Heretic Spellblade - Complete Series Commentary Pt1

So, I promised last year that I’d do comprehensive commentary for the entire Heretic Spellblade series. I never delivered on the commentary for the final two books, so they’ll have to be wrapped into this commentary, simply because otherwise it won’t happen. This is a series of posts I’ve wanted to do for a while, as it contains a lot of interesting stuff I’ve wanted to talk about for a while.

This post will include broad commentary on the entire Heretic Spellblade series, including lore, editing decisions, IRL background to it, and much more. As such, it is loaded with massive spoilers. If you haven’t read the entire series, come back later. This will be a series of posts as it will be incredibly long.

This commentary will be a bit messy, and isn’t necessarily going to be ordered well. If a topic doesn’t interest you, feel free to skip it, and I’ll try to explain what it is at the start so you can make that judgment. Also, note that I’ll sometimes be very critical of myself, so if that somehow upsets you, this isn’t the commentary for you.

The Missing Year

I debuted as a “proper” author with the Empire Reforged series (which I typically just call Emperor). It flopped hard and I never finished it, largely because they’re badly written and I lost all interest in returning to it.

I don’t really want to talk about Emperor itself, but instead what I learned from it. Because sometimes you can learn a lot from a failure, and the circumstances that led up to Heretic Spellblade made it what it was, for good and ill.

Firstly, the original “Heretic Spellblade” was something different entirely. I commissioned the cover with the woman who became Vera at the end of 2019, at which point I was getting the draft of Emperor Forged edited and was polishing off the original version of Heretic Spellblade. When Emperor flopped, I took a closer look at Spellblade and tried to rework it into something different, which I eventually scrapped entirely (the series was initially more military fantasy themed, and based more on a mercenary company based on Gauron – the continent from Demon’s Throne).

During 2020, I still had a job, as you’d imagine. I worked in Management Consulting, and nearly quit the company in 2019 due to… I’ll simply say that I ended up working for a manager who was very good at throwing people under buses (she pushed no less than three other managers out of the company in the space of a year). In 2020, I was burned out pretty badly, the company had been bought out by Accenture and was turning into a hellhole, and I was very busy. I spent my weekends writing for fun, and eventually leveraged that to write a novel – the new Heretic Spellblade, using the covers I’d commissioned earlier.

While I relearned how to write during the year, I also “learned” a few things from looking at harem books. I’ve actually unlearned or modified some of these lessons, and I think the genre is healthier now and doesn’t expect this from every book. But if you’ve ever wondered why my earlier books feel different from my later ones (particularly anything from Neural Wraith onward), there’s a reason for it.

Some of the “lessons” I taught myself were:

• Infodump more. Readers get upset if they don’t understand exactly what’s going on.

• The MC needs to constantly appreciate the assets of the female characters. I toned this one down, as it’s incredibly weird in some harem books (looking at asses during battles), but I’ve always kept more detailed descriptions going forward, and you can see in Mob that there’s a time and a place for the MC to admire the women.

• Shorter and clearer battles, aided by an understandable magic system. The Emperor series was like 50%+ battles, often described in excruciating detail, meaning fights lost their punch. Battles were instead plot-relevant in Spellblade, and sometimes brutally quick.

• Simplified prose. My writing style has changed a lot over the past 12 years, but it changed between Emperor and Spellblade, and again over the my first several books. While there’s definitely more appetite for more complicated prose these days, a cursory look at some of the most popular progfantasies (and some community discussions) shows that most readers would struggle with actual fantasy prose more complicated than a Sanderson book, and many wouldn’t even like his writing. In a nutshell, badly written books are popular because they’re badly written (this is something I noted a long time ago when I read fanfic – it’s a symptom of younger readerships, and a major reason I’m skeptical of claims the harem readership is that old).

• Lots more, although many are specific to the issues with Emperor (e.g. the MC is kind of weird, and keeping readers in the dark about a lot of the past stuff was a bad idea).

Despite how “planned” this makes Heretic Spellblade seem, it really wasn’t. The central hook came from a story I was writing that year (the twist on the regression story, where the MC goes back and starts again, but as a different faction with all his experience). I overplanned Emperor, and therefore forced myself to write Spellblade with minimal planning. This is why I’ve often talked about the overall plot of Spellblade being developed during Book 2 – many of the ideas in Book 1 were completely changed.

For instance, did you know that Kadria and Omria were originally intended to be the same type of special Messenger, and that Kadria was actually trying to usurp Omria’s world? That’s why Kadria called herself “Sister”, as she was taking control of Omria’s religion. I only had very rough plans for the series (four books: the opening one; the Federation; civil war; and the ending book; with the dark elf and Faerie ones as bonuses if the series did well), with Kadria likely revealing her true powers during the civil war and influence in Trafaumh.

Spellblade was written in a weird way, and kind of a Hail Mary which worked out. A lot of the “prep” for it was done throughout the year, and then put into action. It’s also aged the worst of all my modern books (for simplicity, I’m going to exclude Emperor going forward, as it’s an abandoned series). But the book has a special place in my heart because it kicked off my career as an author.

An Accidental Epic

I just mentioned above that a lot of Heretic Spellblade’s plot points were changed in Book 2. Long-time commentary readers will be aware of how this played out, but it’s worth explaining how everything happened here, for the final time.

Heretic Spellblade 1 came out in November. It did pretty well, if not exceptionally well. A month release, Arand’s Honor of Duty comes out and I see an immediate spike in sales as Amazon begins recommend Spellblade to readers of that much, much more successful book. At the same time, people begin recommending my book (including a post on the haremfantasy sub). I sell more copies in the second month than the first, and realize I have a chance to actually go full-time as an author over my Christmas/New Year break.

Spellblade 2 was in editing hell. It had been mostly written when the first book came out, but I was really unhappy with the first half of the book.

Originally, Spellblade 2 included the Diet plot line from Book 3 in the first half. Nathan would go to Aleich, deal with Tharban and Torneus at the same time over negotiations, and the Nationalists would be introduced to set up for the civil war in Book 3. The cascade would have caused an invasion in Aleich’s castle, where Maylis’s betrayal would have been hinted at (yes, she was going to be a traitor that early), and then the war with the Federation would play out as seen.

As you probably just saw, that’s an insanely complicated plot. I was struggling to make it manageable. It also removed a lot of what made Spellblade 1 interesting, by taking the action entirely away from Gharrick Pass.

(There’s also another reason I ended up removing it, but this happened after I’d already delayed Spellblade 2 and it simply confirmed my decision. Also, it would be controversial to talk about, even 4 years later, so it will likely remain a secret.)

By reworking the first half of Spellblade 2, I changed a lot of key details. I also began the process of lengthening the series, even though I wasn’t entirely sure if I really wanted to (and briefly regretted it). The Twins shined, Kadria officially became a succubus, I started the “Nathan godhood” arc with ascended magic (I can’t recall if that was intended from Book 1), and the political elements loomed much larger than ever with the involvement of Alice. Removing the Aleich section made it incredibly difficult to start the civil war in the next book, however.

Unfortunately, Spellblade 2 did significantly worse than expected. This might be due to my expectations being inaccurate, but it is the worst release I’ve ever had, barring the Emperors. It got hit with an NTR accusation (at a time when the genre had issues with bad faith accusations being hurled at new authors) that tanked sales immediately. I considered cutting the series short and going with the original four book plan.

While I was upset, I took some time to cool down. Things were successful enough I felt I could go full-time (and took the risk), and I started Demon’s Throne. Ironically, that nearly flopped hard enough to ruin me thanks to Amazon fucking with its algo for new series (in mid-2021, Amazon decided that new series should get “hazed” in an attempt to trick authors into spending a lot on ads, as they were going hard on increasing their ad metrics at this time).

During this period, I reworked a lot of Spellblade’s long-term plot points, or at least fleshed them out. Many of the major plot elements were established at this stage – Fyre was created from an unnamed horsegirl Champion in Book 2; the Twins became much more important after I fell in love with Steph’s rendition of them; the idea that each nation would be in the midst of a political revolution that left them vulnerable was solidified.

The moment I started Book 3, Heretic Spellblade effectively transformed into an epic fantasy series first, harem fantasy series second. I distinguish the two, because harem fantasy uses plot and action as an excuse for the harem and sex (with many exceptions, but I’m talking about the cruft published on a near daily basis). I’ve always preferred the idea that I’m writing a fun and good story that happens to have a harem in it, which runs into the problem where many readers are after a harem because they’re looking for male-focused erotica. But I don’t really give a shit about them, and there are book-farms and publishers for them.

Book 3 became the transition book between the old style of book, as it established the stakes for Book 4 and the civil war, while simultaneously focusing on a self-contained plot in the Spires (much like the past two books were self-contained).

Book 4 is where the series completely changes. It has a slow start, by my old standards, but once the battles start, you can’t get off the ride. Until Mob Sorcery, it was my most successful release by a country mile. It was also the point where I started getting recommended a lot. Story-wise, it ends a lot of plot threads from the first three books and starts the dueling prophets arc, along with the new scale of war and politics.

The flipside is that it means the first few books are completely different to the bulk of the series. The first three books make up well under than a third of the series’ length, despite being nearly half the volumes. If somebody is recommending the series, they were doing so from an epic fantasy perspective, and a new reader has to stumble through the first few books. It’s very “it gets better after the first three books”, which is never a great start.

At the same time, I guarantee a lot of readers felt the opposite. They probably preferred a more ordinary adventure book with Nathan claiming Champions and winning battles, instead of the sprawling political and crazy sciencey-magic epic it became.

To me, the Heretic Spellblade series became the fantasy epic I always dreamed of writing. I always wanted to write an epic fantasy series, and I did. It was an absurd amount of work, especially with all the competing plot threads that I didn’t want to drop like so many self-published authors do in order to maintain their published schedule, but that’s what it means to write epic fantasy. I don’t plan to ever write epic fantasy ever again, but I’ve done it, even if I stumbled into it.

A Lower Bar

Harem was substantially different when Spellblade came out, and I’d argue that if I released Spellblade 1 now, in exactly the same format, it would do much worse. There’s a reason why anyone who starts it after my newer books often struggles: it’s written far worse than my current books.

Back then, most of the current big names were still taking off. The big four ghost-farms were easily the biggest, aside from Arand and Schinhofen. Truk was still being chased out of the genre. The current publisher that now puts out slop almost daily was still trying to work out how to replicate MSE, and some major scandals from the past couple of years were only beginning to settle.

I mentioned earlier that Spellblade’s sales took off after Arand released one of his books. That’s technically conjecture, but my sales graph matches the release date exactly and the genre was much smaller then. That book was also really controversial, for reasons that aren’t exactly relevant but that probably drove its sales higher.

At the same time, there weren’t many authors focusing on story in harem at the time. Schinhofen did his own thing, and there was Arand. Truk was on his way out and sales were rapidly falling off under an onslaught of criticism. Bruce Sentar was picking up, but focused on cultivation. I didn’t follow Ceb that closely, but I believe he was also on his way out of harem, as Velise came out a year later.

In short, I got lucky at a time when the vast majority of new authors in harem were focusing on the same audience the ghost-farm authors had. Story never really became big, though. Erotica and slice of life got lots of focus in late 2021 and 2022. But I’d argue trend-chasing was what really remained popular as urban fantasy and superheroes came and went (and then reverse isekai, and now urban fantasy again(?) – although I don’t pay much attention to trends anymore).

One thing I have noticed over the past two years is the rise in the actual quality of the books, though. Sure, there’s no shortage in slop, but the books that take off and get recommended are actually well written.

This isn’t isolated to harem. Litrpg and progfantasy have experienced the same effect as they’ve grown in popularity. As the older series and authors get better, their writing improves (well, usually, if they give a shit) and expectations of the audience for newer series grow. This means the new series that take off are often of the same quality of the latest books of the bigger series, rather than the original books.

Games experience the same problem. MMOs, MMOlites etc often released with very little content, or even utterly broken, but were forgiven because their competition sucked. Destiny was so bad they completely re-released it and Destiny 2 was still a rough launch. Warframe has undergone multiple complete overhauls, and has a ton of utterly broken shit. Yet, when Anthem released in a state that was arguably comparable to the launch state of both games, it got destroyed – because people could simply play its better competitors.

This is ultimately good for readers. It’s good for authors – at least those who want to write something decent. If I’d seen some of the hits that came out in the last year, instead of the authors in 2019 and 2020, I might have felt more confident in writing something different or better earlier. There was such an insane push in the first few years in the harem space (coming from the same voices that I’d argue push out a lot of slop) that I felt embarrassed admitting I actually gave a shit about my writing when I first started Patreon. It was a very “money, money, money” space. Those people haven’t gone away, but I’ve happily made an author career by writing what I want, even if it took me a while to finally get around to it.

A Regression with a Twist

So, the central conceit of Heretic Spellblade is pretty simple: Nathan starts in a world where everything has already gone to shit, then gets a chance to fix everything by going in time. The twist is that the offer comes from his enemy. Oh, and he chooses to restart in a different faction, right where everything first went wrong.

This has a very “kill Hitler to stop WW2” approach to it, and was chosen to mess with a bunch of time travel tropes on top of regression and fixfic tropes at the same time.

But before I talk about that, I should talk about regression stories.

Regression stories have become huge lately, I think because a lot of Korean webnovels are getting manwhas, and it’s trendy. It’s basically the Korean isekai right now. The format they use is pretty simply: go back to being a kid and redo everything using their future knowledge. What prompts this varies: they might die to some great enemy; or maybe they learn they wasted their life studying the wrong magic or something; or they’re abandoned by their “friends” or some shit (god, that’s such an overused trope) because it’s discovered that somebody else is better at their job. There’s often a deeply personal motivation that ties into IRL motivations of repeating school and early employment, but with a “cheat code” or being able to buy Intel or buy bitcoin or some shit.

But these stories are older than the recent trend. Hell, the core idea of “grinding from a baby” can be seen in Mushoku Tensei. I recall reading trashy Japanese manga in the late 2010s that used the idea, which means the webnovels for them were likely started around 2013-2015 (given they would have been become LNs before becoming manga). I bet I’d find Korean stories in the 2000s, or others. It’s hardly an original premise.

I’ve also seen some people state emphatically that Spellblade isn’t a regression, which I think is because of how hard some people stick to the basic tropes. This probably isn’t a bad statement to make when it comes to recommendations – I’m pretty sure some people got upset when they first read the book that it didn’t play out exactly like a regression story. The book, Second Chance Swordsman, uses a superficially similar hook to Spellblade but plays the regression tropes dead straight, making it a litrpg popcorn read.

But Spellblade is taking a hatchet to a bunch of core tropes in regression and time-travel fixfics (for those wondering, fixfic is the term used for fanfics that “fixed” the base material, sometimes by having the characters go back in time and repeat the events of the story. There are even crossover versions of these.) Ironically, I did this before regression stories picked up in western progfantasy.

This is the reason why in the early books, there’s some pointed cases of Nathan’s attempts to rectify history just not working, and his efforts eventually change everything so much that his future knowledge becomes substantially less useful. This is a “no-no” in regression stories, because being able to magically predict and solve everything is part of the power fantasy. In Spellblade, it’s pointedly very stupid to expect everything to play out the same.

To use Harry Potter as an example, imagine if Harry regressed and stopped Pettigrew from escaping (forget how time travel works in that world for a moment). Hell, maybe he lets Sirius kills Pettigrew. How does Voldemort come back now? In a regression story, everything needs to play out the same way, no matter what, because otherwise it ruins the central conceit of the MC using his foreknowledge – but that also means the MC can’t actually accomplish anything meaningful.

Spellblade initially plays with this. In the first few books, it appears as if there is some higher power manipulating events to ensure everything goes to hell. Some greater force that will force the Empire to collapse. Only for Nathan to capture Torneus alive and break the cycle by the end of Book 2 – the nefarious force turns out to be entirely mundane. There are machinations taking place, but the demons are exploiting the weaknesses humanity is providing, rather than creating them.

This is where Spellblade steps into time travel territory. History is a complicated sequence of events, and it’s often held that many things would have happened in spite of any one individual. Hitler represented an entire movement in Germany; Lincoln opposed slavery as part of a popular shift against it; if Caesar didn’t try to topple the Roman Republic, then Pompey would have seized ultimate power, or the Optimates would have backed somebody else. History is easily told from the perspective of powerful individuals, and they’re certainly influential, but over the span of decades and centuries they are replaceable, but societal shifts outlast lifespans.

Eventually, these time travel tropes gave birth to the multiverse insanity. Although I stopped short of really embracing that too deeply. I nearly did, with the early chapters of Spellblade 7 having Nathan seeing alternate realities, but decided that would cause too many problems. Multiverse travel or sight is too much of a pain in the ass to deal with.

Vive La Revolution

In Spellblade, every nation is facing the culmination of centuries of unrest and problems. The idea is that while the demons are the physical foe that will destroy everything, it’s the internal disputes that are the true threat. The greedy powermongering of the nobility, the clergy, some rulers etc don’t stop for anything. They’ll scheme even while everything is burning, because all they care about is having more than others and believe they’ll end up on top.

Each nation’s problems are different, but drawn from different parts of history and the world.

The Anfang Empire was the Holy Roman Empire facing the rise of immensely powerful nobles that effectively crippled the power of the Emperor – I believe I based the civil war on the downfall of the Salian dynasty (although the comparisons aren’t too deep).

Trafaumh is France in the leadup to the French Revolution. The difference is the cause for the unrest. Trafaumh is a religious military dictatorship, where the façade of noble representation is undermined by the Inquisition’s influence over the clergy, control of the military, and ability to declare their enemies heretics. At the same time, the growing merchant class is deeply unrepresented while the soldiers get very little. Trafaumh was mired in tradition, but it watered down the meaning of that tradition, leaving it as little more lip service. A great example of that was the anecdote about knights still being granted land (whereas knights in other nations were now unlanded nobles), but it was so little that it served as little more than a plot to bury them in.

Falmir was England, but specifically in the 15th-17th centuries (the War of the Roses and aftermath), as the King dominated politics, but was losing power to the nobility. Again, this isn’t a 100% accurate comparison, due to the completely different history of Falmir to England (Falmir had a massive post-secession war that established the power of the monarchy and relative strengths of various nobles), but the general theme of nobles chafing against an absolute monarch is the same as what led to the English Civil War of the 17th century and the execution of Charles I.

The Aurelian Spires of the dark elves are Eastern European inspired, but don’t have a direct inspiration from history. It definitely drew from Soviet Russia, though. I fumbled the situation with Sureev, so that you don’t really understand just what the hell is going on with the dark elves. In general, the idea is that the Spires have two levels of unrest: the slave problem, which leads to the riots in Book 8; and the massive equality and representation issues between the elites in the Spires and those outside them.

Arcadia could be the US, or really any country with a modern democratic system. It’s intentionally an overcomplicated version of a modern democracy, both for the cultural issues, but because it’s such an openly corrupt and rigged system from the get-go, with the faeries moving the goalposts any time the elves see any measure of success. The ease with which a few bad actors can destroy a system with so many checks and balances, but fixing it while playing by the rules is nearly impossible, is a pretty easy story to tell without actually engaging with the system in great detail (and avoids people getting angry at me for being preachy, especially these days). This is the reason for the bait and switch in Book 8.

The Federation is complicated. Again, it’s not based directly on anything specific from history, but general themes (and I could easily find examples if I looked). It’s a collection of city-states that gathered together to oppose a much larger threat, but in the process of doing so it’s become a corrupt mess. Individually, each city-state would have collapsed to some internal power struggle or rebellion, but the other regents were able to protect each other (this isn’t really brought up in the books, as the Federation is short lived, but it means that the Federation has lost its purpose as its focused more on internal threats than external ones). I can at least say Tartus was Greece (meaning Torneus was as well), and Fyre was Italian.

Vera, The One That Got Away

This topic has been a long time coming, but I’ve always been leery of talking about it in detail. So I’ll go through the entire thing from wo to go.

When I commissioned the first cover that had “Vera” on it, Heretic Spellblade was an entirely different story. The sorceress in that story was the first love interest (with a character not dissimilar to Anna being the second, and an earth elemental being the third). When I ditched that story, I still wanted to use the cover.

As a sidenote, the cover that became Narime was actually for a character who can theoretically turn up in Demon’s Throne (Tsucchi, the sister of the Seven Leaf clan chief).

Vera was intended as a traitor all along, but I wasn’t entirely sure of how far into the betrayal she was when I started the story (noting that her tower got invaded when Sunstorm first attacked Gharrick Pass). The idea was that she’d join Nathan and they’d have sex near the end of the book.

When I wrote the scene where Nathan confronts Vera, I decided that having him and Vera get together cheapened the situation and would have annoyed people. Noting this is a very long time ago and I might be misremembering, I believe I made that call pretty late and it was partly due to needing to up the ante of the climax (as I was struggling a bit to finish the book – I actually dabbled with dictation at this point), which made the Vera betrayal more intense and therefore a relationship harder. I believe I made the right call, as Vera was incredibly polarizing.

Book 2’s process was an absolute mess. I think Vera was intended to join the harem, but got lost in the immense rewrite. This is the same rewrite that accidentally had Ciana excluded entirely from the book (as she featured exclusively in the Aleich section which was cut).

Unfortunately, this is where I need to touch on a shitty part of the story, and the genre as a whole. Harem was undergoing a huge NTR witchhunt at this point. It was common to see vague accusations or implications (often from the same people, particularly in harem communities) thrown at new authors, even when no NTR or rule-breaking was happening. Anything that could even be used as a slightest hint that an author would have a potential love interest cheat on the MC was called NTR.

In any case, Spellblade 2 got an NTR accusation levelled at Vera. This was purely based on the idea that she might, upon becoming a Bastion, take on male Champions and have sex with them. This was never mentioned in the books, let alone the idea she’d take on Champions (you know, the woman who was an infamous loner in the two books). I made a small edit to the book to make it clear she wouldn’t do it, but took a big sales hit regardless (as this was a pretty clear attempt by somebody to hurt me financially).

Between Spellblade 2 doing worse than I liked, Vera being extremely polarizing, and the fact she was getting NTR accusations – especially as there was also some trolling when Demon’s Throne came out – I ignored her in Book 3. Kadria got overshadowed a bit in Book 3 for a vaguely similar reason, but had a better plot reason as she was puppeteering Fyre (and the Twins also stole her position as advisor). Kadria’s polarization made me wary as well at a time when I was worried about my success, but I was more attached to her as a character and she was integral to the plot.

I believe (again, this is ancient history) there was intended to be a section at the end of Book 3 where Nathan helped Vera and Anna with the rebellion. This got cut in favor of the Sunstorm PoV scene due to both time but also the fact it made the pacing weird (having a big showdown with Thanatos followed by a smaller fight with the rebels).

Vera was supposed to have a big return in Book 4, instead of just becoming a Bastion. She couldn’t get much focus early, because the book was already slow. And, again, I cut the civil war scenes focused on Amica in favor of other scenes. In this case, it was purely due to time constraints. Book 4 was written in a very constrained timeframe – I remember heading home after my family’s Christmas party on Christmas Day and finishing the book so I could send it to beta readers. Note that the book came out on January 6th. It’s a fucking miracle the book was as good as it was, but Vera was a casualty.

And, from there, Vera kept getting pushed aside. I’d basically missed my chance to have her join the harem naturally due to a mixture of circumstances, and there was now a massive number of girls competing for her attention. Every book I was putting stuff off to the next one, despite the growing size of each book. Plot threads and character arcs were stretching out, book after book, and I kept having to prioritize. Huge climactic scenes sometimes got cut down, like in Book 6 beneath Soreaux.

In the midst of the editing hell that Spellblade eternally was, Vera never stood a chance. No book ever contained everything I wanted.

When I’m writing my books, I often avoid overplanning them. But with Spellblade, I do need to have a good idea of the plot and character threads I’m going to hit, the midpoint, climax etc, as well as how I plan to end it. Plus I usually have some big scenes and battles already in mind. As I write the book, the remaining chapters begin to fall into place. By around the halfway mark, I often have an ongoing list of every event I want to include. At some point, these break down into chapters, to give me some idea of the finish line.

When I hit the final stretch of the book, I start looking at these remaining chapters and prioritize them. Some get combined, others pushed until after I finish (as I very rarely decide I love them enough to add them back in), and some cut completely. Vera got cut every time, especially as she competed against characters like Astra, Nurevia, Sunstorm, or Sen, whose character threads were often pushed back or added in at late stages.

At some point, I envisaged a way to deal with the Vera situation in a similar way to the Ciana one: make use of the way I’d ignored her. I believe I came up with this during Book 5.

The idea would be that Vera would grow upset at how she’d been ignored by Nathan and struggled to make much progress as a Bastion. Without much training or mentorship, she hit a wall. Sofia would corrupt her and she’d become an enemy during the final book, back when it was envisaged more as a huge war between the faeries and everyone else.

I realized pretty quickly this would be a bad idea, to be honest. One of the major criticisms of Vera when she became a Bastion was that she didn’t deserve it, and because she hadn’t been 100% loyal from the start, she’d betray Nathan. This would simply prove those folks right, and I’d get angry “I told you so’s”. Thematically, it made sense at the time, as Nathan was supposed to get much darker, but I eventually decided on a lighter approach (where he worked with his former enemies more) and having to forgive Vera a second time would have been dumb.

So I was a bit lost with Vera and she nearly got lost again. After my Europe trip, where I decided to revisit my approach to Book 7, I decided to finally bring her back. Book 7 included a ton of stuff, and while some scenes were still cut, it was the first time where scenes I’d normally remove made it in (which made it gigantic).

However, Vera’s final arc never really made her harem material. She remained the harem member that got away, no matter how angry certain people (some of whom, to be honest, were the same people who attacked me over her) are that she took up the first cover.

A Black Hole of Complexity

Writing Heretic Spellblade was fundamentally different to writing any of my other series. Truthfully, I write all of my series in different ways, which is why they all feel different.

Neural Wraith is more of a detective/mystery novel, with each book being self-contained with a story running between them (like in the Dresden Files, which I based the idea off and thought would be a good idea, but apparently wasn’t). Demon’s Throne is just kind of weird due to being such a strange mishmash of stuff, particularly with the Labyrinth (honestly the weakest part of the series and something I sincerely regret not seriously reworking or removing). Mob Sorcery is very meandering, with strong slice of life elements between the action that ties it all together and deals with my biggest criticism of slice of life (namely, that lacking proper conflict makes them boring, or that the conflict is so blatantly unimportant and exists just for the sake of it).

But Spellblade is an epic fantasy novel, with a billion characters, multiple nations, overlapping politics and schemes, weird multiverse shit, and complicated plot threads that run across multiple books and arcs (and even other plot threads). From Book 4 onward, there was a sort of pressure when writing every chapter to make it count. Unlike Mob, where I actively spend time smelling the roses, Spellblade is about being efficient. If there’s a scene where the characters are smelling the roses, it’s because I felt it was important – either for the setting, theme, pacing, or characters.

A simple example of this is when Nathan visits Otto’s palace. There’s a long section where Nathan walks through and observes the opulent decorations of an archduke’s palace. This serves multiple purposes: it symbolizes how Nathan shrugs it off, as he’s become so used to (especially in comparison to earlier in the series); it captures how empty and disused the place is, as Otto is focused on the war and not entertaining fellow nobles; and of course, there’s the portrait gallery. Otto is obsessed not with his status and impressing other nobles, but his legacy.

While Mob also has this sort of care taken with its scenes and worldbuilding, its rarely condensed into short scenes like this. When I chose to have Vince meet Mei in a tiny French café in the Sommet, there wasn’t anything important about the menu or the décor. Lionetti Tower’s architecture is representative of the era it was built in, rather than being thematic.

I believe the fact I focused so much on making each chapter and scene matter so much is the reason I’ve noticed some people say that the pacing feels fast in a series that is really long. Two of the books cover separate civil wars that take place over the space of weeks, with much of the action depicted over days. Book 7 is nearly the size of the first two books combined.

This pacing also made planning really difficult. While writing, I don’t really have time for “slow” chapters or filler. In fact, if I detected filler I’d often go back and rewrite it, as patrons reading the chapters noticed (this often happened earlier in the books, where I would sometimes put out chapters under pressure of Patreon timeframes that I’d regret).

The sheer number of characters was also difficult to juggle. Something I’ve noticed in some harem series with large harems is that the author will flat out remove half the harem for entire books or even the latter half of a series. I’ve never liked this, and it feels very cheap. But I know why. Not only does it bloat word count to include so many extra characters, but keeping track of them and having them contribute to battles is difficult. If I was an author with a strict publishing deadline, I’d probably have to do this, and I’m not surprised that some of the authors I know that did this trick publish pretty damn often (or, in one case, used to).

Managing this scene-by-scene got so bad that I literally had a list of every harem member (and any other major recurring character, like Gareth and his Champions) at the bottom of my Word document, along with their current location. This would ensure everyone was doing stuff and that they wouldn’t get ignored during battles, scenes etc. I also used this during major battles, such as the fight against Sofia at the end of Book 7, to track if everyone had done something in the fight (I originally missed Reine in the fight against Oliver as she wasn’t usually included in the battle scenes and had to edit her in, and I suspect I underused her death laser in Book 8).

I considered at one point going one step further and tracking how often characters got screentime, but that was overkill given I often formed groups for long sections. There was usually a reason I was excluding certain characters from Nathan’s group, too. A character might get less screentime in one book because they got lots in the last one, or because they didn’t have a huge role in this one (e.g. Fei got sidelined in Book 6). This was far from perfect.

Managing such a large cast means some people will always be unhappy, especially as sex scenes started involving multiple girls at once almost all the time (Tarako was actually pretty special to get a solo scene). I put in a ton of effort to make it work, as I like having the large cast and harem for other reasons (including harem-adjacent characters like Kara (well, until the ending) and Erica), but I definitely still got a lot of criticism.

I learned a ton from Spellblade about managing a large cast. Even though Mob isn’t as crazy, I’m still using some of those techniques. Mob has the benefit of the girls not following Vince as followers, as he often does his own thing and catches up with him, and I want to avoid breaking that mold at least for a while (e.g. buying a huge mansion and having everyone move in together). I know a lot of people like the idea of the omnipresent harem where they’re all following the MC, even when it’s nonsensical and some of them should be off running the Empire or whatever.

As for plot complexity, I was kind of my own victim here. There are lots of things happening in Spellblade across multiple levels, and I suspect that meant most people were simply along for the ride, rather than actually engaging with the plot. Black was basically playing a long game the entire series as he let Kadria manipulate Sofia into a dead-end cycle, forcing Sofia to give in to someone: either Nathan or Black. But this just sort of… happened for most people, I guess.

Trying to make all this happen while still hinting at it was damn hard. Especially as I would tweak elements of it. I had to update my VA notes for Steph a couple of times for some characters as they’d change between books. Charlotte was the big one. In Book 4, she was under Sofia’s control entirely, but I changed my mind in Book 5 and decided that Charlotte talking with Sofia in her head was way better (which is why Charlotte is substantially colder in Book 4).

I don’t plan on ever writing something this complex again. Even if Mob Sorcery hits 10 or 20 books, I don’t think it will ever become as difficult to write as Spellblade. Not that I find any series easy to write, in truth, but Spellblade was exhausting to write in a way that is different from every other series. The combination of length and complexity always left me feeling like I ran a marathon, and I’m still feeling the effects months later.

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This is the end of the first commentary post. It’s very “author-focused”, I guess. The next one should be more about the characters, but the topics will jump around a bit. I think I’ve covered a lot of the big, overarching topics, though. There’ll probably be a few days between each post, as I also want to post the Spellblade epilogue and resume Mob chapters.