TL;DR: the meter ran backward. I paid off 12 extra chapters, then owed another 14 from the monthly ticket bounty, bringing my total debt to 36 chapters...
Since I owe quite a few now, I'll take a breather and skip the bounty next month. Let me finish paying off the chapters I owe first, sob sob!
Next month, I'll work hard to pay off the debt and aim to clear it all, then reopen the monthly ticket bounty in December!!!
Below are a few little reflections from the author this month. Feel free to read them or skip them:
Actually, my mindset shifted a little this month, and the updates got a bit lackluster as a result.
The reason was pretty simple.
I'm still something of a newbie, so I took a little too much for granted when planning the outline.
In my original plan, the protagonist would spend a year in Paldea, with the timeline broadly tying into the development of the Pokémon Scarlet and Violet storyline.
But when I actually put that into practice and reached the million-character mark, a small problem cropped up in the plot-
I hadn't considered that the protagonist's growth should be more linear and more well-rounded, with more small, tangible improvements that would gradually give readers a sense of him and his Pokémon progressing together.
By the time I crossed the million-character milestone, the Paldea storyline was also more than halfway through and about to enter Elite Four Teacher Yu mode. At that point, whenever the protagonist used his own Pokémon, there was simply no way he could still trade blows evenly with students.
So our protagonist's strength seemed to shoot up all of a sudden. He even started thrashing the Elite Four in the Psychic Power Masters Tournament. That sense of