As you can probably tell from the title of this blog post, my semi-hiatus is over! Almost exactly after 3 months since I made that blog post about going into a semi-hiatus, but recently (as in, last month or so), I've been getting a serious itch to write. Unfortunately, I got COVID shortly after that itch really started so it delayed my coming out of semi-hiatus; that and a game I'm playing (WoW for those who know what that is) where the people I play with and I have a weekly commitment that has been for the most part taking away the times on weekday nights where I would usually get the most writing done.

I still have that weekly commitment but I decided I don't want to wait until we're done with it, so, well, HERE I AM :D

But as you might've also seen in the title of this blog post, I added a 'what's going to be new'. Before I explain about that exactly, I'll go into a bit of a breakthrough I had regarding writing and part of the reason why I was having that burnout.

I watch quite a bit of mini-lecture style videos about writing and whatnot, and a byproduct of this is that I've started to really try my best to incorporate all these things I've learned in these videos into my writing. Ways to write better characters, ways to plan out story elements, ways to write otherwise cheesy dialogue or scenarios, almost everything about how I wrote stories to the characters I created to the relationships between the characters was something I tried to improve. I think it was this very thing that contributed to the burnout I was feeling that led me to a semi-hiatus: the intense desire to write better. Not even to write for the joy of it (although, don't get me wrong, I did still enjoy it), but to prove to myself that all the things I learned in those videos were things I could implement into my own story-telling.

The thing that made me realize this was this video I watched a month or two ago title 'What Makes Writing So Hard?' (here's the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6elY5Voh3GM&list=WL&index=10&t=5s) I haven't ever seen a video from this channel before but I connected really well with it. The way the YouTuber talked about his/her feeling of burnout was something I really sympathized with, and the thing he/she said was a potential solution was so simple that I couldn't believe I didn't think of it.

Instead of doing what I was doing, being extremely try-hard while writing, I should go back to writing because I loved it.

That isn't to say that I can't try-hard while writing, but I should only do that when I want to. I shouldn't force myself to do that as I have been for a good amount of time before, but do it when I feel like it.

That, finally, leads me to the thing I addressed a few paragraphs ago: what's going to be new?

Before, I had a pretty strict schedule: once a week, I would write the update for 'The Divine of the Decree', then 'Soiling Mr. Innocent', then 'The Pet of Kim Taeyeon'. There was hardly any time to write one-shots or to write anything else, but the reason why I set myself this schedule was because I didn't want the readers of any of the stories to wait too long for the next update. So, using this schedule, theoretically the most amount of time a reader of any of these stories would have to wait would be 3 weeks.

Now, I decided that I'm not going to be using this strict schedule. I'll still be trying to release something once a week, but there's not necessarily going to be a pattern for which story gets the next update. Some weeks, there might be an update to two stories, or some weeks I might post a one-shot, or some weeks I might even miss (hopefully, these don't happen often though). What this means is that, for example, if you only read 'Soiling Mr. Innocent', I might update the story in back-to-back weeks, or sometimes I might not update for 4, maybe 5 weeks.

Doing this sorta makes me feel bad for those readers who will have to wait a long time to see an update to the story of mine they follow, but I think this is best for me going forward. But, hopefully by doing this, I'll avoid that feeling of burnout that caused me to go into that semi-hiatus.

I really, really do appreciate each and every single one of you who read my stories. Thank you for being patient with me, and please look forward to my next update coming out probably by tomorrow (aka Sunday, May 15th) :D

EDIT: the once a week thing has become more like a once a month thing LMAO

I'm gonna try to do better, but no promises. Thank you as always for being so patient with me <3