ThePudding

Upcoming Changes and a Poll (Paid only)

Added 2025-10-21 00:18:34 +0000 UTC

Well, things have been going pretty well lately, so here’s the status on what’s going down.

To avoid burnout, I’ll probably scale back the chapter releases on Neophyte World Builder. That said, I will be INCREASING the chapter readahead here. Not sure how much yet... depends on my buffer size. I could go to about ten right now but that’d leave me zero room for illness, but my goal is 10 for Proto-Tinkerer and Tinkerer by end of next month.

My hand is healing nicely and I was actually able to type this message from start to finish instead of relying upon dictation. With any luck, a few more weeks and I’ll be back to 100% productivity.

The Poll results were fairly impressively against the MC settling on a female gender identity. Taking into account all platforms, it was Male barely edging out Genderless, so I’ll be making them male-coded but mildly genderfluid -- basically, they’ll take a female avatar if they have to, and be fine with it, but their preferred avatar will be male, and they’ll usually stick to male pronouns for themselves in their Sanctuary. The current ‘female avatar’ arc will just serve to have them decide this. I kind of expected this result, so it’s not a big adjustment for me to make to the story.

I am considering participating in the Royal Road write-a-thon. Neophyte World Builder will have a dedicated, set schedule, but the new one will probably be shotgunned out during the month of November, then move to sporadic(probably weekly) updates afterward.

I’ve put a poll in this post for anyone to put their input into what they think I should do next. I’ll probably post a first chapter sample for any of them that get a decent number of votes. For a few, I have the first chapter written already. You can vote for multiple if you like more than one idea, I’ll probably post sample chapters and do a final vote next week.