@Lloxie || Journal Entry

RE: Mystic Heart Odyssey
16 Nov 2023, 04:57 PM

So yeah, I've got the first five chapters of MHO up at the time of this journal. I finally found a way to bulk-convert the odt files into html, so uploading here is a bit more feasible now. So now it just remains to be seen if it's worth it. I'm thinking maybe I'll post the rest of the first episode, Strangers in a Strange Land, then wait to see if anyone pays it any attention, heh. So please, if you're reading it, do leave a like and comment!

As a quick heads up, MHO is definitely geared towards a mature audience. It's not smut, obviously, although it does have a very small number of (usually brief) explicit scenes. There's also a fair amount of (sometimes intense) violence and plenty of strong language. That said, I have no intention of making it "gritty" or anything like that. Rest assured that it is, overall, a fantastical adventure story with a slow-burn romance subplot. Any mature content ultimately serves that purpose. Sexy scenes are meant to demonstrate characters' attraction to one another and the sexual tension between them, and any violence serves plot purposes.

I DO have versions of a couple chapters that skip the more explicit scenes, particularly in Strangers in a Strange Land. I haven't decided which versions I'll upload here. Unless someone requests them, I'll probably just stick to the full, original versions. So if you're interested in the story but don't want to read a couple brief lewd scenes, please let me know, so I can upload the comparatively 'clean' versions as well! (Chapter 6 is the first one to have such a scene, hence why I'm pointing this out now.)

Comments (4)

Posted: Saturday, 18 November, 2023 @ 11:02 PM

I'll warn upfront, my average engagement is pretty poor even amongst close friends, though my work's esoteric at best and stretched over a dozen themes, so I'm not a good benchmark for popularity. :P What you've written is wholly competent; my impression is the active userbase tilts decidedly to creators over consumers, so don't be discouraged by lack of an audience—they haven't found us yet.

P.S.: Tsundere, or tsunDEER? :^D

Posted: Sunday, 19 November, 2023 @ 03:14 AM

@Thorvald: Hehe that's fair. ^^ I'm mostly worried people will get intimidated by the sheer size of MHO, hence why I'm kinda sharing it here 2-3 chapters at a time, hehe. xD Thanks for checking it out though! And hey, I'm used to fighting for an audience wherever I go. let's face it, visual media gets waaaay more attention than written anyway. :P But that just makes the few fans I get all the more valuable, honestly!

XD Tsundeer... I love it! Yeah that definitely fits Kuna at this early point in the story. >w< Rest assured, he does grow though! ,,,though he never outgrows the snark. :p

Posted: Sunday, 19 November, 2023 @ 06:41 PM

@Lloxie: Aye, I know that feel: my biggest works here are consolidations of serial stories originally posted on web forums and approach 60 pages as PDFs. DeviantArt has pretty much always treated literature as second-class citizens, and the Eclipse reformatting up and threw writers under the bus. At least S7 lets you post custom thumbnails to lure 'em in—I've had waaay too much fun with the covers. XD

Posted: Sunday, 19 November, 2023 @ 07:32 PM

@Thorvald: Heh, using a rough estimate of 550 words per page, MHO is sitting at over 900 pages at this point if I combine all the parts/episodes xD And yeah, unfortunately most art sites tend to give literary works the short end of the stick, and that's assuming they accept them at all. Like Itaku technically does, but they're basically treated as regular blog/journal/etc. posts and have a character limit that only works for real short stories/chapters. And yeah, thank goodness for thumbnails! I need to make some new ones sometime, hehe. xD

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