First off, wow, thank you for reading my first full-length novel all the way through.

I hope I shocked you; I hope I entertained you and I hope you think about this story a month or year from now ... and smile.

This novel came about as something of an offshoot of a story I wanted to tell about Esme and where she came from. I kept toying with the idea of that first book, but wasn't confident enough as a writer to tackle it at that time. So, I moved forward in her timeline to after the events of the first book(s) that had been bouncing around in my head for such a long time.

Note: That story is about a girl growing up in a secret underground base as an experimental weapon who is freed by the actions of a mysterious benefactor who they must in-turn set free. Chased and hunted by their ex-classmates and shadowy mercenaries, what they find out changes the world and themselves forever.

I wrote this book as the beginning of a trilogy where Esme and her team take areas of this game over and progressively the stakes raise as we go along. The timeline for me writing this was late 2019/early 2020, which—as you can imagine—2020 put a damper on my momentum for the story and I actually entirely stopped writing and editing until I got the first chapter out here on RR in 2021. During that time, I purchased a house and moved my family to another state.

In my first try at 10,000 words of this story, Esme had been shot and was bleeding, running down a street away from a corporate killer and stumbles upon Kian and Briar (or, really, they stumble upon her), who were living in an abandoned house. They pilfer some headsets and all play the game in-between running from a hitman. Esme hides her past and the kids get roped into an intrigue where corporations are using time-compression (or similar) to get ahead and pay the kids to assassinate (in game world to slow down) competition, of course later they find out some of it sticks. This abandoned storyline would have been a direct lead-in from the earlier books(s) I wanted to write. Alas, it didn't ring 'right' so I branched into another storyline with a school and the kids, who are poor, run across a terrible wreck and abscond with some headsets and then get the hitman after them. This story took place more in the 'real' world and was abandoned for similar reasons. Those two melded into what you just read, in which I ended up avoiding the real world to focus on the game world, which is fine for a LitRPG, but it's still not the story I 'want' to tell.

I have to admit, the story you just read is still rough. You can't walk away from a second draft for one or two years and really get back into it. The momentum and energy are gone and you have other stories to tell. At that point, the story feels "stuck" in the past. This is painfully clear in the first chapter of Nightfallers, which is a rough/freshman effort by any standards. The story falls flat in various parts, meanders around, and has consistency issues. These issues are larger in part because I moved and lost many of the original notes on the project, including, sadly, many on where I intend to take the story. My editor who muscled through this work and tried to pull it together saved much of what you got here, though we didn't circle back later as planned. 2020 had many large changes in store for me. This book was one of those.

Some hindsight issues that need to be fixed in Nightfallers book 1:

First chapter does not start with any action, promises to the reader or an interesting call to action. My original: "A wounded and bleeding young girl, running from a killer" would have been much more interesting beginning. First chapter includes the 'rules' which are way too complicated and should have been slowly metered out through the starter island. The SAINT training 'montage' parts should have been spread way out. I do not flesh secondary characters out enough so the reader understands many of the relationships. I have implied promises to the reader to have part of the plot be about deals over cuts of the winnings that ended up not happening, and the knife of reconciliation never played its part. Josie is more one-dimensional that I would like, her reasons are not given any time for the reader to understand them. I need 'outside the game' vignettes that raise tension and the stakes. There were so many I needed to add. The newbie island needed more description and to be more clear, frankly I didn't intend for this to be or become a serial and if I had, then the starter island would have been the first major arc of the series—a full 100k-word book of its own. This is a pretty massive issue leading forward as I could have avoided rushing through so much content. SAINT training and overall technology level of the world are not properly explained to the reader. I could have done this simply in the first chapter with the presentation and announcement of the contest. I do not flesh secondary villains out at all. I originally meant Josie as a 'muscle' for the real big bad, where she was basically funded by a more shadowy "bigger" bad that would have been a revelation in the last few chapters. This was a huge miss. The relationship between Esme and Kian earlier in the books needs to show the strain it is causing. I never even hint at the idea of a romance between Kian and Esme, which could have been a source of tension for the story and was originally the initial role of Kian. As a budding author romance/flirting is easy to mess up and uncomfortable to write. I particularly wanted to avoid it because of their ages. The 'class advancement'/'secondary class' section with the old man of the mountain could have been replaced with a mysterious letter/dead body/trap, etc which could have tied into a shadowy villain/larger story arc. As it is, is not exciting as it is and ends up feeling forced and/or disjointed to the story. The Toldos storyline needed something 'more' ... originally it was to be this constant looming threat, dogging Esme at every turn, but ended up just being a cool backpiece and subtext for a killing competition. It was convoluted and trying to get the tension right with that was not working. I could have left it as much more of a mystery and perhaps it would have served the story. I needed to add more 'pulse' mini-chapters (segments of three to eight paragraphs) explaining how the directors of the schools are manipulating things, dropping tidbits to you, the reader, so you would need to continue reading. I needed to add more 'pulse' mini-chapters with secondary characters to show other points of view. Another miss that would have been addressed had I not shelved this book for so long. The large dungeon romp needed more setup, the stakes needed to be higher, otherwise it makes no sense for them to spend that much time away from the fortress when they knew Josie was coming after them. There should have been a whole 'Council of Elrond' style meeting to plan this out and weigh the pros and cons. There could have been some humor with "You have my ... dagger" and it would have helped the reader ease into a major part of the story. The timeline with sieges allowed too much down-time and never felt rushed and harried. The action could wait, which left dead-air in the story and I needed to skip most of the days of each week. The rules were confusing with the siege times. I didn't get the PVP rules setup early enough and explained well enough.

Just scanning above, this is not a trivial list, and this list is not entirely complete.

Particularly the 'big' issue:

Many issues I encountered were that this is the first story I have written in first-person point of view (yes, I wrote my first 80k-word novel in a POV I was not familiar with). I chose first-person POV because it really gets you in the protagonist's head and allows the reader to connect with them deeply. The problems here lie in that the reader can only see what the main character sees. You can see how other authors work around these limitations in the stories most all of use have read. Take the Harry Potter series, for example, you only get the story from his perspective and so in order to view other perspectives, JKR had to invent ways for Harry to 'see' things—thus the invisibility cloak, the pensieve, the time-turner and the polyjuice potions, among others. All those things in the story were included just so that Harry could get information he otherwise would not have been able to get being just 'himself'. Here in my story, Nightfallers, I had similar issues where Esme needed information that would come from her knowledge of the games via her SAINT class—the one that Dr. Friend gave to her—and I admit this is a lazy cop-out that bothers me a lot. Originally, the sessions with her virtual teachers were supposed to be interspersed throughout the story, almost a conjoined second thread weaved into the primary 'game' story to complement it. However, these got dropped into, and shortened, at the start of the book because I was unsure how to do what I wanted to accomplish with that storyline. I believe this is a detriment to the story that I could have told and is a pretty classic first-timer mistake. Esme needed the info and I needed a way to get it to her quickly.

All of this said, I think I got the ending that I wanted to see, and I hope you agree and hopefully enjoyed the finale of the book despite the issues in the rest mentioned above.

So, what is going on with this story?

I have put this story on (partial) hold for now to write the prequel novel to this—which is what I originally started to write and scrapped before moving forward in time for Nightfallers. That story will be more in the 'thriller' genre.

Then, with fresh eyes later this year, I can revisit this story.

Having written a novel now, I can appreciate how much more I needed to do and how much taking so much time away from the story really hurt it.

This has been an amazing experience both writing and seeing readers engage with the characters. I have learned so much from the experience, about writing, about life, and about "what" I want to write and how I "need" to write. I've also learned that I need to plan more, and then plan some more, and then plan the editing, and just lock myself in a room to edit and edit and plan for editing time that is 2x or even 3x the time to write the book.

That said, everyone needs to have a first book.

This was mine.

-joeldg