Tag / Update

by D. Wolfin

New Novel + Update

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.

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

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.

by D. Wolfin

Then, Now, and Tomorrow

I think this is my seventh attempt at choosing an opening paragraph. It is hard to believe 4 years have passed, during which I have taken a long break. So much has happened over that time period I doubt I could write it all in one post. I will save other information for later posts, and instead focus this one on the aspect of writing.

I truly hope that everyone has been well during these years. We have all had countless ups and downs, whether personal, covid, or other.

Let me start with the ‘Then’ of this post.

TL;DR – I never gave up, but I lost my mojo.

I can’t recall all the explicit details, but back in 2018, I had moved house with my brother so he could have custody share of all his kids. I like the kids, but six of them were compiling my stress levels. I have nothing but respect for my brother who can manage that many all at once.

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by D. Wolfin

The Big Update

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Update: Chap 14 – 17 unedited are available on my patreon for everyone. Just click on the link and follow it there ^.^  No sign up required. That’s the end of this book, all that’s left is a bonus chapter, consistency checks for names etc which I ended up changing half way through, and battle edits pre chap 11.

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So many of you are worried. I am here to tell you, there is no need to!

I originally wanted to post this once I had finished Chronicle of the Eternal Volume 2, but I’ve been busy the past couple of days and haven’t had the chance to finalize the writing. I only have half the final chapter remaining plus the bonus chapter. Here is what has been happening.

As many of you know, before I disappeared, my brother had been living with me and I we were looking for a new house. Well, we got a new house! But this is where everything also started going wrong.

Here in Australia, we have a new type of internet rolling out called the National Broadband Network(NBN). I contacted my isp in regards to changing address, and they informed me that I can’t continue on a landline and need to transfer over to the NBN. I don’t understand why when a phone line is still connected to the house but they were adamant on the fact. I even had to buy a new router as their branded router that was NBN ready is apparently not compatible with the NBN – I raged at them pretty hard over this.

I was also assured that the transfer would be 3 – 5 business days to complete then my internet would be ready. I didn’t have a problem with this as it wasn’t a significant deal. Little did I know that that was a big fat lie.

Ignoring the nitty details, The NBN is installed and run by a single company called NBNCO, who are massively understaffed with technicians and services are extremely poor. Customers can’t even contact them to ask what is going on.

It took over 3 months for me to finally get working internet again! That’s the main crux of the problem, I simply have had no internet.

While I’m sure there are methods around this and I could have done better to find internet elsewhere, it wasn’t the only problem I ran into. I have had no money and have been struggling to look for work in order to pay rent. My bank keeps singing Lunchmoney Lewis to me which, whilst being a funny analogy, is quite serious.

My Microsoft Office subscription also ran out not long after moving house. If any of you don’t know what happens in that scenario, Microsoft Word basically becomes Adobe Reader. You can view files, but you can’t do anything else. I had no money to renew it at the time, and no internet to renew it through!

I’ve had internet for about the past three weeks, and have been working on getting back into the rhythm of writing, but it is a gradual process to find the state of mind you were in previously.

Nowadays, I have been getting stuck into writing more. I do have six kids running around the house Friday evening to Monday morning which can be quite distracting (I am the easiest person to become distracted in the world), but I am getting there.

That’s why, I do apologize for being slow, but you don’t have to worry about me dropping the series or anything like that. No matter the speed, it will still be coming… eventually. Anyway, I’m hoping CotE Vol. 2 will be published between 1 – 2 weeks, after which I will be getting stuck into End Online.

Well that is my status update and rage at the world ^.^ I would like to give a personal thank you to everything who has stuck with me and supported me through Patreon, there was one month I was VERY short on rent and the money accumulated helped me make up the remainder. The remaining unedited chapters of CotE will be published there this evening, as well as being sent to my editors.

D

by D. Wolfin

Short Update and Recommendation

As many of you are probably already aware, I hate filling my blog up with updates and not chapters, even more so than I hate going back over what I have already written. Updates always sound like excuses to me, and there isn’t really anything good about excuses.

Here is the update on what’s been happening now that I’ve finished chapter 13!!
I went through a rough time at the end of last year, which also lead to an extremely bad habit of binge reading. What is recent ironically happened on the same day as I posted the last few chapters of CotE onto my wordpress. I was a nice long sleep after it when I woke up to my brother knocking on my front door, needing a couch to sleep on because his marriage, which had hit the fan long ago, had finally turned into intergalactic war with a progression speed comparable to Gurren Lagann.
For me, I can only write without distractions (such as facebook/youtube videos, reading… mainly reading). I had finally partially broken the habit of binge reading and had started a system of spending the mornings getting all those great novels out of my system and writing in the afternoon/evening. This was starting to work. But now that my brother is staying here (along with his kids 3 or 4 nights a week) I find this free time I now had to write worry free is now full of more distractions.

My brother likes to talk a lot (which is good in helping him through this tough time) and the kids are often very active, so my single track mind finds it extremely difficult to focus on writing with the additionals. An example of this is that from 50% of chapter 13, I have only been able to end up writing an average of 500words/day. The rest of the time I haven’t been able to concentrate. Chapter 14 is planned already, and once I get started on it tomorrow, I will update the top of this post with the status. I hope I can aim for 1000words/day as I want to try push myself, and considering I will turn poor if I don’t write very soon, I really need to drop a few novels and do even less reading.

That is all. I also have a short novel recommendation for anyone who hasn’t read it yet. It is Demon Girl ~ Tale of a Lax Demon ~ (Link to novel updates by clicking on the text). It is truly an ingenious piece of work, albeit being slightly short. It only have 4 volume of approximately 16 chapters each, with a continuation of 89 chapters (It was a redo of the sequal, but I’m not as much of a fan of it because I was reading google translate of the raws and despite understanding it, I found the ingenuity lacking for a short story). The translation of the first story is currently into the fourth volume, so there is a decent amount of reading material.

The ideal part of the above story which truly sets it apart is the unlikely combination of its cuteness, fluffiness, and the occasional texas chainsaw massacre. Well, that is actually a little vague because I don’t want to spoil anyone who hasn’t read it before, but I strongly encourage that you give it a try. P.S The novel is hosted at moonbunnycafe, and they can occasionally have really annoying ads, at least on a tablet anyway.

by D. Wolfin

I’m Back! (Never really left)

First Agenda: Current Status

Here I am, feeling bright and refreshed. Since my post on suffering from depression, things have become much better. First of all, thank you to everyone who offered me their support and best wishes. While I may not have replied to comments and have appeared to have vanished, I have been here the entire time and have read them as they came in.

An update on my condition, my depression has lifted its grip on me. It truly does feel like a weight has been lifted from my shoulders. The only bad news was that the medication didn’t do anything for me! It was actually quite frustrating to be honest. In the end, I ended up taking a classic R&R period to allow myself to forget everything that has been causing stress (Mainly self made writing deadlines, money to pay rent, etc…)

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by D. Wolfin

Editor Retirement

It was just over a year ago that our current head editor, genericIntent, joined the team and started helping with the editing for End Online. He has possibly been the greatest help in turning my horrendous grammar, half asleep sentences, and changing my mind in the middle of a paragraph, into a much more readable format.

I often made jokes about him taking a hammer to my writing in the process, and to be honest… No, I’m right, he really did take the metaphorical hammer to it. His well placed Monty Python jokes while editing were also always amusing.

As you have probably guessed by the title, genericIntent will be stepping down from the editing stage.

There will be a recruitment for 1 or 2 new editors, but I will make another post for that tomorrow. Today, I only hope that you all can leave a comment thanking our editor, who has always been working silently in the background, for all that he has done over the past year, and wishing him the best for the future.

by D. Wolfin

Chronicle of the Eternal Cover Art and Announcement

With Volume 1 of Chronicle of the Eternal current going through Amazon’s reviews, and will be live soon, I thought now would be a good time for this.

First of all, the cover art I have subtly hinted to as being amazing from time to time. The cover art was produced by Dylan Pierpont, a good friend of mine and an amazing artist. He has his own website www.dylanpierpont.com where you can have a look at some of his work.

Book Cover Final_wrap

Normally I would make the images smaller in the posts, but that would be an injustice in this case.

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My second piece of news is something I haven’t really told anyone as of yet, but I came to the conclusion that I should tell you all.

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by D. Wolfin

CotE Decision

This is a relatively short post, but it is something I would like all of your input on. I have changed various things as I am going progressing in the story, mainly because it is Volume 1 so it serves as the foundation for the entire series.

I am currently getting further through Volume 1 and have come across a decision that needs to be decided upon. The energy/ion weapons. I haven’t really included them at all in the story since the beginning of the novel. Should they stay, and become a part of the novel during the latter half, or be removed? Leave a comment below sharing your thoughts on the matter.

This series is aimed at a Victorian Steampunk setting so I have the inclination that perhaps they don’t fit in. I can still have a form of rail gun within the novel by having a positive charged barrel when firing, arcs of electricity jumping off the barrel tip instead of a muzzle flash and all the fancy fireworks still.

P.s. I’ll remove this post after the decision is made to avoid clutter on the homepage.

by D. Wolfin

News Update

I thought to update you all on several new things, and as it isn’t just a minor piece of news or two, I created its own post to grab your attention.

Part 1:

First of all, I am incredibly excited to announce the page views. I have been waiting patiently for the past month for this blog to reach a million views. I’m not some super conglomerate website, like wuxiaworld – that has recently, very recently, updated the fact that they have now reached 500 million page views, or other massively popular fan translation sites. But to someone like me, a million views is an incredibly big deal to me.

Considering I started End Online as a hobby during unemployment, without the slightest intention or idea I would make it my full time career, a million views back them was smoke and mirrors within a dream.

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