Good morning, this time I’m ON TIME!!

As y’all might have noticed, the next two chapters have been put out, so I’ll address some things written in #4, but first, we feast – on the stats for the story as of today!

Current Chapter: 14 (Interlude II)

Pages: 295 (via MS Word)

Total Word Count: 100,513 (via AutoCrit)

So, first off, I wasn’t able to complete my goal of finishing this chapter before the end of the year, but I think where it’s at right now is where I’ll be ending it, give or take a few clarifying paragraphs.  The chapter, not the book – I think I’ve still got a few good chapters left in this one.

Where there is failure, however, there is also success.  This is the first time I’ve ever written a single document with this many words, so I’d like to briefly celebrate Hell/Dolls reaching 100,000 words! Not a huge accomplishment, but for me, this was an unattainable goal for many years, but now that I’ve reached a point in my life where I can dedicate this kind of time to writing, I’m very happy.

Now then, Chapter 4.  Entitled “The Meeting and The King”, this is an… interesting chapter.

Chapter 4 went through a lot of revisions, from cutting the chapter in half to rewriting the actual debate four times (not including times I only did line additions).  Because I always struggled in school with public speaking and debates (despite being a theatre kid), this scene was rather hard to form.

Vincent especially still feels like he’s a little too abrasive for a meeting with the most powerful leader on the continent, even considering his mercenary upbringing.  I always envisioned him challenging Knite-Siege at every step, but he seems a little too chill in the meeting.  King Pennrose, in contrast, seemed too easily swayed in the earlier forms of this chapter, though even with the added questioning segment, I feel like I made him a little too eager to go with the task force – though, I worked later moments with him to specifically work around this.

This chapter also marks the first major character built for the novel.  Warbelle Ecartes was never in my original idea for Hell/Dolls, and became a major player in the story mainly because I didn’t have a reason for the barrier’s existence.  When I first came up with Warbelle, she was intended to be the final antagonist of Unity’s Edge… and there’s a good chance she’ll be a major antagonist later down the line as well.  I don’t want to spoil it too much, but… Warbelle became a very central character for this first “book”, beyond what I originally made her for, and I can absolutely say I’m excited to see where her particular narrative ends up going.

If I’m being honest, I don’t think I gave Knite-Siege the attention he deserved in this chapter, but that will be remedied.  Overall, on a scale of 1 to 10 on how I think this chapter turned out, I’d give it an 8.5.  I think this chapter is incredibly important to the story, from the task squad’s naming, to the amount of things I learned writing it, to the introduction of three major characters to the story.  I was considering adding a section with Barolo’s testimony on Simon’s and Rinkyu’s progress in the training sessions, but by the time it was time to release these chapters, I’d decided against it.

Stay tuned for the next update, where I’ll be addressing Chapter 5!

-Marcosias Isif