In 2016, I started writing Of Rust and Gold, the first book in a series I later came to call “The Saints Song”. Immediately, I began posting the book to Wattpad, where it would become part of the paid program in 2019. Last year, I removed it from the site permanently. A very brief summary of events I’ve discussed here before. It’s crucial, since I always promised my readers that once it was off the site, I would self-publish it myself.

Well, I got distracted. Other projects, the sequels, deciding what I would change or add, and just the simple fact that diving into the 4-book project again never seemed appealing. Now that the tenth anniversary is coming up, I’m starting to feel the heat. Earlier this year, I started revising my self-publish edit plans. I made this years ago when ORG first went paid. It basically comprises of a list of name changes (between 2019 and 2024, I decided to change the name of one or two locations as well as the name of one character), slight world building fixes (usually about each country and their relation to each other), and minor details (ages of side characters, spellings, etc.). All things that wouldn’t change the meat of the story but would improve my ability to tell it. This list, however, did evolve and lead me down a pipeline of “what-ifs” that would result in larger plot changes. What if this one character that had been dead since I started writing in 2016 was no longer dead? What if this character were much older? What if this character started the series married? What if these two characters, who are already brothers, were twins? I found a lot of these ideas compelling, but when I did a recent reread of the sequels to help plan my rewrite, the ramifications of these changes made me feel insecure.

If this character is still alive, does it diminish the emotional impact of their absence? The bond the character had to the others and the way others manipulate that bond would either have to drastically change, or it would be gone entirely. If this character is already married, did it just mean I’d have to shove their spouse under a rug when the plot demanded it? I put my rewrite plans on pause and in doing so, made myself feel stagnated and paralyzed by choice. In the case of these books, my road was always easy. Due to my participation in the paid program, my only route was to self-publish them whenever I ended my contract. It eliminated any anxiety of having to try anything else, but if I couldn’t decide in what state I wanted to publish them, I was more or less in the same boat.

However, I believe I came to a compromise. I’m not scrapping all my new ideas. There are still improvements to be made, and as this is a story that’s been with me for almost ten years, I want to deliver it back into the hands of readers in the best state it can be. I’m currently unsure of my timeline, but I’m more optimistic than I was.

I’m sure someone out there wants to know about the other stories on Wattpad, and what about the one I’ve left behind there? Well, I’m still not sure myself. I haven’t thrown out any of them, and I’d like them all to make it back to the readers who cared about them, but if I had to make a decision for all of them all at once, I might combust.

Just know I’m still working on them and I haven’t given up.