There will be a Book 2 to follow Fortuitous Mage.

2015 - LitRPGs are a thing?

In 2015 I bought my first Kindle. I consumed many books that year. Toward the end of it, I came across a book called Survival Quest: Way of the Shaman Book 1. I bought it out of mild curiosity.

It was my introduction to this new, relatively young genre, called LitRPG (or GameLit).

I was hooked. I've consumed many since then. Not all of them are well written. It got me curious about how I'd write a character who was stuck in a game, and birthed the idea of what would become Fortuitous Mage.

2016 - Ideas, 4 books.

Originally, Fortuitous Mage was intended as the first of four books. It was to be followed by Fortuitous Rogue, Fortuitous Warrior, and finally The Auspicious Three. The entire quadrology was tentatively titled Infortunable Saga.

Mage was going to focus on Daos and lead up to meeting and joining Erlandra and Chopper.

Rogue was goign to focus on Erlandra, starting as a flahsback to her becoming stuck as an Alpha Tester with DeathLag, and end with her joining Doas and Chopper.

Warrior was going to focus on Chopper, his backstory with cancer and Nilchi's helping to convert him to code to live in the game world, then end with him joining Daos and Erlandra.

Auspicious Three, then, was the book where the three of them would make their stand against DathLag.

There would be a sentient AI governing the game world, and continuing to flesh it out beyond what the developers coded.

2017 - Game Mechanics

I spent much of 2017 developing the underlying mechanics for Velli Machia Online. I created an algorithm to handle leveling up. Values for enemies. Statistics for items.

I became tired of that.

Some of it survived, but while brainstorming the cruncy numbers was fun for a time, I found myself disliking the novels that included an inordinate amount of them - particularly because I'd begun listening to all of my books in audiobook format at this point.

So I decided I'd use what I'd created in the background. I'd include some crunchy stats, particularly early on - but what if the world started to feel more real the longer the MC spent in it? What if all the stats and system messages started fading into the background, sometimes disappearing entirely, as he integrated with the world?

How would a sentient AI approach the worldbuilding? What if it coded itself as a god, a creator? That had been done before, of course, but I liked the idea and thought it might give me room to play with the MC's perspective on the world, once it became his entire reality.

2018 - 7 Chapters

I began writing Fortuitous Mage in earnest. I had documents of ideas, tables and charts of stats to review, ready to go. Matt Ramsay was born as the human behind Daos.

I wrote the first 6 chapters. The framework of the first 5 of these survives to this day.

I thought that would be a solid buffer, so I began uploading them. New Author Mistake #1 Learned! Life happened, I fell behind, and the story fell into Hiatus.

I'd had some decent feedback and good reviews by that stage, and I felt bad that I'd stopped posting.

2019 - Progress, Hiatus, 2 Perspectives, 1 book.

In 2019 I made some progress. Not a lot, life was still happening, and I was furiously finishing the first draft of Shadowstep (the first novel I marked "Complete" here on RR). That took up the bulk of my free time.

Nevertheless, I had a few more chapters. At the suggestion of some readers, I thought about introducing another character's perspective, so that it wasn't only Daos.

Chopper became that perspective. He began getting his own sections. It was interesting writing that much more with Irish slang. Challenging, but fun.

At that moment, I realized that I couldn't do Fortuitous Warrior if I had already introduced him this early to Daos's story.

4 Books became 1. Fortuitous Mage, which would introduce Chopper and Erlandra, and have their showdown with DeathLag, all in a self-contained story that I could use as my first forray into self-publishing if I ended up liking the result.

2020 - Early On: Hdd Crash, POV Shift, Sequel

In early 2020 I had a harddrive failure. I lost a lot of work on all five books I was working on.

I had cloud-backups. They were 9 months old, because reasons. Not all was lost, but a lot was.

Emotions happened. I was bummed out. I needed a break. For the first part of 2020 I stopped writing entirely. I focused on my blacksmithing, bladesmithing, woodworking, pen turning. Any physical projects that would get me out of the house and away from the computer.

The pandemic hit.

I could no longer go to the forge or the workshop. I'm a vagabond craftsman, living in an apartment as I do, and "my" forge and workshops belong to other folks.

I grabbed the nine-month old copies of my five books, and decided to reacquaint myself with their stories and characters by transcribing them into new documents, revising as I went.

I started with Fortuitous Mage. I transcribed/rewrote those chapters I had already posted here, and something ignited in me - I kept going.

I removed Chopper's POV. It wasn't working for me. I kept writing.

Slapping chapter after chapter down sloppily, I suddenly had a completed First Draft. I posted it here. It was full of errors, but I wanted to get it out there somewhere beyond my hdd and cloud storage as an additional backup.

2020 - Midway Point: Revisions

After transcribing Shadowstep, The Hunter Prince and A Thief' Sacrifice, I came back to Fortuitous Mage and began making my first revision pass. I had an offline alpha reader assist in the first edit.

I posted it, and decided to make this retrospective.

In Shadowstep's retrospective I was surprised to find that very little of the original story idea survived the final draft. It's better for it, but it was interesting to notice.

Contrary to that experience, much of Fortuitous Mage survived the final draft. I lost the format of 4 books, one focusing on each character and instead stayed with Daos - but the other characters remained. DeathLag remained. The AI overlord as a character remained.

There is much work to be done editing and revising, editing, and revising. My fingers are crossed I will consider it self-publish-worthy by the end of the process.

I'm looking forward to tackling book 2.