“How many are going to be demons, vampires, dragonkin, necromancers, or half-fae?”
“I would say hopefully none. We have enough excitement as is. However, the Nod Complex has been invited. I know at least a dryad will be arriving with them.”
“Yet a bunch of humans are expected to compete with demons?”
“Mr. Anderson,” Zoe said through pursed lips, “hopes to show off alternate methods of utilizing magic. A protest, if you will, against what he feels is a society stagnating by restricting itself to thaumaturgy.”
“Sounds like cheating to me.”
Zoe kept her mouth shut. The same thought had occurred to her. But it didn’t really matter. He would be getting the school’s name mentioned alongside the names of actually reputable schools. For the next school year, they might not have to go around, scrounging for students. Some might actually apply willingly.
“Who is running the betting pool on some disaster happening while the other schools are here?”
Zoe blinked in confusion. “I’m… What?”
“Figures you wouldn’t know,” Serena said, turning back to the window. “But somebody has to be gambling over this. Maybe I’ll try to sniff them out.” After a brief moment, she shook her head. “Though I don’t know why. Probably terrible odds on something happening and I’m certainly not betting against.”
Leaving her chair and walking around her desk, Zoe approached the vampire at the window with a long sigh. The fourth in seemingly as many minutes.
“Yeah,” she said, resting her forehead against the cool glass. “I wouldn’t bet against it either.”
Author’s Note 008
Hello, thanks for reading.
Book nine will continue as scheduled. No intermissions or interludes. Tune in next time for 009.001.
As with last time, I’d just like to say thanks before anything else. So thanks to all my supporters on Patreon and PayPal. I really do appreciate your support. And thanks to everybody else for reading my story!
I don’t know about all of you, but I had a lot of fun with book eight. It didn’t cover half as much as I wanted to cover, though I’m not sure why I don’t just plan for that. Pretty much all books so far haven’t gone exactly as planned.
Next book, we will finally be getting the other schools involved and start their little tournament. Something I know at least one of you have been waiting for since waaay back in book one.
Last Author’s Notes, I said two books left. Since one book has passed, that means one book left. Except… not. As mentioned, I didn’t cover as much as I had planned. How many books are left? No idea! Probably best not to listen to me on these sorts of things.
I’ve actually been thinking a lot lately about writing and characters. Specifically my writing and my characters. I posted a Worm fanfic titled Ziz (Simurgh!Taylor), only about 30k words worth as of writing this. Depressingly enough, I’m pretty sure that story that I’ve put about twenty minutes of thought into got at least a few thousand more viewers in two weeks than VD has gotten in the near two years that I’ve been writing it. Now, to be clear, I’m not mentioning that to whine about my numbers or anything, at least not too much, but simply to add context.
Some of those thousand people made their way to VD and started reading it. A tiny subset of that larger subset actually sent me private messages with critiques of Void Domain. That tiny subset is only about three people, but point still stands. Anyway, I sent messages back and forth to a few of them, discussing writing and my writing.
One of the big things I’ve decided is a problem is the lack of real consequences. The stakes in VD are almost always life or death, which is a fairly silly thing to have on the line as I’ve barely killed anyone. Even antagonists. If I were writing Game of Thrones (which I admit, I’ve never read or watched), death would be a valid consequence because of how frequently GRRM kills off his characters.
I touched on this in the previous Author’s Notes, but antagonists are another thing I feel I’m deficient in. Gertrude and Clement and the occasional Elysium Order are probably the best antagonists in the story. Sawyer, Willie, Des, not so much.
Honestly, it is likely too late to do much for proper antagonists. Gertrude and Clement have been a good shift, but too late. Still, something I’m heavily considering while thinking about new stories to write.
While on a semi-related topic, however, I’d like to pose a small question to people.
Chapters 004.020-004.024 are, in my opinion, the lowest point in the entire work. For a refresher, those covered the fight in Willie’s domain between Eva, Genoa, and Arachne. I’ve been considering outright deleting them and replacing them with a single chapter. Probably a simple battle to the death between the three of them without all the minions and nonsense, one that still ends up with Genoa stabbed and Juliana summoning Zagan. I’m not sure that it is the best choice, but it does need to hook into the rest of the story still and would at least get rid of all the meandering about with the cat-vampires and other things that I really don’t know what I was thinking at the time.
What do you all think?
Now for some side notes:
Again, thank you to everyone who has donated through either Patreon or PayPal.
As a reminder, I’ve posted a few chapters of a series that might be in the future for me on a second WordPress site. Tower Curator Preview! Yay! There are currently three stories with at least two chapters each, all of varying genres. You may have noticed little author’s notes at the bottom of some chapters during this book. If you’ve never clicked them, that’s what they were.
As for whether or not any of them will actually become real series after Void Domain, I’ve got no idea. I went through dozens of story ideas before settling down to write Void Domain. There are only three over there. Far from dozens. Though I will admit that I’ve started and have thrown out about five other first chapters that I haven’t even bothered to post.
I’ve also considered trying to find an agent and get published. Not Void Domain, as I still don’t think it is publish-worthy and it has already been published online—something publishers don’t like, I gather. If I go that route, there might not be a web serial. Or, if there is, it would probably be posted at a much slower rate and would not be what I am considering publishing.
Of course, that’s all merely in the consideration phase. I’ve barely looked up what I would need to do to find an agent, let alone actually get published. Though I do believe I need a complete novel that I haven’t put online.
So don’t worry too much, I’m mostly rambling anyway.
I’d like again to point out that a good amount of referrals to this story come from Top Web Fiction. As such, I would appreciate any extra votes in my direction. It is a quick click once a week and helps a lot.
On to the trivia section!
• The segment where Alicia died was originally intended to be a quick joke. “I wonder how Nel is doing,” Eva says, right before it cuts to Nel standing in a cartoonish bullet-hole outline in the wall behind her. It got a bit longer, but I think it was a fairly decent chapter. And added character development for Nel! Yay!