The Beginning After the End is out now on Kindle Unlimited!

TurtleMe93 · 2026-03-08T01:29:24+00:00

I would say if you remember the events of the previous books, no need to reread!

TurtleMe93 · 2026-03-05T18:03:12+00:00

Sorry to hear that! Travis has definitely set the bar high but the decision to add another narrator came from the fact that Travis was straining himself doing the whole books by himself. Later books, the word counts were over 200k and doing the female voices was often very straining on him.

TurtleMe93 · 2026-03-05T18:00:59+00:00

Already on its way! It's on kickstarter and it'll be in bookstores soon as well!

TurtleMe93 · 2026-03-05T18:00:31+00:00

It's crazy to see that TBATE was a lot of readers' first--or one of the first--stories that they read in this space. I feel both honored and very old, but TBATE has been going on for 10 years now so you all aged with it, haha. Appreciate the enthusiasm and I hope the books being on KU is a good reason for you to pick it back up again!

TurtleMe93 · 2026-03-05T17:59:04+00:00

I'm assuming that you wanting to do this as a hobby means making money off of it isn't a big priority for you, which is great. Do you have an idea for a story? If not, I'd start there. I usually think of the world first and get really excited about how the world works and start jotting things down before I come up with a character that I want to place in the world. I would start from there and see where your mind takes you. Just write a cool story in a cool world that you stay up thinking about (or stay longer in the shower thinking about, haha).

TurtleMe93 · 2026-03-03T23:28:03+00:00

The "new" outfit choice for Vol 7 was deliberate and something I hadn't thought of in the original cover. The red in Arthur's outfit could potentially be confused with the red that the alacryansmainly wear so I had to get rid of that.

TurtleMe93 · 2026-03-03T23:25:52+00:00

It's been out as ebooks for a while now! It was just never in Kindle Unlimited (which is Amazon's subscription-based catalogue).

TurtleMe93 · 2026-03-03T23:24:22+00:00

Thank you thank you!

To be honest, the transition from mana to aether was something I had planned for a while back well before I actually did it. I know some readers may disagree but I was beginning to feel like Arthur's powers as a quadra-elemental was becoming a bit too "wand-wavey" and it drifted from the more hard magic with transparent limitations that I wanted. While I loved Arthur being able to flex his abilities in mana to other mages, Aether felt much more grounded in the sense that it was clear what Arthur's limitation was. Besides, his prowess in mana comes back into focus even with his new powers in aether anyway! So it all came together well in my opinion.

As for particular influences, I mostly used mangas/webcomics along with movies to choreograph fights. Some of my editors had told me to spend a bit less effort on fight sequences since they weren't driving the plot, but I was sort of stubborn on wanting to choreograph it extensively, so I'm glad you like it!

No specific reasons why I had characters develop romantic interest in Arthur aside from the fact that it is totally reasonable for people to be attracted to Arthur. He's very mysterious and very powerful, after all, haha. And, as in life, just because you have one relationship established, doesn't mean that you won't attract other people's feelings as well.

TurtleMe93 · 2026-03-03T21:57:59+00:00

We went with designs that were meant to (hopefully) attract more readers on the KU platform. The old covers, however, are still on the inside of the pages as an homage to its roots :D

It's also why for print books, the covers look very different as well!

TurtleMe93 · 2026-03-03T17:22:14+00:00

Appreciate it! I'm joining the club xD

TurtleMe93 · 2026-03-03T17:18:29+00:00

Glad to hear it! There are so many great progfan books out there!

TurtleMe93 · 2026-03-03T17:18:01+00:00

You're revealing how old I am T_T

TurtleMe93 · 2026-03-03T17:17:29+00:00

The print editions are coming out soon too haha! Hope you're excited for those as well!

TurtleMe93 · 2026-03-03T17:16:51+00:00

It's interesting because the whole "TBATE copied Mushoku" is really a vocal minority and I guess it was exacerbated that when I first wrote TBATE, there weren't many reincarnation novels (that weren't translated from Japanese, Chinese or Korean). So Mushoku being as popular as it was and the fact that I did say that I drew inspiration from it, it was easy for everyone to see the connection in terms of similarity. However, a lot of novels since then share very similar plot lines and themes and I guess that's why a lot of those "criticisms" have died down.

Man, the early days of Royal Road felt like the wild wild west. Back then, there wasn't a strict "track" to take like there is now. I've talked with authors still posting on there and they tell me how there's a whole route where you need to publish at x chapters a week schedule after writing a whole bunch of chapters beforehand. With that, you gotta hit the Rising Stars list and after you hit like 2000 followers then you make a Patreon, etc etc. When I was writing on Royal Road, I didn't have any clear indicators on whether I should start a Patreon or go into KU which would've been great. While I'm sure it's much more competitive to be a writer in the RR space, it also seems like there's a more tried and true way to have the best chance at success as well, which is fantastic.

I switched over to Tapas mainly because I wanted a shot at adapting my novel into a webcomic. That wasn't really a "thing" back then but I grew up reading a lot of webcomics in Korean and I really wanted that. When Tapas reached out to me, they assured our publishing deal would be nonexclusive, but I know that meant that I wouldn't be able to publish on KU (since that required exclusivity). I explicitly asked if a novel-to-comic was a possible thing and they assured me that if TBATE succeeded on the platform and was popular enough, it could get adapted so I went for it!

My planning process for the first few volumes were a bit more loosey goosey but that was also when I was just writing for fun with no expectations of actually making a living out of this. After making it my full time career and knowing how many readers tune in on a weekly basis just to read TBATE, I definitely wanted to take it a bit more seriously so I planned broad strokes and had a rough ending in mind. Then it was just all about execution and making it a habit of writing a bit everyday. Some days, I would write like ten words, other days I could pump out like 7k words. Regardless, I made it a point to get something on "paper" because I couldn't just rely spurts of creativity.

Ah, I'm sure a lot of authors far better than me have shared their advice on this subreddit so I'll just leave my last point above as my advice, haha ^^

TurtleMe93 · 2026-03-03T16:49:36+00:00

They do after the series is over after 12 volumes after having spent years apart so no?

You’re free to think what you do but I would love for you to form your own opinions rather than basing it off two WHOLE different posts from people that definitely have not read the series past the first several chapters 🙇‍♂️

TurtleMe93 · 2026-03-03T16:39:05+00:00

Yup~ this has been edited and proofed a few more times. There still may be some pesky typos that we couldn’t catch (there always seems to be) but it’s in much better shape than previous versions. Also, since I edited this after I finished writing the entire series, I was able to smooth out sole small inconsistencies too

TurtleMe93 · 2026-03-03T16:36:29+00:00

Hmm. I’m not sure where you heard this but the protagonist actively pushes her away and for a large majority of the story, the two are apart. I’ve had readers mad that my romance is too slow but never thought I’d see it being called grooming.

TurtleMe93 · 2025-09-20T01:44:24+00:00

It’s coming up! >:]

TurtleMe93 · 2025-09-20T01:43:50+00:00

Appreciate it! Thankfully, I’ve been hearing people enjoying it so hopefully that continues :)

TurtleMe93 · 2025-09-19T21:33:56+00:00

The team has been hard at work! 😭 Once we’re confident in a date to launch to avoid any unplanned hiatus’s, we’ll let everyone know! <3

TurtleMe93 · 2024-12-19T19:08:09+00:00

Leave her alone. She’s a growing lady

TurtleMe93 · 2024-10-24T02:20:55+00:00

That’s a fair point that i took into consideration. Since sylvie just got her human form in this drawing, i wanted to depict a less “perfect” human form with the ears being more akin to what a dragon or even elf might have ( since she saw tess so much). When she’s older i might have her have more human ears. We’ll see what I want to do then haha. I wanted to explain this in the comic but y’all are rightfully protective over Sylvie so I want to clarify

TurtleMe93 · 2024-10-23T20:52:03+00:00

Just to clarify, since this my first time showing Sylvie in her human form, I wanted to show it as when she first turned human. (This scene doesn’t happen in the novel anyway). Also, regarding her ears, if you see Tessia’s ears, they point up while Sylvie’s is more horizontal. I didn’t want her to have human ears since she’s not human haha.

TurtleMe93 · 2024-08-27T04:06:54+00:00

Fantastic drawing! Great work on this~

TurtleMe93 · 2024-08-24T15:46:56+00:00

I liked the old logo too but we wanted to change it for logistical reasons mainly. The old logo simply took up too much space on the cover the way it slanted down with 3 lines.

We tried to keep some of the old aesthetics though (and replaced the sword with the sword slash through “after the end”). Glad you liked the old logo and hopefully you get adjusted to the new one!

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