36 UPDATE: HIATUS AND NEW NOVEL

Alright, alright. I'm doing it. I'll let y'all know what's going on with me these weeks. This has been the skeleton in the closet of my life for the past month and quite frankly I'm just embarrassed at this point that I couldn't take the most basic steps of responsibility and inform you what happened. For this horrendous delay, I'm sorry. I have no excuse. This is 3 weeks overdue.

So, going back to the beginning. I got pretty depressed for about 3 days and didn't write for those 3 days then went to the doctor's and got told to see a therapist. I mean, I really didn't want to and was about 90% sure all worries in my life were stemming from this so I just completely shut myself away from Webnovel.

A week later, I was feeling better and quite refreshed. I had been getting out and enjoying life again (I had been either in school, writing, or asleep for maybe 80 to 90% of my life before and my grades were suffering.) That's clearly not sustainable and I was stupid for not realizing it. However, during this time period I had an introspection of sorts and realized with a profound epiphany that I hate this novel.

Seriously- to the bones. It was a nascent idea a few years back that I wanted to bring to life on the paper but God I was clueless. Really, I butchered this poor novel. There was so much I could have easily done better and now I just want to put it past me.

Rigel's character is slowly mutating out of my control, the story just really went nowhere I wanted it to, and the initial 15 chapters suck so bad for myriad reasons that it puts me to shame to publish them on here. There was also the fact that I think I strove to be "different" so hard that just a messy story with watery characters and world-building/plot arose.

Could I have just kept going at this rate and tried to slowly fix it? Honestly, yes. I was very excited to, in fact, but somewhere between the idea and the act I lost my drive and became disillusioned. I have about 700 words of the latest chapter written up on the document right now that I physically cannot bring myself to touch.

So what's going on with me and Astrae now? Well, I have no intentions on touching this radioactive waste for a while lest I myself get contaminated. It's going on "Hiatus" but I most likely won't touch it ever again.

The story still happened, though, and that follows in line with my next upcoming novel: Ascending the Tower of Worlds. This one takes place a few (insert large number here) years after Astrae and on a completely different galaxy, even, but will contain some of the lore and results of Astrae.

What will I do differently as an author that will hopefully keep the issues that popped up with Astrae down and away from this new ATW? Well, I believe that Astrae was a really good dip in the water in terms of writing something super long-form. I have really only written essays and short stories that were no longer than 3 thousand words before this all. 1: I will keep everything consistent. No super weird tonal shifts and just weird stuff in general, really. 2: I will put more effort into developing human characters that are believable people, even the extras. 3: I will keep a good outline to work off of so I don't get lost in the plot. 4: I will make a normal protagonist that will gradually grow into a different person that can be emphasized with. I really still hate Rigel as a person and character and I hope he dies.

Ascending the Tower of Worlds is in the works right now. It will be quite different from Astrae. It will have western cultivation elements and will place alchemy in the foreground. The general gist of the plot is much like Tower of God and Sword Art Online mostly: climb up. There will be over 100 worlds for me to create to my heart's content so there should be some really fun things to write about.

I plan on having the outlining and other alpha materials done by the start of next weekend. That means the day of release will be sometime next weekend unless something huge pops up for some weird reason.