It's been a while since there was any news about the collaboration mafia romcom book (The Mafia Boss is my Web Novel Fan!) with Aina Wang, so you might have forgotten that I do indeed have collaboration projects.
I'll let y'all know the update later. But first, take a look at the cute gift she prepared for me with her boyfriend! Aina travelled all the way from the Philippines to Singapore, but I wasn't fully aware of the dates she was here. We only managed to meet up on her last day in the country last minute right after my work, and I'm a little sad we didn't get to spend longer time as I had to rush to catch the last train back home. We met up rather late in the evening, but she's exactly how I knew her online, bubbly and adorable!
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To protect your eyes, I've censored all our faces. Aina isn't that much taller than me so we had her boyfriend help to take a wefie with his phone. It definitely wasn't because he had better phone picture filters! We're both natural beauties, definitely no cap here.
Also, yes. I'm wearing two different watches because I can. You can never have enough time. Now back to the important things!
Apart from having a really good time talking with Aina and her boyfriend about random things such as the origin of banana ketchup, and accompanying them to buy local products so they can gift their relatives as souvenirs, Aina and I briefly discussed the plans for our collab baby.
Tldr, I will continue writing the rest of the story according to Aina's outline. While I am now the main author, Aina will still be beta reading and uploading the chapters onto the site. However, it won't start until I have successfully completed writing Dear Don. We also intend to publish the book after editing on Amazon and Kindle once it is completed, but there is no date in mind yet.
For those who are interested in why there is a change of arrangement and such a long hiatus, I'd summarise this as a side effect of too much success. Both Aina and myself are self-made career women. Aina is working in a niche research industry during the day. She's a real professional, and on top of that, she has started upgrading herself by pursuing a master's degree. When she first told me this regretfully a few months ago, she was afraid I would be angry at her for breaking the promise to commit. The workload she faced also contributed to her writer's block. During that time, Aina submitted several chapters to me, but they were not the quality that the readers would have wanted, so we didn't finish the work. That's Aina's side of the story.
On my side of the story, some of you might already know the bits on pieces of what projects I was working on that prevented me from fully focussing on any contribution. I participated in Goddnovel's writing contest for the mafia entry and started Dear Don. At the same time, I was editing books for release on Amazon. A great example would be the first part of The Haunted Vibrator. Although I finished writing that a while back on Goodnovel, that quality wasn't good enough for a paperback. Editing took a while, designing and formatting took longer and I've decided to split the work into two parts. The first part is a collection of three anthologies, and the second is a stand-alone. It's going to be available on Amazon in time for Halloween this year but already, I have to prepare to edit the second half for next year's Halloween.
At the same time, those of you who follow my streaming side career would know how I've transitioned into a Vtuber more seriously on the second channel. Apart from playing games (which is the easy part), I am also working on song covers and clips in the background. The heavy commitment paid off because we just reached the 250 subscriber milestone but even so, I had to put the streaming activities on hiatus for a bit as my freelancing career increased. I'm also seeing a therapist regularly because I'm falling apart from all the projects. It's been rough as I found myself unable to immerse into a role enough for writing or streaming. You might have noticed a slight shift in my writing style and that is the reason.
Despite everything, we're not giving up. Aina and I will do our best to sort everything out and rush the completion of The Mafia Boss is my Web Novel Fan! hopefully by the end of this year. I'm almost finished with Dear Don, so I should be able to start working on it while wrapping up Time Cross Academy's series on Patreon.
A small note unimportant to most readers, you might have noticed I changed my in-blog advertising from Patreon to Kofi. Yes, I'm starting to slowly make the migration. If anyone wishes to support me financially now, kindly head to Kofi. Although I will not be closing down my Patreon account, I will stop updating it after Godfather World Season 5 and Time Cross Academy's After Stories are completed.
With that, I think that's all I want to say. Hopefully the photo has fully convinced you that I'm human and not an AI.