2022 In-Review

It’s almost Christmas and that means 2022 is just about behind us. Rather than an ordinary monthly update, I figured I’d look back at the year and give an update about my plans for 2023.

Before that, the basic news: Neural Wraith 2 is off to beta readers, and I’ll be making final edits next week. I suspect there’ll be more changes to it than most of my books, probably to shore up the fundamentals (i.e. the mystery). It’ll be out on Jan 3, and the audio for Demon’s Throne 2 is out on Dec 27th before that.

Other audio news: Demon’s Throne 3 on Jan 31st, and preorder is up on Audible. Emperor Awakened will also be out in late January. I’m pretty sure Spellblade 5 is ready but Podium wants to avoid releasing so many audiobooks so close together (November ended up being quite silly). Neural Wraith 2 already has recording booked in with Steph, so I suspect the steady drip of audio will be maintained for a few more months. Then, uh, I’ll run out of content.

On to the annual wrap-up. I usually restrict this depth of commentary to Messenger patrons, so if you're surprised at the length, this is normal for the detailed commentary that follows the release of each book.

The Books

I released 4 books in 2022.

• Spellblade 4 in Jan
• Demon’s Throne 3 in April
• Neural Wraith 1 in June
• Spellblade 5 in Sep

Although, really, Spellblade 4 was written last year and Neural Wraith 2 this year. I’ll talk about both books anyway.

My break ended up nuking my writing schedule at the end of the year, as I burned myself out following Spellblade 5 (particularly as I abandoned my plans to do Spellblade 6 despite having done all the planning/outlining).

The two extra books I had really wanted to get done were Spellblade 6 and Emperor 3. Demon’s Throne 4 arguably got replaced by Neural Wraith, but I got a bit dispirited by the writing process and release, and I need to take a serious look at how I approach that series when I pick it back up in 2023.

My biggest “mistake” was not thundering through and getting Spellblade 6, but it’s easy to say that in retrospect. I put the quote marks there, because I’m not stranger to burnout and I know myself. When you’re in the pits, the struggle is intense and turning that planning into a book looked unmanageable. Now, I’m in good mental health and I mostly look at the “failure” of not delivering what I promised.

Honestly, it’s a fucking lot easier to assess this when all the deadlines are self-imposed. Hell is being burned out, surrounding by other burned out bitter people, in a project flying directly into the sun, and trying to pull yourself out of that spiritual black hole. There is a reason I keep to myself as an author, as I sometimes find it easier to simply disconnect and not deal with the absolute nonsense of some folks.

On a less uber serious note, Emperor 3’s delays are simpler. It’s just hard to pick up a series you haven’t touched in 2.5 years, written in a PoV you don’t use anymore. First-person has a different vibe. My particular style of third-person is still inside the protag’s head, but it’s still different to when everything is filtered through the protag’s perspective in first-person. There are multiple layers of effort to bring any outline to life, and I need some time between major releases to devote myself to this.

We’ll see whether the constant delays cause any audiobook dramas.

I’ve pushed myself to get Neural Wraith 2 done this month in order to finally end my break (which kept running into all sorts of issues/excuses to extend it). That worked, but there’s been a price to pay. I haven’t burned out, but I’ve definitely hit some mental limitations. I can churn books out if I need to—that’s never been the issue—but a lot of time is usually spent easing issues in the outline or problems I feel in the narrative I’m creating.

There’s some good news, though.

One of the benefits of being able to look back at the calendar year is that you can smooth out the peaks and troughs. Stuff that looks rough at the time can seem trivial later, and smooth sailing can ironically look like you went through a storm that nearly sunk you. For a species built on pattern recognition, we actually suck at working with numbers like this. Even with years of experience in stats, I still find it very easy to get caught up in the moment. Zooming out can be difficult.

My individual releases in 2022 were, for the most part, a mixed bag. Spellblade 4 was a breakthrough moment for me. Easily my best release, it brought in a ton of new fans, lots of buzz, and was extremely well received. The divide between how people talked about me before and after is night and day. I like to think that the first Spellblade made me an author, but in a way Spellblade 4 is the reason I’m able to avoid trend-chasing.

Then it kind of went downhill, in terms of individual releases. Demon’s Throne 3 had a rough reception, and its sale underperformance has carried throughout the year. The lack of a fourth book has probably contributed somewhat. Spellblade 5 experienced the same thing, with roughly another drop-off occurring. My opinion about the risks I face in the genre hasn’t changed. If this continues, instead of levelling off, I’ll be releasing books with worse sales than I experienced in 2021. But I don’t want to bang that drum again.

Neural Wraith was a bright spot in the year, but it was a new series and had a very slow burn. Word of mouth kept this one going strong. It probably still undersold some random low-effort superhero book, but that’s the genre.

What buoyed me over the year was the power of having so many books, as well as some international factors.

In self-publishing, we talk about “tail” or “legs”. That’s how long sales last after a release. Individual book releases actually have less legs now, as the genre is so saturated as the amount of rapid release authors has grown (I’m pretty sure we’re up to six or seven ghostwriting mills now, even if some of the newer ones aren’t as blatant as a single pen name pumping out a book a week).

But my overall sales tail has grown. I’m not feeling the pressure to release books super fast. Lots of books means that even if the individual releases aren’t as good, new readers pick up the old ones. And if my new releases are good, they then devour everything I have. I’m feeling a lot less pressure going into 2023 then I did coming into 2022, or even a few months ago looking at Spellblade 5’s performance.

The big international factor is the exchange rate. I get paid in US dollars, and it’s really strong, so I get paid more in Australian dollars. On top of that, while inflation is bad, Australia hasn’t been hit as hard. I also don’t think our income expectations are as crazy here. Or maybe I just hang around with fewer people with aspirations of becoming Jeff Bezos.

Oh, and I guess audiobooks are finally picking up. Kind of screwed the pooch with Audiobook Guild. Gonna stick with my tried and true strategy of just tuning out the publishing bullshit and focusing on writing. Patreon income has also stabilized and I’ve found a decent-ish rhythm without worrying too much. Thanks to you and everyone else here for the support. It does mean a lot.

The takeaway is that I’m trying to keep more of an open mind going into 2023. More on that later.

Ultimately, 2022 has been a rocky ride. But some of the big waves I went through might have been deceptive. I also need to focus more on writing sustainably, to avoid a repeat of the second-half of the year.

Leveling Up

This year has also required me to “level up” my writing craft. Ironically, this is the least useful skill from a pure money perspective, but the stories are my jam and my interest in the marketing/publishing side remains as low as it was when I started (maybe even lower).

But back to the craft.

My fantasy series have really started to hit their stride when it comes to the “epic” part of the epic fantasy. Both series are very much embedded in the international conflict phase, with long-term schemes and major players weaving in and out of the plot. Spellblade in particular is closing and opening lots of plot threads (yes, I know that doesn’t sound right). Some long-laid plans of mine are coming to fruition and I’m beginning to write scenes I’ve sometimes had in mind since the first or second book.

This means lots of characters, long interwoven character arcs, and motivations that frequently butt up against those of others. The scale tends to be massive, even if I don’t show everything off. If I was willing to commit to writing a really long series (or just wrote faster), I could easily make these series into the double-digits without really running into issues with content, and still have fairly well planned story arcs.

By contrast, Neural Wraith is a new series, it’s scifi, with a very different form of worldbuilding, is written in a completely different style, and is a mystery/noir to boot. The first book proved surprisingly popular, and we’ll see if that carries over to the sequel (or if it was lightning in a bottle).

The worldbuilding requires me to do a lot of research, often into topics I barely know anything about but know people will. I’ve been chipped about various things, from firearms to how unrealistic space elevators are. Hell, I had a long conversation today about the helicopters and way I approached the military in the book, and I know that there’ll be some people who feel curmudgeonly about that despite my research into it. In fantasy, you can have a single farmer feed a city and people just go “it’s fantasy, bro, who cares” but you get some minor detail wrong that some dude’s career revolves around and you’re equivalent to that dude who used a Legend of Zelda recipe in his YA novel.

I’m exaggerating for effect here. The research is actually really fun. I just have to be careful about what makes it into the book, because I also need to assess what I don’t know from the basic level of research I have the time to do.

What is extremely challenging to write, however, is the mystery element. I’ve always enjoyed including a mystery in my fantasy books when possible, but they’ve never been the primary focus. I have my own personal benchmark for what makes a mystery good, compared to a thriller (namely, can the reader realistically expect to guess the villain).

But mysteries require actual writing skills. Harem, litrpg, and progfantasy rely extremely heavily on the progression side of things. The story moves forward, readers often forget things that happen in the past (including entire mechanics in litrpg systems), and plot threads can be dropped and picked back up entire books or arcs later. I’ve relied on this, wrapping up stuff in Spellblade that was hanging around for a few books (either intentionally or not, like the Sister Kadria thing, which was a holdover from the original 4 book series plan). Hell, one of the best-known tricks as a writer is to make something appear planned by just referring a past event or character. Include lots of extra shit, just in case you might need it later. Now you have contingencies out the ass.

A mystery is self-contained, however. Readers expect a logical progression that is explained at the end. Characters and places are frequently introduced just for a book, giving a somewhat episodic feel, even if the broader world is slowly expanded over the series. This limits the potential for character arcs (in fact, rather than arcs, mysteries instead tend to reveal pre-existing facets of characters) and progression.

Most importantly, a lot of crutches are simply gone. In Spellblade and Demon’s Throne, I sometimes get overly ambitious with what I try to cover. But unless it causes major pacing issues (which does sometimes happen) I don’t cut the content. Instead, I leave the plot or character thread unresolved. A great example of this is the wedding from Spellblade 5, which was supposed to occur in that book, but got punted back due to how damn long the novel already was.

Doing that in a mystery can be dangerous, as there needs to be a clear delineation between the mystery (which resolves inside the book) and larger events. Neural Wraith 2 has been a learning experience in this regard, as I suspect including a bunch of larger worldbuilding elements muddles the mystery in the current version, and I’ll need to strip some of that back.

In short, I’ve had to git gud. I don’t think I could have written Neural Wraith a year ago, and it’s increasingly apparent why this particular genre blend will never take off.

The books do prove fun to write, though. Neural Wraith is easily the best book I’ve written, in my opinion, with Spellblade 4 in second place (mostly due to the way it acts as the culmination of a lot of stuff). Trying to capture the spirit of the first book has been hard, and I expect likely impossible. I think of it a little like the difference between a superhero origin movie and the sequel. They can’t have the same vibe. I think that will apply to the rest of the series.

In terms of the larger craft problem and my limitations, I’m beginning to get a grasp of where I run into problems. My fantasy series and Neural Wraith both test different aspects.

Spellblade 5 exhausted me because it was a marathon. A massive book that required me to juggle an immense amount of lore, characters, and plot lines, while also trying to ensure that the next book could close out the second half of the story and that I didn’t self-sabotage myself like I’d done in the past. I’d compare it to writing an absolutely massive report. Nothing is especially hard, but it’s 100 pages, involves copious amounts of research, and you know that there’s going be another report based on it in the future so you can’t fuck it up.

Whereas Neural Wraith is shorter, tighter, but far more taxing. If I churn out a huge amount of words, they can be absolute nonsense if you pay close attention. In a progfantasy or litrpg novel, that would probably be fine. But if things need to make logical sense, then I need to slow down and think. Sometimes the outline turns out to be shit, or a key element of the mystery just doesn’t work.

I can probably write a lot more Neural Wraiths than Spellblades. There’s a lot less utter exhaustion when I reach the finish line, and the shorter size means I’m not tearing my hair out while editing and proofing. The flipside is that I need good ideas to write Neural Wraith, whereas Spellblade just needs me to be ready to write and the book comes together.

Ultimately, exploring a new element of my craft this year and forcing myself to improve has been the highlight. More than anything else, I refuse to get stuck in a rut churning out garbage that sells but is basically just the same book with a new coat of paint and coming up with excuses for its poor quality. The fact people supported Neural Wraith has given me the chance to focus more on writing stuff I enjoy.

Plans for 2023

In short: finish what I’ve started.

Spellblade is approaching its planned end. The sales of Book 5 mean I’m unlikely to extend it past Book 7. If I do, it won’t be revealed ahead of time. I’ll write a big Book 7 and split it in two with a rapid release. I don’t plan to repeat the previous problem.

Emperor needs an ending of sorts. The audiobook gave it some new life, but I don’t expect a new book to see many sales. I just need to set aside a couple of months to get it done. It’ll be an open-ish ending that closes out the important stuff.

There’s no way I can finish Demon’s Throne, but it will come back next year. I just need to rethink my plans for the second half. The audiobook rerecording has bought some time there, as it brings in new fans to the series.

Neural Wraith will continue on. I had planned to finish out the series with 3 books within a year, but I’m backing off on an accelerated writing schedule.

And that’s the important part.

Harem is a very rapid release-centric genre. It’s coming to see people, including other authors, say stuff like “any series that doesn’t release a new book within 3 months is dead”. I’ve let myself get sucked into that nonsense.

I’m going to let myself settle into the “book every 3 months” schedule that I’ve ended up with. That avoids me setting expectations that I never meet, constantly putting back release dates. Maybe I’ll even be able to do a proper release calendar if things work out over 2023.

I have some IRL stuff that will make the first half of the year a little dicey, though. I’m moving in Feb (that’s the IRL distraction that made it hard to really get going with Neural Wraith 2), and I’ll be taking another break in March.

Tentatively, I expect to release books in late Feb, June, Sep, and either Dec or the start of Jan 2024 (there are fifty billion books released in December, so a New Year release always seems less crowded).

Right now, those books are likely to be, in no particular order:

• Heretic Spellblade 6
• Demon’s Throne 4
• Empire Reforged 3
• Neural Wraith 3

Realistically, I have no clue when things will get written other than Spellblade 6, which will be my next book. I strongly considered jumping right into Neural Wraith 3 in January, but I don’t have enough ideas to make a good mystery. The themes and ideas are there, but the mystery isn’t. Whereas I have an entire outline for Spellblade 6 and I’m in good spirits (for now, the Neural Wraith 2 launch may change things, haha).

I tend to write on whims. If I end up with a great idea for Neural Wraith 3, there’s a good chance I’ll just write it and put off another book. Conversely, if I’m feeling exhausted from writing an epic fantasy, I may not want to write another one. Emperor 3 needs to get done, though.

To finish off this section, I guess I’ll talk a little about the mentality I’d like to take into the year.

2022 has been rocky, despite not being as bad as I thought in retrospect. I’ve spent a lot of time questioning why I’m writing in the harem genre. That constant bubbling negativity is frustrating to deal with.

What I’d like to do is just focus on what I enjoy doing, and if I’m making enough to not give a shit about the meta nonsense then all is good. By focusing on my existing series, all of which are mature enough (or focused only on core fans, in the case of Emperor), I’ll get a good feel for whether that’s possible.

There’s a youtuber I’ve been watching for years. Other than his thumbnails and titles, he doesn’t do any meta nonsense. He streams a little, uploads edited videos of his games on a nearly daily basis, and just does stuff in his style. Sometimes he has a run of bad videos, other times he has some big hits. Guy just does his own thing and seems happy with that. He’s blown up a lot over the pandemic and definitely makes good money now, but I remember finding him back when he sure as hell didn’t.

That’s some Chad energy if I’ve ever seen it, to put it in harem terms. Living the dream without being hit by a truck.

I don’t know if I can ever quite reach that point, but I do want to channel some of that energy and care a lot less about the mercenary approaches preached elsewhere. Naturally, there’s a balance to be achieved. I can’t start writing absolutely batshit stuff. But if it works out, I figure I’ll be a lot chiller and happier, which was a large part of the reason I wanted to be an author instead of stuck in my old career.

No More Muppets

So the audiobook situation has finally been resolved. The whole thing was a bit of a schmozzle. Maybe I’ll talk about it in more detail one day in the distant future.

In any case, by the end of January, almost my entire catalog will be on Audible. The narration is also good. I don’t know if it was intentional or not, but the infernal characters in the ABG version sounded terrible. Somebody compared Grigor to a muppet. Personally, I felt he sounded more like an Igor. It was difficult to take him seriously, and a few other characters were really hard to like.

By contrast, Stephanie Savannah has done an amazing job. I gave substantially more detailed notes (which, for reference, didn’t matter in the ABG version. Even pronunciations I did provide were ignored by the narrators). A lot of characters are a delight to listen to, and I’m very happy with Mina in Book 2, as she’s my favorite character in the series. To some extent, the awful performance of her in the ABG version was probably the straw that broke the camel’s back and led to me ending the contract and rerecording.

Empire Reforged also got a great narration, and the second book is now finished according to Royal Guard. I figured that I’d eventually get this series recorded once I finished it, but expected it would be out of my own pocket.

Box Sets

These have become a fad this year in harem, so I gave one a try. It’s done pretty awfully. Evidently there’s an audience difference between me and those authors who do well with box sets.

I’m unsure if I’ll do any more box sets based on this one. I don’t want to start using worse cover art to represent the series, which would likely be necessary to make this viable. It also took time away from my cover artist working on new stuff, and I like having a decent backlog.

Royal Guard will want one for Empire Reforged. Otherwise, that’ll be it unless there’s a spike in interest.

For those wondering, the main reason I didn’t add extra short stories to the box set was because of the exclusivity issue. While a lot of authors simply ignore the KU exclusivity stuff (and sometimes get buttfucked by Amazon once reported/caught), the rules are that a short story is a separate work. If I included any in the box set, they need to be exclusive, which meant I’d need to take them down off Patreon. Given the awful performance of the box set, I’m glad I didn’t chase that particular fairy.

Writing Hard, or Hardly Writing?

I almost called this the ‘Rise of AI’ but that’s not entirely accurate. Hell, I almost cut this section entirely.

2022 has been an… interesting year in terms of inventions and their reactions. Not that everything is necessarily new.

Harem is one of a few self-publishing focused genres where authors have found ways to pump out content as fast as possible, with a focus more on being a business than an author. Everyone knows about the book-a-week ghostwriting mills. Ghostwriting in general is more prolific than many authors are willing to admit (mostly because of the potential for damage to their brand—if you know that an author uses ghostwriters, then you’ll pick and choose which series to read, treating them differently to an author you think doesn’t ghostwrite). But Amazon strongly rewards rapid release, and ghostwriting is a way to achieve that. Co-writing, often conducted very similarly to ghostwriting, became really popular in progfantasy but is significantly more honest.

But AI writing was the invisible tool discussed in hushed whispers by many authors. Some people despise it. There are author groups that flip their shit when it comes up, and others that are strongly pushing it. Some folks won’t hear a bad word about it. It’s almost certainly in use by some harem authors, especially with the rise of urban fantasy and shifter stuff. AI writing tools excel in scenarios where there’s less context for the AI to maintain. If you have a billion characters, with intricate relationships, and half your conversations revolve around elements inherent to the bespoke fantasy world, it will just explode. Or, more likely, give you fairly useless nonsense.

Whether it’s a tool or not is up for debate. For the most part, it’s here and it’s not going away. Unlike AI art, there’s nothing obviously detectable about AI writing. In the right circumstances, it just speeds up production. The quality is definitely subjective.

ChatGPT has made waves recently, and prompted lots of navel-gazing. I’m mostly at a loss when I see people suggesting it’s particularly brilliant. I regularly see reddit posts with more cogency and punchiness than what ChatGPT pumps out. It has a knack for producing the level of intelligence I regurgitated in high school English. Or be a monkey’s paw (“Give me a program that does X, that compiles with no errors, and make sure the turkey isn’t dry”).

However, ChatGPT is a real shot across the bow for the intentions of companies like Google. I used to write reports and schedules that often included AI chatbots and such nonsense to sell to business execs who understood little more about IT than buzzwords. Now those buzzwords are nearly real, and those massive job cuts always promised in those failed IT projects can finally be realized. Once Google stops focusing on passing a Turing Test, that is – ChatGPT gets maths wrong, for fuck’s sake.

We’re still a long way away from AI’s writing entire novels wholesale, though. There are a lot of technical hurdles that ensure an author will be handholding an AI for the near future.

The same can’t be said for AI voice acting and art. The former is already here, but mostly held up due to very real copyright issues, unlike the AI art one which is in a grey area that will slowly slog its way through in some manner.

Google offers AI narration, and is attempting to entice authors to use it. Both Microsoft and Amazon have also made huge inroads here. Audible is the main barrier against AI narration, because it owns ACX and controlling the largest audiobook narration service is powerful. But Amazon have already taken actions that suggest they don’t really care about the issues, and Audible may one day change their policy, opening the floodgates.

Legally, the issues are unlikely to explode as the tech companies are busy dodging them. Likenesses are protected by copyright, so an AI can’t reproduce, say, Andrea Parsneau’s voice without licensing it. My understanding is that most AI narration has been based off licensing voice acting, often by paying voice actors who drastically undervalue the value of their voice.

But the progress in these fields doesn’t really make the news much, or stick around in people’s heads. They’re very important to the self-publishing field. I expect there to be a point where I either need to be large enough to weather the AI writing storm, or start using one if it becomes good enough to actually work with my complex worlds. AI narration will arrive whenever Audible decides.

AI art, however, has been making people really angry. The increasingly angry reactions to it compared to ChatGPT has kind of cemented some of my more cynical opinions, given the lob losses from stuff like ChatGPT will be very real as it gets commercialized. Artists are popular on the internet, though.

In terms of self-publishing, AI art is already here. At least one major harem author has published a book with a fairly lazy AI art cover (they didn’t even fix the fucked up hands). I’ve seen a few other covers that I suspect may be touched-up AI art, but like with ghostwriting, there’s literally no way to know. Smaller authors are already jumping on the bandwagon with varying levels of quality.

Hell, even proper publishers have used it. There have been a few big books, including a Paolini book, that use AI art. Companies don’t like spending money they don’t have to. Given the simplicity of many mainstream book covers, AI art will dominate there.

Honestly, my main disappointment with what I see of the AI art being used commercially is how damn lazy it is. When I made that commentary post with a few experimental pieces, NovelAI’s model had only just hit the scene. Since then, the floodgates opened and things only got worse. I made a comment at the time that AI art would likely result in a new level of mediocrity. Well, shit, turned out to be true.

It’s sad because better stuff can be created. I’ve done a bunch of private experiments that created book covers with a higher level of quality, and quietly shelved them because I don’t need them. They took me around 30 minutes each. I’d estimate that some of what I’ve seen is the result of literal seconds.

But there’s been a lot of pushback against AI art. Kickstarter just banned it, arguably because they have a strong financial incentive to do so. Patreon may follow suit, given they’re also an artist hub. Legally, it’s a grey area, but the tactic so far is to put middlemen between the author/publisher and the AI generation. “I bought the art off someone, and you can’t prove it’s AI art.”

In short, the defense against AI art bans is to lie. If somebody puts in more than the token effort to make some AI art, it can impossible to be certain.

I don’t see AI art going away. I still mess around with it privately (less so this month, as I’ve been busy af) because it lets me create my characters. An artist only ever creates their vision of my characters, and there’s always some level of pushback when you try to make changes. An AI tool does what I ask it to, with some finessing, even if it’s worse in other ways.

As for me, I don’t see myself posting any AI art or using AI cover. Not with the current zealotry around it. I had considered doing a monthly roundup of any pieces related to book characters I made using AI, but the risk of somebody rounding up an angry mob just isn’t worth it. Especially with the sands shifting. Also, cover-wise, I have well over a year’s backlog.

New Series

As hinted in the 2023 plans, I don’t currently have plans to release new series. That’s not because I’m out of ideas, but because I need to start finishing some of my current stuff. I don’t write fast enough to even have four series on the go.

The other big reason is that I’m wary of making any new commitments in harem. I have a few cool ideas, including Billions, but I think I need time. It’s highly likely that you’ll see some stuff related to new series dropped on Patreon, whenever I need to work on something new to get my creative juices going. If I hadn’t forced myself to do Neural Wraith 2, you probably would have seen a big drop of a something pretty weird (still harem, just… weird).

The Best of 2022

To end on a high note, I’ll quickly go over the writing-related parts of the year I liked the best. Scenes, characters I came up with, reactions etc.

These may include some spoilers, but I’ll avoid any really big ones.

• Neural Wraith is my favorite book that I released. I’ve actually reread it cover to cover a couple of times, and listened to the entire audiobook. That’s not normal for me. The fact it was so well received is only icing.
• Favorite sex scene is the Kadria one in Spellblade 5. The puppyslut one. I realize most people don’t read my books for the sex scenes, but for the most part they make it in because I want them to be included. Writing sex isn’t my favorite thing, though. These days I prefer raunchiness and eroticism. Sex jokes, characters being lewd, innuendo, that sort of thing. That’s why Heretic is so steeped in it, and why Neural Wraith 2 has a little more (not much more, as I don’t want to change the vibe of the series too much).
• Picking a single battle scene is really hard. Mostly because what makes one good varies. When it comes to intensity, I think the Siv fight in Spellblade 5 is probably my objectively best from a technical perspective. But I also have a few really funny combat scenes, such as the fight against Maliah in Demon’s Throne 3 or against Thanatos in Spellblade 5. So I can’t really pick. Honorable mention probably goes to the merc battle and runaway scene in Neural Wraith, as I really liked how it came out.
• I create a lot of new characters all the time, and Neural Wraith has the advantage here due to being an entirely new book. My overall favorite is probably Kushiel, especially as I managed to have more fun with her in Book 2. She’s morphed a lot from my original idea but that’s the fun of it. Reine from Spellblade is an honorable mention, but she challenged me a little bit in Spellblade 5 after I wrote her really well in Spellblade 4. Imira was fantastic in Demon’s Throne 3, but damn did she make some people angry for simply existing as a powerful entity in the setting.
• Picking a single scene is hard. Especially as Neural Wraith is really fresh in my mind, and Demon’s Throne still feels a little sour. But I really enjoy writing some of the more personal scenes, where characters reveal some personal demons and often their secret fury. The first scene between Nick and Hammond in the bar with Kate probably gets my vote as favorite. I wanted to write that scene since I came up with the setting, and it stuck with me. I also really like the opening of the book. Spellblade 5’s opening chapter with the funeral is one I also like, but I think I’m alone there.

I have four excellent books to look back at. None of them were perfect—except maybe Neural Wraith—but I learned new things with each one. Sometimes it felt pretty rough when I was in the weeds writing them.

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With any luck, 2023 will be a good year. Hopefully you’ll read and enjoy the books I put out there, including any possible endings I release.

There’ll be another chapter drop before Christmas, but in case you read this and not that: Merry Christmas, happy holidays etc