Release date for chapter 15! · 8:25pm Oct 18th, 2023
Hey folks, so while I originally had chapter 15 planned to be released on Halloween, I realized that Halloween is actually on a Tuesday and not closer to the end of the week. The chapter will come out Saturday, October 28th instead. I plan to remember to be on and put it up around noon EST, but it could be up earlier or later in the day because I'm pretty sure I can't schedule posts on here. I've already got work started on the next few chapters, but as I think I've mentioned already (or have in the author's notes for that chapter) due to some issues with the outlines for two upcoming chapters looking incredibly short but also knowing the weird duality of my outline lengths to chapter lengths, I want to fully write out the next four chapters before putting another one out after chapter 15 is up. This is because sometimes I have outlines that look really short but the chapter ends up incredibly long (the phantom island chapters and chapter 14 are my current examples of that), and some chapters that had a lot of stuff written in the outlines that ended up much shorter than they looked like from the outline (chapter 10 is the big example of this, as it ended up having to become combined with what would have been chapter 11 because most of the notes just fit too neatly into large paragraphs). Given the length of the past few chapters, I feel it would be weird to go from 12k words to 5k to back to 10k for two chapters and back to 5k after that, but I won't know how long the chapters end up being before I write them out, since I'll sometimes stick completely to the outline and other times I'll use the outline as the bare bones and flesh the chapters out around it, and if the shorter looking ones end up being similar enough length to the larder looking ones, then I won't need to worry about trying to move some details around without messing up plans and plots already written down.
This isn't to say that no more chapters will come out until the book is finished, but once I've gotten 16-19 down and at the lengths I want them to be, then I'll start releasing chapters again while I work on wrapping up the rewrite of the final chapters (which currently have the longest outlines out of all of the other chapters).
Also, if you're wondering why I don't just pre-emptively shift things from 17 and 18 into their neighboring chapters, I have the chapter breaks at the specific places I want them to be and I'm sticking to those breaks until I'm forced to change them.
I hope you all look forward to the release of chapter 15 and the start of the final quarter of the story!