Octavia Girl Vol. IV

Hi Ink Drinkers, 

Let's talk about Octavia Girl Vol. IV.  Soo.... I am not really ready to release this.  If I lived in a perfect world, I wouldn't release it.  I have a complete manuscript, but... I'd really rather sit on it for a few months, edit the hell out of it, and release it then.  Except... I'm getting a little flack from my readers.  

In response to impatient readers, I have to say:

1. I could write a volume of Octavia Girl once a year for the rest of my life, but if you're all going to explode between release dates... I'd rather not.

2. I'm not getting paid for this.

3. I want to ban impatient readers.  I'm not talking about 'I'm so excited for your next book!  When's it coming out?'  I mean explosions blaming me for having an incomplete series.  'I never read incomplete series and if I'd had any idea that yours was incomplete, I never would have read it.  You have wasted my time and ruined my life and now I wish you would just ^*&."

4. As if all this isn't hard enough..

I don't want to release this book.  If you're thinking that I'm being bullied into releasing it now, that is only partly true.  There are other problems.

Problems like:

1. This is it for the covers.  The artist who did the pictures of Jenna (didn't know she was making pictures of Jenna) and I've run out of pictures from her collection of a girl who looks enough like Jenna to squeak by with my graphic design skills.  I had to give the girl on the fourth cover a nose job so she'd look enough like the girl on the front of the first book.  We've also run dry on possible covers from the artist who did the backgrounds.  It was quite difficult to stitch this fourth cover together and I don't know if I could do a fifth cover without massively sacrificing quality.

2. There hasn't been enough interest for me to have reasonable belief that the average reader will be interested beyond the fourth book.  Normally, I say that if a book has earned 4k hits, it's been worth it.  Well, Octavia Girl earned the necessary number of hits on Royal Road, but not on any of the other sites where it was hosted.  It just hasn't been popular enough.  My Sleeping Beauty Inc. series has been popular enough on all platforms to warrant it's continuance.  Octavia Girl is a weird genre.  It may need time to get more readers and maybe it'll get the necessary popularity after it's complete, but by then I will have moved on.  Oh, the irony.

3. If I pause and pursue other projects, I'll come back to Octavia Girl and I'll have no idea what I had in mind, what I was doing, where I was going, Sardius will have left me and I'll have to dedicate myself to studying my own books in order to finish.  It's better to push myself now than lose all that I've worked for in a haze of forgetfulness.

Octavia Girl Vol. IV will be the last book.

It has to be.  At the end the series will be around 240k.  That's a beast and I don't have the kind of brain that wants to just work on one thing.  I want to work on lots of things, so I don't know if I'll ever even write another series like this in the future.  

I hope you all enjoy this last bit.  I think it's good.  I'm happy with my final draft.  I just wish I had a bit more time to stew over it before I release it.  There will be very little stewing.  I'm releasing it chapter by chapter on Thursdays on the following sites:

Royal Road: https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/64843/octavia-girl

Inkitt: https://www.inkitt.com/stories/scifi/1298721

Quotev: https://www.quotev.com/story/15561209/Octavia-Girl/8

ScribbleHub: https://www.scribblehub.com/series/1138250/octavia-girl-vol-iv/

Tapas: https://tapas.io/series/Octavia-Girl-Vol-IV