All right, this is going to be a fairly lengthy one where I just talk about stuff for this story and some future stuff, so here is something for those that just want an update.

TLDR:

This story is getting done this year come hell or high water.

Are we good? Did you glaze past that and just kept going? Ok, so let's get into the meat and potatoes of this update. So in case it wasn't obvious, hello, I'm Storm Starshine, the author of this… passion project of a story. I have been working on this story over 4 years off of just the seat of my pants and I would say it's gone ok for my first big story. The reason I'm making this update now is because I honestly feel like I should just make one to keep everyone up to speed, though this should be the last assuming this story gets done this year.

Pokemon Rising Melody

Either way, if you can't tell by the length of the past three chapters and how much is in them, I am starting to get exhausted writing this story. For context, I do have a few other stories that I'm working on after this one is done, but that is exactly the problem. I thought this story would be done in a year several times, hell I thought that would be the case last year, and I just have been slow with writing this. As you can probably guess, this wasn't ideal for those other stories because I haven't paid them any mind. Note that doesn't mean I hate this story, hell it's been my baby and gotten me through the pandemic.

Either way, I am dead set on finishing this story this year. I do have ideas for what I wanted to go and do, but I am going to trim those out. For reference, I was going to have one final confrontation with Shika right before either the final tourney and the championship match with a Shadow Mewtwo. As you can imagine, that is no longer happening at least in this version of the story, more on that later.

For I know is set in stone: the 8th gym (obviously), a brief respite before the final tourney (which was originally going to be a battle royale to determine the contestant, but… no), the final tourney which will consist of 3 or 4 written battles, the championship match, and an epilogue. Admittedly, this should all be fairly obvious stuff, but I did just feel like putting it out there. How long this will all take is something I don't know, but all I pray for is within the year.

I will admit, there is a lot, and I do mean a lot, of stuff in this story that is just bloat and fat and stuff I would rather get rid of. Hell, a good chunk of this story was done by the seat of my pants with basically no plan, if that wasn't obvious at any point after roughly the mid 20s. I could just go back and rewrite what I don't like, butI will not be doing that to this story, mainly because god I have spent 4 years on this story, I want it to end. That being said, I do plan on rewriting this in the future, at least after one of my next stories is done. It should (keyword: should) be more cohesive than this version, but I will see how much I chop off when I begin planning on that.

Now I should say this about this version, it is going to stay up as it is when I am done with it. As much as I dislike it, it's still the first story that I committed to and saw to completion, I wouldn't get rid of it even if I was asked. That is all I have to say about this story, which leads me to the next part of this update…

The Future

I wasn't exactly sure if I wanted to put this in, but I figured that hey, why not? Yeah I do plan on making more stories after this, I have too many to count so I might as well share some. Not going to say exactly what, but there is one elephant that I do need to address, Arc-V Linked. This was a Yugioh story that I had started I believe soon after Pokemon RM and let me just say, it was a disaster. While it was a bit more planned than RM was… that plan was started in early VRAINS and my intrest petered out over the years once I actually started to make it. I don't even remember most of it now aside from wanting to give the girls from both shows a bit more love, especially Aoi and that before the rest of the series played out.

Ok small rant over, back on topic in that I am somewhat remaking that story, at least planning to. I still have to debate on that internally, especially because Duels are so fun to plan out, but it's very much 50/50. If I do decide to work on it, that will bring my currently planned stories up to 4. After Rising Melody is done, I am going to take a small break and just get things in order so I know what I'm working on. Also going to see about doing voice over for future stories in an attempt to make audio books about them, but that is not till much later and still very much just an idea.

Anyway, I think that's about all I have to say. Sorry about making this a more general update and not story specific, I just had a lot I wanted to say. Hope you enjoy the rest of Rising Melody as that comes out and I do hope you stick around for everything else that I write. Have a good day.