Hey guys. Instead of just disappearing without saying anything, I decided to post a chapter both saying that I was dropping and explaining why.

I just can't get into this story anymore. This is one of my oldest stories. Through the last four years of my life, I've been through four or five drafts of it, each progressively better. This draft was so much better than the others that I decided it was worth posting on Royal Road. But now, after a year and a half of writing (or not writing) the story, I've come to the realization that while this story is better than a lot of the stuff I've done in the past, I can definitely do better.

This year I've been taking a creative writing course and I've been forced by my teacher to write a bunch of works in creative writing outside of my typical comfort zone. Some of them were so-so. Other's were exceptional. They outstripped TBoHL by such a wide margin that when I sit down to write TBoHL I just... can't.

A large part of the reason why TBoHL is such low quality is because of a key decision I made when I started writing TBoHL. I structured the narrative in an extremely limited and narrow way. I introduced no other characters that could reasonably be placed in the dungeon with Arris and essentially locked him into a seventy or sixty chapter long farming segment with no real character development. It was literally just supposed to be a massive montage of action arcs. Maybe fun to read, but boring as hell and repetitive to write.

At the time, my idea was to improve my action sequence writing and general use of descriptive language to describe scenes. While these two functions of language won't make a given work particularly deep or meaningful, they will make it be entertaining and exciting to the reader, which will keep roughly half of all people reading. I think that when I started writing I was a lot more fixated on keeping people reading my stuff. I feel like that's less of a priority for me now, and I want to focus on writing more meaningful stories.

And that's the crux of the problem. TBoHL has no meaning and has no real avenue to change that. It's a cliche, wish fulfillment, zero to op hero LitRPG novel. The MC isn't a very deep character and there's no supporting cast easily introduced. Now don't get me wrong. It's entertaining. If it was kindle unlimited I'd buy it and read the whole thing in half a day. But I wouldn't remember it. And I want to write something memorable, or at least try. I don't feel TBoHL can get there short of a full rewrite, and even then I'll still be dropping this work.

So yeah, that's pretty much it. I'm gonna go work on other stuff for a while. I can probably start posting some of it now but the odds of a specific work I'm working on now eventually being completed are pretty low. I'm gonna get at least 200 pages in a fiction before I come back and start posting. So yeah. See you around, if there's anyone still reading.