A Guide to the Arcane Universes and Other Stories

Acknowledgments for The Unseen Wars Novella Series

This is by far the most distressing series I've yet to write following the end of my final semester in university, my pending and eventual graduation, and everything that happened in June to September 2023. That said, I'm pleased to announce that I've written 328,771 words for this series. It may be a tad less than the word count of the entire Memoirs of Mayhem series, but after everything I've been through, I'd say it's worth it!

Because let's face it: no one wants to be graduating while thinking of when they have to write the next installment for TUW.

Another fight I had to go through was in getting the individual novellas to 20k. You might ask—how is that possible? Do you ever run out of words and stories? The answer is yes, I do. Such is the case for this series. There will be novellas that are shorter than the rest because I have told the story I needed to tell without it ever reaching the minimum length for a novella, which is 20k.

This prompted me to hit up Google and found out the "Somethings" in the west said the ideal novella length starts from 17,500 words. I'm like, sweet! And so, I continued without guilt, and the next thing you know, voila! You have this insanely long spin-off series that is quite unnecessary but totally made for me and the few readers who have caught up to me as I'm writing. We'll get to that in a sec.

And the story for TUW actually started when I was developing MOFM. I just went and composed titles for fantasy works I want to write someday, and I slotted them in my secret discord server. I eventually forgot about it.

Same story with MOFM, right when I was editing the main series around 2021, I have seen the spots in the plot that deserve some spotlight that they weren't given. Why? Because I was afraid it'd take the story too far from the main point of each book, and I don't want to turn each one into Game of Thrones-esque word count monsters. So, the stories of each of the characters featured in both MOFM and TUW are, unfortunately, put on the back burner for a while.

I only ever had the courage to tackle TUW in its monster planning phase when I was already knee-deep in turning MOFM into the beast that it was. And off I went, knowing I had to devote at least another year for it before I can fully focus on the sequel series (oh yes, it's a thing. lol). From there, I changed the blurb a million times, the covers thrice, and the zero drafts for each one 102870340823rd times. So...yeah. I'm alright. Peachy.

Oh, did I mention that I also had to write this series out of order just because my attention span back in July (as I was awaiting graduation) was all over the place? Some of you might have noticed it, and others even questioned me, but I swear it was intentional. I got the shortest ones out of the way, so I can focus on the lengthier ones later on. Also, I got distracted by a shiny creation contest by forcing me to cough out four novelettes that I had to write alongside TUW. (Shoutout to LiteraryLoungeD for that!)

That's why the order of release was totally wack!

So, now that's all said and done, the COF Universe has 34 works under it, and I'm looking for it to go over 50. Why? Because there are so many fun things ahead! But...some things that I'm never allowed to talk about apart from the announcements I did at the end credits of The Last Oracle.

Finally, to make this journey even more worth it, let me thank some people I've been thanking for a while and those I haven't before.

To my SWF fam (Waterbender_poet, TessaTuring, AmnerisTenjo) who have been with me since the beginning, who have seen my cringy author days and my whiny ass self, thank you for sticking with me through thick and thin, and for watching me get to where I am now. I hope you're proud of me and not annoyed by how much I write in a short amount of time. Good luck to all our endeavors, and I hope we can all meet each other soon! Uwu.