SYNOPSIS
Brakket Magical Academy in Northwestern United States is on its last legs. Enrollment of new students is at an all time low. The academy instructors go out to recruit prospective children other magical academies have ignored.
Eva is one such recruit. After witnessing her perform magic no teenage mage should have learned, an instructor of the academy offers her a full ride scholarship. Eva does not turn down the opportunity to learn magic in a proper capacity and quickly ships out to Montana.
Barely a day there and things already seem off. Every student has the same scholarship, odd-smelling men wander the town, and a spider demon has decided Eva’s dorm room is the place to be.
A Complete story
10 Books
257 Chapters
1,035,000 Words
About Void Domain
Void Domain is the first story I ever wrote. Not just put out for others to see, but actually wrote. I was quite proud of it and still am, but I do feel that it has quite a number of flaws. The beginning and ending of book four is especially a bit of spot I take issue with along with some characterization and character motivation.
Saying all that is perhaps not the best advertisement, but I think it is important to reflect on what was in order to improve in the future. I believe Void Domain is still an enjoyable story as a whole, so give it a shot!
— TC
The Story idea sounds good. Do you have an overall idea of how your story will pan out? Like, the main points and the ending?
From experience (though it’s mostly writing short stories and following 20+ novels at the same time, and at least 40 novels read completely), novels/serials which do not have a planned out basic story line, end up on hiatus (or dropped, eventually) or stretched out to the point it gets boring, Even if the story is really good and the author has an above-average command of English.
I have a very clear ending in mind and several points I need to hit to reach that ending, but a vast majority of the stuff in between is in flux. General ideas but nothing concrete yet. My outlines tend to get followed strictly for a few chapters before deviating to the point where I have to redo the outline. Plotting too far ahead would lead to madness, I feel.
Because of the web serial nature, I am planning for a lot of content. Or perhaps I have room for a lot of content. Most web novels that I have read tend to be quite long and I do enjoy having some meat to read rather than sit down for a few hours and blow through a measly 80-120k words.
I’ll likely accelerate into the ending to, at the very least, provide closure should things get out of hand in any of the ways you mentioned. The ending is something I could paint a picture of–if I could paint, that is–so I do not anticipate many problems in that department.
Thank goodness. Thank you for replying.
Now, onward to the serial!
When do you expect this to get wrapped up?
This story is awesome. I really enjoy it. Thank you so much for writing it. Keep up the good work. The characters are interesting and engaging and the magic system is diverse. Again big fan.
Just wanted to give you my appreciation as a reader and maybe some extra motivation to keep writing.
Love your story!
Hopefully you will never stop improving your writing skills and continue creating great stories for the world
Hey thanks! I’m glad you’ve enjoyed!
Is there plans for a new project, now this one is done?
I talk a little about that on the author’s notes for book 10. Short answer: There isn’t a plan for anything right away, but eventually I hope to do more.
Will you be writing any more books, me and a large group of my friends love this!
Currently writing one called Vacant Throne over at http://tcthrone.wordpress.com/ 🙂
do you have any recommendations for stories with similar a premise?
Hi! I’ve decided to read Void Domain, and since reading it in the browser is not fun, I wrote this script to convert it to FB2. Requires Python 3.7 (earlier 3.x versions are not guaranteed to be compatible). Can be used by naive double-clicking if you’re a Windows user.
Feel free to use it (it’s AGPL).
Please disregard the post above – I forgot to remove some debugging code from the script. The fixed version is [removed, see below post]. If you are a moderator and are reading this, please delete the link in the previous post.
Done.
A-a-and I did it again. There was some code to skip the navigation nodes (Back | Index | Next), but it was too broad and ended up also removing author’s notes and really any paragraphs with non-default alignment (such as the Voice of the Void in chapter 25 of the first book).
I removed that. Now it doesn’t ignore paragraphs with attributes. Instead of that it later post-processes the element tree to remove navigation paragraphs and links with “>>” and “<<" in their names. Also, the text is now escaped when printing (before I made them gone, the aforementioned links broke XML markup due to lack of escaping).
Also, lists now use real bullet points and have correct line breaks. Sadly, FB2 does not support lists natively, so I had to be…creative… to get some indication that list items are nested. FB3 would have been better, since it has support for lists, but it's far too complex for me to create, and too new to be supported in most readers.
Here is the new code: https://pastecode.xyz/view/7b165107
As always, please hide/delete the link in my previous post (if someone wants to look at previous versions, they are still at pastecode and the links to them are there).
P.S. I've almost finished the first book. One thing I've noticed is that you seem to miss the fact that a lot of characters are children. Eva is 13, and I assume that her classmates are roughly the same. Therefore it's weird that you would sometimes describe one of them, e.g. Juliana, as "a woman" (if memory serves, that was the Halloween costume shopping scene).
Sorry it took so long, I was actually at a wedding over the past week. I could have still edited it, but just forgot after checking my email and only remembered just now. Removed the old link.
As for your P.S., yeah, that is a bit of a problem throughout the entire work. It has also been pointed out that they don’t often act their age in some circumstances. Though, at least in Eva’s case, a hard life does equal having to grow up faster.
That’s fine, it’s not like anything hinges on the old links being erased.
Here’s a small update: https://pastecode.xyz/view/220b3088
Fixes a few stupid errors that made the output files somewhat malformed (most reader software likely would have been able to read these malformed files just fine, but hyperlinks were broken).