Yay for getting a good review from a random :D
You've only spent slightly longer than me on a project XD (I'm at 17 years currently on mine x_x) I know what you mean about the self promotion. I was getting screamed at a lot about doing it but I hate doing it so I don't and hope things will magically work out, good thing I'm doing this because I want to and anyone else actually liking it will be a bonus XD
That's my main thing xD just hoping things will magically work out! 😅
My main goal with all of this is to just finish this whole series, for me. I want them printed out and on my bookshelf, for meee. But then, a tiny egotistical part of me is like, "But, these characters are my babies. They must be loved. BY EVERYONE!" 👀
17 years is okay! These projects take so long because we love them and nurture them and want them to be the best they can be. 💕
Careful that way lies a potential MARY SUE SYMPTOM :D lol (don't mind me long running joke between my sibling and I, basically everything makes a character Mary Sue because that's what the litmus tests make it seem like sometimes XD)
I'm just glad to find out I'm not abnormal in that regard as a lot of my friends who don't do this type of thing seem to think it should be churned out as quickly as possible just to "Get it out there" (I have seen what happens when you do that kind of thing and it's not always pretty).
Ooooooh, yes. If I churned this out as quick as I could just to get it out there, we would have this very linear story with a literal Mary Sue xD who speaks in the painfully pretentious pompous language indicative of the Shakespearean era. There'd also be fifty thousand adjectives making up the majority of my wordcount 🤣
(But at least it would be out there, haha! In all of it's first rough draft ghastliness.)
You're not abnormal at all! 😁 Sometimes it just... takes that long.
Not to mention the plot chasms that when you go back and edit you go HOW THE HELL DID I MISS THIS THE FIRST FIFTEEN THOUSAND TIMES XD
Or is that just me?
YES! Hahaha. I tend to write character-driven things over a plot that expands a series... if I didn't spend all these years on this, I wouldn't even have a plot LOL. Actually, I wouldn't even have a couple of my characters!! 😱
(I wrote Vengeance about fifty times, and every single time I rewrote it something new would pop into mind, or something would at last click for the future, and eeeee. These things take tiiiiime!!!)
So you have a world history outline possibly covering hundreds if not thousands of years too? 😆
(I ended up with one of those because I needed to work out why some characters were acting a certain way I didn’t understand but seemed to be cultural and now not only do I understand but there’s a lot more characters in different times that I’m going to need to revisit eventually 😵)
YES!! 😅 Vengeance is actually the result of just that! 🤣
Originally my story started at what is now going to be Book Three. Then I started thinking about the past and how things got to be the way they were, and LO! A new start to the series! Basically a novel-length prologue, haha.
The whole thing expands over a thousand years. So we have Vengeance, then a few hundred years later these other peoples who have connections to what happened in Vengeance, then a few hundred years after -that- we have what was my original story. Then it all comes to an end!
(In a fashion that would not have been possible had I not marinated in this story for twenty long years haha!)
Writers. We're all clearly insane. 🤣😆