The Soul Collector is my first webnovel, and my first serious attempt at writing and trying to make money from it. I have dreamed of becoming a full-time author for probably 5-6 years already, but as an ESL writer, I always have doubt of whether my writing would be good enough. Is my writing readable? Are metaphors taken from my mother tongue evocative or cringe? What about my grammar, my author's voice, world-building, characters, or plots? These thoughts invaded my mind constantly, and I doubt they would ever go away. I don't know what gave me the confidence back then, or was this just my way of saying f**k it, but half a year ago, I sat down, decided to give it a go, and started to write the first chapter of this story.

  As a novice author, I started out with a prologue, feeling confident that by hinting at an end-game element and conflict, the prologue would open up the story in a way that makes the readers go back and reference it from time to time. Turn out, it was an utter failure. I have introduced some characters and settings too soon that they won't appear again in a couple of books. I have been too ambitious, which leads to a disastrous launch. I think the note about me having to rewrite some of the opening chapters in the weekend is still there haha. Luckily after the change, you all have given my story some love with the follows, favorites, and comments, so thank you. So, first lesson learned, and what a hard one to start with.

  The second lesson is the pacing issues, which is a combination of me trying to avoid convenient discoveries, to make everything feel earned; stuffed and run-on introspection; and my eagerness to write everything down without cutting all the fluff. I am trying too hard at making turn after turn for the story without having the necessary skills to back it up. The most noticeable of them is my failure to deliver on the promise of Zalanir being a soul collector. Only at the end of the first arc that I gave him the tool for it (trying to make it so that the butterfly and the nasciivez don't come off as an asspull, but looking back, I think I still failed at this), and even at the end of the first volume, Zalanir still hasn't been able to use it fully. Thinking about this from a webnovel standpoint, it takes you as the readers 2.5 months to get to the promise. With good prose to keep you with me, I think this is doable, but doing this with my first serious attempt at writing is like loading up a game and starting with hard mode lol. Some of you have given me comments on how slow it is, and I hear you. This is something I'm working on for the second volume.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  An issue that I am currently analyzing is the choice of starting out the story with a slavery arc. I think not everything in life is pink and glory, but I should've written this type of arc only after already having the setting of this world set, and giving you time to bond with the MC. This would give the story a better start, in my opinion, so, another hard lesson. Rewriting the whole arc would be too much, since I have made various references and preparations based on the arc already, so I will just continue onward. Also relating to this type of content topic, my choice of giving Zalanir his active and passive skills leaves a lot to be desired. Up until the middle of Arc 2, Zalanir only had Adaptability Bolt and a niche use of Energy Barrier as offensive/active moves. As a mage, those are simply not enough. Together with the next issue, I think some fights have become rather dull and predictable.

  And the last major weakness of my writing is in the scene descriptions, especially with the lack of sensory details to ground you in the story. Many of my descriptions are too bland (red dress, white eyes, curly hairs, etc., stuff like this) and too reliant on the visual information. After giving Zalanir Sound Sense, I have tried to incorporate the sound aspect more into the story, but still not enough taste, smell, or touch. I'm actively working to fix this issue the most out of all the other aspects, so you can expect things to get better soon.

  I'm sure there are tons of issues as well, but these are the major ones, I think. And how to improve them? It's by actively reading better stories and challenging myself to write better with these learning. Though with my current schedule of writing and posting 5 times per week with minimal edit and downtime to learn, I find it too exhausting sometimes to keep up. This is why I'm reducing my pace to 3 times per week starting with the second volume to learn and find the process that works for me in the long term.

  All in all, this experience is still extremely valuable, and I'm glad that I did this, that I saw the first volume to the finish line. Thank you everyone for giving my story a go, and if you're reading this, thank you for sticking with it despite the rough start. If you can, please revisit the last two chapters and give me some feedback then. It would help me so much to identify what works and what doesn't.

  So, see you again on January, 7th for Zalanir's new adventure at Yebin.