Calling it Quits

Hello everyone. Sorry that this isn't an actual chapter update, but a status update. I thought it was best to let everyone know that after some careful thought and consideration, I've decided to call it quits with Battle: Actium. Yes, your eyes do not deceive you: I am officially canceling this story and abandoning it.

I've been writing this story for nearly a year and a half now, and during that time I feel like I've accomplished a lot, however, as is common with stories of this scope and nature, this fanfic has gotten far too complicated and bloated. In essence, it's too long and it's starting to drag. While it makes for a really bad story, for me personally, I think it's a good thing.

I've mentioned this a couple of times in the past, but this story to me has always been an experimental one. It was always supposed to be a place for me to try new things. I've never attempted to write a story with this many characters, each with their own character arc, over such a long length of time, and utilizing their own style of fighting, and I had always thought Battle: Actium would give me a chance to try all of that at the same time.

But, with the benefit of hindsight, that was a mistake; this story is far too ambitious for someone of my limited writing ability. To use an analogy, it's like I was a couch potato who one day decided I wanted to run a marathon, only instead of doing the sensible thing which would have been to take it slow and train myself up, I signed up for the first race I could find and made it a fifth of the way through before realizing, "hehe, I'm in danger."

Among the multitude of mistakes, I think my most notable problem was that I allowed myself to get too distracted by the minutiae: rather than focus on the overall plot, I ended up giving a play by play for the entire battle which, for a single character focused on a single event, that would be okay, but not for a story with this many characters and this length of time. Really, the first red flag should have been when day one of the battle lasted a total of thirty-four chapters and nearly three hundred thousand words, and that's with the cuts I made.

Now, with that being said, I don't think this is necessarily a terrible story. It's something I feel like I could probably salvage. However, with the amount of material I would want to cut… at that point, I might as well just rewrite the damn thing. Which, I might end up doing. But not anytime soon as it's always frustrating to abandon a story when there are so many ideas and plot points I had that I never got a chance to get to.

So, where does this leave me? To be honest, I don't know. I had planned on making this my main story for the next year or so, but now that's obviously not going to happen and I just don't have anything else prepared. There's my other story, Barracuda, but unfortunately, a number of plot points for that depended on this one, and with this one no longer being written, Barracuda will be cancelled too (and will have been deleted by the time I post this note.)

I did have six chapters for Battle: Actium already written out before I made the decision to drop it, which, if readers are interested, I'll go ahead and post, alongside a rough outline of what the end of Battle: Actium would have looked like, as well as the fate of the characters. If that is something you are interested in, I strongly encourage you to leave a review or send me a PM because if I don't hear anything by next Friday, I'm going to assume no one is interested and I'm just going to leave this story as is.

Aside from that, I'm going to have to think about what I want to do next. Thank you to everyone who has left a review, sent me a PM, or even just followed/favorite this story. I kind of wish I could have finished it for you guys, but I guess I'm just going to have to add this story to the massive pile of fanfictions that have been abandoned halfway through over the years.