EoR Afterword, Thoughts, and Next Steps

Warning: minor spoilers for my past stories in this post. No real spoilers for EoR itself, though.

Five months ago, I launched Engine of Reincarnation—a story I started writing seven months prior, on my days off between writing Re:Chimaera—on Royal Road. I had just shy of 100k words written for it at the time, which isn't a lot of words for seven months of development, but that was on top of the 180k words I put into Re:Chimaera.

Re:Chimaera was a bit of a miss for me, compared to Worldseed. It didn't hit Rising Stars, though that's partially on me for failing to do any real marketing; the fact that Worldseed, my first series, did hit RS with nothing but the chapters posted was either pure luck, incidentally nailing the meta at the time, or had to do with the time itself, as competition for RS was a bit less steep in 2023. Still, I had always planning on Re:Chimaera being a standalone novel, and from May to Oct I diligently put the work in to bring it to a conclusion, first on Patreon and then later revising that ending and reposting it on Patreon before concluding it on Royal Road.

I launched this Patreon for Re:Chimaera, and it never really took off. Most of my motivation to keep writing was to see the story through to its end, as opposed to the "pressures" of success (like a profitable Patreon or large following on Royal Road). Even still, I found myself rushing the original ending and needing to come back and do revisions before it posted publicly. I have a weird relationship with revisions. I've only done major revisions a few times. I don't particularly enjoy that part of the process, if it can be avoided. Minor revisions, on the other hand, are an important part of my process, as I'm a discovery writer. Those first 100k words of Engine of Reincarnation got a full edit pass twice before they made it to Royal Road in the first place, in which I did many minor revisions.

The month before launch, I did Royal Road's Writathon, where I wrote over 100k words towards Coin Capture in five weeks. It was even more of a flop than Re:Chimaera, barely even breaking 300 followers. That was fine with me, as I again had an ending in mind, but I was losing a bit of faith in my writing and my ability to draw eyes on Royal Road, specifically. I decided to launch what I had of Engine of Reincarnation in December, sort of as a last-ditch attempt to see if I still had the juice. And, well, it worked out. Over 7k followers on Royal Road.

I ended up bringing Coin Capture to 125k words, into the launch of EoR, before I decided to shelve it. For those of you not doing the mental math, that's a bit over 400k words written in 2025. That's important for later. I wanted to keep them both going until I finished Coin Capture, which I didn't think was that far off. I had managed two stories the year prior, but the difference was that I was only posting one of them to RR, and it wasn't all that popular, so the pressure was fairly minimal.

As Engine of Reincarnation blew up and hit RS1, suddenly, the pressure was not minimal. People begged me to continue writing EoR on Patreon, which I planned to do eventually but wasn't really all that prepared to start doing at the end of December. I was excited by the success of it as well, of course, so I happily returned to writing out the end of Tovar's story.

Of course, then the engagement controversy popped off. Thankfully, I had just about finished Tovar's chapters by then. I had come to the decision to focus on EoR, putting CC on hiatus so I could focus and, ideally, pull ahead. That didn't happen. Instead, I struggled to keep up with the demands of just one story, because I was not in a very good place, emotionally. I don't want to rehash all that again, but the issue wasn't that a handful of loud people got mad about it so much as the fact that someone reported the story and, in a twist I still can't entirely come to terms with, the moderator who dealt with my story sided with them and demanded I censor the scene in which Tovar and Felris merely discuss the possibility of an arranged marriage.

I'm not going to lie to you: if not for this Patreon, and the support you gave me (both emotionally and financially) I almost certainly would have put EoR on hiatus and spent the rest of the winter trying to forget all about it. Maybe I'd have come back to it by now, or—more likely—I'd have started writing another story entirely, which I would be releasing now. At the time, despite EoR doing amazingly well, it hadn't actually surpassed Worldseed yet, and I'm the type of person that would have walked away rather than deal with the negativity (even though the negativity was, in reality, maybe 1%, while the other 99% was positivity).

Income isn't really my motivation to write. That's an awkward thing to say to the people who are giving me money to write, but it's the truth. But I do want to write and I was earning income doing so, and the reality was that Patreon was providing enough income in January to keep me committed. Whether it's my motivation or not, I live in a society that runs on money, and there's an unavoidable basic motivation to accrue the resource I need to live. I leaned into that. That remained true in Feb, when I still wanted to hiatus, and March, when I still wanted to hiatus. But by then, Tovar's life was in the rearview mirror, and we were fully into Mali's life. I do think Mali's life suffered for it, and I'll circle back to that later, but by April, that too was coming to an end and I found some internal motivation when it came to Cheokit's life and concluding the first volume.

Patreon support has dropped by almost half from its peak. That could be for any number of reasons, but I can't discount that some of it has to be the fact that I wasn't writing Mali's life from that stable of a foundation, emotionally, and I think that comes through in the writing. Around halfway through Mali's life, there was a dip in RR followers as well, although it was far less than I honestly expected, and has since recovered those losses and surpassed the previous number, so I don't think it's the only reason. The support I continued to receive through to the end of volume 1 has remained amazing, but it's not so blinding that I can't consider all my options more objectively for what's to come.

When I first started writing and put out Worldseed, it was just a story I wanted to tell. Or, maybe, needed to tell. It was an idea I couldn't contain. Writing it out was a necessary release valve. That was true summer of 2023 when I released the first two books of the series, but even when I went on a hiatus through the winter, the circumstances of life brought me back to try and finish the story in summer of 2024, which I did. Nothing really mattered to me beyond finishing the story as I had envisioned, but by the time I did, I had also changed. I now considered myself a writer. And as a writer, I wanted to improve.

The unifying motivation to write all of Re:Chimaera, Coin Capture, and Engine of Reincarnation was derived from the most common criticism I received across Worldseed, which was about my characterization. Some people didn't like how much Pilus ruminated, other people thought the story lacked fleshed out secondary characters, and others still complained about the inter-character relationships. All of those complaints are valid. If you knew me, personally, you would immediately identify the source of the issue: I spend far too much time sitting around ruminating, my life has had precious few real human relationships, and I regularly go long stretches where I don't communicate with other human beings in any meaningful way at all. I am an introvert, homebody, and a loner. Obviously, writing human relationships is going to be a weakness of mine.

Yet, a lot of my favorite pieces of media are about human relationships. I'm a huge sucker for found family stories, in particular. My personal experiences might be limited, but I've read too many books to count and watched plenty of series and movies, more than enough to draw from in order to build on my meager foundation. So I tried to apply what I learned.

If you're familiar with educational psychology at all, you've probably heard of the zone of proximal development. The concept outlines three zones, with the innermost being what the learner can do unaided, the outermost being what the learner can not do no matter the aide, and the zone between being that of proximal development: what the learned can accomplish with guidance. I don't actually know if psychologists would say this applies to self-teaching and personal development, so it might not be the perfect example, but I think it applies to this: just because I want to write a story with solid characterization and relationships doesn't mean I can just turn around and knock one out of the park. That goal is still in the outermost ring, where the learner (me) just can't do. I can point to it, identify it, and want to duplicate it, but I fall short.

What I can do is keep trying for iterative improvement, take the feedback from readers and critics, look at the metrics of the stories, and take one step at a time as I develop my craft. (I'll acknowledge that I could spend more time and energy directly studying writing or seeking out professional opinions and tutelage in order to expand the zone of proximal development, but I'd rather just learn from doing. Even if it's minor development, limited by my own reflection, I'd rather continue putting out work, even if it's only as good as what I've already written.)

Re:Chimaera was... not particularly the right story to try and develop this aspect of my writing, since the MC is a monster and the story is a time loop which destroys relationships with non-loopers. I also write from a first-person limited perspective, for the most part; most of my stories read like a reporting of events by the MC, something that I leaned into for Worldseed. With Re:Chimaera, I added scenes from other characters' third-person perspectives to round the story out, which are far and away my favorite parts of that story. The MC's motivation involved people, and there are sections of the story where he's quite involved with them, but ultimately, it's a lot of solo grinding against monsters. It's because I recognized that the story wasn't going to build sufficiently on my past failures, and would ultimately be a fun but limited LitRPG, that I also worked on Engine of Reincarnation.

Rather than just write a character who immediately connects with others, though, I made that a part of his character growth. There were a lot of complaints about Tovar's personality and feelings towards his family members at the start of the book, but one of the major through-lines of Tovar's life was the thawing of his heart and allowing other people into his life. You all already know how that went. The whole volume is about character growth, really, and not just in the progression fantasy meaning of the word. I think it largely worked out, given the success of the story and some of the comments of responses, especially the people who were brought to tears at scenes like Somnial's funeral. That's the kind of evocative storytelling I want to be doing, and am working towards in my zone of proximal development.

Side note, I actually think I do an even better job at characterization in Coin Capture, it was just too off-meta for success on Royal Road. It's got a full cast, and the characters feel largely unique and each have their own challenges. The story itself might just not fit the format, since following all the creature names in prose rather than picture is a serious challenge, but alas, I'm not an animator. The point is, it's one of my few pieces of work that the MC doesn't operate from a place of solitude, something I'd like to build on in a future story.

Here's where I failed. After Tovar's life, I always planned on doing a couple of non-human lives. What I didn't really identify was how those would impact the MC's ability to form relationships. Mali and Cheokit's lives were unintentionally designed around certain ideas that centered more on abilities and world-building than characterization. By contrast, Tovar's world is fairly mundane and basic, to the point where the magic system is actually kind of disappointing, because it was just meant to be the setting for the characters. The Uli world and the Mother tree, in a way, were the characters the story focused on, taking too much attention from the MC and his relationships.

It's not that I can't point to both those lives and talk about secondary characters and the MC's interaction with them. It's that they fall too far to the wayside when there's so much to explain about the world itself, while the MC is also wrestling with feeling disconnected and out of place in those worlds.

Both those lives served their purposes, but I think both could be better. Had I been writing them on my own terms, entirely, I might have walked away at various points to think harder on what I was writing before returning to the story. I may have done a lot more minor revisions as I went, so that the final product was superior. I can still do major revisions before I publish, but as I said earlier, I don't like to do that; I'd rather move forward.

This is the flip side of Patreon (and to a lesser degree, Royal Road). Yes, you amazing people helped keep this story alive over the past four months. At the same time, for four months, I've been bumping up against deadlines three days per week, every week, which encouraged me to post what I had when I had it rather than produce my best possible writing. I'm not complaining about this—it was good for me and my consistency improved—but it is a reality of the situation.

Despite wanting to pull ahead in the writing so I could still have the space to make minor revisions and give more thought to what I was writing, I never did. There's something about deadlines that work against me. I rarely struggled to sit down and write each chapter for the deadline, but as soon as I finished, the motivation to continue just drained out of me, even though I put Coin Capture on hiatus in order to make that very progress. The end result was months of fairly consistent output, around 30k words per month.

I can't be too mad at a consistent 30k words per month. At the end of the year, that would be 360k words, which is a solid number. But you may remember that, earlier in this post, I said that I broke 400k words in 2025. That was despite taking entire months off, inconsistency in output, and relying on internal motivation almost exclusively (I did have some Patreon support for Re:Chimaera and Coin Capture, but very minimally, which in total was far less than what I earn now in a single month from EoR; not enough to be a primary driver of my writing).

Again, full disclosure, I absolutely think I could just keep this up. I strongly believe that if I don't take a hiatus, I could continue to put out three chapters a week for quite some time still, and very possibly all year. I may even surpass it, finally, and create a backlog; those final two chapters of volume 1 were almost twice the usual length each and were flowing well. Now that it's spring (which is usually the peak of my yearly productivity) and with a new life incoming, I could land on something that causes me to double or triple that 30k output.

I just don't think that's the right move. Not if my goal is to write a better story with strong characters and relationships. I know there were some complaints about MC's Metaharmonization, which I anticipated when I noticed some people strongly attaching to the idea of increasingly non-human lives, but that was always the plan. I mentioned in the past that part of what I like about Engine of Reincarnation was that I get to explore a lot of different settings I could imagine starting stories in otherwise, but those settings are largely humanoid fantasy ones. While I always planned to limit MC's non-human lives to these second and third lives, I think it's all the more important for the character of the MC himself, now, to close the distance between him and other people again. Although the nature of his solo serial reincarnation itself means those relationships will continue to be reset until some future point where he might be joined by someone (but that's a way off, if ever). It's not as bad as the example of Re:Chimaera, but EoR has its own inherent faults when it comes to the direction I want to pursue in my writing.

Some of that is solvable. There will be worlds where people with a high supernatural stat live longer, and we'll likely reach a point where an entire volume is a single life, giving me room to stretch my relationship-writing legs. Once MC learns to re-key Metaharmonization, there may be other non-human lives that also run long, but we'll see. I don't want to give too many spoilers about EoR itself, but I have (at least) six worlds planned for the coming volumes. But in order for it to be solvable, I think I need to sit with it longer than ~2 days at a time per chapter. If I want to continuously develop my writing abilities and improve my baseline capabilities further still, I need breathing room.

Hence the hiatus. I'll be pausing billing after this blog posts. I'm sorry to say that I won't be jumping directly into EoR's second volume, which I'm sure is what most of you would like to hear, so that I can come back strong after a month off and dump a bunch of hopefully excellent chapters for you to enjoy.

The next thing that I need to do is see Worldseed through to final completion. I've been delaying editing and publishing it properly for over a year now, because at the time, I was content to let people find it on Royal Road and enjoy it there. That's paid off, as it now sits at over 5k followers with over 3.5M total views. After my experience with the mod demanding censorship for that one chapter of EoR, I no longer feel comfortable letting it live exclusively on Royal Road. I now want to stub it and move it elsewhere. Getting it published to Kindle has the additional benefit of, potentially, bringing in income separate from the RR/Patreon pipeline, which gives me more freedom to take long hiatuses if needed to ensure I'm writing the best stories I possibly can for that stage of my development.

I should probably also do that for Re:Chimaera, though I don't think it will be particularly profitable. Rather, I just don't want it to live on Royal Road. Once bitten, twice shy. I'm thankful that Royal Road existed for me to reach this point as a writer, but my trust in the site has been burned. What once was the goal is now only be a small aspect of the actual life of my stories. I never thought I'd be the type of RR author to stub immediately at the end of a volume, but I think that's what my future on RR will look like, once I play catch up on my portfolio.

That also means I'll probably try to get Engine of Reincarnation's first volume on Kindle before I resume posting a second volume, which adds time to the hiatus. For one thing, I need to let the last five weeks of chapters post to Royal Road so I can take whatever feedback I can get on Cheokit's life, so I can consider that in my editing. Long hiatuses suck, so I can understand if you aren't happy to hear that. They especially suck if, when the fic comes back from hiatus, the story's progress feels slow. I've been on the receiving end of that plenty of times.

So I'd rather take the same approach I took to Worldseed. I'd rather take the time to write the entire book (or, in EoR's case, maybe an entire "part" of the book, i.e. a full life) and then just post those chapters daily. The first month of EoR's run on RR got daily chapters, and I like that pace for reading a lot more than not even every other day. Past experience tells me that I can triple my writing output without deadlines, though perhaps not as consistently, but posting daily is only roughly doubling the rate of posting. Had I finished EoR volume 1 entirely ahead of posting and published daily, it would have finished in March, but if I was writing without deadlines March through May, I could potentially be ready to post another three months of daily chapters through the summer.

It's a balance of pros and cons, and obviously things may come up and get in the way. Making the decision to hiatus until I'm 100% ready to dump chapters is the worse option for Patreon, which is why I need to see how much potential Kindle has with Worldseed. I've seen some startling income numbers from other authors in the genre which, again, isn't my primary motivation, but if I can continue feeding myself and not worry about bills, I can obviously focus more on my writing.

Rest assured that I have every intention of returning to Engine of Reincarnation. Far too many ideas about its future live in my head for me to drop it, and doing so would be objectively silly given how well it's done. Having written volume 1, I have learned some more lessons, though, and I would like to start writing something that doesn't loop time or jump worlds so that I can really sink my teeth into it and develop secondary characters and relationships over multiple books. I think I'd like to try a third-person perspective for my next story to further explore that. Probably an omniscient view, as I think I need the room to showcase characters away from the MC as well to further develop as a writer, especially when it comes to writing deeper plots. I haven't really talked about that at all in this blog, but it's something I'm thinking about both for the future volumes of EoR and also whatever else comes next.

For EoR, at least, I'll need to give plot more of a consideration if I want to figure out a way to end the series, since it does not have any form of built-in ending as it currently stands (aside from soul destruction, which would be a bad ending). I specifically chose a serial reincarnation so that I wasn't racing towards an end, but at the same time, having read long-running series in the genre, I don't want to fall into the same traps I see in those. Endings are important (whether or not you've liked my past ones; I know they've been divisive) and I don't want to milk the success of one series far in excess of what it needs, because then I can't learn from my mistakes and apply what I learn to something new.

That said, the next non-EoR thing I write, as alluded to in the earlier paragraphs, might be a sequel series in the Worldseed universe. It's been percolating in my subconscious for a while now. Once I've published it, and especially if it does well on Kindle, it may be time to revisit this idea. I've talked about it several times since that story's conclusion, but as I just talked about milking a property to death, I want to clarify the difference here. I spent a lot of mental time in that world, and a lot of how I wrote Worldseed—particularly towards the end—was set-up and world-building for something to follow.

There's a story I'd like to explore from the perspective of a native of the world, not an isekai (for once) but still a progression fantasy, more in a traditional fantasy style. I would write the sequel series to be readable on its own, but having some of the world-building established (and readable in the original/prequel series) allows me to shift my focus as a writer to what I need to focus on: plot and character.

I just love writing world-building stuff so much that I get too absorbed in it, especially from an isekai MC's perspective, and this "hack" would let me bypass that. In the future, I might just need to do my world-building entirely separate from my usual process (before I even start writing the story) to replicate that. That would likely also involve some plot and character outlining, which doesn't play to my strengths as a discovery writer. If I can bridge that gap, though, I think I can tell much better stories, so it's worth a try.

This was supposed to be an Afterword for EoR but I didn't actually talk to much about the story itself, just the process. There isn't really much I have to say about the story that the story doesn't say already, but also, Patreon doesn't have a way of hiding spoilers (that I know of) and I didn't want to give insights that may spoil something. Feel free to ask any questions you have any in the comments below, and I'll try to answer everything, but I'm going to put a blanket spoiler warning on my answers right now. If you don't want spoilers, maybe avoid the comments entirely. If you have a burning question you want to ask but don't want spoilers in my answer, then say as much in your question and I'll do my best!

Otherwise, if you're sticking around as a member, I'll try and post something in a month's time to update you on the state of the hiatus. I'll see you then. Thanks so much for your support, in all its forms, and being here for me and my story.

I appreciate you!

—Phil