(I feel like I should clarify something right off the bat: Despite the title, I don’t have an official date for the release of Volume 2 yet. I’d like to promise that it will be out before the end of September, but it all depends on how long the artwork takes and how my editing/formatting turns out. I still believe I can make that date, but I won’t set it in stone just yet.)
With that out of the way, now I can get into what’s been on my mind. I’ve wanted to write this particular update for a long time now, but I put it off with the justification that I didn’t like my old website and wanted to wait until I had a real place to make blog posts. Well, now I have a real website, and my excuse is gone. So, let’s talk about future releases of Restart Again.
When I started this project, I had no intention of sharing it with anybody aside from a few close friends. Volume 1 took me five and a half months to write, from early March of 2019 to late August, and I immediately began work on Volume 2. It was much later in the year when I realized how easy self-publishing could be through Amazon, and after commissioning some artwork and doing a round of editing, Volume 1 was officially released on March 1st, 2020. According to my first blog post, I already had 70k words written on Volume 2 by that point.
That brings us to today. Volume 2 has a completed draft and is coming close to a release date, and I’m working everyday on Volume 3. At the time of this blog post, I have 46K words written. While my average words per day have increased quite a bit since I first started, that still puts me behind the arbitrary schedule in my mind. When Volume 2 comes out, whether I want it to or not, it sets a precedent for how long people should expect to wait between volumes. If it does indeed release in September, that says to people “we can expect two books a year”.
I know it’s silly to hold myself to that, but it still bothers me when I think ahead and know I won’t be able to keep that up. Things would be different if this were my job; it’s a lot harder to make those excuses when you have all day every day to work on the project. As things stand now, I greatly enjoy writing as a hobby and want to keep it that way. I don’t want to burn myself out on this project by trying too hard and spending every moment of free time writing to meet that made up schedule.
I feel particularly bad about any fans reading the project on Royal Road. Since I discovered the website in late March, I’ve had new content releasing on there every single week. I had plenty of chapters to release for Volume 1, and my Volume 2 chapters are almost done posting now (the last chapter will be released August 16th). Once that happens, the project will linger for a bit until the second Volume releases for purchase on Amazon. At that point, I’ll have to delete everything except for the first three chapters (due to the rules for adding the book to the Kindle Unlimited Program).
What happens then? I certainly won’t have enough written of Volume 3 to begin posting rough draft chapters every week, so it’ll just have to sit in obscurity for a while as a sad advertisement to go buy the full products on Amazon while promising “New stuff soon! (TM)”. That makes me feel pretty bad, but I don’t see any way around it.
This post has been a terrible ramble, so I’ll try to condense my thoughts here. TLDR: Volume 2 will be officially coming out in the next few months (hopefully by the end of September, stay tuned), and I’m still working as hard as I can on Volume 3. There’s not enough time in the day for me to keep up with a decent release schedule after that, and people will probably have forgotten about the project by the time Volume 3 releases. When Volume 2 has its official release, I have to delete 90% of the chapters from Royal Road, and that account will sit dormant for a while, which I apologize for. I will continue to update this website as much as is appropriate in the meantime.
That’s all I’ve got for today. Exciting things are coming, and whether it takes 3 weeks, 3 months or 3 years, I promise the project will someday be finished. Until that point, I hope you’re all safe out there, and of course, thanks for reading.
~Adam
P.S. I know this post was a bit of a downer, so here’s the rough sketch of the character art for Lia. I think it’s really cool to see how things evolve and change through the art process, and maybe you will too. Of course, thank you to @4hnyu on Twitter for the art!
