Hey Folks!
I figured I owed those of you following this particular fic a bit of an explanation since my last update 5 months ago.
It took me about two months to finish sorting out all the stuff that had been going on and find the nerve to sit down and write anything significant again.
I first had inspiration to work on one of the other two fanfics I have up, the Dragonlance one, and ended up on a writing bender that churned out over 30 chapters in about two months. The fans of that story were incredibly interactive and kept me motivated, and getting that done between non-writing responsibilities didn't give me much time to work on this fanfic. I've almost finished the first installment of that series, and intend to get it done first so as not to leave those folks hanging when it is so close to the end.
The last month and a half or so, I've had a lot of real life responsibilities piling on that needed to be dealt with.
HOWEVER, as I've taken a short mental break from the Dragonlance fic to make sure the ending of the installment is going to be properly written and satisfying for the readers, I've been re-reading this fic to familiarize myself with where we were, draft up new notes to replace those lost when my old computer crashed, and give a good long think on the plot and its direction.
That is especially important for this particular fanfic, out of all three I'm working on, because this one is the most complicated. The other two, I only have to juggle a single canon with the fic. Like I stated at the beginning of this fic, I wanted this one to combine the history of Vlad Draculea with Stoker's novel and the Hellsing Alucard; to form a cohesive story line from start to finish between the three evolutions of the character. That's three separate sets of information to keep straight in my mind, plus how I'm intertwining them into this fic. So it's been a complicated task to refresh myself on, and then try to pick back up where my plots were going.
And I'm actually really glad that things stalled where we're currently at. Having about a year break from the story now, I have some distance to impartially evaluate certain support characters that have barely been touched on, or that have yet to be introduced. Some of the plot I originally intended would have felt forced to just tidy certain plot threads up neatly in later installments. I honestly think at least two of those initial sub plot points would have pissed readers off.
Where the story is at currently, the first installment nearly complete, those plots weren't laid out and interwoven yet because we were primarily concentrated on Mercedes and Alucard. I still had time to remap the support characters out and make them better, without instituting a massive retcon later. So I have been taking the time to redraft my ideas, and hitting up some of my creative minded friends as sounding boards to work out those problems. It has been quite the process, especially for one especially difficult support character to decide on what should be done with them; but I'm steadily ironing out the new sub plots and revamping certain characters and their evolving relationships (negative or positive) to one another.
Also, over the last two weeks, I've been slowly but surely working my way through editing previously written chapters. Whether it was grammar mistakes, or spelling mistakes that Spellcheck didn't catch because it was things like "them" in place of "then" or "if" instead of "of", or I missed typing an article like "a" or "the" because my hands were moving so fast- I've been catching and fixing on average 2-5 subtle mistakes per chapter. I know most of you haven't been that bothered by it, and in fact I've received several compliments to the effect that the quality of my writing far exceeds the usual standards of fanfic sites, which is part of why some of you have been able to enjoy the story so much. But those errors do bother me as I've been reading through the past work for a refresher, and I know I have about 60% of my audience not having English as their first language, so I'd like to make my stories as error free as possible. At the rate I've been going for editing in my free time, I will probably have the majority of those errors gone by the end of this week.
I am not certain how long it will be before I start posting new chapters, but I wanted you folks to know that the story is not abandoned. When you do start seeing proper chapter updates, it will be because the other fic got its first installment's proper ending, I've worked out the major issues with this fic's plot points over its installments, and my attention is now set on churning out chapters for this story like I have been for the other.
Hope you've all been well, and I'll see you around when the story resumes.