Soon, into the Wild Blue Yonder!

Welcome back to yet another blog post which I am now aware of is basically a glorified diary in disguise, and yes, you can tell from the title that I sorta forgot what I had planned this past weekend. Whoops! I wanted this post to be about Atom, but I forgot and now we’re stuck with whatever this happens to be. Go me! Anyway, there are a few things to discuss, so let’s get into it shall we!

The Sapphire Verdict

Starting off, we have a new, big milestone for the Sapphire Verdict. I am just about to lock in at 136500 words! This is a massive milestone and means we are within roughly 1500 words of hitting what I wanted to hit. There are still more chapters for me to finish this pass on as well, so I think I can get even more out before this is done. What does this mean exactly? It means that soon I will be attempting to find an agent for it once again!

Over a year ago, I started my first attempt to find an agent, and it did not go well. Eventually, I received some advice that it was the word length that was killer, so I began at the beginning of this year the lengthy process of chopping it down to size. At first it was 560,000 words, and then it became 350,000, and then 225,000, and then 180,000, and then 145,000. It has been a long and painful road, but we are hopefully, truly at the end of this. Even if I cannot find an agent, I will be publishing this somewhere! One way or another, this journey is nearing its end!

Harmonizer

Wait, this again? Didn’t you just bring this up for the first time last week? Yes, and… it might be moving forward sooner rather than later.

But isn’t the first book still in flight? Yep.

Then how are you going to write this? It’s taken you so long just to finish the first! Fully aware and making many changes to accommodate it.

Alright, so, I’ve already argued with myself forwards and backwards on this. I don’t want to just work on the Sapphire Verdict forever, even though there are a LOT of books to cover with it. The idea for ‘Harmonizer’ came about roughly four years ago and is HEAVILY tied into Sapphiria’s universe. In fact, the name itself comes from a concept in Sapphiria’s universe that we’ll get to in book… Uhh, technically eight? Subject to change depending on if book six gets axed or not.

All in all, I want to write Harmonizer now of all times for two reasons. Number one, I want to prove to myself that I have actually learned stuff over this massive editing period. The Sapphire Verdict bears a lot of scars from my ignorance, and I want to see what happens now that I can apply all my knowledge fresh from the beginning. Number two, I want to publish this one out directly. No agent, no publisher, no nothing. This one just goes straight onto the web and that’s that.

This story is meant to be shorter than the Sapphire Verdict… per book, I should say. One book from the Sapphire Verdict could theoretically be one or two of these, so I’m hoping to crank it out much faster. I want to start getting my stories out there, and a huge goal of mine has been to grow an audience, which… leads to another point.

Twitch

So, Twitch was started for two reasons. I wanted to become more social, which has largely been a success, and I wanted to grow my audience, which has largely been a failure. Yes, I’ve gained a few viewers and hit 8-9 viewer highs numerous times. However, this isn’t helping me. It’s been a year and a half of this, and it’s not exactly growing ,and the only way to make it grow is to… well, commit to it fully and make it a full time thing, which I’m not interested in.

This leads back to Harmonizer. In order to make time for it, Twitch is going to have to take a full back seat. This means no more Monday, Wednesday, Friday. Instead, it’ll be… well, whenever I feel like. I think this will help me be more productive and boost my mental health at the same time, because trying to manage so much has been a lot over the past year. While it is unfortunate, I think getting myself out there in the spaces where I would like to be known needs to be a priority.

This does not mean that Twitch is dead in the water. It just means that I’m not going to pursue growth on it anymore, which means a very flexible and volatile schedule, and me only streaming what I want to instead of what I think I need to. Yes, it’s a massive mental game.

What will happen to the website?

At the moment, nothing. Eventually, however, the Sapphire Nexus will update to accommodate Harmonizer and it’s stories, but since they are in the same universe, the name doesn’t need to change! We’ll eventually get a world map for Vianna’s world, some details about it’s people, some new character portraits, and other things as time goes on! I expect this to be a bit of a faster turnaround than the Sapphire Verdict, so we’ll see what ends up happening when. Instead of making rigid plans, for once, I’m going with the flow!

Art

Art is still happening! I promise! Yes, it’s ironic that I’m pulling back on Twitch right as I’m finishing up my starting soon screen, but this means more time for art, and boy do I have stuff! I want to make time now to figure out how to draw my characters better, and I’m steadily learning new tricks for environments! My art has gone through an evolution over the past month, so when I finally make my return to posting art, I promise it will be impressive! I think… I hope…

Youtube

Wait, what? Why is this getting brought up when Twitch is going down? Youtube is not Twitch. Youtube is about uploading videos and that’s it, which is a lot simpler to do. I’m not going to promise anything here, but I will say that stuff is being considered. It all hinges on how much time goes into Harmonizer and my art, and even then, that art may make an appearance on Youtube. IT’s all about reach, and I’ve been an idiot because I’m trying to reach people who don’t care about what I do because that’s just the content I knew how to make. Time for me to learn how to do something else!

Conclusion

Lot’s of updates this time around! Next week will be the beginning of a very strange adventure. I have no idea what it’ll bring, or if the experiment will last, but I’m at least going to try. So, I can say firmly at this point that starting on Saturday, I begin writing Harmonizer. We’ll see where it ends up, so stay tuned for both that and the potential launching of the Sapphire Verdict at long last! With all that being said… Cheers!

The Flying Fennec