Void Domain Author’s Note 10

Well, here we are. Two and a halfish years. Somewhere around a million words (I haven’t actually added them all up at the time of writing this).

Thanks everyone for reading.

Void Domain has ended.

Honestly, I don’t know what to say. I’ve done nine of these Author’s Note segments. This one feels a bit different though. Probably because there isn’t a ‘tune in next time, same bat time, same bat channel’ feeling anymore. People who read these author’s notes are probably aware that I write several chapters ahead of the currently posted chapter. As such, I’ve actually been done with Void Domain for two to threeish weeks before you’re all reading this.

Let me tell you, it’s an absolutely eerie feeling waking up in the morning and not having Void Domain to write.

Anyway, I suppose we could start out looking at Book 10 in particular.

The ritual occupied almost the entirety of the book, minus a few chapters right at the start and at the end. I worried a ton over focusing so much on the ritual, but it was a huge part of the overarching plot that’s been hanging over the everyone’s shoulders for several books now. I think it turned out quite well though. There was a lot of standing around and talking, but I think it was an interesting sort of talking. Though the few fight scenes, mostly those with Gertrude, were good as well.

Of course, I might be biased.

The ending… Oh boy, I had a fairly concrete idea of how I wanted the series to end ever since I started writing. When I finally got to the last six or so chapters, I was stressing out quite a bit. Enough so that I actually dropped both of my fanfics (which I’ll talk about later) to focus on Void Domain. Fun fact: I scrapped more words in the last ten chapters than I had over the entire rest of the series.

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.

Neither do I have any other fanfics in mind. Every time I think about starting something, I keep thinking that I should be working on my original fiction instead. Which is a problem I had before starting Void Domain—despite wanting to write a few casual fanfics, I couldn’t. Maybe after I get Toxiphobia going at full steam, I’ll get a drive for fan fiction again.

Though I have had a few thoughts about writing a quest. Just a few though, I doubt anything will come of it.

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Reading Recommendation

Oh! Almost forgot about this section.

Think of something to recommend before posting.

New Danganronpa V3 is actually the thing I most recently read. I say thing because it isn’t really a book. It’s a visual novel. If you don’t know what a visual novel is, it’s a book with pictures. Typically of Japanese origin.

DRV3 is the third mainline series, though mostly unrelated to the rest of the series. Actually discussing the series is a bit difficult as just about everything is spoilers and spoilers will hurt your enjoyment of the series as a whole.

So if you haven’t heard of Danganronpa, it is essentially a cross between murder mystery and Battle Royale/Hunger Games. 16 students (give or take) are locked into a school and told that the person who successfully gets away with murder will be allowed to leave. The gameplay is actually most similar to Phoenix Wright in that you go around detectiving murders and figuring out whodunnit, but it is mostly text that you read with the occasional choice of what item or person to interact with before another item or person. Features a great soundtrack, fun characters and character designs, and people filled with Pepto Bismal instead of blood.

If any of that sounds interesting in the slightest, I highly recommend not looking anything up about the series (don’t visit wikis or YouTube). All three of the mainline games and the action game spin-off are on Steam as well as the PSVita. Some of the games might be on PS4 as well.

Though, you should be aware that the series has a bit of a weird spot after the second game. You’re supposed to play the spin-off then watch the anime.

So the series order is as follows:

Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc (Game (or anime but the anime is pretty meh))
Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair (Game)
Danganronpa Another Episode: Ultra Despair Girls (Spin-Off Game)
Danganronpa 3: The End of Hope’s Peak Highschool (Anime, you’re supposed to alternate episodes between the Despair side and Future side (Example: Watch Despair 01, then Future 01, then Despair 02, then Future 02, etc.))
Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony (Game)

Then, if you get really into it, there are a few actual novels that you can read as well, but I’ll leave it there for now.

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Special Thanks

Special thanks to x for the typo reports on every single chapter. No idea who you are but I really do appreciate that.

And thanks to everyone else who commented on the chapters as well. I didn’t usually reply all that often; I was never sure if I should answer things or leave them as speculation, so I usually ended up doing nothing at all. However, it was fun to read all your thoughts as the story went on.

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What else?

I’m probably forgetting a million things that I want to say. Luckily I’m writing this in advance of posting it so I have some time to think of more things to write. Hmm…

Thanks again to everyone who made it this far! There were a few rough patches, but it turned out alright I think.

If you are interested in any future projects I might have, consider clicking the follow button somewhere on this page (top right?). It sends an email when I make a new post and I’m sure I’ll make a post if I publish a book or just decide to serialize something else.

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Statistics

Number of updates late or missed: 0! Yay!

Book Ten Stats:
Chapters: 37
Wordcount: 126,539 (according to WordPress’ built in word counter)
POV counts (max of one count per chapter):

Eva: 30
Zoe: 6
Devon: 5
Juliana: 4
Catherine: 3
Nel: 2
Genoa: 1
Riley Cole: 1

Total Stats:
Books: 10
Chapters: 257 (+7 extra chapters)
Wordcount: 1,034,914 (including extras)

Now that you’ve finished my first work, perhaps you would like to continue to one of my others? Click the tiles below if they catch your eye.