Only Villains Do That

Only Villains Do That

I have bad news and good news, faithful readers. First of all, I apologize for the long silence. This post is to update y'all on everything going on with this story.

The bad news is that it'll be a while yet before there are more chapters. On the advice of my therapist, I'm shifting my attention away from OVDT because this story is a massive source of stress for me. Despite how it appears, OVDT is not on a formal hiatus yet: my plan is to put it on one as soon as Book 4 is finished, and in the meantime, it is moving to a "whenever" update schedule. Meaning I will get chapters out as I can get them out, as I have time and spare energy and a healthy enough mental state.

But the good news:

1. While shifting focus away from OVDT, I've returned to my previous serial, The Gods are Bastards. It is currently updating with new chapters on its dedicated website, tiraas.net. You can binge the entire almost four million word story there, as well as following the new updates as they're posted. If that sounds like too much of a mouthful, though, I am also cross-posting the story here to Royal Road, linked in the comment below. If you haven't seen it on this site yet, it's going up at a rate of about three chapters a day, both to be less intimidating for new readers to follow along, and for old readers who want to catch up before reading the new chapters but don't want to binge the huge backlog all at once. When it eventually does catch up to the current date on tiraas.net, new chapters will go up there and here simultaneously.

2. Great news! OVDT has been signed with Podium Publishing and will be getting the full treatment: audiobook, ebook and paperback editions! This does carry the caveat that the early parts on RR will have to be stubbed once those come out, but we're early in the process and that's a few months out, at least. Probably closer to a year. Working with everybody at Podium has been fantastic and I'm incredibly excited about this.

Now, the second piece of good news does come with some caveats. The stubbing, yes, but also I have to re-edit the entire manuscripts for the first three books of OVDT, which both takes up a lot of my time and re-immerses me in the stressful headspace of this story that I'd been trying to step away from on my therapist's advice. None of this is great for me; it's already impacted my update schedule for he new TGAB chapters, causing me to miss a few in the last several weeks. Point being, this is definitely pushing back the arrival of new OVDT chapters.

So I still can't say when I'll be able to get back to putting out new chapters for this serial, or how often I'll manage to once I do.

What I will say is that I'm committed to finishing it. OVDT has a fully planned arc with an ending in mind, and it's very important for me to get all the way there. I don't know how long it'll take or how many times I'll have to hiatus it and step away before it comes, but unless I die before the story finishes, it will finish.

Thanks for reading, everybody. I appreciate you.