Announcement

Alright, let’s get this one out of the way quickly: This story is going on hiatus until July 31st, 2023. I really, really didn’t want to have to do a hiatus but IRL issues have been absolutely clobbering me these last 6 months or so and I need time to sort them out before I can focus on writing. The drafting for Volume 3 also went… poorly. Not because I don’t have a decent plot outline and such, but because the expanding scope of Volume 2’s chapters (see section: Scope Creep) left me too drained to do many advance drafts for Volume 3. While I probably could write them as they release, I prefer to at least have a few weeks of advance rough drafts just in case issues come up.

I know this might be disappointing, but sadly it’s unavoidable for now. Being unemployed for 6+ months sucks and I’ve been having continual issues with the government about taxes due to some crap from a previous employer and screw-ups on their side regarding my personal information. I probably can’t update from a courtroom or if I run out of money, so I gotta fix those two things if possible :^)

What worked in Volume 2

Well, I personally think Volume 2 is about 100% better than Volume 1 for a number of reasons, but I’ll summarize what went well for me here:

- Characterization. We got to know everyone much better than before and there was time to put in a lot of little moments to help make Yuwniht & Co more like real people.

- Worldbuilding. Finally, I got the chance to explain magic a bit :^) Plus, we introduced a lot of things like gods, politics, culture, etc. I could have spent probably three times as long on this section but a story has to happen at some point so… yeah.

- Power scaling. Self-explanatory, but we took it up a notch in a way that feels mostly natural. Only flaw I think is that, to keep it interesting, we had to have Yuwniht fight less and less normal people. He could basically just murder any regular person in the blink of an eye now and fights like that have no tension or stakes.

- Next Volume Setup. I know you all want to see what happens in Volume 3 which is why this hiatus is a bit of a dick move, but it’s a good thing too. I’d much rather have people engaged but frustrated with a delay than disengaged and uncaring.

I could go on but really, it’s easier to state the negatives for me. I’m kind of a negative person, not that you’d know it.

What could have gone better in Volume 2

- Road Trip Format. In the original draft, the pacing was better in my opinion. I designed the world of Violent Solutions before the plot, so when writing I just sort of went “Oh yeah we gotta go from here to there so there’s this many cities…” and it was fine. In the release draft, due to rewrites, the pacing got a bit weird. I probably could have cut one or two cities and condensed the rest. Speaking of which-

- Pacing. So here’s the thing: In the original draft Vaozey was near static as a character due to a lack of “screentime” Koyl’s issues felt a bit hollow. Yuwniht kinda just pulled magic powers out of his ass at a few points (For example, he figured out AC electricity before Kahvahrniydah). The Rehvites were a little more hollow by design because some of the reveals about their motivations were set to be in Volume 3. Overall, it had a more “stuff happening” feel than a “trying to get to place before the weight of all my screwups destroys me” feel. Also, the original draft had shorter chapters. Like a lot shorter. While this had its negatives, it did mean that the pacing was more snappy, which would have been a positive if I could have kept both.

Of course, if you have any other thoughts on the Pros and Cons, feel free to comment about them.

Scope Creep

So I’m a software engineer by trade and this term is infamous with us. For those of you who aren’t aware of what this means, it describes a process where a project continually expands beyond what it was initially planned to be. The “scope” of the project, which is to say the limits of what the project was to become, “creep” outward and grow, creating much more work than expected.

Violent Solutions Volume 2 had a lot of scope creep. Some of this is time related, losing my job in December really gave me too much time to work on it, but some of it is also just my perfectionism. Every time I would read a draft I would go “Oh yeah I could rewrite this to sound a lot better” and do it, then that turned into full chapter rewrites because why not just redo everything right? Then that turned into “Well I did 2.5k words last time so I guess I can flesh this out into 2.5k again”, which crept to 2.6k, then 2.7k, then 3k, then 3.5k, and so on. Before long I was spending an absolute minimum of 4 hours a day just on writing and organizing my whole day around getting chapters done because the drafts might as well have been toilet paper. Some days I would wake up, write and draft for 8 hours until the chapter release, then need to take time off. Time off of my hobby. That I do for fun. Yeah.

From the reader's end I’m sure this resulted in a better experience, but from my end it became a time vampire of insane proportions. I also… this sounds dumb but I care a lot more about producing good writing than I do about job searching, emotionally speaking. That’s not a good thing, but it’s true. It became very easy for me to ignore real-life issues in favor of writing, which only further fed the scope creep.

Depending on how chapter formats are in Volume 3, I may slightly revise the release schedule a bit, but there’s nothing concrete right now. I think I can manage ~8k words/week without much issue after the marathon that was the second half of Volume 2, but exactly how I divide that is indeterminate. More to come on that later when I’ve had time to consider it in depth.

WARNING: BELOW THIS LINE IS A BUNCH OF UNORDERED AND RAMBLING NONSENSE DUMPED DIRECTLY FROM THE GARBAGE FIRE THAT IS MY INTERNAL MONOLOGUE. EXPOSURE TO RAW AUTHOR THOUGHTS HAS BEEN LINKED TO NUMEROUS DISORDERS SUCH AS: ZONING OUT, NOT CARING, THINKING THE AUTHOR IS STUPID, LOSS OF RESPECT FOR AUTHOR, LOSS OF IQ POINTS, AND FOREHEAD PAIN.

Emotional Impact versus Reader Satisfaction

This isn’t really an action story. I say that after a giant fight scene, but you know what I mean right? Violent Solutions is fundamentally a story about characters: imperfect people changing and acting in an imperfect world, and the results of those actions. Part of that is writing characters who suffer and grow, which is not everyone’s cup of tea so to speak. Some people don’t want to see a man get traumatized and have an emotional breakdown, some people don’t want to have a very frank portrayal of body image issues explored in a way that isn’t exactly Hallmark-worthy, some people don’t want to come to the realization that the strongman protagonist may not be as unassailable as he seems. However, some people really do like all those things, and they would hate the story to just be people being torn to bits and long, in-depth explanations of magic or whatever.

I try to balance these things, but you can probably tell what side I land more on by my writing. It’s not that I dislike action and fun, but to me, the context is what matters. Vaozey, for example, was conceived of as “How do I write a terrorist who the reader may find themselves agreeing with even though they commit at least one horrific act of violence?” Make no mistake, she killed many, many innocent people and got many, many more killed in response to her actions, but knowing her as you now do, you can understand her. If Vaozey was 100% morally justified in all of her actions, or if she was just pure evil, she would be a lot less interesting.

Though, to some people, she just isn’t interesting. Maybe they don’t like how crude she is, or how she didn’t end up dead when she probably should have died, or how Yuwniht sort of preferentially took interest in her, or really anything else. To some people, Koyl just isn’t an interesting guy either, and I’m sure some people don’t like Yuwniht much except for when he’s killing people. They’re not wrong for having those opinions, that’s down to taste, but I also try to appease those viewpoints when possible. And, as much as this is going to sound bad, I think that’s a mistake.

I’m not going to change this for Violent Solutions, but in the future, any writing that I make will not attempt to balance these things as much as I’m doing right now because it has the same issue as multi-POV stories. In a multi-POV story, the reader has to either like every POV character equally, or tolerate the ones they don’t like enough to suffer through them. Inherently, it’s harder to sell a multi-POV story to people because they have to buy in not once, but X times, where X is the number of POV characters. “Sell” doesn’t necessarily mean monetarily either, even just to get someone to care enough to read it, you need to succeed multiple times. This same problem presents itself with a story that tries to balance simple accessibility and power fantasy plot with deep character introspection and philosophical discussion. Most people only like one or the other, and that hurts the audience long-term.

Anyway, I forgot the point I was making halfway through this, so it’s basically just rambling thoughts. I think this story has the problem of trying to present like it’s highly marketable on Royal Road but also be something that really isn’t. That brings me to my next point…

Why in the absolute hell did I not monetize this? :^)

Probably a question you guys have thought of, and one I’ve asked myself, though the follower count is a good reminder of why. I like writing as a form of expression and storytelling, the idea of making money from it feels dirty to me, but I can’t help but look back and think “You know, if I had monetized and aggressively shilled this story, sanitized the opening a bit, and made a Twitter and Reddit account or something, I could probably be making a bit of cash right now. Maybe a lot if I really went full mass appeal and just made it a LitRPG.”

It’s not that I want to do that, but when I consider how much work I’ve been doing on it I can’t help but think that I might have been able to more easily justify such a time investment if I had been trying to make money. Live and learn I guess.

I kind of don’t a lot of things about Royal Road as a website

This is a weird thing to say, but this site sort of sucks for people like me. It’s not to say that it’s lacking features or anything, but the general culture and expectations around media here don’t match very well with what I want to create. I’ve found readers who enjoy my stuff, and I’m extremely grateful for that, but when I look at Trending and realize that every single title on there sounds like it was generated by an AI, and I read the summaries of new and rapidly-growing stories and see literally the same thing over and over with only extremely minor variation, I can’t help but shake the feeling that I’ve arrived at the wrong party if you know what I mean. Like I’m a guy who arrived to have a few drinks and mingle and I just walked in on Wolf of Wall Street.

Oh, and you can’t even do push announcements to your readers, what’s up with that? Why do I need to put announcements in chapters? What if I had fallen ill, or needed to skip a release? I have to write a chapter about not being able to write a chapter, then delete it later? Just strange design.

The other thing I really don’t like is anonymous ratings. I’ve got a 0.5* on the pronunciation guide of this story, to provide an extreme example. No idea who left it, no idea why, mods probably don’t care, what do you do? It takes around 10-12 5* ratings to repair that rating damage, and that does end up hurting visibility and expectations. It’s not as though I don’t appreciate the ratings from people who don’t review, I do, but I think that they’re not very useful from an author standpoint for trying to determine what went right or wrong. Royal Road wants to make sure that a reader never has to suffer backlash from an author if they give feedback, and I understand and respect that goal, but they’ve done it at the cost of making sure an author rarely understands feedback used for metrics unless the reader explicitly desires them to and invests extra effort in making it so.

I think that, in the future, any further stories from me will likely be posted on a blog or independent website that I host and then linked to other places so I have better control over what people see, what audiences the story is presented to, and how feedback can be received. Maybe if I did a LitRPG I’d post it up here primarily as that’s what the average reader really wants here, but for the more introspective stuff that I tend to gravitate towards I believe other platforms would be more suitable.

Keeping up with the commenters

I have finally reached a point where there are enough people coming up from the start of the story that it’s kind of difficult to remember to reply to them all. If you’re reading this and you left a comment and I forgot to read it: Know that I am sorry. It’s insanely stressful to deal with feedback and sometimes I’m just like “Bro if this person is negative it’s gonna kill my vibe and work ethic today so I’m just going to get to it tomorrow” and then I forget to get to it for like 2 months and then feel too embarrassed to reply. Sometimes I read it and I literally just don’t even know what to say because my brain is too tired. Just know that most authors read all comments eventually and feedback is important for motivation, even critical feedback.

Interactivity

On the topic of interactivity, I’ve been watching other creatives/artists a bit more lately to see what kinds of things they do and I’m loathe to admit that I resent the fact that I can’t draw for shit even more now. I think the most important thing about modern approaches to the creation of content and art is the ability for the audience to immediately provide feedback directly to the creator and get to know them as a person. Sadly, writing is basically the worst art form for this as it doesn’t lend itself well to many things like streaming and short memes and such. By the time the product gets into the hands of the consumer, it’s basically already done.

I was trying to think of ways I could not disappear during this hiatus but also give myself enough time to recharge and hopefully fix the issues that caused it, but I can’t really come up with much. Like, who would want to just watch a stream of a guy typing out like 100 words into a word processor and then going “Hmm, yeah… Maybe if I… I dunno… yeah it’s fine” for like 2-3 hours at once? Nobody, probably. Discord might work but I have to say: I hate Discord with a passion. I’m the kind of guy who needs social interaction to happen for only X amount of hours per day to stay sane and the pressure of Discord just kills me, not to mention that I’m sure some people would have spicy opinions I’d end up arguing with if I was able to reply in real-time. I also had the idea of writing a few interludes with POVs that people asked for but honestly, I don’t know if that would produce good results.

I dunno, maybe if you have some ideas, post ‘em. It just needs to hopefully be something that won’t kill me with 4+ hours a day or work that burns my brain out lol.

Serial vs Novel format and story length

Serial stories are kinda long man. Like, damn. I had this whole thing planned out from the beginning but still, it’s surprising to me how long this is. We’re at something close to 500k words now, which is like FIVE actual novels, ten if we’re using non-sci-fi that have shorter overall lengths. That’s just insane to me.

However, serials are also slower-paced and tend to explore certain aspects of the world more than a novel can. They’re also a bit easier to write in general for amateurs because of this, it’s easier to accept mistakes when the content is being drip-fed. The problem is though: When you have the whole story planned out and you’re not just sort of making it up as you go along, it can really feel like you’re dragging your feet at times.

I’m glad that Volume 3 is going to be the finale, if only because I’m getting that feeling now, like I want to just get to the point already. I don’t want to half-ass it or anything, but I certainly feel like I’ve spent enough time building up the mystery of certain things and setting up a few long-running plot points that are to be followed up on in V3. There’s only so long you can spin your wheels before the road just gives out under you or they burst into flame. Much of serial story writing is the art of wheel-spinning when it comes to making money, but thankfully for this story, I don’t have that problem :^)

BRAIN DUMP OVER.

Hokay, so, that’s all I remember about what I wanted to put in here. I’m sure there was more but I’ll be damned if the mush between my ears can recall it right now. All in all, this was about 11k words (including this) over the last 3 days so my hands are about to break and I really need to just sit down and marathon a few TV shows to turn my brain off :^)

I’ll be in the comments and stuff so feel free to chit-chat there, but I might not get to things immediately.

Thanks for following along, commenting, reviewing, and so on. It’s been quite the experience, and I hope it keeps getting better once the story returns.