2021 Messenger End-of-Year Update

It’s the end of the year and I figured I’d do a special wrap-up of sorts, plus some commentary on a few writing matters. The first few sections will focus on my ongoing series, and I’ll gradually progress into more “author” topics, so you can tune out if you aren’t interested in those types of topics. I've restricted this to Messenger-level patrons because it includes some fairly detailed commentary that I'm wary of talking about at all (in general, I stopped talking about this months ago, so this is a "special edition").

As a quick note, HS4 has chewed up more time than anticipated. The Cyberpunk/Dystopia chapters will be out at the start of Jan, alongside the Kadria short story. As HS4 is on pre-order, it takes priority.

And before we jump in, let me say a huge thanks to you. It's been a huge year for me, and I didn't imagine being able to write an update like this at the start of the year.

Heretic Spellblade

The series that started it all, at least from my perspective. Empire came first, but it didn’t really succeed and there’s a whole other story to tell about it (one day).

I started the year pretty rocky with Spellblade. My original draft for Book 2 seemed pretty bad and certain IRL events meant I got antsy about how I depicted the first third. As mentioned before, the visit to Aleich in Book 3 originally happened in Book 2, but involved lots of political shenanigans with the Nationalists.

In retrospect, Book 2 is easily the weakest book of the series. It suffers heavily from rewriting and my uncertainty about the length of the series. At the time, I still planned for the series to be 4 books, with the possibility of extension.

What was originally going to happen was that Book 3 might be about the Spires, in order to build up Nathan’s strength and to justify the later events. Book 4 would be what you’re about to read plus elements of the future Books 5 and 6. The final book would be largely unchanged. It would have been much closer to the rapid pacing of much of the genre.

Naturally, that didn’t happen. I’ve committed to longer series and longer books, which try to tell the story necessary.

Honestly, it’s a lot more fun this way. Book 1 was written at an almost hectic pace, as I simply chugged along and eschewed a lot of my old writing advice. Book 2 definitely suffered because of how much I second-guessed myself. While Book 3 had a rough start, I feel that I’m bringing much of the planning to bear in Book 4 and onward.

Time will tell if Book 4 is as well received as Book 3, I suppose. There’s a joke in Metalocalypse where the band has too much fun producing songs and they’re terrible as a result. Hopefully that’s not the case with my books, because Book 4 has been a blast to write.

Finally, I’ll comment on some of the elements of the series itself.

Spellblade is something of a subversive series. It’s not a parody and I don’t think it attacks anything, but I actively subvert a lot of tropes. I am (or was, given how much less I read this year) an avid reader of isekai and harem trash and I’m pretty sure most of these tropes are in my blood at this point. Except the wuxia ones, but I don’t ever plan to write straight progression stuff, so who cares.

I will say that it’s hilarious that I’ve been messing around with timey-wimey nonsense and Marvel comes out with Loki, which embraces timey-wimey multiverse nonsense to a degree I never thought I’d see in something so mainstream.

One of the more important aspects of the series, and my writing in general, is that I attempt to make it re-readable. I like to include details that might not be apparent to begin with, but make more sense later. Sometimes these are mysteries, other times these are just minor descriptive details or notes. I don’t always get these right, or sometimes just screw things up (I left out Mae’s mask in her description in earlier books and I changed my mind on a certain character, so she never appeared in Book 3).

The series definitely has a set ending. That ending is both concrete, while leaving potential for it to continue if I choose to. I’m a firm believer that series should end, and that planned endings create vastly superior experiences. A series can built up to those events, and it gives me a sense of approaching something final. I’ve messed around with the very final scene of the series a few times and I don’t expect it to change.

Demon’s Throne

The special series. This one had a rocky launch for a bunch of reasons, one of which I don’t think I’ll ever talk about because it relates to some fairly stupid shit that will only cause unnecessary drama.

It’s not even a secret that this is a novelization of an old work of mine. Years ago, I wrote a fairly long piece of interactive fiction (I think it was about 600k words originally) that had a ton of problems but which directly led to me writing books. So I’m rewriting it, and as of Book 2, the plot is completely deviating from the original with very few scenes referring to the origin work.

Demon’s Throne is considerably more earnest about the genre than Spellblade, while still not playing everything straight. I adore empire building, but my inspirations are less from other books and more from a specific game developer. Litrpgs tend to focus more on the nitty-gritty, because, well, they’re litrpgs (numbers go brrrr). By contrast, harem tends to have the empire be a thing they collect. The most common trope is “fuck politics, I’m strong.” Which is fun, too, but sometimes I want my escapism to be as an actual emperor, not as Conan.

So, anyway, that’s why Demon’s Throne is so character focused with such a strong dose of politics and slow burn progression. I want it to be more about being someone with power and influence over others, rather than someone who is merely powerful. The empire will need more focus in future books, and that will occupy some of my time during Demon’s Throne 3, especially.

Rys himself is intended to be a sympathetic villain protagonist. Discussions about this sort of thing have been a bit weird online lately. I remember reading one about how villains shouldn’t be written to draw empathy, and it mostly reminded me that the difference between sympathy and empathy seems to have been erased from popular media.

Rys is sympathetic because while you can understand his drive to become powerful, the awful environment he’s overcoming, and the loss he’s experienced, it’s not something that can be empathized with (the guy murdered a family because they passed off his merchandise as their own). He’s intended as the opposite of the standard harem protag, who is a pair of pants that you can self-insert into. If people choose to do that anyway, well, whatever. I don’t write generic self-insert protags, but I don’t control people.

The popularity of the worldbuilding aspects has surprised me. Demon’s Throne takes place in a kitchen sink setting – a labor of love of many years that explores concepts and characters that I never thought would see the light of day, so I simply slapped them into a single crazy story. The original story simply explained them whenever they came up, which resulted in horrific infodumps at times. Pacing them out, or outright removing unnecessary stuff, is genuinely nightmarish, and caused some genuine pain in Book 2.

Finally, the series appears to draw on a different audience than Heretic Spellblade. I can’t be certain of this, but there are a few clues, including in the sales figures. Demon’s Throne is more successful than Heretic Spellblade, book-for-book, but much of that audience comes from a casual readership that I feel relies on Amazon for recommendations. It also gets an insane number of reviews, but I suspect that’s due to the afterword.

Like Heretic Spellblade, this series has a planned ending. Unlike Heretic Spellblade, this one is left open with a much higher chance of a sequel. Demon’s Throne focuses on the archipelago and the mystery around Rys. Any sequel would then deal with the world at large, but would be dependent on continuing success (Book 6 is some time away).

Future Projects

A thorny topic.

Given my writing pace, I’m wary of committing to too many projects. Getting Heretic Spellblade 4 done in 2 months was a hell of a push for me. I have 3 ongoing series, even though one is close to finished.

However, you’ve naturally seen a couple of other things I’ve worked on and I’ve mentioned that I do work on other series. After Corrupted Retirement fizzled out, I’m warier of posting new stuff unless I’m certain it will go anywhere.

So here’s what I do know I’m working on:

· Empire Reforged will get an ending once all the new covers are done. I expect this to be the end, unless the new book and covers rejuvenate the series massively.

· The Cyberpunk/Dystopia Billions series will be worked on until the first book (minimum) done, then published on Amazon once edited. I imagine this will be around May/June.

· There have been several other ideas kicking around in my head. The biggest issue with some of them are that the Billions series is a big risk, so any other new series should probably be a mainline fantasy series.

Ultimately, given I’m wary of burning out (and I have plenty of experience with this from my professional past and am old enough to have zero interest in burning the candle at both ends), I don’t expect to start another series until the second half of 2022. Unless I hit serious writer’s block and decide to burn it out.

Or I decide to write Corrupted again. If I had time, I probably would have written more of it recently. An easygoing “dude builds a farm” thing has been on my mind.

Non-novel projects are extremely unlikely to happen.

Pacing

There are two things to talk about here: release pacing, and the pacing withing the novels themselves.

Let’s talk about the release pacing first, because it’s a fairly quick topic.

I mentioned in the last monthly update that I was always nervous about how slow my releases were. This resulted in repeated attempts to release books faster, which resulted in poor quality, rewrites, and missed release dates. It wasn’t until after HS3 that I chilled out a little.

While I still intend to improve, I expect that will come with time rather than trying to force myself to write faster. If I really wanted monthly releases, that could happen by forcing my books to a standard size (e.g. 100k words) and sticking to my original outline even when it’s not working. But I enjoy what I’m doing, so I’ll keep doing it while it works.

That’s it, really. While you and others enjoy my books at the speed I’m writing them, I’ll keep chugging along like this. I’ll never slip much past the 3 month mark however, because Amazon’s algorithm explodes in fiery rage and ensures I make nothing if that ever happens (such is the devil’s pact I have made with Jeff Bezos).

Now let’s talk about the more interesting topic: novel pacing.

Slow burn harem (i.e. harem where the relationships take time to happen) became popular right around the time I released Heretic Spellblade. While people consistently complained about how fast the hero got all the girls in just about every book, actually responding to those criticisms was a bad idea in the past. The commonly quoted reason that a harem series I enjoyed failed was because it was slow burn.

My books aren’t exactly slow burn, but I’m more willing to lean into that idea. Prospective members show interest in the MC, but don’t join the harem straight away. Sometimes this is because there are hang-ups that need to be dealt with (Nathan being wary of women not from his past with Seraph; or Fara being wary of going too fast with Rys), or there’s a semi-artificial reason to slow things down to protect pacing (Ciana and the reason Seraph didn’t bang Nathan at the end of Book 3).

The other slower paced aspect of my books is, well, everything. Each book makes a relatively minor amount of progress compared to many other books in the genre, relationships often take multiple books to progress, and mysteries can remain veiled just as long.

Personally, I like this approach. When you read over a series and you can see the progression the characters make over the books. Their personalities, actions, and even appearances change. To me, progression is more than a stat screen and a wall of numbers and skills. If somebody is a simple warrior in book 1 with nobody under their command, and is single-handedly cutting down elite champions while commanding their own armies in later books, that’s more interesting to me.

However, it can mean a lack of powerful individual scenes that show this progress. Tropes are popular because they’re effective, and one-on-one conversations where the harem member explains everything ailing them, only for it to be instantly resolved to progress their character arc is heavily used for a reason. It’s the equivalent of villains having their backgrounds revealed right before they die in shounen manga.

This is one of the reasons I don’t respond too much to criticisms about character development in my books. It’s extremely difficult to work out which ones are “this character genuinely doesn’t show any change” or “this character doesn’t change in the same way I’ve been conditioned to expect in the genre”.

Anyway, like the above, I’ll keep writing my books this way because I prefer it. I’ll also keep chiseling away at how to improve my presentation of the developments. While not every harem member can have in-depth moments in every book, I’m trying to avoid girl-of-the-week syndrome with long-tail character arcs.

Beta Testers, Feedback, and Iceberg Theory

We’re moving into writer issues now. This ended up being the most frustrating issue for me to handle in the latter half of the year. For those who don’t know, the final step of my publication process is sending out a near-final copy of the book to beta readers (you can join by asking me).

No, this isn’t me bitching about readers. Rather, it’s about interpreting criticism and implementing it effectively.

If you hang around on literally any community that talks about media, you’ll see a lot of “popular but incorrect” takes. A community asks for something or criticizes something, but actually following their advice is a terrible, terrible idea. I mentioned one above, about how slow burn harem was constantly asked for but actually doing it was financially dangerous for any author. Hell, I could mention the fact that harem is negatively received outside dedicated spaces but is a successful niche genre.

As an author, I consider this sort of thing “iceberg theory.” The people talking about media and responding in detail to books are only a fraction of the total readership. They’re the vocal minority – sometimes they’re right, but if they’re not, you might be pissing off a happy majority. Sometimes, they're not even the people reading the book.

This can make it an easy excuse to never change anything. My books are selling well, I’m getting good reviews, people say nice things on my FB – everything’s great, right?

Well, no. Stagnation is a one-way ticket to irrelevance as an author. Especially in a world reliant on Amazon’s algorithms, where books need to feel fresh. I don’t trend chase, because I don’t write fast enough and many trends don’t appeal to me, so that means my books need to feel fresh in different ways. If I’m writing high fantasy instead of something inherently trendier, then it needs to pop.

But who can help me there? Sometimes my gut is right. But it might not be.

Beta readers can be helpful, but the trick is finding the right ones. This is a problem I ran into with Demon’s Throne 2. I mentioned above that I feel the reader base for Demon’s Throne and Spellblade are different. This caused me to have significant self-doubt about the book, based on feedback (and lack thereof). Eventually, I pulled back and raked over the book and the first in the series, then finished it myself.

I do feel the book would have been improved with feedback, but as it was, I felt like I couldn’t trust what I was receiving (rightly or wrongly). That’s a bad place to be in. My mood leading up to publication was awful, as I found myself super-critical of my own work and unsure what was “right”. I need to be paying attention to the right part of the iceberg or else I might anger what’s below the surface. Easier said than done.

To summarize, feedback is great and vital to improving. But people read my books for specific things. Accepting the wrong feedback can be more dangerous than ignoring it. I do constantly strive to improve and better integrating beta readers into my editing process is on my to-do list of 2022. Also, I need to work out what the hell to do about Demon’s Throne.

If you are one of the beta readers, I don't want this to feel like I'm shutting you out or anything. Demon's Throne 2 was a very, very rough book to write, and I am going to need to do a proper post-mortem of how I handle beta reading in January.

Going Full-time

I never really talked about this, but yes, I went full-time. 2021 was a pretty shit year for a lot of people, so it always feels a bit awkward to talk about how great it’s been for me.

All in all, it’s been a huge shift. I’ve definitely confirmed I was never a 9-to-5 guy, but adjusting to being completely in charge of my own schedule after a decade of full-time work is a task. It’s also a huge shift in terms of uncertainty of income. While I’m financially secure enough to not worry about how much I’m making day-to-day, it’s still different to know that my income could vary massively based on how successful (or unsuccessful) future books are.

Anyway, a huge thanks to everyone supporting me and who has read my books. You’ve helped changed my life in a way I dreamed about years ago.

Community Stuff and Business

Finally, community.

I don’t really do community stuff. There’s a bunch of reasons for this, and I’ve brought up a bunch. A lack of interest, minimizing drama, etc. Before I became an author, everyone and their mother told me that you couldn’t make it without joining every community group under the sun and pushing your book everywhere.

Well, here we are.

Ultimately, I like writing books. Sometimes I like talking about books or other shit (although I do that less these days, because I’ve been reducing my social media presence lately).

So, yeah, never been my thing. There is a place I shitpost, and I strongly suspect more than a few people have found it (and I should talk less about certain things there).

One day I might start a discord, but I’d need somebody to moderate it, so that there isn’t the whole “why did the author ban me” conversation. Because that’s a baaaad conversation.

Oh, and I’m not really talking about business. My general rule of thumb going forward (and for many months now) is to avoid that. I’ve talked a lot more about the writing process in this update, because it’s an end of year wrap-up, but all you really need to know is that I’m fine. I’ll be fine. If things stop being fine, then it’s my job to make them fine (and I’ve had enough experience doing that to know that I’ll manage if/when that happens).

Closing

On that note, here’s to the end of another year, and to the start of what is hopefully a good year. Spellblade 4 will be out in a week. Hopefully you enjoy it.

Happy New Year to everyone.