as an Easter Seasonal Special novella about a foxboy gentleman thief going against Not!Mirko (seriously, the bunnygirl superheroine is not Mirko—she’s too much of a nerd) will become the next centerpiece as soon as the main fics get cleared out. I will run a poll to ask you about the follow-up but, given what was already talked about, I expect The Demon Lord’s Secretary is Terrifying to be the next project.

The other difference is that I’ll get a backlog.

As soon as WuC, ARFIWTY, and WW are done, every new project other than commissions will have at least one chapter in reserve so that I can guarantee you’ll get your updates on time rather than having you wait until the random hour (or even day) when I finally manage to finish an update. This will, hopefully, allow the chapters to simmer for a bit in the back of my head so that they can be properly matured and tweaked before I post them.

Speaking of commissions? Yeah, I’ve got… quite a bit of accumulated words for plenty of the ongoing projects. Of Sisters and Shadows in particular will get quite a string of weekly updates starting as soon as I get a couple of things out of the way, Yui’s Lily Garden will have a finale that I hope will be on par with that of the main fic, Periodical Cicadas will keep me being paranoid about how many of you have guessed the actual mystery, and the thing that I wanted to unveil on Halloween will keep me browsing historical fencing manuals—oops. Spoilers, I guess.

Overall, I want you all to be more aware of what I’m actually doing and be more satisfied with it. I want to give you at least a bit of the peace of mind and happiness that you give me while you keep me in the business of writing, and I want you to feel good about it.

Which I guess means that I want you to have a great year, and for me to be a part of what will make it better than the last.

I’m kinda selfish like that.