Well, that’s more or less that. Frameshift “Book One”, in all of its dubious glory, more or less totally unedited, a bit shy of 300k words. Where does the story go from here? Well, for now, nowhere; I’m going to take a few months off of writing anything particularly serious, maybe write the first few chapters of a bunch of different stories, maybe write some absolute porny nonsense, and play a bunch of videogames. I might come back to Frameshift for a mini-arc of Adam’s attempt to have some quiet downtime, I might edit the thing for a KU release. (I definitely have plans to rewrite the first arc.) But I am writing something else first. (Like finishing my 8k word response to Ritual of the Familiar. Familiar Spikes will be published in the next couple weeks on ScribbleHub and ReadOnlyMind.)

If you are interested in what my next thing might be, and want to be involved with discussions and polling about that, join the Discord: https://discord.gg/dHh3XMMB4T .

All in all, this story was… a very lopsided mix of failure and success? Obviously just the fact that I wrote it, that it’s a cohesive whole with an ending, is a success, and I can’t discount the fact that I do have some genuine fans. But on the whole the story’s a near-total failure; rating in the gutter, an order of magnitude lower number of readers than most decent stories get just off of RS, shitty salty reviews filling the front page, extremely low community engagement, and a story that I’m reluctant to share with friends because of the quality of the first arc and the origins and how those impacted the writing.

Some numbers!

Final RR stats: 889 Followers, 160 Favorites, 452k Views, 3k Average Views, ~400 active readers, 283,660 words, and a really shitty rating.

Final SHub stats: 64,393 Views, 1659 Favorites, 560 Readers, ~50 actual active readers, 1 review, and an even shittier rating than RR.

Total time investment: ballpark ~300 hours over the course of 9.5 months.

Anyway, let’s see. I wanted to say a few words about Frameshift’s origins and answer some questions that people have asked.

Frameshift originated as a literal shitpost on a writing Discord. I had just burned out writing a more serious story, Tutorial Jaunt, after sort of winding up not knowing what happens next, when a conversation kicked up about what the absolute most sellout garbage litRPG would look like. Frameshift, then, was supposed to be something of a parody. That lasted, like, a couple chapters. It’s possible I’m incapable of writing parody; it’s more likely that I’m just incapable of writing something unseriously, so when I tried to write a story that was a shitpost it turned into an effortpost and took the parody away.

As a result of this, Amber’s introduction and the fundamental structure and portrayal of her character suffers tremendously. I’m actually pretty happy with the increasingly-less-gamelike framing of the Temple as the party traverses it, but oof, everything about Amber was made awful by the initial plan for the story and by the fact that I didn’t ditch everything and rewrite it when I changed plans.

Then again, if I hadn’t, I might not have published anything at all. So whatever.

(My intention is to almost completely rewrite the first arc, with Adam being presented with the first pylon and having him remain conscious and horrified by what the pylon is forcing on him: a shallow-rooted Reca, defined solely by his needs and the doctrines of two Gods. He hacks the pylon, racing to un-fuck the constraints for her creation, and winds up with, well, Amber, and a bunch of regret because he could have ripped out the entwined Kazir/Seidr bundle of definitions but didn’t. She’s more or less as she winds up being; perfectly suited to falling in love with him and him falling in love with her, stunningly beautiful, amazing in battle, wise and clever and steadfast, and qualified as a judge, a trainer of guards/militia, a swordswoman, a healer, and a defenses architect. But they have a slightly less fast burn; slowly growing more affectionate, opening up to each other, talking about their histories, but not fucking until the party / after the party. And incidentally I plan to expand the party a bit and maybe flesh out a bit more the Sky Kingdom, so that the story isn’t so unbalanced towards the Tournament.)

When I started writing this, I had basically nothing in mind in the way of overall plot, setting, or characters that lasted past the first couple of chapters. Amber turned out to be both more easygoing and more sarcastic/snarky than expected, with her my lord that would more or less only be used to make fun of Adam. Zidanya changed completely, Rei changed completely (he was supposed to get into a fight with Adam and then declined to commit suicide once I was actually writing him), Lily changed completely. Adam changed, too; he’s a lot less dysfunctional personally than he was originally envisioned, more aware of what the community he shepherds through the Void did / is doing to him, but still a bit of a wreck. Less horny than he could be; I toned him down because he’s not as young as my own mid-thirties, and it felt unrealistic otherwise. (Yes, a lot of people thought he was wildly, unrealistically horny regardless. Oh well. We have such a wide, wide range of biochemistries, we humans.)

The backstories spun out as I worked. The SF side of things started out with a thought experiment (remember, this was initially a shitpost parody) of “how can someone be both a rock star and a slave, but in a sexy way”; when things restructured themselves behind my back to be more serious, he remained basically all of that. Both a first-class and a second-class citizen, powerful and powerless, a critical part of the Worldship’s community and also someone who’s both disdained and untrusted. The Worldships were always a lot inspired by the Exodans of Becky Chambers’s Wayfarers books and the Zones of Thought fanfiction Programmer at Large, and also, like a bunch of my cultural influences, are highly influenced by my Jewish upbringing and background; even beyond the forms of the Old Faith / Voidfaith, the Spirit was to some extent a commentary on my opinion of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities. The wormhole drive is cribbed from a Scalzi series, and the borderline apophenia is a nod to Unsong, the web serial by Scott Alexander. The puzzles stuff is all a nod to the MIT Mystery Hunt (note: barely has any relationship with MIT the university, which I am totally unaffiliated with), one of my favorite things in the world.

The fantasy side of things wound up being a modified synthesis of three different fantasy settings I’ve either written as D&D settings or had drafts in. The Firstborn are only accidentally like the Dark Eldar of WH40K, which I don’t consume in any form because if I want some pointless masturbatory grimderp I can just read the news, thanks; the sed, the System, and the Shieldstorm are new (for that matter, the story of the sed didn’t coalesce until the chapter where I wrote it, more or less), but the basic structure of the Firstborn’s abuse of their descendants, the revolts, the genocide, the consequent rise of the Gods, Segi’s and Odyyr’s efforts that resulted in the Goddess War, the Long Peace, the Great War, the Shattering / the Harrowing, and the post-War continuation of the Stillness? All of those bits in one form or another are the syncretization of, I dunno, a decade of stuff. (And let’s be honest, those stories still exist in their sketched-out draft forms and could still be finished. Just because we know the world doesn’t end as a result doesn’t mean there isn’t a story to write.) That said, I have absolutely no idea about anything beyond Iavshet’s borders; there’s a whole planet out there, not just the one island-continent, and I didn’t waste any of my time coming up with what happened there.

As a side note, I generally find it excruciatingly tendentious when an author wants me to buy into the notion of an inherent System; that is, a high-structure interface with blue boxes and Classes and stats that is inherent to the world. No, sorry, that’s just silly, it’s not going to make me enjoy the story less but it’s still just silly. Ar’Kendrithyst has the best System justification out of any litRPG I’ve read, A+ good shit, go Arcs.

Speaking of other serials, I just want to mention that none of my shoutouts were ever bought or traded for. While I did sometimes use an author’s preferred description rather than my own, if I agreed with theirs and thought it accurate and true, I read everything I shouted out at least a little bit and liked it all at least a little bit. (Sometimes authors would give me shoutouts back. That was nice of them, but never necessary. Sometimes authors would ask me for a shoutout, and some of those, I said no to, as a result of not liking their story.)

Hm, what else. There’s been a running joke among some of my readers about Adam being an egg (as in, a trans woman who still hasn’t realized it and thinks she’s a cis man); I have deliberately not confirmed nor denied this joke/theory, and I will continue to avoid doing so. What Adam is is a turbo-bottom, but hey, that should have been pretty damn obvious from, like, chapter five. Certainly long before he gets fucked by a protean goddess, which, y’know, if I’m going to publish this to KU, everyone’s gonna be like “take that part out, and also make Adam not eyefuck Rei, KU readers don’t like bi male protagonists” and I’m gonna be like “lmao”. The last section of the last chapter is intended to be ambiguous between the speaker being Hestia and the speaker being Adam, and is obviously somewhat metafictional.

I guess I should also mention my writing history, as a side note. I wrote my first novel-length work when I was probably nine or ten; it was a self-insert fanfic of Swallows and Amazons. By 14 or so I had added a full-length screenplay that was a reverse-isekai of one of my MUD characters into the middle of an arcane urban fantasy-style war on Earth. Both of these were terrible. I continued to write, also all terrible, mostly RP stuff at a pretty rapid pace. In my teens and 20s, I did a lot of play-by-post games on web forums, as my writing continued improving. I also started doing NaNoWriMo (terribly), wrote some prose about being an EMT (which was terrible), etc. Eventually I’d put about a million of my own words into my Light’s Glory setting for a particular forum’s Werewolf/Vampire-style forum games, between GMing a few games and playing in a bunch of other peoples’ games (and let me tell you, the best piece of flattery was “hey, do you mind if I run this game in your setting”). Frameshift is my first published web serial; it comes off the heels of maybe three million words of previous fiction, and over the course of every story I write I can see myself improve.

So as a closing note, keep writing, anyone out there who writes, no matter how shitty you or everyone else thinks it is. You’ll get better. I should know; I did.

(And fix your goddamn grammar mistakes so I can stand to read it.)