Rise of the Guild Master

I am taking an extended break on Rise of the Guild Master to work on furthering my career on Amazon, but the story will return.

Since the launch of Corruption of Coye vol 2, I’ve been seeing a steady stream of success. There’s been a little bit of money coming in almost every day, and that has felt wonderful on top of being a massive relief. On top of that, it’s been no secret that I’ve struggled with a large amount of RotGM’s plot elements due to my own inexperience.

I came out swinging wanting it to be my big magnum opus, but it ended up rushed and haphazard in many, many places to the point where I’ve written myself into loads of corners that I hate having to tiptoe around.

I wanted it to be this huge clean up of the town, magic destiny, thriller, slice of life but eventually there’s a demon lord hybrid story, despite those things really, really going poorly hand in hand. I want to retool it from the ground up eventually. A large chunk of the nearly 700k words I’ve written is still usable, after rewriting, that is. I just need to excise and simplify lots of things so that the slice of life action/romance/comedy is at the forefront instead of all the other junk. Like, no faction hunting them at every turn making it hard for the characters to go for a fucking walk without having to go in groups or have Nikita babysit them or whatever.

There’d still be conflict with Pimpington and the other ganglords, but it wouldn’t be oppressive. I’d probably cut the Duke of Dewhurst element entirely if I’m being honest and just simplify it into a conflict against the three ganglords (Pimpington, Crystal Sage and Fleetfoot) one on one into its own smaller scale thing.

Ah, well. You can see how heavily this has been weighing on my mind- at this point I’m just rambling.

This is why I’ve been having so much fun doing Coye, it’s much smaller scale and plays to my strengths much better- comedy and romance- while still having plenty of action and adventure. As of right now I’m knee-deep in rough drafts for vol 3 and am talking with an extremely popular lewd voice actress about producing an audiobook of the first volume. So everything is going well on that front.

The thing is, I don’t know if when I retool RotGM that it should be free. It would be a lot of work, and I need more material for Kindle Unlimited... part of me thinks I should just leave the webnovel version as is and let people experience the original version.

Either way, I need time to think about the path forward. The Realm of Karnalle has hundreds of stories left to tell, and I need to do the flagship one the justice it deserves.