Key to the Void: A self-made isekai

Well, I am currently trying to get back into writing this series. In order to do this, I am having to review and re-read my way through my earlier work. While I'm at that, I've decided to edit the whole thing.

I've already gone through this exact process for Hell's Underworld and managed to get through the whole thing at a rate of around 2 chapters per day. There are significantly more chapters in Key to the Void, but I am also planning to turn what is currently book 3 into book 4 and slot in a new piece of content that takes place between the two, meaning I only have around 80 chapters to go through. (I am currently around chapter 6.)

As such, I should be resuming this series with the between-period inserted chapters starting up somewhere around early March. In the meantime, you can expect to see the edited versions start replacing current versions starting soon. Some of these edits have been rather major, and chapter 6 is being almost completely re-written keeping only the part about Tia's crazy and wild movements and replacing almost every single other thing in the chapter.

(Also, every week or so I will update this chapter with details on where I currently am with the editing and mention any chapters that saw particularly major changes like chapter 6. A part of this is to keep people appraised of such major changes, but mostly this is to keep myself accountable and let people know the edits are still coming and progressing through the series to keep that March estimate on when the series will start again.)

Edit 1/17/24

I have finished with the edits to chapter 6. I ultimately wound up deciding to steal some content from chapter 7 and moved it back. This will mean I will be doing a lot of exactly that from now on, constantly shifting bits of content backward and compressing it. Eventually, when it reaches the entire content of a chapter, I guess I will wind up just having to delete one entirely.

Edit 1/17 24 (a few minutes later)

... actually, now editing again only a few minutes later, I have just taken a look at chapter 7 again. I have decided it's trash. I am going to have to be deleting a chapter a lot sooner than I expected, because that thing's got to go.

The first half of chapter 8 doesn't work either. Instead, it looks like I'm going to have to find some way to bridge the gap between the new end of chapter 6 and some part of the half-way point in chapter 8.

(Rate things are going, I think book 3 is going to be able to stay book 3, because it's really starting to look like books 1 and 2 are going to be collapsed and compressed into each other.)

Edit 1/18/24

After some consideration, I added about an additional 100 words to the end of chapter 6, and those 100 words essentially summed up and invalidated the entirety of chapter 8. So, I guess chapter 8 gets the ax as well.

Edit 1/28/24

I might have to significantly push off the March estimate for re-starting the series. I am seriously struggling with chapters 9-16. Most of this is because I am not going through them chapter by chapter individually to editing them. Rather, I am editing all 7 of those chapters as a single whole, and am re-arranging several events that take place during that period in order to make things flow more smoothly and break up some multi-chapter info dumps.

I have written 3 chapters based off this work so far and am almost done with a 4th. I can't say for certain how many chapters will exist once I have utilized all this material.

(This working with a block of chapters at once approach is likely to become more frequent moving forward. I think it's the right way to go to make it a good edit, but it is not really conducive to getting the job done quickly.)

Edit 2/7/24

I am currently doing a 2nd draft of what is amounting to a re-write and complete jumble of chapters 10-13, which seem to be more or less encompassing the entirety of the material that it goes over in chapters 10-16 in the current version and even re-introduces the material from the previously deleted chapters 7 and 8.

It's a massive tightening down of the material and is becoming a greater undertaking than when I wrote the chapters originally.

Edit 2/11/24

I have successfully finished compressing chapters 7-17 down into only 4 chapters. I have everything that happened in that chapter range except for Nymph's introduction.

But, because Nymph's introduction is missing, it currently can't be linked up with the current story as is. As such, I need to capture content from chapters 18 and onward into this effort and find a way to write Nymph into it before I can add these edited chapters back into the series.