Hello everyone,
It’s been several months since my last Daybreak update, so some people might be wondering what’s going on. I did finally take Chapter 6 out of beta and publish it here. However, it might be a while before another chapter comes out, as I haven’t been writing more for a while.
Part of the delay is simply because I’ve been busy in my personal life — there’s been a lot going on at work, within my family, etc. Some of my work-related issues have been intruding into my personal life. For example, someone on my team whom I was very closed with was laid off in a recent company ‘reorganization’, so I’ve been helping him find a new job (I’m glad to say that he was successful within just over a month).
However, the slowdown wasn’t entirely caused by personal issues. The other reason is an issue with Daybreak itself. More precisely, a difference between how I had envisioned the 5th volume of Daybreak versus how it’s coming along as I write it.
The 5th volume of Daybreak was given the name ‘Journey through Daybreak’ because I had envisioned this volume to focus on a journey, both physically and metaphorically. The story was to focus on Kaede travelling across several countries on a diplomatic mission. And during the trip she would come to discover more about the world she inhabits as well as in herself. The story was supposed to be focused on this with the war mostly serving as a backdrop — the war incentivized her to go on a journey and adds stakes to its outcome, but the journey is its own story.
However, the more I write into the story, the more I noticed that the war was taking center stage and hogging the spotlight. When everyone around Kaede is putting it on a pedastal, it’s impossible for Kaede herself to not do the same. The very experience of writing this is really reminding me of how wars consume societies and distort its people’s values and views (and often not for the better).
This has become an issue because the two wars Rhin-Lotharingie simultaneously finds itself fighting are both extremely messy, complicated, and has too much emotional and historical baggage associated with it. And unlike Kaede in Volume 1, the current Kaede is deeply intuned with all of said baggage and cannot avoid it coloring her thoughts. Not only does this not bode well for my aim of having a ‘soft reset’ in Volume 5 for potential new readers, it also isn’t what I wanted to focus on writing.
In real life, the global economy, the conflict in the Middle East, the AI revolution, all of this is giving me enough anxiety. I wanted to focus on writing something more exploratory and meditative — something that lets me think about life and all its choices without being hyperfixated on depressing, zero-sum conflicts. Instead, I find myself digging deeper and deeper into the cultural and individual trauma left by Rhin-Lotharingie’s wars. It’s just not a mindset I want to be in right now. And since it’s the mindset I have to put myself into to make good progress, it’s become something I often find myself avoiding. After all, writing has mostly been a calming, stress-relieving activity for me. I can get over a few chapters when that’s not the case, but right now I feel like I’m sinking deeper into a hole.
Lastly, I’ve also been troubled over how I can still make Kaede grow as a character in the story moving forward. Volume 1-4 focused on Kaede adapting to the new world, coming to accept it as her own, and involving herself in its problems. But Kaede’s core motives and values are fairly grounded at this point. How else could I still develop her in a meaningful way?
Because of these issues, I’ve been putting Volume 5 on temporary hold and exploring other ideas, other topics. This include story setups that I could experiment with, different settings, different relationships, et cetera.
One of my big regrets with the Daybreak setting is that I stayed too close to the traditional ‘high medieval fantasy’ and I wish I had branched more away from it. I’ve hinted in Daybreak that the world of Hyperion is approaching the cusp of a major societal revolution — but truly building up to this change will require some time and effort.
For example, one story I’ve been experimenting with is a ‘group isekai story’ where three best friends gets reborn into a new world at once, but the circumstances of their rebirth fundamentally alters the dynamics of their relationship. This is an idea I’ve always found fascinating yet poorly explored in the genre (at least in recent decades). I’m also testing some thoughts on how magic would interact with industrialization in this setting and what kind of hybrid it would develop (i.e. using magical storage as a shortcut for the battery capacity problem to deploy widespread electrification). I’ve written a few chapters so far, but the story still has issues — certainly not something I feel ready to post here.
Regardless, I do plan to return to Daybreak at some point. It’s just that at the moment, I need a break from it to figure out how to get around its issues, while trying some new things.
Best regards,
~ Aorii