We made it!

Hello, readers! Welcome to another end-of-arc author’s note slash blog post slash postmortem slash peek behind the curtain. This time around, I want to talk a little about writing, and then we’ll get into what’s going to be happening during the hiatus and next arc. I’ll also be posting a writeup about the inspirations for various characters over on Patreon for supporters.

Announcement: Goodies!

Before anything else, I want to highlight that there’s a side story publicly available on the site/Patreon for when you’re done reading this AN. This is part of a larger paradigm shift regarding Patreon content; basically, everybody’s getting more stuff. The short version:

• Side stories are becoming public! They’ll be posted publicly on the Patreon and the site. Right now, there’s just the one, but I hope to write another during the hiatus, and then one every few months going forward. There may still be some paywalled ones, but I’m gonna default to making them public.
• Patreon backlog is increasing from one advance chapter to three starting next arc, and the price is staying the same if you sign up before May 1! That’s 15k-25k words of advance chapters for $5. After that point, the price will be $10, which is still a better deal than now.

See this public post on Patreon for more details!

The Word Mines

Now, I shall blog a little.

Writing a webserial is hard. Sunspot posts one chapter a week (and I take every fourth week off), but they’re long chapters, 4000-10,000 words depending on the week. The total word count in this arc was 124,930, meaning the average word count per chapter was about 6,250 words. That’s a lot of words! Readers who come from other serials may observe that this is roughly half the weekly output of other authors like Hungry or Thundamoo, and only like a sixth of that of pirateaba, that monster of monsters.

This is something that sometimes weighs on me a bit—but then again, all of those writers have far more mileage under their belts, and are necessarily outliers to be as successful as they are. So I’m not too broken up about it. There’s a universe where Sunspot’s weekly wordcount goes up, or I start a second serial. But we’re a while off from either of those, I think—I’m busy! For example, this arc had a few interruptions in posting around 2.06 and 07; that’s because I was busy graduating from…a bunch of stuff, actually. Hopefully, I’m done doing that, because it was really quite a busy time. However, I continue to have Stuff To Do IRL, so it’s possible there’ll also be some interruptions in arc 3.

As I said, it’s hard. Writing at the pace I do is only really possible because of the beta readers. I thank them in every chapter for a reason—their incessant poking and prodding helps me maintain a reasonably steady input so I’m not just cramming for the deadline every week, and their insights into the story are invaluable. I truly could not write this story without their help. If you’re interested in joining the beta reader team, we’ll be recruiting 2-3 more during the hiatus via the Discord.

I’m still growing as a writer. Readers seem to think the back half of this arc was excellent overall, for which I’m very grateful, but I found the action scenes to be quite a challenge. There’s a lot of moving parts! I’ve learned a lot from it, though, and expect it to get easier moving forward. On the flip side, I think the weakest part of the arc was the slice-of-life sections in the first few chapters. I enjoy writing slower paced character stuff, and I’d like to think I’m good at it, but giving them strong momentum is something I’ve struggled with. I’ll do my best to polish that aspect of my writing in arc 3.

Overall, though, I’m really proud of myself for getting this arc done, and I’m blown away by the story’s growth over the five-ish months it took to get here. Between RR and Shub we’ve gained over a thousand followers! The ads I’ve been running on RR have also performed exceptionally well, which is awesome. And the Discord has been, to put it bluntly, popping off—370 members at time of writing is ludicrous relative to the follower count, and it’s been so, so rewarding to see a community form around this little story. The general story discussion, the theories, the live-reads, and especially the fanfic (yeah, we have fanfic now, what the hell) bring me so much joy to witness and participate in. It blows my mind to have fans, and I’m so very grateful.

The Hiatus

Sunspot is on break until at least May 1. I’ve got various IRL errands to deal with, a whole lot of story-related stuff to do, and then a bunch of backlog to write. Here’s some Sunspot stuff that’ll happen before Arc 3:

• The Patreon restructuring mentioned above
• The beta reader applications mentioned above
• Probably one more side story
• More website upgrades. We’re gonna add an RSS feed!
• A Bluesky account for the story
• I’m commissioning character art!

Arc 3 will be titled Threading The Needle. I’m a little embarrassed to say that there’s no new cover in the pipeline yet—I haven’t even picked an artist. If you have artist recommendations, by all means, send them my way!

That’s pretty much all from me for now. To recap: thanks for reading, check out the side story and consider joining the Patreon before prices go up on May 1. If you have questions or further thoughts about the story, I’m always around in the Discord, so don’t be afraid to start a conversation!

See you all in a monthish!