Normally, after the new-book month, the vast majority of novels hit a slump. I'd originally planned to use this month to fix up my sleep schedule and avoid burning myself out—but as it turns out, June's performance actually *surpassed* the debut month!
For me, that's nothing short of a miracle, and every ounce of glory belongs to you.
Last month we placed eighteenth on the total monthly-ticket leaderboard. This month we've surged into the top fifteen—exceeding last month's total even *with* the double-vote bonus—while staying on the weekly-recommendation chart the entire time and cracking the top ten on the monthly-recommendation ranking.
As for subscription growth, I mentioned this during the featured promotion: our single-chapter subscribers have climbed past fifty-six hundred, with average subscriptions hovering near seven thousand. Reaching this level just two months after going paywalled—I'm incredibly satisfied and proud.
Of the story itself, I'd say the Periodic Table arc was my best work yet in terms of setup, development, twist, and payoff. I'm quite pleased with how it turned out. That said, there are certainly flaws worth improving—for example, the transition leading into the latter half of the Periodic Table section was missing a beat in two places, making the plot feel a bit untethered and not quite landing the way I'd envisioned.
Then that smug feeling of mine got promptly shattered by the *current* arc. Writing it has given me splitting headaches and brutal bouts of writer's block. The root cause: I felt the story needed a stretch of calm—breathing room and groundwork—but the foreshadowing I'd already planted forced me to barrel into this plotline at full speed. The result was two climactic sequences crammed too tightly together, back to back, leaving readers exhausted and deflating the impact far below what I'd aimed for. Fortunately, weaving in some intermediate groundwork helped build the atmosphere back up. In the end, I basically got sabotaged by my own meticulous outline.
Raising these writing issues is partly a reminder to myself never to get complacent—to keep striving for excellence—while also sharing the agony of my writer's block with you all. Heh heh.
New month, new push. Octopus (that's me) is humbly begging for your continued support so we can set even greater records!
Now that I've been eloquent about it, let me be blunt: "Guaranteed monthly tickets and recommendation tickets—I want them *all*!"
One last thing: I'm back at work tomorrow and won't have time to write the morning chapter, so Chapter One goes up at seven in the evening and Chapter Two at ten. No missed updates—I promise.