If you’re new here, strap in, if you’re not, you know how it is already, I’m a very inconsistent uploader. I make a ton of promises that I don’t end up keeping, and I’m about to do some more of that. Sometimes I need to remind myself that this is still a hobby and not some sort of requirement to feel fulfillment in life, and as life has gotten busier and more complex, I find myself having much less time and energy for things like this. So let’s talk about what has been going on in my private life, what I’m doing when it comes to writing and where this blog is headed next – and then change my mind in a few weeks, as usual.
One consistent thing will stay, I promise you at least that much, and that is a yearly volume of The Hesitant Hero. I have decided on the next part of this story with certainty now, and it will be following Mirgia’s journey as he is separated from the rest of the party. The party is headed in his general direction at the end of volume 4, so it will be good to see what happens to him before they possibly meet up again. I will retcon a bunch of the letters that Mirgia sent to the gang over time, as I’ve done with other parts of the story before. This version of the story – that you love to read on my blog – was always intended to be a rough draft, and a way for me to write something that I think is good enough to stand on its own on a blog, but perhaps not the quality I would want to submit to a publisher. I am working on revising the first few volumes and getting them to a place where I am happy with them. Volume 1 and 3 will stay very similar, although I will rewrite large parts of it, the core of the story will stay the same, with my main focus being on consistency, worldbuilding and scrapping out the boring parts. Volume 2 will need a lot of overhaul as I find it quite boring upon rereading it. I haven’t decided much on volume 4 yet, but just like with volume 1 and 3, don’t expect massive changes to the core plot, I’m happy with it as it is now.
But I was supposed to talk about life, not about my story for the millionth time. Things have been challenging. My mom lives on welfare and finally got to go on holiday for the first time in many years, only for her sister – with whom she traveled – to get covid, and the entire holiday being ruined, so I had to spend a lot of energy listening to her talk about that and trying to comfort her. While this was all happening, my dad had a cancer scare – a pre-emptive test found something – which luckily ended up being something benign that they could easily remove. As those things were happening in the background, I was saying goodbye to my social worker, which means that for the first time since I was a teenager, I do not have any help with my mental health. This was on purpose of course, as I’m doing much better than I was in the past, but it’s still a big step for me and definitely comes with some anxiety.
Lastly, my brother – who I live(d) with until now, is emigrating to Denmark. He has a job with a Danish company and has had this for a while, but they now want him to work at the office and he’s moving to an apartment near it. This is of course great, but my brother has been unreliable in the past when it comes to big steps in his life. Mental health instability runs in the family I suppose. I’m optimistic about his future, but definitely feel a bunch of stress about the first couple of weeks he’ll be gone.
And finally – the sword of Damocles that’s always hanging over my head – is getting my degree. I will spend these next few months working hard on finishing up my final few courses until I am done with studying forever and can finally relax. If everything goes well, I’ll be mostly done by late January, and all the other stuff hanging over my head in the background will be resolved or going well (or it’ll all have gone tits up and you’ll never hear from me again), and I can go back to writing at full force, like I did in the past. The amount I’ve written since June is so low that I really shouldn’t have been making any big promises to you all, but I couldn’t keep my mouth shut.
So what’s next for the blog?
I don’t know. I’ve currently resolved myself to properly prepare for the fifth installment of the Hesitant Hero. Alongside that I’ve been working more and more on worldbuilding for my other story, the Necromancer’s Daughter. I have no real promises on a release schedule for that story, and there’s even a sizable chance I won’t be posting it here, but only writing it for myself at first. I’ve also gotten the urge again to watch some old anime, and I might as well do some reviews of them as I’m watching them. But all of this will wait until the new year. November and December are always slow months on this blog, and they will be even slower this year. I’m not promising anything right now – that’s character growth baby – but I will try to talk to you all somewhat regularly. I’m hoping either weekly or biweekly, but if you don’t hear from me for a few weeks in a row, just know that I’ll be back after the storm blows over. Thanks for your eternal patience and for reading these posts. Even though I don’t get a ton of traffic, knowing that some people read my stories and – seemingly – enjoy them enough to keep reading them makes me very happy and although I’d still be writing them if no one cared, it does motivate me to try my best and get better at it when I know others do care. Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you in the next one, whenever that ends up being.
Opal Kaharis 