Goodbye from UnderCurrent HF-Edition (Moving To Royal Road & Beyond)

Hi all, thank you so much if you've made it this far through my longest book - Having been redrafting this last week I'm amazed how many people have been kind enough to work through the early arcs to get to the stuff they build to and that I'm more proud of 😄.

If you followed me these last couple weeks you'll know I've been much like the UK goverment, U-turning on a dime for which I apologise😅.

I'm not going to go into everything here but I still felt it only fair to leave some sort of chapter behind for those who get this far in the future and have no idea why the novel just stops (although the ending of Arc4 is kinda a wholesome place to leave it I guess😂😂).

In short the last year on this site has been... An experience - I've read alot of great stuff, improved my writing and continue to do so and talked with a few dozen awesome fellow writers😊.
But I've had my fair share of issues too - From the HoneyFeed editor placing bizarre gaps in my chapters to the lack of proper image pages or reviews tabs - And of course a baffling bug that every now and than simply stops me from posting entirely as was the case about a week ago - These issues have persisted for months on and off - I've attempted to contact staff on this site, twitter, email and even their Facebook page for literal months on both my public and before that, personal social media accounts - Never a response.

The one time mods did engage with me led to a whole shite-show back in march that was... Interesting.

And make no mistake, that really should of been where I drew the line and quit - But I didn't, in large part because I like the people who's books I read here and talk to.

In the last couple weeks I tried to start a little initiative to help boast the moral of my fellow writers, especially those struggling to get feedback - A Readers circle to start, with hopes of using it to attract new readers from the outside - I even had a Mal club with a bigger active population than HoneyFeed itself, reach out and offer their support for the idea!
And than that bug I mentioned came back with a vengeance and for over 24 hours I couldn't post - Heck maybe it was longer than that, I gave up trying after 24 hours.
I could read books, post comments, etc, but not upload a single chapter any longer than a few hundred words - No staff offered to even address what might be causing this no matter how I tried to contact them.

And for me that was the last straw - I should of quit sooner I know, I guess I'm a glutton for punishment, there'd been plenty others reasons to quit before now.

Put briefly this latest 'bug' combined with the mind-blowing lack of any advertisement of the HoneyFeed contest outside of its partner banners, and the bizarre choice to make the first update to the sites framework in over a year, a bookmark modification which has deleted to library backlogs for many of us - I think enough is enough.

I've begun a new version of UnderCurrent over on Royal-Road under the same pen-name.
It's the same content but with some actually decent grammar at long last and.... No more random gaps, hurrah!!
Its formatted like an actually book there, I can divide it into volumes, schedule uploads for weeks in advance, insert images and proper author's notes - It even has review tabs, comments and all that jazz for readers.
The mods there respond fast, are active, professional and politely, without bias or personal affronts - They're happy to help and want to see the site and its users grow - Put bluntly it appears to me to be superior in every regard but one - It isn't an anime focused website.

And that is a shame. The thing I find weirdest about HoneyFeed is the handful of writers I've chatted to who write some anime niche, that doesn't work on HoneyFeed - Which is just missed potential on the sites part - HoneyFeed is the only anime-only web-novel site in the west, anime is an ever growing market, the site should cater to all those niches in order to get in as much of the western community as possible - Yet BL, Mecha and heck alot of sci-fi in general, all really struggle among others - But alas if I start talking about my complaints we will be here all day😅.

I won't be uploading here any more, I'm done re-editing every chapter just to work around the gaps and to fit the odd way it shows up on phone screens - The Royal Road version will be easy to port to word, other webnovel sites, or for sending to an editor or even to a potential eBook some day - The HF version has to be redone if you want to put it anywhere else.
So you have my apologises and my greatest thanks if this is where your UnderCurrent journey ends - While I'd love to share the whole thing with you, I won't try pushing anyone to join another site to finish it - But equally I won't give my time to uploading on this site any longer.

Did I plan on starting a new UnderCurrent Draft 2/3rd through the current one? - No not really but that might be for the best - Getting reacquainted with Arcs 1 -3 can only make 5-6 stronger when they eventually release and was something I atleast wanted to consider😊.

Reading wise I'm also going to be winding back - I'll finish my current backlog of competition novels (Or atleast the ones I can remember, the rest being lost to the great library purge and contest tab deletion I suppose....) as well as a few non-comp ones I've already started.
Most of the long running books I'm reading and author's I'm following are on other sites so eventually I'll transfer to reading them over there and hopefully getting my review hat on for them too.

Might take another month or two but after that I should be caught up here and done - Once I reach that point this account will fall dormant unless there's a particular book I can only read here and even then it'd only be like a once a week log in dealy.
So while you may see me around and about for a bit longer -  This will be my signing out via this chapter.

I thank everyone who read any of my books but also just everyone I chatted with and made weird anime and literature references too - Literally dozens of creatives who I hope to see again on other, more caring websites.

And if you find yourself hesitating like I did for far too long, thinking you should stay here because its anime orientated or because its a relatively young site - Well my advice would be don't wait, this place doesn't improve, it doesn't advertise, it doesn't help its creators in any way shape or form and it won't even answer you when you have a technical issue - Your time as a rookie writer like me, is better spent on sites who give a shite and using writing editors that teach you how to format books, not a HF exclusive-novel style.

I know its a bitter note to go out on, but I really am grateful to ya'll and wish ya all the best on this website or the next - There is some serious undervalued talent here and I truly would love to see it natured and flourishing as deserved.
Going to press publish now (Hoping that after a week I can actually do so again😅👍)

Thanks genuinely for reading,
Momentie.