NOVEL WEB Authors note
Hi ya, all and thanks for reading my story so far. I know I’m not not the best writer and I have plenty of places for improvement but I really want to thank everyone who got this far.
We are now at the end of book one and I have a few things to say. First off a special thanks to all those who helped point out mistakes and inconsistencies. I did my best to fix them when you all pointed them out and so thanks a million.
Now the rest of this is kinda a cluster of things I wanted to say. I apologize if it is a mess but bare with me. I will be titling each section so it's easier to comb through for those that don't want to read all of it.
Writing progression, story background and writing history.
Now I want to give a little background on this story and what led up to me actually putting a decent amount of words to paper. I started writing this around September of 2022, the first 35 thousand words of this just over 100 thousand word book were written in 2022. Most of 2023 was me having no motivation to write and lead to less than 5k words being added to the book, most of it was just editing what was already there. Then in the beginning of 2024 over the course of about a month I wrote the rest of the body of the book. Which left me around 92k words. After that I did not touch it again until May where I did all the editing and tried my best to clean up any inconsistencies and add more meat to some of the rather short chapters. This brought me just over 100k words which was my goal. I have been trying and failing to write a story for about 8 years now. Back then I was still in high school. So this is rather an achievement for me and the fact that people not only have read my story but even like it has not only made me incredibly happy but much more motivated to write.
This story for me is kinda a mash of things that I want to read about. I have watched my fair share of anime and read a lot of web novels both on here and another site, I also have a library of over 200 books on audible. So most of the time when I have the motivation to write it is normally because I ran out of things that I wanted to read, watch or listen to at the time.
I have always wanted to read a good female vampire story that did not just end up in some kind of reverse harem, then again I’m not one that likes to read stories where romance is the center point, I don't mind it as a bi produce of the story and characters interacting but if it is front and center not really my cup of tea. Shoot 2 of my most favorite books. There is no major romance until the 3rd book or later. But I’m getting off topic. What I'm writing here is a mash up of my favorite story elements or things that I have not found and wanted a story about. Urban fantasy, female vampire mc, game system, dungeon, semi post apocalyptic (but as the last chapter implied it's quite a bit more than semi) and a city builder. I'm not going to lie, I might have been a bit ambitious with what is going on here but I hope it works out well.
Addressing comments saying they did not like chapter 26
With that being said I know I'm not any kind of great writer. That brings me to chapter 26. I had at the time of writing this 2 people express displeasure with the chapter. Which is I think 2 of the 4 total negative comments on the whole book. And if 2 people thought it was bad enough to comment then there were more that did not comment or just dropped the book right there without saying anything. One of the people said it was the reason they dropped the book.
Now I want to give you a little look into how I write. As I stated above this is the first story I have started that has gotten this far. One thing I learned about myself while attempting to write other stories is that I can not try to plan things out too much or at all. It tends to mentally trap me and I end up with major writer's block. One story got to around 20k words and another 17 before I bounced my head off a mental wall trying to figure out how I was going to get to the next plot point. This leads back to this story. Almost nothing in this book was preplanned. The only 2 things I know where going to happen before they happened was the family gathering and that martial law. As for the future I have a couple ideas of things that might happen. But nothing more than what could be put on a note card.
So all that was to say was I had no idea what was going to happen when I killed Carl. I did not know if Joshua was going to show up in book one. I knew he was going to be some form of antagonist but how he would show up or influence the story I did not know until well it happened. But when it did happen I had an idea of how I wanted it to play out. Two things I don't like in a story is when everything goes right for a character and when too many things go wrong for a character. At this point in the story with the exception of there not being as many supplies available as she would have liked, nothing has really gone wrong for Vivi since chapter one when her secret was revealed to Sarah. She is also at this point in the story shown to be almost unstoppable. Yes there are long term things that are shown to be a problem to her but that does not mean much. The possibility of problems and failure does not make up for actual problems and failure to me. So after I knew the encounter with Joshua was going to happen I decided to make it a point of failure for her. Also by doing this I could tie in a little more of her history and flesh out the character a bit more. I also wanted to make this both the climax of the story because i felt that there was not one at this point and to give some emotion impact to the
But it seems it did not come out as well as i hoped. In my bias for my own writing I thought it came out well. For those of you that wondered why Vivi did not just kill Joshua well i have a couple answers for you. Now I like to keep certain things vague because it is easier to write around. Like with the vampires. It's magic so yeah. I don’t necessarily want to go into deception about every aspect of vampires, at least not right away. I have already done my fair share of info dumping in this book and that can be rather boring to read. Now I don't know if i will explain things at any point in the book so if you want to skip this feel the next paragraph feel free too.
As stated before Vivi had little Knowledge of the suppression effect of vampires mostly due to the fact she had very few children and she avoided the more powerful vampires. So it never really came up for her. And if another vampire pissed her off well it's not her kid she could just kill them. So how it works on a basic level is the orders of a vampire that sired you or their direct elder are near absolute ever after death. Just because they died does not mean you are free from them. For their blood still runs through you. There is still more than that to this effect but at this point it's just flavor text. Anyways due to the skills Joshua had he was able to mitigate the and basically out right remove the auras of foreign influence of others on himself and those under him. Now I'm going to be honest I do not know if this effect would last after he died. I have not really thought about it. Honestly as I write things it would most likely do that. But who knows no one in the story knows how this works. Then there is the fact while Joshua is weaker than Vivi it does not mean he is not also old and powerful. I mean one of the most powerful vampires alive wants you dead. Yet he is still alive. He would have gotten out of there alive almost no matter what happened. Also it would be a waste of a perfectly good antagonist. Is it a cope out probably but what can I say.
I might go back and rewrite part of it to clean up the characterization of Vivi because that was what was mostly pointed out. The final outcome of the chapter will remain the same.
So for my last comment on chapter 26 is I'm sorry I'm not a better writer and am able to more properly write scenes like this and to write characters to accurately portray what they are meant to be. I’m really trying and I’m trying to get better. But please feel free to tell me your thoughts on it and how I can improve.
Future chapter release schedule
Now onto the next order of business. Unlike many of the people on this site I don't think I have the ability to put out one or more well written chapters every week and with how I write I don't know if that would be the best thing regardless. I tend to go back and change things quite a bit. For example in chapter 10 when Vivi uses call of the dungeon master the raid boss and dungeon break were not in the original draft of that chapter and the stat explanation was rewritten I think 3 times.
So I have a question for all of you. There will be a pull in this chapter asking whether or not you would like me to post chapters that I write of book 2 as they are readable. By that I mean after I go through and make sure my poor grammar, spelling and sentence structure is not too noticeable. But I know that there is a relatively good chance that I will go back and possibly make major changes to chapters as I write the book. While I do think this will be less likely then it was in the first book for the fact that I had to do my best to make a good foundation for the story moving forward there is still a good chance of it. So vote in the poll and we will see what happens.
Skill list
Ok now for those of you that want a full description of all of Vivi’s 105 offered skills I will be working on that I don't know when it will be done seeing I don't think i did more than 30 of them already. I will mostly do it when I am bored. So I have no time line for you all but it will be done. Do note that for this list I will not be giving Vivi’s thoughts on each skill, it will only be the system description. I also might write the descriptions of the classes that she did not look at too. But that is up in the air at the moment.
Synopsis rewrite
I know my synopsis is a little lacking so if anyone wants to try and write a better one for me after reading the first book that would be awesome
Asking for reviews good or bad
I would also like to ask anyone interested in the story like it or not to write a review. If you don't feel like it, don't feel pressured too. But good or bad I would love for you all to write a review now that book one is done.
Beta readers
If you could not tell, I did not have anyone proofread the story outside of myself. I had a couple of friends who did the first couple of chapters but did not get much past that. So if anyone is interested in being a Beta reader please message me and we can talk about it.
Q&A
Lastly, I will do a Q&A about the story and I will be willing to answer a few questions about myself too. Once I see a decent number of questions in the comment section I will post a chapter with my answers to them.
Once again thank you all for reading about the world I am building. It really is amazing knowing that people not only read my writing but even like it. With that I wish you all a great day.