Random bumbling thoughts (Not a chapter) and Volume Four announcement

Hey there, everyone,Firstly, to dispense with any suspense you might feel from the title, I’ll go ahead and reveal my plans for Volume 4: I will not stub Volume 4, and it will remain free in perpetuity.

The main reason is that I don’t feel the quality is quite up to par with the previous volumes. My plan for Volume 4 was always for it to be a slower-paced book centered primarily around Kingdom-Building, but I don’t think I executed that vision as well as I could have. Plus I also like the idea of having these sort of bridge volumes that remain free so new readers don't feel like they are gated behind a massive paywall.

When I started writing Fallen Eagle, I really only had the first volume, or arc, planned out in detail. I spent over a month plotting the story and the world, researching, brainstorming plots, and figuring out how everything would fit together. That is probably why, for many of you, Volume 1 felt like a more tightly woven story. Every volume since then has also had an element of planning behind it, but plotting a book while actively writing it is a completely different challenge, especially when I also have to keep putting out quality chapters and figuring out Patreon, publishing, Discord, and a dozen other things.

While plotting Volumes 2–4, I started thinking about the different aspects of Kingdom-Building (something I touched upon in previous chapter notes), and I realised I wanted each volume to focus more heavily on a particular aspect so that each would have its own flavour. Volume 2 leaned into politics and intrigue. Volume 3 centered around war and military strategy. Volume 4 was meant to focus primarily on Kingdom-Building and economic development.

However, I think I fell short of the vision I had for Volume 4.

I leaned too heavily into character work. My idea was to intersperse the Kingdom-Building with character arcs, as I had done in previous volumes, but I ended up creating arcs that were too complicated and required too much setup and exposition before they could become rewarding. That ended up eating into both the pace and the focus of the story.

The other problem is that some of those arcs simply didn’t resonate with readers. That part is harder to control. I mostly work off instinct when writing characters, and I tend to choose arcs that I personally find interesting rather than ones that are necessarily neat or satisfying. Characters are human, and humans aren’t black and white. They are messy shades of grey, and that is generally the philosophy I follow when deciding what to do with them. In this case, though, I think I overcomplicated things and leaned too heavily in that direction.

The end result is a volume where the pacing has felt slower than I intended. I think that is also partly because I began working full-time while writing it, and juggling both is something I am still figuring out.

The main takeaway from these rambling thoughts is that, from the feedback I’ve received here on NovelPhoenix and on Patreon, the biggest complaints have generally been about too many side POVs slowing down the pace, and uninteresting plotlines or seemingly illogical character actions that appear to come out of nowhere.

Stolen story; please report.

Going forward, I think the main thing I will change is cutting down on some of the groundwork for character arcs. Only particularly important moments, such as Theophylact’s breakdown in his room, will merit substantial scenes of their own. Some of the preceding setup can probably be conveyed more briefly rather than requiring entire scenes or chapters.

I also sometimes limit Theodorus’s POVs because they can very easily become dry exposition. When he explains something like the cement scheme, for example, it can become several paragraphs of Kingdom-Building information that I then have to somehow make interesting. For me, it is often easier to write from the perspective of one of the workers involved and show the nitty-gritty of how that policy actually changes his daily life.

I think that could be a useful direction for the Kingdom-Building side of the story: temporary, self-contained POVs that exist specifically to show the consequences of Theo’s policies. That way, the focus remains firmly on what Theo is doing and how his decisions affect the principality, while still allowing me to vary the perspective and show things he would never personally witness.

Overall, I’m going to try to make Theo’s story more center stage and limit some of the other storylines compared with what I have been doing recently. Once I manage to calm down the frantic pace I’ve been keeping with the chapters, I also hope to have more time to properly think things through and plan ahead.

One other quick thing I wanted to address is the criticism I’ve received regarding the overall corruption of the Church in Theodoro, or at least the seemingly impious clergy characters I have introduced so far, which is warranted (if plenty of readers are in agreement about something, it usually is, haha).

My thought process has always been that, while the Church served many critical functions in medieval society through education, charity, community organization, and the promotion of moral values, it also had its ugly side. I wanted that ugliness to be particularly visible in Theodoro because I am portraying it as a corrupt and declining rump Byzantine state. In that sense, some of the immorality we see within the Church is deliberately on the higher end because it is meant to reflect a broader culture of institutional decay.

Clergymen are also human. While the average village priest might well be pious, kind, and genuinely devoted to his flock, I tend to think that institutions with enormous political influence will inevitably attract ambitious people as well. A man who wants power and finds himself within the Church hierarchy has every incentive to climb as high as he can, and some will inevitably be willing to do unpleasant things to get there.

The starkest example is obviously Thaddeus, but I am trying to portray him as an outlier even within the Church. I also never really intended Metropolitan Damianus to come across as simply greedy or corrupt. My conception of him is actually of someone who is genuinely pious, but who is willing to do things he personally finds distasteful because he believes they are necessary to fulfil his holy duty of protecting his Church and his flock.

So I suppose the main takeaway is that I am not trying to portray every priest, or Christianity as a whole, in that way. It may sometimes feel that way because Theodorus himself is deeply atheist and actively dislikes the Church, and much of what we see is therefore filtered through his perspective.

I have already tried to introduce a more genuinely pious priestly figure in later chapters, and I also intend to touch more on the very real good that the Church provides to society. As with most things in the story, I prefer the answer to be complicated. Saying that the Church is wholly evil would be just as simplistic as saying that it is wholly good.

Anyway, let me know what you guys think. These sorts of feedback posts are usually something I reserve for Patreon, but given my dissatisfaction with how Volume 4 has turned out so far, I wanted to hear your guys' thoughts as well.