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Raiya: Early-Game – Archons Chosen: Book 2

Russell Wilbinski
LitRPG, Science Fiction and Fantasy Writer

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Good day friends!

I know – It’s been a while since you heard from me. My bad, you can ask my mom, it’s a real problem of mine. No hard feelings I hope. That said, let’s get to today’s update. Since we last spoke, I have been working (Career wise and Writing) hard and found that I had less and less time to commit to my writing. Besides a few months with 60+ hour works, I struggled to find the motivation to write, and time to spend with my family.

Still, a writer needs to write.

Book 2 of the Archon’s Chosen series is complete and going through its final round of beta readers. I just wanted to give you all my sincerest gratitude for your patience. Hopefully, this next one will be worth the wait.

Let’s talk about the Archon’s Chosen series…

Originally, I intended this series to be a trilogy, no more, no less.The Trilogy would have book one: starter zone, book two: mid-game, and book three: end-game, but during the writing of book two, it continued to grow and grow until I realized there was no way to tell the story I wanted in three books, without making them all 1200 pages. I know some people would love a monster novel, but there are just as many who like books to be easier to digest in a single week.

Don’t misunderstand – Book two is still eighty percent longer than book one.

Raiya: Mid-game has become two separate books – Raiya: Early-game and Raiya: Mid-game will be the title for book three. Unless I get a wild hair in my derriere, book 2 sits comfortably at 150,000 words, just under four hundred pages. It should make for a fairly chunky read. As a Lit-RPG book, I found I wanted to limit the number of times the character sheet appears, and have taken every effort to reduce word count/page bloat. Many books in this genre suffer from dozens of pages that are just stats and inventory.

Avoiding bloat in Lit-RPG writing

As with book length, some readers absolutely love crunch (myself included) but just as many only want the highlights, significant changes that will alter the story. An interesting conversation that I have had many times relates to audiobook production. Having someone read out the stat pages can be mind numbingly boring and pull you out of the action. The question many readers have asked: why not minimized tables and stat blocks for audio to keep things moving? Because you can’t most times. For those who don’t know, audible has some requirements, namely that audio and text books have minimal differences in content, less than three percent in total. If you make edits AFTER they release an audio book, keep them within that tiny editing window or you will break whispersync.

Onto the juicy bits – Two books for the low, low price of .99 Cents!

Raiya: Early Game will be available for pre-order on 9/2/2109, with the full release on 9/6/2019. During this time, Raiya: Starter Zone will available on Amazon for free. That’s right, ZERO DOLLARS and to sweeten the pot, you can pick up Raiya: Early Game during the pre-order window for only $0.99.