IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT

Hail, dear readers.

I've needed to drop a life update for a while now and have been kicking the can... but fortunately or unfortunately, we're finally here. I'll put a TLDR at the bottom. It shouldn't be too meandering. Probably.

It'll be a year today since I started releasing chapters for The Sovereign's Toll on NovelPhoenix in earnest, and it's a bit crazy to look back on the journey. The story hit #1 on Rising Stars, which is pretty unheard of for a nobody author without a fanbase. And just last week (or maybe it's been a few weeks now?) it topped 10,000 followers, which for an Ongoing Fiction puts it in rarified waters, with only 0.5% of the site's active story population reaching that high (at least, according to some dude on Reddit). Pretty freaking wild!

I just want to take this moment at the top to thank all of you, my wonderful readers. So many of you have been incredibly supportive, which has helped shape the story over the last year, as well as helped me improve as an author. I'm truly grateful for all of you!

Believe it or not, TST began as a bit of a midlife crisis (and not just for Caleb). Heck, the WIP title for a long time was "Midlife Crisekai," but I thought it was a little too silly and ended up changing it. I was approaching 40 and realized that most of my hobbies were spent as a consumer of things, and not much of a producer, and I wanted to create something. I dabbled in writing off and on during COVID and have a couple dead sys apoc projects that I'll likely never get around to rewriting, but I eventually decided to buckle down and do the dang thing with this one. A big part of finding the motivation for that was settling on a story that resonated with me--that I could really see myself in, and wasn't just some murderhoboing shenanigans.

That's ultimately why it's about a family man. Caleb's story became a personal outlet for the desire my wife and I have had for a long time: to be parents. I wanted to write about a father because I was struggling with growing older and not having any children. And it's been great! Cathartic in a way, to imagine how Caleb would go through all of this, and try to instill my hopes and dreams into his character. To get to express the type of Dad I'd want to be, while struggling with the doldrums of a corporate career in suburbia like so many of us do. It's been a lot of fun and incredibly rewarding; however, times are a changing.

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My wife is pregnant!

We're so over the moon that we've been blessed with a child and can't wait to meet our little one. But it's not been an easy journey: we went through a miscarriage with our first, and this second pregnancy has been very difficult. Between that and the relatively new job that I'm still settling into, my stress and anxiety have been high, and my wife's needs will only continue to increase as the birth gets closer, and especially afterwards.

All of that leads to me doing what I've been putting off for the better part of three months: reducing chapter release frequency.

My wife encouraged me tremendously to keep pushing over these past many weeks, so that we'd get through the end of the third volume (on Patreon--look forward to it!). I'm glad she did, and it feels like a weight lifted to have made it through just in time for the one-year anniversary of publishing the story. But push has come to shove, and I'm going to be reducing to a Monday and Friday release cadence for the foreseeable future...

...after this coming week. This week I'll have the two chapters on Wednesday and Friday, just to complicate things, and to hopefully ensure people see this announcement.

I'm sorry for the disappointment and frustration this likely causes some (many?) of you, but I've been flirting dangerously with complete burn out, and hopefully this is a step that insulates things from full hiatus. It's not outside the realm of possibilities that I'll need to drop down to one a week at some point, and while I have every intention of moving back to three if ever possible... this is where we're at for right now.

This will be the new plan going forward, starting immediately. Ideally, I can save up some chapters so that I could actually take some time off over the holidays, but we'll see. For the past year, any vacation time or holiday was spent doing something in regards to TST and we really just need downtime before the little one gets here. The big thing right now is work-life balance, and making sure that my wife and our baby are getting what they need.

Thank you all for reading, supporting, commenting, and understanding. I look forward to continuing to tell this story; hopefully, in a less stressful manner. May you all continue to enjoy reading it!

TLDR: Jon is having a baby, wife needs more help, dropping to two chapters a week.

Jon