This is an author’s note, not a chapter, so it isn’t locked.
For those who don’t remember much about roman numerals from school (as I doubt it ever helped you in any way other than trying to puzzle out the copyright date of a movie) ‘D’ is the roman numeral for 500. The real Chapter 500 will post immediately following this item. Thanks to all my readers for sticking with me this far.
I predicted in the last century mark that I wouldn’t reach 500. I hesitate to make this mistake again, although it wasn’t a mistake, per se. I was debating between two completely different endings, and thought I would be taking the shorter one, but in the end I decided the short one would be too rushed.
As it turns out, however, the non-rushed ending is turning out to be very non-rushed. As in, I feel like I’ve barely started it.
The rushed version would have completely skipped the deaths of Mother and Uncle Owen and proceeded via a different impetus to an end that is, in the story I am writing, still a bit in the future. Shindzha would have shown up much sooner and when matters became critical, Tiana and Rod would have been dealing with running the southern half of the country for Owen rather than Ged. Also, Mireia was never going to be a Servant, although she was still Rod’s future concubine and Rhea’s priestess.
So yeah, here we are, most of the way through a Volume 10 that would have been the final volume, but is instead Volume 10 out of probably 12 total. And right now, we’ve barely finished with most of the stuff I was going to skip.
I hope I don’t regret making that prediction.
Of course, with these events included, the ending is decidedly different in many ways, but I’m glad I stuck to my original plan. Not because I will still be writing for perhaps another year, but because I now suspect the shorter version would have felt rushed.
We’re coming up on four years of Tiana, believe it or not. The first chapter was posted on March 20, 2019. It’s been quite a journey. I know I’ve lost a number of readers who decided the story was never going anywhere. I hope it is clear to everyone left that it indeed is going somewhere, and we will get there in the end. I give my profound thanks to everyone who has stuck with me to this point.
I’ve mentioned this before, but I do have another story set on Huade, in which Tiana is a character but not the MC. It takes place in the future of the current story, and now that it isn’t a spoiler to say so, I will tell you that the MC is one of her daughters. That’s all I will reveal at this time. Oh, except that Kiki is definitely in it.
She’s also about to start showing up a lot more in this story, by the way.
But, I will probably not immediately publish that story, because I am focusing instead on a completely different story. Actually, there have been three of them, because I kept bouncing back and forth between them, but I’m pretty settled on which one will be first now. I will begin publishing it before I wrap up Substitute Hero, so if you stick with this story, you’ll see the announcement on that one.
This website has been having issues lately, though, so it is possible I will publish the new story in a different venue. We’ll have to wait and see. If CrN continues in a somewhat functional manner, I will probably publish in both this and one other location.
So, Chapter 500 for real will be released shortly after this publishes. If you don’t see a next chapter button yet, then you jumped on this the second it published, and need to reload the page.
Thanks for reading!!!
