MiP In Review

I really should have gotten this done on Tuesday. Sorry about that.

I'll go over my thoughts on book 1 further down, but first:

Reviewing last week's poll results:

The highest vote result was from people who are just here for Magic is Programming, at 36%. Honestly, that's not at all surprising to me. I haven't written multiple series to demonstrate consistency and versatility yet.

"I'll read anything you write" came in at 18%, which feels pretty gratifying to me. Thank you all for your support and appreciation, and I will endeavor to live up to it.

"System Discovery Research," which I'm now thinking maybe I should rename to "Skill Unlocker," surprised me with how popular it is, at 27% of the votes. At this point, I'm wondering how much of that is just the meme appeal of "Yo dawg, I heard you like unlocking skills, so you unlocked a skill to unlock more skills." On the other hand, I'm also wondering if that exact meme appeal would be good for attracting new readers. I'm not ready to commit to anything yet, but I will certainly give this story some serious consideration and thought while I write MiP book 3, and I might do a first draft of Skill Unlocker chapter 1 soonish.

"Cultivator Therapist" / "The Power of Heart" got only 6% of the votes, which was a bit disappointing to me, because that's the one that I have fleshed out the most by far. However, some of the comments expressed strong and specific interest in it, and some others seemed suggestive that I might have explained poorly the manner of story it would be.

For its title, I'm leaning more toward "The Power of Heart," and it would largely feature going on various adventures and missions. The main character would get to know people through ordinary interaction in the course of his adventures, and helping with their mental health issues would be integrated as part of how he achieves success in those adventures. Straight up therapy sessions as depicted in the bonus post I linked to would actually be a mainly background thing, rarely shown directly.

I'll write Magic is Programming book 3 first, of course, and as I mentioned in the poll, it is possible that there might end up being a book 4. For what I'll write after that, I'm undecided between Skill Unlocker or The Power of Heart. I'm interested in both ideas, and I think both of them have strong potential for gathering a large audience of readers, though the latter would be more of a gamble financially, with needing to reach more outside of my established audience. I think I'll have to write the introductory chapters of both of them to really sort out which one I want to do first. I may end up with one of them as a side project while I focus on the other.

Juggernaut of Defense is going on the back burner for the far future, if ever. My interest in it is weaker than for either of the other polled ideas, and its 12% share of the votes did not stand out.

Reviewing Magic is Programming Book 1:

First up, let me do a full reveal on the untranslated gibberish dialogue in chapter 1. I wrote the actual meaning of each sentence in English first, then replaced each part of it with nonsense words, and I tracked each replacement to ensure consistency. Here's my dictionary for that:

hey: bar
you: te
ok: dok
to: le
finish: abdurish
this: tar
dungeon: deng
I: ti
don't: deter
see: ye
a weapon: osheng
on: ar
here: bel
can: dux
borrow: orlen
have: drin
spares: tarnil
talk: trel
much: len
do: det
not: er
whatever: hulangus
let's: vara
go: shu
might: doka
as well: star
take: tren
the quick: shulen
way back: patresh
with: va
her: to
programming / "crafting spells": abraril miks

Incidentally, the name of Erlen, the first town Carlos came to, was kind of an easter egg from this dictionary. I leave translating the chapter 1 dialogue and that easter egg as exercises for the commenters.

I think I started the story strongly in several ways, but I also have some major regrets about the early parts, and some things were outright mistakes. I am attempting to address some of those in editing, but others are too major for anything but a complete rewrite of the story to fix.

The one that got by far the most negative reactions was Carlos's decision to trust Amber in chapter 5. Many comments declared that this decision was incredibly stupid, dangerous, and out of character for a supposed-to-be-smart character, and several of them explicitly stated that they were dropping the story because of it. I'm sure many more dropped the story in response and didn't bother to comment.

Obviously, the consequences of that decision are much too foundational for changing the decision itself to be viable as a mere edit. However, my assessment of it is that I just didn't explain Carlos's reasoning well enough, and I'm hopeful that going into more depth on that will satisfy most potential readers for the published book. In short, Carlos was in a situation where he desperately needed help that he could only get with trust, and he thought he was unlikely to find anyone he would have better reason to trust than he already had for Amber. My actual edit in the book will expand on this substantially.

A strong runner-up for number of direct comment reactions was the conversion of Darmelkon's 100 gold bounty offer into copper. A lot of people calculated the conversion ratio for gold to copper and forgot to multiply by the quantity of gold offered. This one's a lot easier to fix, though; one brief remark drawing attention to the gold quantity should do it.

There are various other things that could use some clearer explanations than I originally wrote, but nothing that generated nearly as many comments as those two.

Just a minor note, I will be adding a sentence or two to Carlos's reaction to the first spell he sees, to make it explicitly clear immediately that I know how atrocious the language design is.

As mentioned in the poll post, I regret bringing free respawning into this story. I eventually managed to make some good use of it, mainly with how it gave the Black Blades a reason to not just immediately kill Carlos and Amber, but it kind of neutered most really major stakes for a while, and I've ended up sort of patching it out with the introduction of soul-kills. It affects too many things to easily edit it out, though, so I'll keep it as is.

More structurally, I regret making Carlos have to build his own programming infrastructure and tools. It took a lot longer than I originally expected to get through that part of the story, which greatly delayed getting meaningfully into the titular programming aspect of the story. If I were starting this story fresh with the experience I have now, I would have the system provide some basic essentials premade for him.

In a similar vein, I regret making Carlos's power growth involve such major non-programming aspects. I got a few reviews criticizing that the story is more about soul structures than about programming, contrary to the story's title, and I think those reviews have a point. I think I would still have soul structures or something like them in a hypothetical do-over, since the concept of the programming system being artificially built on top of the setting's natural magic is an important part of the story, but I would try to more thoroughly integrate them into the programming paradigm.

One of the biggest problems I've had in writing the story is that all of the major conflicts I had planned were too major. I had to have Carlos and Amber do a lot of power-leveling grinding just to make it reasonable for them to even be at all relevant for a conflict involving established powerful nobles and the Crown, and that magnitude of grinding is not interesting to either write or read without a lot of time skipping. It also has a strong risk of leading to the readers feeling like the characters have not truly earned their power. For any future stories I write with major power progression, unless a huge jump in power is part of the up-front premise, I will plan story arcs to allow relatively small gradual increments, so that "we need to grow 1000x stronger ASAP" will never be a needed plot element.

On a more positive note, I'm very happy with how the discovery of `help` came together. I enjoyed writing that chapter a lot.

If you want to know my thoughts about anything specific in book 1 that I haven't mentioned, please ask!