With the post of epilogue 14 today, Winter’s Tale has reached its conclusion.
There are a lot of ways I could describe how huge this story has become. Fourteen books, which between them (and including interlude chapters) are just over 1.3 million words in length. The better part of four years since I started writing it. More hours spent writing than I could even make a decent estimate of.
Looking back on it this story has a lot of flaws. There are things I wish that I’d done differently, things that would have made the story better. There are things that never quite made it into the story, things that didn’t fit together the way I wanted them to, things that I simply didn’t have the skill to write properly. But on the whole I’m satisfied with this story. I think that it came out okay. I hope you do too.
It’s possible that I will return to this world at some point. I still have ideas for stories to tell here, and there are still characters that I think could make for good stories. But that won’t happen soon, I think. I need to get some space and give this setting some time off. And no, I won’t be writing more stories about Winter. He’s done.
I won’t be posting regular chapters over the next two weeks. This does not, however, mean that I won’t be writing. I have some maintenance work to do now that the story is done; I have to update the information on this site, as well as post the last few interludes and the last book for download. I also have some behind-the-scenes work to do on the side project I’ve been working on, which should be ready to unveil pretty soon now. This isn’t the most glamorous work, but it still needs doing.
The second thing I’m going to be doing is going over the old books and doing a bit of a retrospective look at them. I’ll be posting my thoughts in the comments on each chapter, going through a book each day for the next two weeks. These comments might include everything from criticism of my writing to things that were changed in edits or talking about how the chapter ties into the larger story. I don’t know whether anyone is really interested in reading this, but I think it will do me a lot of good to write it, and there’s a chance that someone will find it interesting.
The last, and I’m guessing the most exciting, thing that I’ll be doing is getting ready for the next series. I do have plans for the next story, and I’m expecting to start posting it in two weeks. There will be no interludes until after the first book is finished, because that just makes more sense to me; as such I’ll be cutting back to a Monday, Wednesday, Friday update schedule rather than trying for four chapters per week, since I’ve been having some trouble keeping that schedule lately anyway. I’ll say a bit more about the new story as it gets closer to time for it to start, but for now I’ll just say that it’s one I’ve been thinking about for a long time and I’m really excited to finally start actually writing it.
So look for that, and in the meantime, the retrospective will start tomorrow with Almost Winter.
I will look forward to your next work 😀 I thoroughly enjoyed this one I can say.
And if you make more stories in Winter’s world at some point I will look forward to it ^.^ the concepts and ideas put into it is very interesting.
This has certainly been an epic tale. The amount of effort and creativity you have into the story is truly extraordinary. I am amazed. I have read your “About” page and it is fascinating that you are only 20 years old and also a college grad. And have in the mean time, written this. You surely are extremely gifted and push yourself hard.
Thank you for so much entertainment. I look forward to your future endeavors.
Okay, sorry for the delay on that commentary. Some other things fell through which have left me scrambling a bit, and between that and a particularly unpleasant bout of influenza I’ve been pretty well out of commission for the past few days. The worst of the symptoms are past now, I think, but I’m still feeling a bit too out of it to be writing. I’ll try to start working on this again and getting things set up for the next story tomorrow, but they will both likely be delayed for a few days relative to my initial plans.
Sorry about that, but this one pretty much was out of my control; it was a lot of overlap in timing of bad news, and then the illness on top of it more or less made working on this impossible for the past few days. Rather unfortunate timing, but then, that generally seems to be how it goes.
uhm sry to ask but what about the next series?
also will it come on this website as well?
Not a problem. I’ve been trying to get a bit of a buffer built up so that I can, hopefully, avoid the delayed and canceled chapters which plagued the last couple books of this series. Unfortunately, right as I was getting over the influenza some other things fell apart in a rather messy way which consumed a lot of time that I’d been planning to spend writing.
The series does have a good start on it now, though, and I just got done with the initial work of making arrangements to host it. It’ll be on another URL; I’m planning to keep this one set aside for this story rather than clutter it with more. I should have a post here tomorrow with the link to the next story and a more comprehensive status update.
Sorry again for the delays. This one was just about literally the worst timing things could have had, and I can honestly say that it’s just about impossible that this will happen again.
I am pleased that you are speaking to us again. I am excited to know that we will get to read more of your creative writing.