THIS STORY IS ALIVE. AALLIIIIVVEE! (Plum, play the Frankenstein soundtrack!)

HAPPY….well, I'm sure its someone's birthday out there, so happy birthday to you! I got no holidays to mooch off for this message so you birthday ones can take this.

If your reading this, you can join me in a monumental moment in my experience as a writer. For the first time in over two and half years since I first started writing Shadow Monarch on that hellhole of a website (WN) back in Feb 2020, I have officially rewritten something!

Shocking to those who know me, I know. I have very rarely ever even looked at my own work after I posted it. I might do a bunch of stuff before its posted but once it's up, nothing. My brain rejects it for whatever reason.

Anyway, the point of this message is to talk about my story 'My Life with an S&M Maid.'

As I promised I would, I paid close attention to the poll from my last Author Note chapter, as well as the open poll on my discord server. S&M Maid was the winner by a good margin interestingly enough.

I was surprised but what do I know. So I got to work on it and I'm pretty happy with how things are turning out. My beta's Plum and Pheonix have been a huge help in reviewing and working through the content with me.

About 70% of the OG version is being kept. The plot points and stuff will remain the same. The grammar, sentence structure, relationships, and the magic and world dynamics were majorly changed.

The old story had numerous inconsistencies and flat out confusing content that I don't even know why I wrote. This new one hopefully cleaned up a lot and added some flow to the lore and magic system.

There were a few other points that changed as well that I would love to have some reader input on. Please share an answer to the following three subjects.

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#1: The pairing.

Do you readers know why I couldn't keep writing the Old OG version? It was because of the pairing. I had the entire story skeleton in great detail written out years ago, and yet I couldn't write a single word further.

It was because I absolutely fell in love with Virgo's character.

The original intention was a harem, a special type of harem admittedly with some unique factors coming into play that I still say could work very well, but my hands just wouldn't move forward. I was supposed to be introducing a new harem member in the next chap and just couldn't do it.

At the currently rewritten chap, Chapter 5, putting the story at around 45K so far, I can't see this story being anything but a solo romance with Dante and Virgo. I even changed some points to make it even better in my eyes.

With that said, Cana and Ultear, as well as my original intention to make a crossover character with Rumi the dark skinned goddess bunny girl, will be dropped. I'll still use them, make them interesting characters if I can, but I don't think I'll be able to pair them up in the end. I'll see if I can find other characters to pair them with or keep them solo while keeping things fun.

The only character from the original harem that I could see being a possible fit in the dynamic would be Seilah.

So question for all of you having read the OG version. Do you want a solo romance? Do you want a harem?Do you want a solo romance with Virgo and Dante having occasional female characters joining their nights?

I will say this 100% of the way, please DO NOT recommend other women. I have looked over the entire FT cast a hundred times looking for pairings that could work with my intentions, and these 5 are the best fits for this story.

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#2: What part of the story is most interesting to you? Tell me which ones grab your attention. You can pick more than choice, just let me hear your thoughts on why.

/2.1-The original content I made with the wild environments? The magical beasts and wonder of Danger Zones to expand the magical wild aspect of the world. So more exploration and adventure.

/2.2-The potion business and auctions? The clientele and potion based jobs? The potion crafting?

/2.3-The research into magic, the various branches, and mysteries of magics depths?

/2.4-More action scenes of Dante fighting.

/2.5-More action scenes of Virgo fighting.

/2.6-More scenes of Virgo interacting with various clients and her 'punishments' to those who make trouble. Or better yet, just showing clips of her growing cult that worships her S&M ways.

/2.7-The interactions with background characters to give them more focus. The King of Fiore, Layla Heartfilia, etc. Also includes my crossover characters like Ink Mage Revy.

/2.8-The interactions with Dante's friends.

/2.9-Delving deeper into the Celestial Realm and Virgo's personal realm. Perhaps something like Edolas but instead of that world, I show the Celestial Realm where the Zodiacs are lowkey royalty.

/2.10-More interactions with the Snake children.

/2.11-Or would you rather I scrapped all my original content and did the boring stuff by focusing on Canon events? To be fair, I planned to solve a lot of problems before canon even showed up, so by the time of canon, I could really pull the rug from under things. Or better yet, just deal with things earlier. No reason to wait for things to come to a head if I don't have to. Which also adds the point that I love from Vimenthusiast's stories, that not every problem has to be solved by the MC. It's not like he's the center of the universe, just the focus of the story.

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#3: Do you want me to keep the AN's in the chapters? Pick one please.

Looking back, I noticed I used to write Author Notes in the chapter contents. Admittedly, I was trying to explain some reasoning for my choices, but only now do I see that it screwed up the story flow.

/3.1-Keep them in the chapter.

/3.2-Put them at the end of the chapter with something like (AN: #1) followed by the full note for #1 at the end of the chapter.

/3.3-Put them at the end of the chapter without any (AN: #1)

/3.4-I shouldn't care about explaining myself, you just want to read my story.

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I'm going to wait 24 hours from the time I post this till I post the new Pro and Chapter 1. Following that, I might keep things a few days longer to make sure that the earlier chapters match the later chapters.

You have no idea how much back and forth work I had to put in to fix the absolute mess of the OG version. Plum is a real minion…*cough*…bro. Plum is a real bro of a beta.

Further, I would rather spend 8 hours writing a 14K chapter than spend 2 hours using Grammarly on said chapter. Grammarly might be useful but there's a special place in hell for that stuff.

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Sorry for the long wait everyone. Let me know your thoughts and let's get things moving here. Further stories for rewriting can be voted on through my 'Author Notes' latest chapter, or through my discord server. All previous votes will be taken into consideration.

(Feel free to review here, in the discord server, or on the Old/New version of the fic.)

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