A postmortem of Hymns of the Apostate lead me to believe that I forced myself to streamline some aspects of the plot that I would have rather developed a little more during the story. In retrospect, I wish I had built up the importance of the Runeam Library and it’s impact on international politics, and I wanted to comment on how a large portion of the Alvaran population was living abroad as mercenaries and cheap labor. When I think about some of my motivations when I was actually making the pages of HotA, a lot of these points were streamlined because I was unable to update regularly due to my deployment schedule and then afterwards when I was working for the DoD in Japan. I felt pressured to “move the story along.” A lot of these plot points are eventually tied up in the Cast page (which I encourage you to read), but they also come to a head in Canto XXXVII which is arguably my favorite story beat in the entire series. I fret because a lot of readers overlooked some points when this canto was released, and I attribute a lot of that to the streamlining instincts that I had when making Hymns of the Apostate. For Lost Noise, I will resist the temptation to push the story along because moments like this are important. So, I apologize for the delay. I don’t want to compromise on Lost Noise, and I’m really happy how this episode came out.

Please let me know if you have any thoughts or feedback in the comments sections on this site or by tweeting at me.