Hello everyone!

I mentioned in the last announcement chapter that I was looking for a way for this to be published. Well, it's taken some time and some searching, but I've decided to go with Tantor for an audiobook version of this story, and to self-publish an ebook version as well! (This comes with the usual warnings: That *does* mean that this will eventually have to be taken down).

As for how writing has been going, well, here's an update: I've been doing the rewrite of book 2 and I think I'm about 80-90% done with it (the first draft, at least. After that I will be taking some cutting down to it since I currently consider it far too long; it's about 220k words right now). But with this update I'm currently holding off on finishing up book 2 so that I can work on editing the weak parts of book 1 (this book).

As for the edits, my plan is not to change any major beats of this story. I've gone through part 1, and so far it's mostly been me tightening language, cutting rambling passages, combining some chapters, etc. No huge edits. But I do think that there are some weaker sections of the story. In particular, part 2 (what is currently chapters 11-17). These chapters I'm taking a closer look at, rearranging some events and trying to give them a more cohesive flow.

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And one goal I have -- though I don't know how well I'd achieve this -- is I'd like to be able to *shorten* the story. This draft stands at around 185k words, which is pretty long for what happens in it (It's a fairly simple, limited story, in the end). I *am* considering trimming some events/characters from it in order to make more drastic cuts to the length -- not cutting characters from the overall *series* entirely, but maybe moving the introduction of some of them to the next book, etc. Just editing wordflow from part 1 of this book (not removing any big plot elements), I was able to cut down about 3k words, which means that if I continued this "trimming" strategy for the whole book I'd cut about 10k words, probably. However, I'd love to get the book down to 150k words (or even less) if I could, which means I'd need to cut about 35k words, and I don't know if that can really be done just by trimming. But we'd have to see how the process goes; 150k is just something I pulled out of the air, really. I just want anything I'd officially publish to be well-crafted and respect the reader's time.

But anyway, take this as an update: Officially on the way is an audiobook, and an edited e-book, which will, again, mean that this will eventually be taken down. I will give another warning before it goes.

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