A Wrap On Chapter Four

Hey There!

Well that’s the end of Chapter Four and with it I wanted to take another moment to sort of reflect and talk about what’s coming next as I have with previous chapters. And with Chapter Four I think that’s doubly important because this marks a pretty big turning point both in story and out, so you’ll forgive me if things are going to get a little long here but I hope you read through!

To make things a little easier I’m going to use headings to separate out the four basic things I want to talk about on this page.

STORY STATS

My Second Chance started on November 1, 2022 and has been going since then with only a few breaks. To lend some context, there have been 211 days since the story kicked off and I’ve published a new page for 171 of them. I think those are pretty decent numbers but I think they could probably be better.

A few more numbers to go along with that. If you took all of My Second Chance and dropped it into a word processor you'd likely get around:

275 Written Pages (standard 8.5x11 size)
138 118 Total Words

If My Second Chance was published as a book, right now it’d be about as long as The Return of the King or about half a George R.R. Martin book. And if it kept on going at this pace then by the time a year is done we’d have about 475 Pages or 236 930 Words, or about the length of Crime and Punishment.

For the record not putting this work into the caliber of any of those, don't want to seem egotistical. That comparison is strictly a numbers game.

Still that’s all a little crazy to think about but more importantly I’ve become increasingly conscious of the fact that it’s a lot to jump into in the middle of as a reader. Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the latter part of that, and am more than a little worried that the length of it might be dissuading new readers from picking it up. To that end, I’ve come up with an idea.

RECAPS

If you check the story map you probably already noticed these new pages since they were already added in. But essentially as it stands right now I’ve added a few pages that summarize the story that has happened so far, kind of like a ‘previously on’ to catch people up who may want to jump in but find the length of it a little daunting.

Right now there is a general recap as well as some individual information about notable characters. When or if I have time I think I might introduce more detailed individual recaps for each chapter, but that’ll take me a bit to get through and strike the right balance between brevity and information so for now the general summary will have to do.

Additionally both the summary and character pages include links to any sex scenes in the chapters, for those readers who just want to skip to the good bits.

As of right now, all of this can be accessed starting here: https://chyoa.com/chapter/New-To-My-Second-Chance--Start-Here%21.1235191

I hope that goes some length towards kind of catching people up and hopefully helping new readers get into the story without having to read a literal novels worth of content to get there. And these sections will be updated at the end of each Chapter going forward to reflect the story as it develops.

TIME

With that covered, I want to talk a bit about time. Both in terms of time on my end and the schedule for the story going forward. (Don't worry! This is good news!)

For anyone who did the math on the numbers above you’ll notice that in 212 days I’ve missed 40 or about 18% (if my math is correct which it very well might not be because I am generally terrible at math). For a story that is supposed to update daily that number feels a little high for me, but also a little bit inevitable at the same time given the situation happening outside of this story in my life.

When I started off writing this story I definitely didn’t think about how much time it would take. To give some context each day I'm dedicating around 30 minutes to write and that means that I’ve spent around 5160 hours or 3 days and 14 hours of time on My Second Chance so far. That means that at the current pace I will likely hit around 9000 hours or 6 days and 6 hours on writing alone over the course of the first year.

That doesn’t take into account text editing, photo editing, uploading, plotting, outlining, and all the other things that go into a story of this length. So what I’m saying is that time is a lot. A whole lot.

Unfortunately, as well, over the last few months I’ve had some exciting work opportunities come up that I absolutely had to take. I won’t go into detail here because they aren’t really relevant to My Second Chance, except to say that unfortunately, work that pays has to take priority.

When I started out on My Second Chance it was mostly a writing exercise to me, essentially warming up my fingers in the morning before jumping into other work. That was the idea at least, but as with a lot of my projects it has grown beyond the original scope. As of now it’s taking up a not insignificant portion of my work week. Not enough that I have to drop it entirely but enough that it is becoming increasingly difficult to justify.

I really want to keep up with this and I really want to continue daily uploads and in fact get that number of days skipped even lower than it is now. And I think I’ve come up with a way to do that.

I need a publishing schedule. (As I said earlier don't worry, this is good news!)

Going forward there are not going to be any more breaks in the middle of chapters, only at the end of chapters.

Breaks at the end of chapters will be a set term of seven days + however long it takes to get to the next Monday. So for example if a chapter ended on Thursday August 10th, then the next chapter would launch on Monday August 21st or a break of 10 days. But if it ended on Sunday August 6th, then the next chapter would start on Monday the 14th and the break would only be 7 days long. I hope that makes sense and it means that between chapters at least there will be a break of 7 days and at most it'll only be 13 and I think that sort of scheduling will really help set a bit of certainty to the story.

Two quick notes for explicit transparency:

1 - If there is going to be a break in the middle of the chapter (i.e. there is a holiday. I'm out of town, or another reason I cannot reliably upload new pages to the story) you'll get a drop of a bunch of pages for the days that would take place while I'm gone.

2 - The coming break between Chapters Four and Five is an exception to this new schedule. It's going to be a total of 18 days for a reason that will become clear in about 1 paragraph.

That's the schedule going forward for the foreseeable future and I know breaks aren't ideal but I do believe they're necessary. That said for those of you who don’t want to wait anymore and who are interested in consistent daily updates with no breaks between chapters (and even more benefits!) well I would say you should probably consider checking out my Patreon!

PATREON

I don’t know if this is entirely unexpected since it seems like everyone has one these days, but I’ve decided to launch a Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/SophiePert) to try to offset effort and expenses for the story.

Now I’m going to start by saying this is entirely optional and I have no intention of stopping the daily uploads of My Second Chance, so if you cannot support or don’t feel that it’s worth it by all means feel free to just continue reading without subscribing. But if you’re enjoying the story and want to support it or if you’re interested in some extras I’d encourage you to consider subscribing because I promise I’m going to absolutely do what I can to make it worth your while.

I’ve added a separate page (https://chyoa.com/chapter/Patreon.1340566) to this story outlining all the specifics of the Patreon and I would encourage you to check that out. Beyond that I’ll just take some time here to outline some benefits:

1. The primary benefit is that you get new pages of My Second Chance in advance of public release. Specifically you get seven new pages every Monday and in fact the first seven pages of Chapter Five are already up there right now. So if you’re eager to get a jump on Chapter Five and don’t want to have to wait, well you can subscribe and check it out right now.
2. Beyond that you’re also going to get access to polls that will determine the future of the story. There may be some general polls open to the readers on chyoa but going forward likely the majority of them will be exclusive to Patrons. So if you liked picking out the dress Emily wore and want to continue to have that kind of impact and more, well then you’ll need to subscribe to get it.
3. Also available: professional quality downloadable copies! While I like the current format if you’re reading along every day I confess myself a little bit more used to traditional formats like PDF or ePub. So I have decided to convert the story as it appears now and make the current story and all new chapters available to my Patrons for download! These releases will be professional quality PDF and ePub, the same quality level as the stories I sell on Amazon.
4. And finally and exclusively and most excitingly: Side Stories! A monthly short story that Patrons have a hand in deciding! These are essentially a non-canonical ‘What If?’ kind of branch off the main story. Did you wonder what would have happened if Emily had let Blake push her to her knees in the library the first time they were alone? If girl-Kim hadn't stumbled into the clearing and made them stop? What about if Lucas hadn’t held back but had bent her over the table in his kitchen instead? This is your chance to find out with Side Stories! Released monthly Patrons will have the ability to nominate, vote on, and see these what if moments come to life!. These short stories are, for now, Patreon Exclusive. It's possible they will have a public release but if so it will be months down the line and even then it's not certain, so if you want to read them you should really consider subscribing.

As I said, I’m strongly committed to making Patreon worthwhile for anyone who decides they’re interested. So if I’ve got your attention then please consider subscribing to my Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/SophiePert) and if you want more information then check out the page on this story where I break down the tiers with more details (https://chyoa.com/chapter/Patreon.1340566).

And as always thank you so much for all the support you’ve given to me and I truly hope you’ve been enjoying the story so far. I also hope you’re as excited for Chapter Five as I am, because I think Emily is in a really good place to start opening up a little bit more and accepting the desires that are bubbling up in her. Honestly some of the plans I’ve got for Chapter Five have me absolutely thrilled and if you like what you've been reading so far I think you're going to love what's coming.

Thanks for sticking with me and I hope to see you over on Patreon, otherwise I’ll see you on June 19th for the launch of Chapter Five!

<3

Sophie