Hello everyone! I’m back again with another update post for you, sporting the exact same joke as last year. As of (almost) today, the Restart Again series has been officially published for 3 years now! Unfortunately, hitting the exact anniversary date is quite difficult, as for some reason I decided to publish the first book on February 29th, 2020, AKA Leap Day. I’ll actually be able to celebrate the official 1st (4th) anniversary next year, and you best believe I’ll be making the same longwinded joke. However, there’s more to talk about than just anniversaries, so let’s dive on into the blog post!
My current draft for Volume 5 has just passed 121,500 words. We’re rapidly approaching (and will most assuredly pass) the word count for Volume 2, but I’m not sure we’ll quite hit the 180K mark of Volume 3, and we certainly won’t hit the gargantuan 200K+ count of Volume 4. I’m at a little under 20K written from my last blog post, and while that is a bit slow compared to where I’d like my pace to be, I’ll cut myself some slack this time around. The chapter I just finished writing (Chapter 13, for which you have no context), was quite a difficult one to write. Writing for characters who are far smarter than I am is always difficult, and this was a chapter comprised almost entirely of dialogue with one such character. As fun and challenging as it was to write, I’m very happy to have it out of the way! Lots of interesting reveals and fun plot threads were laid down, and now I’ve moved onto a chapter that is much easier to plot out. Let’s hope that boosts my progress a bit between now and the next blog post!
Now, I have just mentioned Chapter 13, for which you have no context, but what if you did have context for it? Well, consider yourselves imminently contextualized, because Restart Again: Volume 5 draft chapters will start going live on my Royal Road page in March! This release schedule stands in stark contrast to how I handled the previous volumes, which only started going live on RR after the entire draft was finished. I had a lot of reasons for posting this way: I wanted to have the chapters edited before they went up, I wanted to try to maintain a consistent release schedule, and my processing time between a first draft and publishing was far longer back then than it is now.
A lot of things have changed since those days! I’ve been doing line edits in vivo during my drafting, sending the chapters over to my editor in batches of 5 (instead of dumping an entire 200K+ word draft on her at once), which I think has been quite helpful for both of us. My end processing has also sped up substantially; not only have I become proficient at navigating Amazon’s backend processes and getting my manuscripts formatted correctly, but for the first time in my publishing history, ALL of the art for this volume is already completed, and has been for quite some time! If I want to get all of these draft chapters posted before I publish the novel (no date on that yet, by the way!), I’ll have to start putting them out sooner rather than later. There’s not a whole lot of time to wait once the draft is done!
The one thing I didn’t address in that list is the release schedule, which is the one thing that still gives me a bit of pause. You have all seen that I am a terribly slow writer, and I can’t guarantee I will have my first draft finished in time to get every chapter posted on its proper date. There might be a few weeks of lag time in between chapter sections near the end of the novel if I don’t get the words down, but I think that’s fine! None of this is officially scheduled in any way, so the only person I’ll really be disappointing is myself if I can’t get everything finished “on time”. Also, notice I said “chapter sections” there; in similar fashion to Volume 4, most of the chapters of Volume 5 are quite lengthy (10K+ words each), so they’ll get posted in multiple chunks. I’ll most likely split them in half, and that might lead to some dissatisfying cliffhangers between sections, but I think it’s the only chance I have of not immediately outpacing myself with my scheduled releases.
This is all still very top-of-mind and not concrete as of yet. I don’t have an official date on when the chapters will start coming out, but my current guess would be March 12th (one week from this coming Sunday, should you find yourself reading this post on or near its release). That gives me time to chop up the chapters, set up the scheduled uploader on RR, and post a notification on RR itself to let my followers there know the chapters are coming. I’m also planning to write a quick summary of Volumes 1-4 to serve as a refresher for those of you who read the books on their initial release all those years ago. I intend to keep that post updated in the future, so when Volumes 6 and 7 start to appear (my goodness, years from now no doubt), you’ll always have an easy place to find your concentrated Restart Again lore and get back up to date!
I’ll cut this blog post off here and leave you all to anxiously await the drafts of Volume 5. When everything is settled and scheduled, I’ll make a very brief announcement post with links to the Royal Road account (click HERE if you want to get there early and follow me before you forget!).
Thank you all again for supporting this series for three whole years. It’s been an incredible journey so far, and the series has expanded well beyond what I could’ve ever hoped for when I silently published Volume 1 that Leap Day night back in 2020. There’s plenty more to tell in the story of Restart Again, so I hope you’ll stick around with me for another 3 years (and probably more!).
Until then, though, stay safe out there, and as always, thanks for reading!
~Adam
