Why Changing Things Might Be for the Better

Through the last few years, I’ve come out with five books, though it’s technically eight.

I released a beta-version story called The Lost Ships of Lim Wierre in May 2024 as the second light novel in the Orchestrylus Odyssey.

Later that year, I released Numinous, a bridge novella that I was not happy with at all.

I also released Lowella, a social commentary on parasocial relationships and supernatural elements in the world of streaming. I was happy with this one, even though I moved the release date twice.

For Numinous, I ended up revising the novella into something I’m happy with, keeping the novel short and changing things around a bit. Now it is Numinous: The Golden Tunists.

That novel met its deadline.

With Ships, I ended up scrapping it as a light novel and reworked it into the modern incarnation of The Symphonist, releasing it in early 2025 as a longer novel, and then scrapping The Last Key of Maestraumus as the third novel in the series, turning the base of that into The Voided Promises of Noble Songs.

Sometimes, to get better results, we need to change things around. Working existing stories or projects into something that will give them new life.

The Symphonist light novel went from 43,000 words to 84,000 words and turned out better for it.

My initial plan of releasing shorter light novels in the series is now defunct, and I reformed the process into creating something like a massive epic with full-length novels numbering into twenty books.

We should always do what’s best for our art, even if that means slowing down and taking the time to craft the prose into a fine sculpture instead of an amorphous blob of words.

For me, this has led to delaying novels instead of meeting some arbitrary date. Auminous, The Symphonist, and Numinous: The Golden Tunists came out on time.

The rest of them did not.

This taught me to make better deadlines and decisions for my work.

My thought process now is to make craft-level masterworks instead of pumping things out.

The next Orchestrylus Odyssey book will come out during the summer, and while it is a recent novel, it has some form of the basis of one of my scrapped books.

Sometimes writers throw drafts away entirely. I did that for A Knight Stained Black a few times.

I pushed it toward the summer of ’25 because the story never came out quite right.

It is a digital-only book and will remain that way, but sometimes I throw it in as a free story at the end of other books.

I made a joke post last year about how many times I’ve delayed something using the characters from The Symphonist in a little skit.

I am quite self-aware and have no issues with self-deprecating humor.

Changing my books resulted in better books.

Writing is like a difficulty spike once you set a certain standard. It can throw you for a loop, and then you’re set on meeting that caliber every time.

Crown of the Orphic Queen will come out soon, and due to the story and the retelling aspect of it, I think it might do well.

It’s now longer than 65,000 words in its entirety as its last incarnation.

The words flow like honey caught on the dipper instead of plain reading. This hones my skills for a greater story because I believe the craft of the book is just as important as the story itself.

There are some cheeky reasons I do some of the things I do—but that’s best left alone for a post such as this.

The successful version of yourself or your art might not look like how it was first envisioned.

And you know what?

That’s totally okay.

Happy writing!

P.S. AI might be able to pump out your books, but then you’ve sold the art for the whims of death. Don’t use AI to write your novels if you want to do it the “true” way.