So, this is half of a generic update following my last “I’m back” announcement.

Let’s start with the most interesting news to you all, and for those who want the tl;dr. The novel I have been working on over the past year, or at least the initial version, have had several chapters posted of on my Patreon. I have posted the prologue, which consists of four parts, as well as the first chapter.

The name of the novel (tentative) is… Fae of Rancor!

Patreon link!

This is free for everyone, but I will be posting to Patreon’s only for all subsequent chapters. It will be posted for free on this site once the final revised, better version is up for sale.

Do note while the plot will be more or less the same, there will be changes in the revised version. It is expected for there to be more typos, plot holes, or inconsistencies in the free version, so keep that in mind. I am separating it in this way as I want to be able to give back to the readers who otherwise wouldn’t be able to read the book, whilst also providing an incentive to support the book.

(The fact I would probably be forced to set it to non exclusive in Amazon and only get a 40% share instead of a 70% share if they were exactly the same books is also a significant reason.)

I will now break this post into two sections, the first part about the book, including current progress, plans, and origins.

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Fae of Rancor (Tentative)

The initial tentative title for the book was actually Immortal Templar, but as the work has progressed, I have been trying to think of a better name. The title is fine in itself, but I just feel it is a bit bland – maybe because I have been using and looking at it over the past year.

The inspiration for this has been a bit of everything. I have taken my life experiences, the literary sub genres that I have read, the games I have played, the styles I have enjoyed, and meshed it together into a world that is my own style of novel. There are western superheroes and mages, eastern cultivators, creatures of legend, gods and more. There is references to tropes that have been used until they are nothing but rags, and side characters embodying cliche.

The overall story is one designed to be more light hearted in a day to day nature, but with serious sub plots and flawed characters. This is planned to be a quadrilogy, but there are plots already half planned for works set in the same universe, but well after the events of this book which are the beginning of everything.

Talk is all well and truly fine, but this is a difficult target to hit, and I did a massive amount of over planning in the book. The final revision should be much more refined, with more vivid landscapes and conflicts, and be much more consistent. It is an inevitable part as ideas and plots have shifted the more I have written.

The current progress for this book is 87,728 words, with 30 chapters written and I am nearing the end. I thought I hadn’t done much since the last post, but it is surprisingly 20,000 words. (In fairness, that still isn’t near enough considering its been 3 months).

The releases on Patreon will either be 2 chapters/week (Wednesday + Saturday), or 1 chapter/week (Wednesday). I have yet to decide as it depends on how long I think the book will take me to finish. Whilst I don’t want to drip feed chapters at a pace too slow, I also don’t want to finish publishing all the chapters then have everyone wait 2 months for the final release.

I had thought to finish this over my Christmas break, I mean, I had two weeks to do so. Even with procrastination, that should have been plenty of time to get a lot of work done… Well, there are two reasons, which I will move onto the next section for

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Personal Update

D went back to school!!

Well, D went back to university.

This is the main reason why things have taken so long. I have not done any writing over the past month, simply because I haven’t had time. There was a great opportunity at work and some incredible advice/recommendation from some colleagues higher up in the corporate ladder than myself, and I jumped on it. I may have jumped a bit far though.

I signed up for a free government funded upskilling course, a Cert IV in OHS, which goes for 6 months, and also applied for my Bachelor of Data Analytics, which will take 3 years. Oh, did I mention I am still working full time? The starving author doesn’t want to become a homeless author after all. My Cert IV started 17th December, and then I was left with an assessment that was simply monstrous in scope. I am proud to announce I grandly passed my first two units with a 24 page assessment and 9 supporting documents.

My next three units for this course start in 2 and a half weeks so fingers crossed they are easier!

My Bachelor started January at some stage and it is very time demanding. Thankfully, I am already familiar with programming enough I can skip a lot of the non assessed exercises or skim through them.

I do have to admit, it is difficult maintaining discipline for all the studies, work, and my personal hobbies, but I believe it will pay off in the end. I should have more leeway once my Cert IV is complete as well.

The second reason why I was delayed was I bought myself a new GPU for Christmas, a Radeon 7900 XT (In Aus, the XT is/was better value for money compared to the XTX, which was also sold out.)

You may be thinking, “How is this a delay? Swap cards and done. Maybe reinstall windows, but how long could that take?”

I can not put enough o’s in wrooooong, very wroooong.

I use Linux on all my personal computers, but I do have an old second hand mini pc workstation running windows for the purposes of running exam software.

Whilst the landscape of linux is different now with updates already pushed into the main distributions, being an early adopter of the new AMD gpus on linux is so, sooooooooooo not recommended.

Without going into too many details, I had to build an Arch system with LLVM 15+ and Mesa 23+ to get it to work properly. This took me 4 days of bashing my head against the desk to finally resolve and have a stable system which would output to multiple monitors.

I am very happy with everything now, and there are only a few caveats to the card (which most would consider minor or inconsequential but its the little things that gripe us!).

One of these days, I will take a bunch of pictures and show my home setup to everyone, but that is for another day.

This is my update for today.

Your truly,

D

P.S. Once I have finished the draft, I am planning on taking a week off work to get as much of the final version done and ready for editing as possible.