I started out just continuing. Nothing resolved and everyone was all ready for Book 11. It wasn’t until I realized that there really aren’t any major villains left and I don’t have anything planned past this point that I went back and properly fixed things towards how it ended up going.
Then I started worrying about how I was ending it. Should Eva have ended up stuck in Hell, seated on a throne of blood with her eyes brightly burning red as the very final scene? Should Brakket still be open or closed? Does Arachne come back? Should this or that and everything else?
After settling on what happened, I started on character epilogues.
All but one of which I ended up not writing. About five hundred words into a Juliana chapter with her pretending to be Indiana Jones and maybe going slightly crazy in attempts to entertain Zagan, I decided not to do the epilogues and to leave things up to readers’ imaginations. The only epilogue that I actually finished was Nel’s chapter and that one ended up slightly altered and eventually became 010.033.
A few chapters ago, there were a few comments of lists of things they wanted to see before Void Domain ended. Some of those things I hope I answered with some satisfaction. Some of those things I deliberately left vague or unanswered. Some of those things just didn’t fit in the scope of the ending (mostly the things related to Sawyer and Griffin and their actions in Book 1).
And some of those things I had forgotten I added entirely. Which was a problem in the early books. I kept thinking ‘Oh, this [concept] is cool, I should write this in somewhere.’ And then I would write it in, fully thinking that I’d use it more later, only to not. I think that stems mostly from my inexperience as a writer. I didn’t keep a list of things that needed addressing and just kept adding them.
Because of all that, if people want to post questions in the comments, I’ll try to answer them. If the questions relate to things I’ve deliberately avoided or kept vague, I’ll probably skip over them or mention as much. If a topic is big enough, I might write an extra-style mini-chapter. Might being the operative word.
Anyway, I hope everyone enjoyed the journey! The rest of this Author’s Notes will be more administrative matters and thoughts about the future.
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Administrative Matters
First, I’d just like to say thanks again for reading. And a special thanks to everyone who has supported me on Patreon and PayPal. I really appreciate it.
Regarding Patreon, I will be leaving my account active. If you are a current Patreon of mine, you might want to adjust your donation. There will not be a new writing project immediately following Void Domain (which I’ll talk about in a paragraph or two), so take that into consideration. This is mostly so that if someone starts reading in the future and decides they want to donate while reading, Patreon can handle that alongside PayPal.
As for the site, I get an email for every comment posted, so no matter how far in the future you’re reading this, I should notice and be able to respond. If you’re a first time commenter, your comment will be in the moderation queue, but I get emails for those too. The only exceptions are the comments that get stuck in the spam list. There have only been about five legitimate comments stuck in spam ever (and several hundred actual spam comments). I do not get emails for those. If you want to avoid being automatically flagged as spam, I’d advise against posting links and short messages (less than 20 characters). That seems to be the thing that hits first time commenters the most.
While I’ll likely be checking the site (and the spam list) regularly for several weeks, I imagine that I will slowly stop checking as activity decreases.
And isn’t that a sad thought.
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The Future!
As I mentioned up above, I don’t have anything planned at the moment. I really wanted to have something, some other serial such as those I posted on the preview site, but I don’t.
I don’t think I’ve talked about this before, but Void Domain is actually about the sixth iteration of the same story/world/characters. I wrote between 1 and 10 chapters of the other versions and ended up scrapping them for various reasons. Maybe I didn’t like the characters I had chosen to focus on, maybe I thought the demons were too traditionally demonic. Whatever the reason, they all got scrapped.
That same problem is happening with pretty much everything I posted on the preview site.
Currently, I’m working on a story similar in setting to the project Demi-God. The new project is titled Toxiphobia currently, though that is subject to change on a whim. It is similar to the point where I might wholesale steal the intro to Demi-God (the bit with the war versus a god) for this project and that there is still a heavy Victorian theme, but otherwise it is a whole lot more subdued. More realistic. And no inhuman companion character. At least for now. If I count Demi-God in the same project, Toxiphobia would actually be the third iteration. I think it’s pretty solid so far and hopefully I don’t have to go all the way to six to get it finished. It’s actually become something of a spy thriller.
I’m around 25% of the way through the first book. I’m writing much slower, partially because the rate at which I was writing Void Domain was getting a bit much in recent months, and partially because I want to write it a bit better from the start.
Aside from me having to go through these iterations before I know I want to stick with a project, I want to maybe try my hand at publishing. Maybe. After finishing Toxiphobia, I think I’ll try shopping it around to some agents. If there aren’t any takers, I think I’ll try self-publishing it on Amazon or something for a few dollars while also posting the story for free on WordPress. Perhaps one scene a week or something like that.
Don’t know, that’ll be probably a year from now at the earliest. I have to finish the story before anything.
If publishing doesn’t work out and self-publishing does well enough, I’ll probably do it again with a second book.
I think the serial format is great, but I also think that it caused a lot of problems with Void Domain. There were several points over the course of Void Domain where I had to keep writing even though I really should have paused to reevaluate what I was writing. This wound up with several chapters that were filled with essentially filler or poor quality writing because I didn’t know how I wanted to get from point A to point B.
It hurts to lose the regular readers. I’m no Worm, but I think I’ve gathered together a fairly sizable readership. But I hope that writing an entire book at once will alleviate the above problem, resulting in a higher quality end work.
We’ll see how it works out I suppose. If you have questions or comments about any of that, feel free to post in the comments.
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Fan Fiction
This section is about my fanfics, not about any fanfics about Void Domain. I’m not aware of any Void Domain fanfics, though I did get a PM on SpaceBattles about someone wanting to use the setting. Don’t know if they ended up doing so or not. I should probably check my SpaceBattles account. It’s been a while.
So, if you found Void Domain through my SpaceBattles fanfics (either Clone or Ziz), you probably have noticed that I haven’t updated either of those in a while. That started out, as noted above, because of a bit of stress regarding ending Void Domain.
However, it’s been some time since then and I really haven’t felt any real drive to return to either of those series. I’m sorry for that. Maybe I’ll come back some day. I did write the first few chapters of Ziz nearly six months before starting it as a proper series. However, I’ve no plans at the moment to return to either.