SelkieMyth
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Song is live on Royal Road! BTDEM Epilogue update
🕑 Added 2025-10-27 10:59:26 +0000 UTCHey all!
Song of the Gift-Giver is now life on Royal road! Please come on over, follow, favorite, rate, and review! https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/137312/song-of-the-gift-giver
Now look, I know you're probably wondering "Selkie, why? We're on Patreon already. How does this help you?"
It's pure algorithm stuff. Royal Road rewards growth, and I'd love to capture readers early on. Right now is the time to push the numbers. More views, more ratings, more reviews = Song gets higher on all the charts = more people will see it and read it = success!
Anything you're willing to do would be a HUGE help.
Schedule!
Guess who wrote 7 chapters last week?
If you guessed Selkie, you guessed right!
That means ANOTHER SEVEN CHAPTERS THIS WEEK! 18 CHAPTERS IN A ROW!!
I've never written so well, words have never come to me so quickly. I'm excited and passionate for Song, I've gotten in the groove, and I'm going to ride it as long as I can.
I continue to ''only'' promise two chapters a week. I'm going to modify it slightly - after RR has its initial chapter dump, Patreon is going to get as many chapters as I've written, RR is going to get as many chapters as I've written minus 1 or 2, so Patreon continues to pull ahead at a good clip. I WANT you to be +20 chapters ahead, just like during BTDEM. Because of Nano, I launched just a hair before I was ready in terms of total chapter count, but not too badly, and my writing pace is currently up to making it all work.
For Song, at least.
Okay! Onto BTDEM stuff! It's not quite as positive.
I've never tried to write more than one story at once before, and I'm hitting a wall and discovering why. When I try to write the BTDEM epilogues at the same time as writing Song, I can feel my passion and ideas draining away as I shift mindsets entirely. It's part of why my writing at the start of Song was so slow - I still had all my mental energy on BTDEM. As I've FINALLY been able to shift mindsets into Song, I'm finding the epilogues to be SUPER HARD MODE to write, even though I used to be hyper passionate about the topic and what I wanted to write! So they're coming excruciatingly slowly, at the same time that they're strongly interfering with Song chapters!
Ugh. I don't WANT to be a diva. I don't want to be one of those authors that 'has to be in the right mindset' or 'in the mood' - writing is a job, and one that I take seriously.
At the same time, if it's interfering that badly with my 'main' work, I'm unsure how to keep doing it. With that said, I KNOW most of you are sticking around for the epilogues.
All of this has me in a really rough position. Especially with the launch of Song on RR, it is THE time to capture a lot of eyes and attention. I'm easily managing 7 chapters a week right now, getting enough material for both RR and for Patreon to pull ahead. If I start mixing BTDEM epilogues in there, I'll probably crash down to 2-4 chapters total, including the epilogues.
If I had known this was going to happen, I would've written a half-dozen epilogues way back in July and just released them one at a time. I'm sorry, I fucked up.
I think what I'm going to do is 'IOU' them. When the Song launch settles down, I'll reread BTDEM, get in the right frame of mind for writing the chapters, sit down, and write like hell. I'll catch up on any 'owed' chapters, and generate a backlog for future months. I DO have a pretty fun arc planned out.
I want to claim unrelated, but let's be honest, it's not. The medic at Camelot is a short lady with long brown hair and starry blue eyes, with a few other features that you'll recognize. It's intended to be a cameo... but Elaine has worked at 'the posh school' before, and she's getting more lines and screentime than anticipated.
The web comic does have a few chapters mostly done, and they'll get posted probably next month. The only hang up right now is getting a good letterer. There's a lot of mediocre people who can't make it look good, we're trying to find someone who can put words on the page in a pretty way.
Actually, if that describes you, let me know, and we'll talk!
Cheers all!
Selkie
Comments
Sparifankerl
Just wanted to mention that your publisher logo (the green thingy with the Elaine figure in the top right corner) on the image for royal road is in a weird place. Looks like the dragon has sticker on its snout.
AlliterativeArts (Eric Faust)
There's also always the "open source" route. I mean, ghost writing is a thing. Like how there were BTDEM art contests, you could invite submissions to a FanFicers Write An Epilogue Chapter contest where the prize is becoming an officially sponsored this-is-Selkie-approved piece of the canon. Who's to say there couldn't be more than one winner. I'm pretty sure there are those who would bite down hard on the chance to participate and/or see their contributions up in lights. --- I too have a very one track brain where context switching is like pulling teeth. The best I've managed to come up with is to project manage the daylights out of that kind of work while acknowledging to myself that I need the space in there to get my sea legs back. Adapting what I do at work to writing, my style would look like a plan for an extended but predetermined time block dedicated to not-the-main-thing work during some naturally occurring "break point" and then ramping myself back up into slamming out as much as I could. Zero working on the main-thing for me as that would be the distraction during this time. Once that window closed though, that's it - donezo. I'd either drip feed that work out, or just say "and this is how far I got, *shove*, back to the main-thing~". Food for thought. We're all scientists exploring the limits and potential of our own minds and bodies so do as thou willt.
TjStorm
Dude, frickin chill with BTDEM. You’ll get to it when you get to it.
![ルンバ[v] from fanbox](https://patrefans.com/kistorage/29688.jpg)
