The monastery is an idea that I've been working on in form or another for probably 10 years!
The version you'll find here is the first completed version and is version 4. The work on this version probably only, covers about a year and half of that time. The pervious 3 versions (of which version 1 I have sadly lost) got to probably less than half way each time.
Despite the amount of time I've working on this, I still only consider this the first draft. I was effectively written in two parts separated by maybe a year and so the ideas I started working on in the first part had changed by the time I'm came to the second. Also the style might be a little uneven.