Volume Four Wrap-up & Taking a Day Off
This volume ran a little long...
It was basically as long as the previous two volumes combined.
I set up two long-term plot threads, and both the chip manufacturing in Muggle society and the protagonist's own growth in power took a lot of work to lay the groundwork for.
Using the Enlarging Charm and Shrinking Charm to make chips, developing potion as photoresist... the principles behind Animagus transformation, and finally the Multi-Magus Transformation... basically, every element of the climax had already been established earlier.
Even the principles behind the Seed of the Mind, "Total Recall," "Dittany Promoter," and so on had all been introduced beforehand.
So when some readers called the Multi-Magus Transformation abrupt or unscientific in those chapters, I disagreed... all that setup I wrote, all that research I had the protagonist do—it was precisely so he could pull off something like this!
To make magic convincing, you have to build up its credibility bit by bit. That was why... there were so many passages explaining the principles earlier on, in such detail.
But that also meant the climax was pushed back to the final twenty chapters, and the earlier parts admittedly dragged a little.
That came down to my lack of experience. I'll improve on it in the next volume.
But I don't really accept the claim that I was padding things out... most Harry Potter fanfics follow the original plot, and some even copy the original text outright. I glossed over even Sirius's trial precisely because I didn't want to make everyone read things they'd already seen repeated countless times.
Still, maybe what you readers meant was that I update too slowly...
That, I admit...
My hands are slow, and more importantly, so is my brain. Figuring out the