51 Author's thoughts - Road to challenges and the future!

Hey everyone! We are past the 50 chapters mark, and I think it is time for an author's thought chapter!

As usual, don't worry, the next story chapter is coming right after.

Some of you may, or may not, know that Rebuilding the Sun Kingdom was rebooted a few months back. I wanted to flesh out some characters, fix some of my mistakes, change the pace of the story as well as many of the events, basically I wanted to make of RSK a more engaging story.

If you are curious about the old story, you can find the old chapters here : https://www.dropbox.com/sh/6ulmkzckkl5zc81/AAD_6WJUYqOpN5GSTThBrJp5a?dl=0

If you have questions don't hesitate to ask them in the comments, I will not answer here but I will make another Author's Thoughts chapter later on, where I will list and answer everything I can.

******* ******* ******* ******* ******* *******

As some may know (from my previous posts) I did not just jump in and say "let's scratch everything and start from zero". I first started improving character dialogues and descriptions, I rewrote a few events and it quickly became obvious that the changes were too much for me to just edit past chapters without doing a proper reboot. As readers would miss important changes and be confused by their consequences. And so I decided to start over which would, in turn, allow me to do even bigger changes (more on that later).

But I did not want to just come back to old chapters and just edit out/in what I wanted. I felt that this had to be a true rewrite and so I had to start from scratch and rewrite every single word of every single chapters even if I was describing the same events. This meant starting from a blank page and writing the chapter. This gave me more freedom and since I didn't have to worry about what was already written the changes were more natural. I also felt it was more honest for my viewers.

* * *

And so my first challenge, after deciding to reboot, was what to do with the first (ten or so) chapters. I was fully aware that many readers would be unhappy with the reboot, and the first chapters would not help as they would not be changed much.

Those chapters are, after all, the foundation of the story as well as the reason I started to write RSK. Messing too much with those would mean writing a completely different story. They were also very close to what I wanted as I had spent weeks preparing them.

Luckily I still had some things to fix for the story to flow more naturally, and some extra details to add to explain what was happening better.

This was, for example, the legend of the Human Goddess, details on how the king was chosen, what the royal garments meant and so on. The goal was to add legitimacy to Chris' status. This is not enough to guarantee a prosperous and long reign for Chris, but I believe, as I like to say, that it is enough for the people to follow the 'clothes' right now, and perhaps later follow the man himself. That is when Chris has proven himself.

But I still wanted to go past the beginning quickly, as I had tons of new stuff to share. This lead me to prepare a stack of chapters before announcing my return with the reboot. And so I wrote 30 chapters in secret, which took me two full months of work. This allowed me to publish them at a rate of 2 every day for 3 whole weeks. (I continued writing every day as I was publishing them, which allowed me to stretch that release spree to a little more than 3 weeks.)

Strangely, the first ten or so chapters, took me longer than the next 10. I did not have much to change, but every change was much harder to do. Because they would impact events much later in the story.

For example, we are still not at Chris' coronation. We are probably a hundred or so chapter from that, but I still have most of it ready, and I had many (cool) changes done because of the new details I added early on (legend of dawn, royal garments, and so on).

** ** **

My second challenge was obvious, but it was to re-work the story events, by making them more appealing but also by moving them in the timeline and sometimes completely removing them.

This was one of the most complicated aspect of the rewrite for me. As moving around the events can have cascading effects in the story line. Like how and where characters are introduced or what consequences this change will have in future events.

This is because the author is (or should be) trapped by his own work (in a good way). Bad writers just don't care and will write anything they want even if it goes against a character's personality or against the world itself. While the others will notice that their previous words open and restrict the world they are creating.

Let's take a very simple and non-spoilery example : Rinat (the chief carpenter). She is a strong person, she is very talented in carpentry, one of the most important profession in that era and she is also very liked by everyone. In the original draft she was introduced in Brine City, which made no sense at all. If she was from Five Cave Village, how could Chris not even hear about her before then? And so I moved her introduction to the FCV arc. This seems simple enough. But now I had to explain why there were so few horse-drawn carts in the village and why they were in such a bad shape. They have an awesome carpenter around, how is that possible?!

This is a little detail, but it's the kind of things I had to pay attention to, for every single change made in the story.

I'd say, this troubled me for most of the chapters between 10 and 40. Those chapters were diverging more and more from the old draft, but there was still plenty of things in common to which I had to pay attention to.

*** *** ***

This lead me to my third challenge, which kind of sneaked up on me.

I soon noticed that I had trouble remembering to which draft some of the small details belonged to. These were not crucial to the story and were just there to flesh out the characters. But since they were not crucial, they could be placed pretty much anywhere in the story without much consequence. They just helped you understand more the character or discover a bit more about the world.

Luckily my earlier decision to rewrite every single word in the novel instead of editing chapters one by one helped me out quite a bit there.

But there were still a few times where I forgot I mentioned an aspect of a character and introduced it later in the story, luckily, LtBeefy my editor, caught these for me :).

**** **** ****

And my current major challenge. We are closing in to chapter 67 of the old draft, (the attack on the Kunalls camp), but there has been so many changes (many new characters, new potential antagonist like the prince, many events removed or added, PoV chapters, new factions introduced like the elves and so on) that the story is now very different to what it was.

But there are also many things from the old draft that I was have not written about that I plan to bring back. And it's really tough for me to mix that completely new content with the 'old' one.

An example would be Carl, one of the scouts under Titus.

In the old draft he was introduced after Chris had 'published' his tutorial on how to recruit people. "Suckering them in - 101". Carl appeared as a simple pure man, who followed his king's order and was completely convinced by their efficiency. After all he had managed to recruit a refugee camp thanks to these very words.

But in the current story, Carl is a very active man who has done much for Chris, he was there when they found the necromancer cave, he was the leader of the expedition to find a spot for Brine City, and he might have found a potential romance doing so.

It is now much harder for me to write about him taking advantage of Chris' tutorial on recruiting to 'sucker in' a group of refugee. After all he has recruited many groups of refugees so far, it wouldn't be interesting to just see him doing it again with a new technique particularly if it's just with a random group of refugees. it would be a "it worked great before, so what's the point?" moment.

So there must be a special reason for him to pull out the 101 techniques. And as it turns out, he still has one group that refused him, the one his potential romance interest is part of. And so the story, logically, pushes me towards this. (See? The author writes the story, but the story also shackles the author). But now I have more parameters limiting me, and the event is now harder to write.

And that's where I am at, which explains (partially) the delays for each chapter. I might not write every day right now, as I lack time. But I am thinking every day of new stuff to add to the story. I have a 3 pages long list of events saved on a text file on my desktop, each event taking a single line at most. So I have plenty of stories to tell.

Do not worry if the updates are spaced out lately, you will always have a chapter released soon :).

***** ***** ***** *****

And finally, I was asked previously if I have an end planned for the story.

And the answer is "Yes". I already know how to end the story. I have not written the chapter yet because the characters and the world will likely change outside of what I am envisioning right now. But the main script is done, and I am in love with it and can't wait to share it.

And I do plan to end the story logically and not stretch things out. I will never add filler arcs and chapters and will always only write because it's either necessary or fun.

I've got an ending planned and I want to share it. Not delay it to the 22th century:).

That's all for this chapter's on my thoughts and challenges. I hope you enjoyed it. The next chapter will be published in a few clicks!