Hakurai
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Pre-orders Up for Book 1, Editing+B4 Update
🕑 Added 2025-10-21 04:10:55 +0000 UTCHi guys, like the title says, the pre-orders are up! You can check out the pages here.
Ebook:
US: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FWKD5K9W
UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0FWKD5K9W
Universal: https://geni.us/SpitefulHealer1
Audiobook:
US: https://www.audible.com/pd/B0FTHQ5HKW
UK: https://www.audible.co.uk/pd/B0FTJCJ1KY
When the book comes out, I'll post 'patch notes' to Book 1, as well as when the next Chapter of Book 4 is released, so anyone who wants to continue with the story without re-reading will know if anything has changed (For the most part, nothing major for B4, just slight VR-MMORPG balancing things).
I want to give you guys more clear and concise updates on the editing progress moving forward, as I am powering through and trying to get on to Book 4 ASAP. Baby No.2 + Baby No.1 starting school last year really took the wind out of my sails for writing and editing is not nearly as fun as writing, so I'm eager to be done with it. I'll keep Patreon inactive for one more month, but I aim to start adding some much owed Book 4 Chapters for you guys the moment Book 2 editing is complete.
Here's where I am at for Book 2: [Major Spoilers]
Currently editing the appearance of Emerill in the Red River, the halfway point of the book, but that's a bit misleading. Book 2 has a major issue of having much too high of a word count and very slow pacing, so I've been rewriting and editing out a lot of fights. Ruins of Kolz was cut down to 1 chapter, the chapters around Aegis breaking the ToS to make NPCs elite was cut, and Darkshot's solo fight through the magma river is cut. The personal conflicts of Pyri and Darkshot in book 2 were a bit messy when I wrote it the first time, as Darkshot's low confidence and Pyri's fear were pseudo-addressed multiple times. With this edit, I'm going to reinforce the problems until they're resolved at the end of the book to make them more consistent, with more satisfying conclusions.
I also changed the Mosmir Hive to have only 2 major fights rather than 5, taking out the Royal Mosmir section and making the bugs respawn. The grinding on Mosmir has replaced the entire Belmiure ruins, allowing me to delete that section of the story, along with the PoV swaps to the Night Hunters. The challenge of finding the Queen changed to the maze-like hive in combination with the constant respawns of the mosmir, which Aegis and his party leverage to level up quickly. He then uses the same unique navigation method to find the Queens lair without the convoluted stuff with the Royal Mosmir in the original.
It works much better for Aegis not figuring out what the Dark players are doing - When Emerill arrives and kills Aegis' party at the red river, Aegis will be force logged out and see Makaroth and Feng visiting the island through livestreams. He'll piece together why Emerill is stopping them, instead of not figuring out, but this time he'll suspect Makaroth is behind everything because of the coincidental timings. The revelation of whats actually going on will make more sense this way, without making Aegis look stupid for the latter half of Book 2 and instead show him more in-line with his character just being so focused on Makaroth he doesn't consider anything else until it slaps him in the face.
Miranda will be taking the roles Anazia took, to give her more purpose in the story rather than a background character. Christoph will take on everything Artaphernes did. Baffo will have more character development and replace Travis, thus removing 3 characters from the bloat that started in Book 2. Nothing is lost here, makes the story easier to follow and improves the pacing.
Overall, goal is to get Book 2 below 300k words, and I'm still around 400k, but I haven't gotten to the major cutting sections yet (Belmiure, PoV swaps). It was made harder because Hae-won's interview and Yumily's concert was moved from B1 to B2, but I'm making it work.
Official Current Status: Editing Chapter 24 out of 51, with 6 Chapters slated for deletion.
I'll keep you guys updated, at least weekly, to help keep me honest and focused on the editing that I hate doing.
