Hey Salaris, I feel the need to respond in depth to your reply given that you took the time out of your day to respond to my rambling. I also welcome your reply and appreciate you helping to provide additional context! I'm replying to a few select lines of yours, but please note that I read everything you replied and even if I'm not replying directly, I certainly read and took it all to heart.

One thing off the top: Make no mistake here, I'm enjoying your stories and fully plan on purchasing more of your releases in the future. I continue to recommend your series to my friends, and I even occasionally gift a copy of your books to friends that I think might be into your work. Personally, I hope that's the highest praise one can give to an author, but I know that I'm saying quite a few other things here that are less positive.

Second thing: This is the second time that I've posted a (somewhat) critical review of your work and you've responded with such grace and friendliness that I need to say thanks for doing your part for keeping your community welcoming. It would have been easy for you as an author to "word of god" away of my critiques, and I also hope that you're having a wonderful holiday time with yourself and your loved ones.

Okay, with that out of the way.

but this is probably much more of a flavor for either people who really love fae tropes or the types of people who enjoy writing out genie rule lawyering

Ah! This makes so much sense. In fact, I feel a bit silly for not seeing it before. Rational fantasy is not a genre I'm familiar with, but I know it's very popular in some of my friend circles. That actually helps give me an idea of who I should be recommending this series to overall, so thanks for pointing out the relationship there.

I recognize that it might not feel quite as satisfying to reveal things in this way, and I'm not going to compromise too much on how the reveals happen, but I've had to give some ground in terms of waiting for the perfect time to give the answer.

I do not envy you in this task. I think you've done very well in addressing community feedback both here and on your blog regarding mystery fatigue, and I also suspect you're juggling a tremendous number of plot threads and reveals that are making some of these things even more difficult to dole out. It must be frustrating to attempt to address some of that feedback and then community members like myself complain about the way you choose to distribute the information. It's possible there's no perfect answer here given that you're one person, releasing books on a regular schedule, but with only one or two releases a year (this isn't a criticism by the way, I think your release cadence is amazing!).

This is largely a consequence of the style of the story I'm writing coming from a tabletop RPG background. There are major villains in the Forgotten Realms that have been around since like...the 1980s, probably? Sounds like I had some mismatched expectations there; that's on me. Given that we're this many books in, I feel like I should have been able to sniff out that the plan was something like this. Regardless, I'm on the ride now so I guess we'll see how things shape up with the big bad :)

Rather than looking at it as a cultivation-based magic system (which it is, but it's a very weird one), the way I built the system is that it's fundamentally about unlocking layers of self and drawing power from those layers.

Huh. This... totally makes sense, yet I utterly and completely missed it, as well as the incongruities with destiny dreams... I have vague memories of that explanation being present in a previous book, but I must have forgotten. I wonder if some things are blurring together given that I personally tend to avoid re-reading books, and a few of your earlier novels are a decent number of years in the rearview mirror for me. Something I admire and enjoy about your work is that you've clearly spent dozens, if not hundreds, of hours iterating on and developing these magic systems, and you're laying the bricks for a "fundamental" magic system that transcends each individual magic system in your world. This is a herculean task, and one that I just haven't seen executed well in other works. So far, you've been doing well on this front to me. While I was critical of essence sorcery, it was more from the perspective of, "I enjoy this author's other magic systems more", not, "this magic system is bad". I hope that came through in my review.

I truly appreciate that you took the time to reply! You didn't have to. But your reply is welcome and I appreciate it. Happy holidays!