Quick Update on Secondo and the Future · 7:57pm Jan 27th, 2023
Myello. It's me. Remember me? Hopefully.
I know this is overdue, and is kind of awkward to talk about since my second-to-last blog post was literally me talking about how I wanted to commit to regularly posting Secondo again and really hammer out the story properly.
Alas, if you've been paying attention, you'll know that promise hasn't materialised. I got deadtracked in the story at the current point and am not sure how to properly progress it currently without me feeling it's either rushed, out of character or just plain boring/generic. This ties into a greater and increasing feeling for Secondo as a whole (Shores of Zebrica, that is), which is that I believe I rushed at least the latter half of what is currently written. The beginning was fine, and I believe I made good ground with the siren trio before the outbreak of war then, but once the invasion for Zumidia started it all became a rushed mess which now I can't really fix anymore.
The pacing is off, the characters feel rushed and the world as a whole feels like it's beyond repair for me at the moment. In short, I am putting Secondo: Shores of Zebrica on hiatus. I don't want to cancel it, at least not yet, though truth be told it may devolve to that point if a certain amount of time passes and I have yet to regain any interest, motivation and inspiration for how to continue the story. I hate to be one of those writers that commits to a long story and then drops it dead halfway, but I don't want it to sit on 'incomplete' for a year either. It'd be disingenuous to lie to people who like my content and I'd rather come clean with how things are going for me and why the story they like hasn't been updated, and won't be at least for a while.
So then, with Secondo on hold, what am I gonna do now?
In short, I am working on the sequel story to World Forged at Midnight at the moment. The sequel will be a novella-length EQG story, in which I hope to explore a lot of the depth to Midnight Sparkle's fall from grace in the previous two stories among other things. Secondo's current issues have taught me to be a little more careful with pacing, and to devote a lot more time to individual chapters. Personally I believe 3k words per chapter is the bare minimum nowadays for most cases, with 6k being a good benchmark for when you should start to close out a 'regular' chapter, i.e. a chapter that isn't dealing with a pivotal plot development and thus naturally would be longer, as well.
To add onto this, I am of course also looking to publish the odd oneshot/short story here and there whenever I get a feel for one, so if you like my brief stories more so than my longer ones, do stick around as well.
For now, that's all I can really say. I'll be posting an update when the Midnight Sparkle sequel story is close(r) to completion, but until then I will probably remain tugged away to focus on both life and writing aforementioned story.
Until that day comes, I wish you folks all the best. Sorry for those who are miffed about Secondo's hiatus, once again.
You just so what you can.