For the anxious: Unjust Depths will be finished as a free epub book when it is finished. I will no longer be keeping a webnovel-type schedule or publishing the series in installments. Meanwhile I will also work on other projects I’ve wanted to do. The perpetually incomplete webnovel version of the work will either stay or go to be determined later. Thanks.
For everyone else:
Greetings. This is Madiha S., the author of the various things on this page.
I don’t make a habit of using posts here to communicate because then there are posts that are not a chapter of something. That hardly matters anymore so I figured I would use a post to communicate. With an eye toward people for whom any kind of news is anxiety-inducing, I have already summarized the salient points at the start. However, for those who appreciate verbosity, which is an art that I both cultivate and enjoy– here is the 4K version of the post.
I’m sure if you have an eye for details, an obsession with Unjust Depths and no way to contact me (and I sure have given people almost no ways to contact me recently) you might think that things are going very wrong. You are more correct than you know! However it’s not all bad, even if it is mostly bad. It’s bad in prosaic ways. It’s bad; but life goes on.
I have a variety of health problems, some of which are prosaic (I’m old and can’t eat just anything I want anymore) and some of which are weird (too weird to describe, but at least non-lethal). I have to work in order to live, and I refuse to sell my written work for a variety of reasons that would take too long to reproduce here. I like to spend time with my beautiful wife more than I like staying up until 3 AM staring at a word processor to meet an arbitrary deadline. I have shifting interests in what I want to write, in a way incompatible to writing a decade-long webnovel project I started five years ago. I have had a headache for 24 hours.
There is a cliche that you may or may not have heard depending on the frequency with which you talk to certain people– which is vague enough to accurately describe any cliche. And describes this one accurately: you can only pick two between good, fast and cheap. Webnovels are frequently written with the intention of being “good” and fast– and then the author puts their stuff on kindle or behind a patreon or something, and you pay to keep reading and supporting them. That’s great for them and we’re all happy about it. Since it’s their job they can devote all their time on Earth and all their effort of life to writing stuff.
People should get paid for their work! Don’t hassle people who do that stuff just for that.
Meanwhile, I’m a neurotic communist who hates getting paid or thinking about money. So I have a day job that funds my physical safety and the satiation of my biological needs as well as my inevitable personal contribution to the destruction of the world and human beings due to paying United States taxes– and I write fiction for free to satisfy my own arrogance and my indelible and strange human kindness. In our little model from before, I’m doing things “cheap.” I’d like to think I was doing them good– that’s up to you to decide. Some of you have varying definitions of good. “There’s too much sex.” “There’s not enough sex.” “She’s not doing enough kink stuff.” “If you think about it the novel is about authoritarian developmentalism so it’s ALL kink stuff.” You can never win on this front. Little tip for you aspiring authors. You will be raked over the coals the moment a cock enters the equation.
(I say this with nothing but love and joy in my heart. If you needed a tone indicator.)
When I started, I was updating like once a week. I was not doing it as fast as some. Certainly there are superhuman writing machines who update webnovels once a day. But I was doing it faster than I am now. I was trying to do it fast. I was trying to make it good, fast, and cheap. It was completely unsustainable. Eventually, some of these elements would slide. There are chapters I didn’t really like that I kicked out to die (and everyone liked them anyway– I dunno), plot points I had to truncate (really! they could’ve been even more verbose and twisty!), and some plain old buffoonish mistakes that I commit every day, and will undoubtedly commit on this post. I definitely didn’t think it was always Good. Then eventually I couldn’t keep up the schedule without sacrificing more of my life than I wanted to between Day Job and Night Job. And now I pay for web hosting that, frankly, I no longer really need! But I will keep giving the web man his web cash so this site keeps existing even though I have decided to largely convert it into download repositories for epub files.
There is basically no longer any point to how I was once organizing my work and this website. I am not updating a webnovel with any regularity so I will update it with no regularity. From now on, I will write books. To define “book” in this context– I will complete however much of a story I think is worth sharing in an epub format and I will “publish” this by putting the file on my downloads page, available to you for your enjoyment. Unjust Depths will eventually be completed this way. My next work will be shared in this way. Something desirable to you might be lost in this transition– but what will also be lost is a ton of stress on my person.
Has your favorite author published book 1 of a thing, and then published a detective novel, and then published six other detective novels, and then published book 2 of the thing you started reading? Well if I’m your favorite author that’s what I’m doing now. There’s always time to be the first one to do something. To trailblaze– to engage in disruptive innovation. The disruption is almost entirely upon your reading experience, but nevertheless–
I am sure this will annoy some people, and might even anger others. That’s fine. There is only one person in the world whose opinion I care about, and that’s my wife. And she told me I don’t need to write blog posts like this. So buddy, if I’m not listening to her, what kind of a chance do you have? Jokes aside, I think it’s within your rights and fine and understandable and even “valid” if you feel betrayed by the way that I have handled my work for the past forever long. However it is true that I also will not be altering my behavior based on those feelings. I don’t know if it’s more rude to be honest about that or to lie about it.
I just wanted to tell you that because it makes me feel like I’m being conscientious to someone even though I believe personally nobody ought to care and probably, nobody cares. Again I’m not trying to be rude by wording things that way I’m just trying to be honest here.
I don’t know what to do about the “webnovel version” of Unjust Depths. Probably I will just leave it up as it is because that’s less work than trying to make it inaccessible. It will eventually be confusing. Just like the URL will eventually be confusing. Unjust Depths dot com will become a portal for you to download a bunch of other shit I’ll be working on eventually. I’ve thought of not paying for my URLs anymore and just having a single overarching writing brand but the problem is when you stop paying for URLs they just get scooped up and used for nefarious activities. So when you have a URL that people have gone to before in any amount you have signed a blood pact to keep it available forever.
Forget cheap– doing this has cost me so much money I’ll never have back. It’s fine.
As far as a timetable is concerned, I have written 30,000 words of my first “detective novel” (which you will find is a descriptor that might not fit too well once you actually get the thing in your hands.) When will it be finished? I don’t know. When will Unjust Depths Book 2 be finished? I don’t know. Hopefully sometime before I die and not after. In the meantime I suggest you breathe and enjoy life. I am certainly trying my best to do so right now.
So anyway yeah tl;dr number two, Unjust Depths is not dead. Thanks for reading.