A Budding Scientist in a Fantasy World

Notice: a Discussion about KU and the story

A few things:

1. I’ve signed a publishing deal for Budding Scientist with Podium. I believe I mentioned in, like… February? March? Something like that? that I was working on something, and well, that was the edits for the next draft of the Volume 1 of Budding Scientist. I felt that it was important not to change it TOO much, but there were a bunch of smaller things that I felt should be changed, either for flow, consistency, or typo corrections.
2. Volume 1 of the story WILL be coming down from Patreon, RoyalRoad, and Scribblehub near the end of next week. This means the majority of the first 62 chapters will no longer be available on these platforms. I am allowed to leave up 20% of the story, I believe? I will double check that number later, but that probably means the first 13 chapters will stay, if I'm doing my math correctly. The rest will be removed.

Now, I also wanted to discuss WHY this is happening. I was originally trying VERY HARD to push for not taking down any part of the story until Volume 3 of Budding Scientist was finished, meaning the entire story would have been available on RR/Patreon/Scribblehub, before I took it down a month later, or something like that.

Ultimately, the publishing company agreed with me, but recently, they emailed me and basically said ‘this is a really bad idea. Are you sure?’ and we got into a discussion about it. I myself eventually changed my mind.

Why?

Simply put, it boils down to financial stability.

I LOVE writing. I spend about half an hour every night before I go to sleep just laying in bed, thinking about my stories and where I want them to go. I’ll imagine scenes that haven’t been written yet and adjust minute details in them, think about how a certain world should be structured, think about how some component of the world interacts with another, or how two characters should meet and interact with each other. Every time I take a shower, I usually spend several minutes soaking in hot water and thinking about stories I want to write, or stories that I’m currently writing and want to improve. I sometimes scrap these ideas (not every idea is a good one), but writing is a passion that I’ve had since I was in elementary school. And while second-grade me wasn’t that good at writing, their heart was in the write place (heh. Puns).

When I posted the first chapter of Budding Scientist, it was during the Covid pandemic. My father had just had a stroke, I was unemployed and depressed, my cat died sometime around when I started releasing chapters, and I needed something to get away from everything for a while. I was very insecure about my unemployment, I felt awful, and I needed to do something. So I turned back to my at the time somewhat abandoned hobby of writing, dusted off an earlier draft of a story called ‘Alice’s Disastrous Journey through an Isekai World’ (I was never that good at naming stories) that I had written, and started messing with it. I rebuilt Alice’s character, the worldbuilding, the System, and basically everything to turn it from an unrefined goop of ideas to a fully fleshed out story that was (hopefully) good, and renamed several times before I settled on ‘A Budding Scientist in a Fantasy World.’ I went through a few drafts, fixing things here and there, and eventually, I ended up writing the draft of Budding Scientist you’re familiar with today.

I’m incredibly grateful that you guys give me the chance to write, my greatest passion, and I actually get paid for it. Which, honestly, is something second-grade me would have never imagined happening.

However, while I’m incredibly grateful, I’m also not quite financially stable right now. My writing is currently in a very weird place - I treat it as a full time job, but I don’t quite make enough to sustain myself writing. I am VERY VERY close - My payment from Patreon each month is almost enough for me to survive, but it’s just a little short each month. And it has remained that way for quite a while now.

When I was just writing Budding Scientist, it was closer to a hobby paycheck - which was fair, since I messed up a lot while setting up Patreon tiers and have never quite managed to catch up to the promise I made when I first set up my Patreon - I had originally intended to have 3 tiers for Budding Scientist chapters, much like I currently do for MaM. That never ended up happening, because I could never quite get ahead of my Budding Scientist chapter schedule, and reworking the tiers without adding new chapters for Patrons just didn’t seem fair to me. The original intention was to have 3 chapters for a $3 tier, 5 chapters for a $5 tier, and 10 chapters for a $10 Tier.

Anyway, Budding Scientist wasn’t paying bills, but I wanted to keep writing. I had started writing, and I wanted to keep doing it. So I expanded a little bit. I went from just writing Budding Scientist to writing Budding Scientist and Markets and Multiverses. I’d had the idea floating around in my head for a while, and it just needed a few rough drafts and some polish. I was also excited to write the story, so I wrote the first draft of a girl named Miria, and her journey through the Multiverse. I thought a lot about things I felt I had done poorly in Budding Scientist, and sought to expand my skill set and utilize my new skills. I got to writing, until eventually, the story reached its third draft and I started posting it.

With the addition of MaM, my income reached its current point - almost financially stable, but not quite there yet. But ever so close…

I still love writing very much. But I would also like to not worry about my finances every day, and wonder if pursuing my passion is a horrible, horrible mistake that will come back and bite me. I would also appreciate actually having financial stability, and the funds to not just survive from one month to the next. And financially speaking, what makes the most sense for me is to remove Volume 1 of the story from RR, Scribblehub, and Patreon, and transition to a model where I can hopefully actually earn a decent living from treating writing as a full time job within the KU unlimited program. I also considered cutting back on writing and abandoning my hobby/job as a whole, but I really, REALLY do not want to do that unless there is no other plausible option. Maybe I’m just being dumb and stubborn about this, but I don’t want to give up on writing if there’s any chance it can work out for me. My other option for reaching financial stability would be to start a third story, but trying to manage that, along with the 3 chapters a week from Markets and Multiverses and the 1 chapter a week from Budding Scientist, is proving to be difficult. And while I do have a new story idea that I’m super excited about writing, it’s still very much in its first draft phase. Markets and Multiverses almost a year in draft form before I started posting it, and I imagine the timeline for ‘Project 3’ will look similar. Maybe it'll be faster, since I learned a lot more about writing since I started writing MaM, but... it's hard to say right now. And I would be looking at remaining financially unstable for another year or so in hopes that Project 3 will eventually solve everything, which is…a dubious plan, at best.

And since I’m also editing older Budding Scientist chapters to prepare for volume 2 of the Kindle/Podium release, and writing both of my current stories, it’s just a bit hard to juggle. Project 3’s timeline might get delayed for that reason alone, making it even more dubious. Right now, I squeeze out time on weekends to work on project 3 (which I am not going to admit the existence of anywhere besides this post, just for the record. Outside of this post, Project 3 is sort of like Schrodinger’s cat - it may or may not exist, but I will admit nothing. After all, I might run into a problem that makes it hard to keep writing the story if I can’t figure out a solution for it, or something - right now, I’m trying to figure out how the second and third volumes of the story’s plot line connect to each other, and whether volume 2 of the story would need to be split into two volumes, and whether that would solve the plotline issue I’m currently running into, and a bunch of other stuff about worldbuilding details. Anyway.)

While taking time out of my weekends is viable while I’m super excited about the idea and really really happy to be worldbuilding and imagining and writing the story, the ‘super excited’ phase of writing a new story usually only lasts a few months. After that, I transition to a more ‘I am enjoying writing this story’ kind of state, where I’m still having fun, but usually no longer invested enough in it to chop out several hours of my free time consistently to work on it and build it more. And inconsistency is never a good recipe for writing. Frankly, going into the KU exclusive program with Budding Scientist is notably more likely to solve my financial issues - and it’s also something I can do right now (well, in a few weeks, but you get the idea.)

Which is why I’ve ultimately made up my mind to take down the first volume of Budding Scientist book 1 from RR, Patreon, and Scribblehub. It hurts me a bit to do, because I did want to have all 3 volumes up on said platforms before taking them down only once I was done with the webnovel draft of the story. But at the end of the day, this is what I think is best for me and my writing as a whole. Not being stressed out and worried about whether my writing is a mistake will do wonders for my mental health and stress levels. And stress levels have a big impact on how well and how much I write. When stress is too high, I have a much harder time doing fun things like bonus chapters or longer chapters consistently, since there are some days where I just feel frazzled and blehh. (Those are technical terms that I just made up).

So this is my ultimate decision. On the 24th of this month, I will be removing Volume 1 from this platform. And Volume 2 will also be removed whenever I finish going through the editing process for it - which is still several months away, but whenever I get to that point, that will be what happens. I wish I could have given you more forewarning, but there were some miscommunications that happened that shortened the notice and forewarning I could give you.

That being said, here’s a link to the pre-order for Volume 1 of the story, if any of you are interested. It would mean a lot to me if you pre-ordered it, but you do whatever makes the most sense to you. Currently, my publisher says that it will be 'released' on the 19th of September, unless something has changed and I didn't get an email about it yet. And it has also gone through a notable amount of edits compared to the webnovel version - I tried not to change TOO much, but I fixed a lot of typos, consistency issues (there were a lot of weird bits about how much one gold crown could buy), and flow issues. There will be an audiobook and an e-book available. A link to one version is here, and I will get a link to the other up as soon as I have it.

A Small Town in Southern Illvaria

Thank you very much for reading this far, and thank you for allowing me to pursue my dream as an actual job instead of just a hobby I sometimes have time for.

~Acaswell