Despite the assurances of many people, the moderator did not see reason and maintained his decision about Chapter 29, so I have now censored the ending scene/discussion about the arranged marriage.
Frankly, it looks way worse now that it's censored than what it actually was, and makes the rest of Tovar's life much less readable without making assumptions about the missing content. As a solution, I hate it, but rewriting seems stupid because this should be a non-issue.
This is the kind of thing that makes me want to take a hiatus, just walk away from the story until the muse re-inspires and I have to write it for myself again. My 6-9 month hiatus from Worldseed was a significantly smaller issue, and were I the same writer now as I was then, that would likely be all I wrote until May at the earliest.
Difference is, this time I have all of you. The support I'm receiving here on Patreon is amazing. Not just monetary, but emotionally and in terms of feedback on the writing itself. With over 800 people now paying to keep reading EoR and almost everyone saying that there was nothing wrong with the chapters in question, I'm not so turned off as to walk away (aside from a few days, which I did, to cool my head.)
I'm still tempted to pull the story from RR and just write to Patreon, now, but I have shout obligations to fulfill. I've stopped taking new shoutout swap requests so that I can step back from RR if I feel like it in the future, but I'm booked through to March, and by then I might be over this. Or, I'll be far enough in the story that stubbing book one is in sight. I could probably call Tovar's life a book and stub just that, at 125k words or so, but I intend on packing all three of the first lives into book one, assuming they don't run away from me (I expect each to be about half as long as Tovar's, probably.)
So, I'm now writing the next life, which you'll see the first chapter of tomorrow, and while my pace hasn't been as great as I would have liked, I'm moving forward. I will note that, while I have given in to the demands of this power-tripping moderator and censored the chapter despite being given no section of the Knowledge Base or TOS that show this isn't allowed, his response time is so bad that the support ticket created for the report still isn't closed. I'm expecting that to take a few more days, but it's possible that now that I'm in his sights, he picks apart the other parts of the story (that I highlighted to show that there wasn't even a "proposal", only a discussion of it, and that it never even happens) and demands further censure.
In that case, fuck him, I'm pulling the story from RR. I'll just keep writing to you here on Patreon. I've read so much worse stuff on RR that the fact that my story is being targeted is absurd to me. But the trickle-down effect of this is problematic. I'm not sure about talking to publishers about it now, and I'm concerned that whatever hater stirred this pot in the first place could follow to Amazon, reporting the story there once it's stubbed, and bring down Amazon's even worse AI-driven support bots on me, which will be impossible to deal with. That could result in my author account being banned, which would completely close off that possibility for my writing--not just EoR, but Worldseed and more, too.
It probably won't happen, but all that over my head is definitely causing me stress. For now I'm just continuing to focus on writing a chapter at a time. As always, thanks for being here and for reading, and I appreciate you.
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EDIT: Whoops, looks like I made this available to both tiers. Oh well! Thanks for all the support in the comments. I'll leave this up for Party Members, but it was a direct continuation of last week's blog, which was Heroes Only. So, since there's some confusion, I made that one Party Member accessible now as well.