Hi all. This update’s a bit different. I’ll try to keep it short, and there’s a TL;DR at the bottom.

The last year and a half has been pretty hellish for me, with both the pandemic and my nerve injury. I’m recovering, but it’s been slow and intermittent.  Through that, this story has kept me going, and I am beyond grateful for y’all’s support.  Thank you.

As you might know, I’ve been exploring traditional publishing as an option for Pith.  I’ve been making edits with voice typing – I’ve cut characters, folded plotlines, and made big structural changes. With my current draft, I’ve cut over 300,000 words from the webnovel version to approach an acceptable word count for a debut author. I wasn’t even sure if this was possible until recently, so I didn’t want to share the news.  But, I’m now confident that I will have a publishable manuscript of Volume 1 for tradpub by mid-next year. I’m within striking distance.

During this process, after a lot of thinking, I’ve realized traditional publishing fits my work habits better than web novels. I prefer lots of planning and countless perfectionist edits – none of which fit the intense schedule and chapter-by-chapter releases of serial writing. I’m recovering, but with my nerve injury, it’s impossible for me to churn out new chapters at a reasonable rate, with all the intense supplementary work involved.

So I’m going for traditional publishing. And from what I’ve researched, publishers prefer novels that are not available on the web. While the new story is much revised from the web novel version, the odds would be better if it was no longer online, sooner rather than later.

I want to give Pith the best possible chance for success. So I apologize, but in two weeks, I will be removing Pith from everywhere I have it posted. When I recover from my nerve injury, I will no longer be posting chapters online. And I will be taking down my Patreon.

I sincerely apologize to all of you who wanted to see more chapters online. And I apologize for getting injured and not updating for most of this year. I am especially grateful to all of you who supported me on Patreon – you will be featured in the acknowledgments of anything I manage to publish, with those who ever joined the Exemplar Tier to be featured prominently. That being said, if anyone on Patreon is unhappy with this development, just reach out to me on Discord (or on Patreon before I take it down) and I’ll gladly provide a Venmo refund.

For those of you who want to see the next version of Pith, I want to keep you in the loop. So I’m going to leave the Discord up (link here), and will use that to provide progress updates. While I can’t say for sure, I intend to start querying with a drafted manuscript sometime next year, so I hope to have news before too long.

Thank you so, so much for reading this story, and to anyone who left support in the comments, joined the Discord, or subscribed on Patreon. I could not have done this without you.

TL;DR: I am taking down Pith from the Internet in two weeks, for the purposes of traditionally publishing it. The discord will stay up (link here).  I’m beyond grateful for your support.