Hi folks!

First off, you might be wondering: I said tomorrow, and it has been several days since tomorrow. Well, to answer that: Silksong. I'm a big Hollow Knight fan, so I am overjoyed beyond reason that this game has somehow lived up to the impossible hype. Good thing it didn't release in the middle of an arc.

With that out of the way, welcome to the arc 3 postmortem author's note thingy! I really need to come up with a name for these, since "author's note" is just so ambiguous. But nonetheless, we're here.

I'm gonna start with announcements and such. First off, I'm intending this hiatus to last at least a month—expect main-story Sunspot to return in mid-October. But to tide you over in the meantime, there'll be at least one public side story. A smutty one. Did you know that most of my lifetime wordcount before Sunspot was smut? Look forward to it, because I am cooking. If I cook hard enough there might even be two side stories, one canon or near-canon and the other me playing with my dolls. They're my OCs, I can do atrocious things to them and you can't stop me. Keep an eye on the Patreon's free tier, the Discord, and the main site to see when these go up.

Second off, Arc 4 will be titled The Cutting Edge. I'm pretty damn pleased with myself as far as giving arcs titles with layered meanings; you can probably piece together this one. I do have to admit that I don't love having three titles in a row with "the" in them, but at least they all have different formats, so I guess it's fine.

Also during the hiatus, I'll be opening a webstore so you can put all this fabulous high quality art you've been seeing onto your walls! It'll probably be Redbubble. However, if you can't or don't want to fork over money to me, you're also welcome to print them yourselves; to facilitate this, I'll be putting up a gallery page on the website to both display the art and make the full quality versions available for download.

Conveniently, this is also your reminder that Sunspot has its own website! In a perfect world, I'd exclusively post everything to that site and nowhere else, but then how would you all find the story? To make the site a bit more usable, I'm planning to finally clean up the glossary and the current pathetic excuse for a characters page on the website. No official lexicon of glyphs, though, sorry. Good luck to everybody who's been trying to piece together the complete list.

Lastly, we'll be opening another round of beta reader applications. If you want to get directly involved with the creation of Sunspot, that's how. It's no secret that I rely immensely on the betas for all aspects of Sunspot, from planning to line-by-line writing to various administrative stuff, so if you think you can do any of that, I encourage you to apply. There'll be two slots this time, probably, with preference given to people who have applied previously. Link will be in the Discord!

Chatting About The Story

What an arc, huh? It's funny how much stuff you can squeeze into about a week of not leaving one building. This is the first arc where I tried for something resembling a mid-arc climax with Sugawara's attack, and I think it went swimmingly, though predictably—attack guy, shit goes sideways, he attacks the home team, then flees before they can finish him off. Classic magical girl stuff. Hell, classic action sequence in general, really. Thanks for letting me get away with it. And Sugawara got away, too! He's a real piece of work.

And how about everybody else! I'm super happy with the Radiances' development this arc; we did a lot of fun things with them and spent some actual non-crisis time with them. A brief recap of stuff we learned this arc:

Alice is becoming horny, whether she likes it or not.

Ai is ace! But she still likes cuddles. I'm super happy that a lot of ace readers reportedly really related to that section and her depiction.

Amane is badass. This isn't really news, but it's worth mentioning because she's just so fucking cool. Also she's kind of a chatterbox in Japanese, and now Ezzen can parse that!

Yuuka and Hina were a thing at some point in the past! This one has been pretty well known in the Discord for a while, because I'm bad about shutting up and letting the story reach information in its own due time, but now it's officially out in the open. I wonder what happened to get them to where they are now?

Izumi wants to ditch her meat-body. I wonder if she could instead do what Alice did?

Not a lot of Ebi this arc. In fact, we didn't see her onscreen at all since fighting Sugawara. She's alright, but perhaps not entirely recovered.

As for our protagonist, oh boy, what an arc. They/it dollthing. This will be challenging for Ezzen to square with the fact that it is seemingly desirous of being Asuka Evangelion shaped. And possibly of having titties huge, which is notably not an Asuka trait either. I wonder how it'll all come together?

On this note, there's been a lot of speculation about Ez's final form being some manner of Vaetnoid bugthing, which is excellent and you should continue to talk about it. But I should mention that "Vaetna is bugs" is technically a fan invention and not corroborated by any particular description of them…as is "Vaetna is elves," which several people have independently put forth. I can't completely deny that one, as I am a notorious knife ear lover. So perhaps the bug theory also holds a grain of truth. Maybe a few grains.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

It's been really heartwarming to see so much positive feedback on the body-transfer scene in 3.12. A lot of people are saying they cried when they read it, which is so so gratifying to me. In some ways the whole story has been building to this, so it's wonderful that it landed so strongly for so many. Thanks for sticking with me through these layers and layers of eggshell to reach the gooey center. We will spend more time with euphoria-Ezzen, I promise!

Blogging About Writing

A lot of delayed chapters during this arc. That's because I was moving. Back to the United States. Fear not, my living situation is fantastic and I expect to be able to continue writing and releasing Sunspot at a regular pace, but that month-ish was hectic. I miss Japan; I have plans to return, but they're complicated ones that will take a while.

During this arc we also passed Sunspot's one year anniversary and the 300,000 word mark, and are on the cusp of four thousand readers listed between Royal Road and Scribblehub, which is an absolutely mind-boggling number. Learning to Be A Webfiction Author has been a serious trial by fire, and the support I've received at every turn from fans and friends and fellow authors becomes more and more amazing the longer it remains a direct facet of my life. Thank you to everybody who regularly leaves comments on the story, joins the Discord, or even goes so far as to give me actual real life dollars to keep writing the story. It's unbelievable; writing Sunspot is the single most rewarding thing I've ever done, even disregarding the income.

It's also hard. It's hard to know if I'm taking the story in the right direction and at the right time, hard to maintain a writing schedule, and hard to sand down the rough edges to the level of polish this whole endeavor deserves. The beta readers make it possible; if you knew where to look, you'd see their fingerprints everywhere, and Sunspot is vastly better for it. I'm grateful beyond words to all of them and their willingness to invest so much effort for no direct reward. If you find people like that, keep them close.

I think I grew as a writer on a technical level during this arc, which is really nice (even if I'm wrong and this is purely ego talking). The pacing was more thought-out, the line-by-line descriptions got richer, and I think I finally have a true handle on the core cast of characters. Good job, me. In particular, thinking more about scene-sequel structure has been huge for helping me figure out what any individual moment or scene should be doing in the larger story. If you're an aspiring writer, I strongly recommend that you take a look at Hungry's (of Katalepsis, which is Sunspot's single strongest influence) writeup on the topic.

This brings me to an unusual call to action: you should be writing. Yes, you, the reader. Have an idea in your head? Start putting it to paper. You're bad at it? Who cares! Fuck waiting to be "good enough." It doesn't need to be a masterpiece or explosively popular, it just needs to exist. Open up notepad and write ten words, then ten more. Hell, if you don't know what to write about, write Sunspot fanfic, I'll read it. I'll even throw you a prompt: "Ezzen and Hina's zoo date gets derailed."

I'm including this exhortation because a year and a half ago, I never would have even dreamt I'd be an author with 300,000 words published. And all that only exists because I began, even though I didn't know anything. You can do it too. I know some of you need to hear this, to be given permission to start, so here it is. Give it your worst shot and grow from there.

To this end, I want to give an earnest, not-sponsored shoutout to the best writing-oriented community on the internet and one of my favorite Discords, COTEH. I've never seen a place that actually helps beginner authors Get Shit Done; I'm used to crab-buckets where people discuss their stories at length without ever putting a single word on the manuscript, whereas COTEH has people actually writing and who know what the hell they're talking about. It's an incredible resource, so good that by all rights it shouldn't exist. But it does, and you should use it. I do need to disclaim that the community is best for writers who are hoping to do the Royal Road -> Amazon publishing pipeline, but the abundance of craft discussion about actually improving your writing and workshopping/critique resources are universally helpful.

Regardless of whether you join COTEH or another writing group, or just Go For It on your own, I implore you to give it a shot. Make something.

Closing Thoughts

I'm super excited to be getting actual merch made. One enterprising reader has actually already taken the liberty of getting some stuff printed out and put on their wall, check it out:

I hope to get other merch made, too. My dream is fumo of the Radiances, but that's a long way off, probably. If there's a particular type of merch you want, let me know in the comments.

There's a lot more art coming in the pipeline. I'm super excited. We deserve some proper art for Ez, official art for the Radiances in mantle, art for Yuuka that isn't just booba, and art for Yuuka that IS just booba. I'll try to keep a steady stream of it coming. Your Patreon dollars at work!

Please consider leaving a rating or review on the story. It helps a lot!

I'm also quietly working on a second story, which I hope to start posting next year. The title is Punch the Hurricane.

That's pretty much all. Thanks for reading 300k words of Sunspot. I hope for there to be many more.

To close us off, have a poll:

Next chapter will be updated first on this website. Come back and continue reading tomorrow, everyone!

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