Just a quick book recommendation for people looking for some more magical content before AA5 comes out!
I’ve previously recommended Tobias Begley’s Chronicles of Evander Tailor, which are an excellent series with style elements that feel similar to Arcane Ascension and John Bierce’s Mage Errant books (which are also fantastic). The Abjurer, the third book in the Chronicles of Evander Tailor is just about to come out (later this week, in fact), and that’s worth checking out, but I’m here to recommend Tobias’ newest story — Mana Mirror.
(Wow, look at that cover quote from a famous author!)
Mana Mirror is a supremely rare case of a progression fantasy with a transmasc protagonist. It’s also one of the most fun progression fantasy stories I’ve read in recent history, with fascinating magic and lovable characters. I’ve been reading the Royal Road version of the story — which you can check out right now, if you’re interested — but if you’re interested in a more polished product, the edited version will be out on Kindle in early June. If you’re interested, you can preorder the first book here.
Anyway, if you haven’t picked it up already, now is a great time!
Aside from that, updates are going to be fairly basic. Arcane Ascension 5 is still ongoing and my primary project. My hope is to finish up a first draft by around the middle to end of May, after which it will go out to beta readers, then a professional editing pass after that.
I spent most of last month working on AA5, with a tiny bit of work on Edge of the Woods 2 and Weapons and Wielders 4, as well as a little bit of work on outlining and pre-writing for AA6. It’s easier for me to get that outlining and pre-writing started on AA6 while I’m still actively working on AA5, rather than leaving it to while I’m working on other projects, since I’m actively engaged in AA5 right now and I can make sure that the two books feel like they flow together logically and organically. My hope is that by doing some of the work on AA6 early, the two books will feel like they connect as directly as possible.
There are no other major updates. My hope is to be close to finishing AA5 when I do next month’s update, but we’ll see how that actually turns out.
I was just informed that Edge of the Woodsis part of a march sale promotion on Audible. If you haven’t already had a chance to check it out, now’s a great time!
February was a bit of a slow month for me, largely due outside stressors like taxes, jury duty, etc. I still made an average amount of overall writing progress (in terms of word count), but it was split up more than my December/January progress was, since I had a harder time maintaining my momentum with stress and distractions.
As a result, I did make overall progress on AA5, but not as much as previous months. On the plus side, it also means I made a bit of writing progress on the tabletop game and EoTW2, as well as some early edits on both AA5 and EoTW2 for structure and consistency.
AA5 is still coming along just fine narratively, although I’ve made some changes to make sure that characters other than Corin have a little more going on. This is still something I need to work on more. I love writing Corin’s perspective, but any sort of first-person story often leans heavily toward telling that character’s story in its nature, and Corin’s particular laser focus on the things that interests him (and general obliviousness to everything else) makes keeping other characters relevant trickier. This is easiest to handle in sections where they’re all together, but for various reasons, I don’t want to force that here. We’ll likely see the more classical “party dynamics” in AA6, though.
Notably, this was also something of an issue in EoTW, and I’ll be doing some different things to approach the issue in EoTW2. (In that case, I’ll be doing more of Scribe’s interludes, as well as some interludes from other characters that aren’t even necessarily in the same place and time, more similar to the WOBM interludes and perspectives.)
I’ve been more in the mood for group progression and party content these days in general, and I’m strongly considering going back to WOBM-style third person multi-perspective for my next series – but that’s still a good way off.
In other news, Six Sacred Swords is on Prime Reading on Amazon.com now, meaning it’s temporarily free to people on Amazon Prime. If you haven’t checked it out already, and you have access to Amazon.com (specifically – it’s regional, I don’t think it applies globally), now would be a great time to check it out.
I’m taking a small, much-needed rest for a few days right now, then I’ll be back to work on AA5. My current target is to get the first draft done within the next three months, then get into edits to I can work on getting it released in the middle of the year.
After that, it’ll likely be EoTW2, the tabletop game, and then either AA6 or W&W4.
Hey, everyone! My Weapons & Wielders series is on sale on Audible from now until February 4th. If you haven’t checked them out already, now is a fantastic time! You can find the books here.
This’ll be a fairly short update on what I’ve been up to, since I had a couple pretty pair of posts just a few weeks ago. My End of the Year Retrospective covers a lot of what I’d be talking about for a monthly update, but I wanted to get into a bit more detail on some of the things I think readers might be interested in hearing.
Arcane Ascension 5 Updates
The first draft of Arcane Ascension 5 is at about 65-70% completion and going pretty smoothly. I’ve had a couple points where I’ve decided to deviate from the original plan significantly, largely to give readers more answers.
The trickiest part of this is executing those earlier reveals in a way that feels satisfying, rather than just having someone hand the main characters the relevant information. There’s going to be a mixture of different styles of reveals in this book (and future ones) through a variety of sources — Corin figuring things out on his own from putting together clues from different sources, direct conversations, watching memory crystals, reading books, etc. — and it’ll be interesting to see how readers respond to these.
My feeling is that there are going to be some scenes that feel a little too info dumpy in terms of characters just answering questions that Corin has, but on the other hand, I think Corin (and the readers) have earned some of those answers, and cutting “ask someone who knows the answers” out of Corin’s options also doesn’t feel reasonable. It’s also the most logical way to relate certain story bits, especially since much of this story takes place in a political setting where characters are going to be making deals and trying to figure out the best angles to handle things like alliances, etc. (Don’t worry, this is still a Corin book, and he’s not going to be spending his whole book politicking. We can leave a lot of that to Sera.)
Anyway, it’s going to be a fine balance trying to make sure some of those conversations don’t feel too expository. Where I land is definitely going to be subjective and vary from reader to reader, but I’m hoping to make these kinds of “lore conversations” more engaging or feel rewarding, rather than just like info dumps. We’ll see if that actually works out in practice.
There are a couple things the last two books haven’t focused on as much that I’m skewing toward more in this book.
First, enchanting. Some of this is going to be a direct extension of Corin’s major invention from AA4 (if you’ve read it, you probably know what I mean), some of it is going to be playing with what he was focusing on in AA3 and used for his duel in AA4, and some of it is going to be much more conventional AA1&2 style invention and enchantment. I know some people have missed Corin just making items, and while he did make some in both AA3 and AA4, they didn’t feel quite as plot or progression significant as the mana watch or Bright Reflection (with the possible exception of the thing he makes toward the end of AA4, which is huge, but hasn’t had much focus yet).
So, expect a lot of enchanting. Possibly too much for some readers, if I’m being honest, but I think we’re due for that — this should have a lot of payoff for things I’ve been setting up since AA1, and in particular, payoff for things that were supposed to be important in AA3, but not quite clear enough to many readers.
Aside from that, the second big focus is going to be on clear and direct power progression. Corin and co. are going to be working on getting stronger a bit more rapidly in this book, with means I won’t elaborate on. My hope is that this focus helps the people who are there specifically for a “Corin gets stronger” style of story to feel like they’re getting their payoff.
Finally, we’re getting back into more dungeon crawling in this book. I can’t say exactly how much of it, but there was practically nothing that I’d consider dungeon crawling in AA4, and AA3’s style of dungeon crawling was generally more casual and didn’t feel as lethal as AA1&2. This is going to be more like AA1&2’s dungeon crawling segments, but with some elements of the style of AA3’s more unusual dungeon encounters (e.g. things that feel more like “scenario floors”, but with some more classic dungeon rooms as well).
There still won’t be a massive amount of dungeon crawling in this one — that’ll be AA6, which will, as currently planned, be the most dungeon-heavy book I’ve written. This is a stepping stone into that direction.
All in all, I’m generally happy with how the book is going. I think the readers who have been missing enchanting and progression are going to like that. I do think some readers are going to find that there’s too much talking for their tastes in this one, but I’m hoping that there’s still enough action to keep those fans engaged, and that it gets them hyped about a more action-heavy AA6.
The Lost Edge 2
This is my current secondary project, but I’ve only spent a couple days on it this month. It’s worth mentioning that I think that the pacing of this book is going to be much more enjoyable for most readers, with a style that feels like the end of Edge of the Woods from the very start of the sequel. It’s possible I should have started out more like this in the first book, as I mentioned in the retrospective, but hopefully people who found the first book slow will still be interested in jumping into this one and be pleasantly surprised.
This isn’t to say that I’ve stopped having character-focused scenes or magic theory scenes, they’re just going to be interspersed throughout the story more, rather than front-loaded.
Another thing I’m doing differently is the Interludes. A number of people seemed more interested in the Interludes than the main story in EoTW, which is interesting, since they’re closer to the general style of the War of Broken Mirrors, but with my more recent storytelling flavor. I’m going to do more with the interludes in this book, including some Interludes from perspectives other than Scribe, and we’ll see how people respond to that. There are a couple of them that I’m particularly excited to write, including one that is probably my favorite concept for an Interlude in any of my books so far.
If people end up really digging the third-person narrative style more than Edge’s narration, I may skew toward just doing a new third person series on this continent after wrapping up Edge’s initial story arc. We’ll see how readers respond to both sides of this book.
AA Tabletop
I’ve made some good progress on the tabletop game this month, including finishing up my first draft on the Attunements section, which was one of my biggest pain points over the last couple years.
Attunements are complicated. The chapter on Attunements currently only covers the eight Valian attunements, and it’s novella-length on its own.
Something I’m needing to seriously consider is whether or not I want to try to push a bunch of extra attunements in here, as well as things like all the dominions. There’s a part of me that wants to include everything I possibly can so that fans can just have the single book and be ready to go with whatever they want, but realistically, I’m about 131,000 words in, and the book would probably be three times that length if I wanted to include all the dominions, attunements, etc.
At this point, my leaning is toward keeping the book to a more reasonable scope and providing guidelines for using attunements and dominions that aren’t listed, but not trying to put every single thing in the first book. Then, if there’s enough interest, I can release more books in the future.
This is probably the right route toward actually releasing something in a reasonable time frame, but I know it’ll disappoint some fans if they can’t read the book and pick out their favorite attunement or dominion, so it’s a tough call. I haven’t settled on anything just yet.
Aside from figuring out which things like attunements to include, I’m also considering whether or not to include things from continents like Dania (from The Lost Edge) in the same book, or to split those off into a separate book. I have a fair bit of Dania’s stuff written already, since I’m currently running a tabletop on that continent for friends, but it’s complicated, and it may be the kind of complicated that it makes it harder for readers to understand the core game if they get too tangled up in it when trying to learn about how to run something completely unrelated. So, there’s an argument that I should cut that content out and release it as an expansion book, but I’m not settled on that. (Similarly, I could theoretically cut Mythralis out and release it separately, but that’s less likely, since that content is a little more closely related.)
A lot of this will probably come down to impressions from beta testers outside of my own main tabletop group, but that’s still a good way off, since I probably won’t do anything with that until after AA5 is done.
Other Updates
I’m still negotiating for some side projects. One of the big ones fell through, which is hugely disappointing, but I still have some other things in the works.
Weapons & Wielders 4 is still planned, and I’ve done some initial work on it, but it’s probably mostly a next year thing. I may end up getting back to it right after EoTW2, but I don’t know. I may just jump straight into AA6 after EoTW2 or even right after AA5 — I want to focus on wrapping up AA, since a lot of people want closure.
For that reason, I also don’t plan to work significantly on Carefully Worded Wishes, the direct sequel to WoBM, or any other new stories for a while. I might do some more pre-writing or planning, but not a lot, unless it’s necessary for one of my side deals.
In terms of projects by other authors, no major updates there. Kayleigh is still working on SL3. I may have some other deals to announce later this year, but I’m not sure yet.
Cradle by Will Wight is one of my absolute favorite novel series. Will and I have been beta reading for each other for years now, and I’ve been incredibly lucky to have a chance to be involved with development of his books. He’s also been a huge help giving feedback on my own novels over the years.
He’s launching a Kickstarter today to get an animated series made out of his novels. This is a major step both for Will and for western progression fantasy fiction in general. Animated series are incredibly expensive to make and a ton of work, but he’s put together an awesome team for it.
If you’re an existing fan of Cradle, or just interested in seeing what a progression fantasy animation Kickstarter looks like, take a look here!
Just a quick note that two of my books are on sale on Audible. I don’t actually know the details in terms of the degree of discount or the region — I’ve just been informed by the publisher that they’re on sale right now.
During yesterday’s retrospective, I talked a bit about changes I’d made during the process of Edge of the Woods. In the past, I’ve also talked a bit about how I’ve changed certain other stories, or decided to stop them entirely.
In today’s bonus blog, I’m going to dig into that a bit more and give you all a small holiday gift — a look a glimpse at what could have been, if I’d done things a little differently.
Let’s begin with the big one, which everyone will likely be the most excited about: Arcane Ascension.
This attached file is the original opening scene for Sufficiently Advanced Magic.
I’ll take a break here, let you read it if you want to, then get into talking about the scene. I’ll take that same break and reread it for the first time in years.
***
Wow.
There’s a lot to dig into here — even more than I remembered.
Let’s start with very the beginning. (It’s a very good place to start.)
We begin with scene setting in this case. A rainstorm is a story opening cliché (“it was a dark and stormy night”), but we’ve got a bit of an unusual take here, since it’s being used to show that Corin isn’t experiencing the storm like one might in our world. It’s a bit of world building and scene setting that works to immediately show off one of the story elements that becomes plot relevant later — the weather shield — as well to show one of the critical themes of both the scene and the story itself.
Corin is isolated.
The published intro still shows this, but in many ways, the original opening shows it better. The difficulty with the original version is that it’s much weaker from a pacing standpoint — it’s mostly character exploration and exposition with zero action. That isn’t necessarily terrible, given that it isn’t too long (it’s only a few pages), but it definitely slows down the story.
Still, cutting this scene came at a cost, both in terms of the story immediately establishing Corin’s isolation better in this original version and certain other story elements. We see him on a train immediately, which establishes the tech level, helping to avoid the confusion some readers experienced when they see Corin on a train home later. It also immediately introduces a bit about his family, which would help a lot in terms of context later on.
Notably, in this version, Corin’s mother left immediately after Tristan’s failed Judgement. Sufficiently Advanced Magic was like that right up until the very last stages. In addition, Corin was originally fifteen, rather than seventeen. So, basically, he’d stopped being traditionally educated at the age of twelve. This made Corin’s weird knowledge gaps much more understandable in the original version of the story — he was home schooled (and abused) since the age of twelve.
We also get very early talk about Corin being abused in this version, though he doesn’t frame it in those terms right away. His antisocial behavior is introduced early, too.
I don’t think aging Corin up was necessarily a mistake, nor was it necessarily a mistake to let Corin’s mother stick around a little longer after Tristan vanished, but I do think that I needed to do more work to adjust the story as a whole more completely when I changed those elements. A Corin that was in public school until the age of 14 should have fewer gaps, even accounting for the fact that he clearly has issues focusing on subjects that don’t interest him and that the abuse may have started sooner.
Moreover, even being home schooled, certain magic system elements should have been readily apparent to him.
AA2 (and updated versions of AA1) eventually addressed some of this by making it clearer that some of the super basic stuff that Corin was “learning” was actually stuff he already knew, that he was reviewing and explaining to the audience for the benefit of Keras, a foreigner. In the original release of the book, though this felt messy and inconsistent, with “Tower Corin” at the start of the story seemingly much more familiar with the magic system than “School Corin” later on.
I consider this the single weakest part of Sufficiently Advanced Magic’s writing — and it’s why I leaned so hard in the opposite direction with Edge of the Woods, with Edge knowing a ton of about the local magic. As I stated yesterday, I overcorrected to some degree, but I still think the character element of Edge’s knowledge makes more sense than Corin’s lack of knowledge does. Too far was better than not far enough, I think, but there was a middle ground (closer to Jonan and Lydia in the War of Broken Mirrors) that would have worked better.
Let’s talk about some other elements here that didn’t end up in the final version.
The next significant change, in my opinion is that we get numbers on how many people don’t come back from their Judgments. This is something that I probably could have kept — I think I probably cut it because a greater than fifty percent survival rate might make the test feel “easier” than it should, but in retrospect, I think that’s fine. The ~80% survival rate makes it all the more tragic that Tristan didn’t come home.
Aside from that? Oh. Right. He’s still Corwin at this point, not Corin. That was another last-minute change. A number of reasons for that, but mostly to avoid the obvious conflict with Corwin from the Amber series.
The last line, “I was ready” is perhaps the most important change. It is, in many ways, the opposite of where the released version begins, and I think it’s one of the best changes. Corin has tried to do everything possible to prepare, but with nothing but unreliable stories to work from — and the way things go rapidly off the rails with the Judgement — his preparations aren’t as useful as they should have been.
Overall, I think this is a pretty interesting alternate intro. I like the final version better, but I think it would have been worth keeping some of the content early on in the book, particularly in terms of some of the important character context that was removed.
It’s important to note that this original intro was one of the first scenes written for the story, whereas the new intro was one of the last scenes written for it. A lot about Corin (or Corwin) stayed the same throughout the production cycle of the story, but that makes the differences all the more interesting, at least to me.
With all that said…let’s keep moving forward, shall we?
Onto the next story.
Weapons & Wielders was pre-planned more extensively than Arcane Ascension was, but it still ended up deviating from my plans pretty significantly. That always happens to some degree or another. I’m a pretty heavy plotter, but most of my major plotting is super long-term stuff, planning and creating proper foreshadowing for events that I’ve already played out in tabletops, LARPs, etc.
Weapons & Wielders was a story that had virtually nothing to do with what I’d already run in other formats. I included things to tie it into certain main story elements in the future — things like the Fall of Velthryn and the Sun Eater — but none of the actual content of Weapons & Wielders had already been played out.
I began running another LARP at right around the same time as I wrote Weapons & Wielders, which helped to shape certain characters and story elements, but even that was at a different point in the timeline (we’ll catch up to it around W&W5 or 6ish, probably). So, I had more to build toward as that LARP played out, but I also had a lot of freedom.
My deleted scene to share from Weapons & Wielders isn’t from the start of the story. It is, however, something I wrote before I wrote the actual intro. It was what I might call a “sample scene” — a proof of concept I wrote for myself to explore the characters and where the narrative was going.
Oh, and for this analysis below, be aware that there are SPOILERS for Weapons and Wielders 1-3 ahead. They’re not huge spoilers, for the most part, but I’m going to talk about things that happen in all the books.
***
The very start is a bit overly heavy on character exposition, designed to introduce an unfamiliar audience to Keras as a character. It is, I think, a weaker start than both the sample scene from SAM and the intro we ended up with in the final version of Six Sacred Swords.
Then we get into the meat of this — and if you’ve read this series, you’re probably thinking, “Wait, isn’t this more like Book 3 stuff?”
It sure is.
The original version of Six Sacred Swords wasn’t going to have Keras go to the Spirit Gateway Shrine. He’d get Dawn, hear about the Six Sacred Swords, then head straight to Edria, where more swords could be located. We’d get the tournament in Book 1.
Yeah. That changed a lot, obviously.
I think that by taking some time to introduce Keras to Reika, Dawn, and the setting before charging off to Edria was a good thing, although it did mean that the first book didn’t end up having as much of a progression fantasy style as the sequels. It was much more focused on relationship building, which I think is important, but definitely doesn’t work for all readers (especially ones who don’t like Keras and Dawn quipping at each other).
…And speaking of which, going back to the sample scene, Dawn isn’t quipping here.
In fact, she’s a very different character in general.
Her interactions with Keras and Ishyeal have a similar core component to them — we have the reveal that Ishyeal Dawnsglow has the amulets that show he’s earned the ability to wield Dawn, much as we get in the released version — but Dawn’s core personality is very different.
Sweeter. Less tsun, more dere, if you want to talk in terms of Japanese tropes.
Why is that?
A couple reasons.
First, and probably most importantly, this one goes to the player. I’d written Dawn as a character for this scene before launching the LARP, but when we actually played the game, Dawn was played by Carly Thomas — one of my closest friends, and also the original player for Wrynn Jaden and Asphodel. And her take on Dawn was not like what I’d written for this scene.
She was bitter. Acerbic. Sarcastic.
She’d been trapped for her entire life, and now some knight who didn’t even have the requisite respect to earn her properly had taken her away from the only place she’d ever known. She was glad to be free, and that made Keras her hero, but she was desperately torn between that feeling and the idea that he’d done it wrong. That he wasn’t the right hero, the one that she’d been told would come to rescue her—
And that made her vulnerable, because it meant that if someone figured out she hadn’t been saved properly, they could put her back. He could put her back. Forget about her, hurt her, just as easily as he’d stolen her away.
Carly played her with those uncertainties, and much of that manifested in terms of her snark and acerbic wit. It was both a self-defense mechanism and a way of asserting her agency, something she’d lacked for such a long time.
Frankly, it was a vastly superior idea to Dawn as simply being a blushing damsel. We get a bit of the uncertainty even in my depiction here, but the eventual version of Dawn is a much more complete character, and much more human.
I’ll throw in a very brief note for Dawn implying early on that Keras might “like scales” — that teasing is a hint of the type she’d eventually do in the canon version, but I was actually considering some other possible romantic pairings at that stage (like Keras/Reika or even Dawn/Reika). I’ve since largely moved away from both of those options. Dawn and Reika is more of a sibling dynamic. Keras/Reika isn’t strictly impossible as a thing that could happen, but it’s not the focus of the story.
Another minor change? Dawn calls Keras “Taelien” here, implying she knows him by that name well enough to use it as a default. That’s a pretty significant shift, since Taelien specifically refers to his role as wielder of a different sword than her. Narratively, calling him that has weight. But without the context of a whole different version of how she got that name for him, it’s hard to say why she’s doing that. But we do get a hint: she talks about what Keras said when they first met.
And, apparently, in this version, he told her what he was immediately.
Good move, alternate Keras. You dodged a lot of drama that way.
Explaining his nature early on changes their entire relationship dynamic. He’s not just a wielder to her, he’s like her. And by admitting that to her early on, he’s admitting his own nature faster, both to her and to himself.
I think we lose something important without the character arc of Keras exploring this with Dawn in Soulbrand. Keras not telling Dawn his nature right away is, in many respects, his single greatest failure in the story.
(Sorry, Ari.)
Narratively, the choice not to talk to Dawn has not only a huge difference on Soulbrand, but on their prior interactions as well. It also leads to a change in Dawn’s arc at the Book 3 stage, rather than easing her into it in the first book.
I think I made the right choice here, but people who didn’t enjoy that element of Soulbrand might very well disagree.
Dawn is likely the most important change in this whole scene. Keras is a little different, too, but mostly just a more boring version of himself — it’s a weaker scene in terms of his characterization than the eventual duels in Diamantine and Soulbrand. That’s not a tremendous conceptual change, just a part of this being a rough draft without the backing of as much time and context to build toward the character and scene. Ishyeal is much the same way: a rough sketch of the version we eventually see, but with a more generic portrayal.
Ishyeal, too, is based on a player character from my games, but he’s one of the originals, not someone new like Dawn. Andrew Warren first played Ishyeal Dawnsglow in my tabletop games around 2001ish, then later for many years in a number of other mediums. He’s a well-established character, but I didn’t have quite the grasp on how I was going to adapt him for the story at this stage.
In the case of Diamantine and Soulbrand, I still don’t think I quite landed Ishyeal properly. He’s best in the scene where he gives the context of what he’s actually fighting for, which helps a great deal, but the original tabletop version of him is a lot kinder and funnier. He’s more of a diplomat, too. I made him tired here, in many ways more closely resembling Arcane Ascension Keras to contrast with the younger and pluckier Keras of Weapons & Wielders. It worked in some ways, but I think I don’t think I did the character justice properly. Fortunately, we’ll have more time with him later, and I think we can see the friendlier version of him both in later W&W books and some other future materials, potentially set in the past (or in other contests, like other series entirely).
There are smaller changes to note. Keras doesn’t use many of his techniques here — both because some of them hadn’t been established yet, and because it’s mostly a character and relationship exploration piece more than a fight scene. We get some nods to the fact that Keras still has his abilities from the War of Broken Mirrors — he references the arena fight with Myros, uses some flame shaping with minimal success, etc. — but he’s not pulling out the kind of tricks he uses in Defying Destiny (which hadn’t been written) or anything from within Weapons & Wielders itself. That makes the fight much briefer and less flashy.
He does use a Body of Iron variant here, this one called Reinforce — and it uses mental mana on top of stone. That’s extra weird if we’re thinking of canon Keras, but Dawn does use mental mana, so that’s probably where he’s getting it in this version.
Dawn’s spell reflection is closer in name to Patrick’s version at this stage, but with the clear reference to the Dominion of Radiance, ala Tavare. I hadn’t settled on the JRPG theme for all of Dawn’s powers yet. A minor detail, but a fun one.
The most important change in terms of combat dynamics is that it’s Dawn’s power — not the Dominion Breaker — that’s used to damage the rune on Soulbrand.
Narratively, this is pretty significant. It gives Dawn a bit more agency here. She’s the one urging this interaction, she’s the one with the relevant ability to break the rune. I like that element of it in some respects more than the canon version.
But Dawn is still critically involved with the eventual resolution in Soulbrand — and Keras’ using annihilation mana makes breaking the sword in an unintended way feel both more plausible and more like his fault, which I feel is important. Ishyeal has less of a reason to hold Keras responsible if Dawn is the one making the decision here — and perhaps more importantly, for Keras himself to hold himself responsible for the damage in the aftermath.
It’s difficult to know what to prioritize when there are multiple competing character arcs in play. I think I landed in a pretty good place on this one, but I think this is a case where there’s a compelling argument that the original take had greater merit, if one considers Dawn’s arc to be a greater priority.
The story ends similarly to the canon scene — we get Akari manifesting from the flames, and we get an explosion in the stands with the emperor. So, you can see that the whole “attack on the emperor during this duel” part was already planned before even Six Sacred Swords was written, even though much of the rest of the scene — and the characters — ended up significantly different.
That was a fun one to go through, but given how long this article is already turning out, I’m going to call it for the day here.
Thanks for reading, everyone, and I hope you enjoyed the deleted scenes and the analysis. If this is something people enjoyed, maybe I’ll do it with more scenes in the future.
Happy New Year, everyone. I hope your next year is filled with joy and (if desired) new adventures.
At the end of the year, I always find myself thinking back on the events of the year. Did I accomplish my goals? Are there things that, looking back, I’d do differently? What are my goals for the next year?
This year, I’m finding myself thinking about that a bit more often than usual. This is for a number of reasons, but the most obvious is that I launched a new series this year for the first time in several years — The Lost Edge — and it didn’t do as well as I hoped.
So, let’s dig into that a bit. And forgive me — this, like my books, going to be a long story.
There are going to be some spoilers for Edge of the Woods in here. I’ll call it out when we get to the part that has the more significant ones.
I’m going to talk a bit about the origins of this project. Some of this will be recap for those of you who have been following my blog for years, but some of it will be new, too.
Let’s start a little earlier than usual in the story, though.
In the 1990s, as a pre-teen and later a teenager, I participated in live-action role-playing games run by the International Fantasy Gaming Society (or the IFGS), an organization named after the fictitious game organizers in the Dream Park novels by Larry Niven and Steven Barnes.
During that time period, I was already an avid RPG player, having played Dungeons and Dragons since my single-digit years and console classics like Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest (then “Dragon Warrior” in the US), etc.
My earliest live-action role-playing game characters were adaptations of characters I’d created for online play in Rhydin, the role-playing chat room setting with an “anything goes” vibe on America Online. My AOL character was, with the creativity of an eleven-odd year old, a variation on my own name (Andarin, now “Aendaryn”) and his rival (who would eventually become Vaelien) was named loosely after my older brother.
At the same time, my childhood friend slash rival Mallory Reaves created her own role-playing character, arguably one of the most important in the entire franchise. You’ve seen her a few times in the books, most notably in Edge of the Woods itself, and I’m extremely excited to bring you more of her story in the future.
(I’m being vague about her name deliberately. My habit of wanting to save reveals for exactly the right time apparently extends to blog posts.)
Anyway, the IFGS rolled around, and I made a character based on a younger version of Vaelien, rather than my overpowered sword god. This was fun, but it wasn’t the important part for our story.
I kept writing for the setting during this time, and as a teenager, I fleshed out the universe significantly more, creating the vae’kes and their oppressive power. And, more importantly, I created a little guy who was stuck under their thumb. A humble scribe, hopelessly outclassed among gods and demigods.
That, dear reader, was when I created Jonan Kestrian.
Playing him was a very different experience from the noble paladins and anti-heroic Vaelien that came before him. He was often stuck on teams of obviously evil characters — or worse, “neutral” ones that were often worse in reality.
Once, his adventuring party sold him to bandits. Another time, the rest of the party chatted with the central antagonist while all of his minions chased Jonan around, trying to murder him in the middle of the discussion.
Being Jonan is just sort of like that. It’s hard to capture that experience on paper, because he wasn’t a punching bag of a character, exactly — he was just constantly in over his head, surviving in spite of the people around him. I don’t think I captured that experience quite effectively enough in the War of Broken Mirrors, because I didn’t start at the right time in his story for that, nor the right circumstances.
(My short story, Why I’m Tired of Stones and Symphonies, in some ways captures that experience better, but it’s too short to really get things across entirely.)
Jonan is often overlooked as a major character in my franchise. This is wonderful, in some ways, because it fits how he’d work in the world of Venaya itself — only those paying close attention are going to see this little struggling to survive among the vast powers of the world. It is, however, also something that tends to give people the false impression that Salaris is my oldest character or self-insert.
Nah.
All my characters represent parts of me taken to extremes. Jonan, however, is in many ways the most honest depiction of a part of my life. He was a teenager overwhelmed by his circumstances. One who might have wanted to do some good, but the systems surrounding him were designed to be inflexible, immutable.
He’s a bit a cynical character design, in truth. And that cynicism bled into the story of the War of Broken Mirrors, too.
I’ll get to that a little later, in the sake of keeping this largely chronological.
I didn’t play Sal in the IFGS. I created him for online role-playing as a way of playing another paladin-like character that wasn’t such an overpowered Gary Stu as my original “Andarin” persona. Instead, he was a teenage take on the pre-teen concept — still powerful, but with more obvious flaws and weaknesses.
That character became my online persona for gaming, and by the time I was going to college in the late 90s and early 2000s, I was using him as more of a quest-giver NPC for my tabletop campaigns.
This tabletop era is when I wrote many of the most important elements of the setting. It’s when I made the original map of Mythralis, created antagonists like the Sun Eater (then simply the “Nightmare Dragon”), and had my player characters learn about events like the Fall of Velthryn that had happened hundreds of years earlier.
By this time, Salaris’ background had evolved to be something close to the following:
A swordsman raised by the fae, bound with magic to a strange magical sword. He believes he might be descended from long-missing gods, but the truth is something far less likely.
Now, if you’ve been following my books…that sounds a lot more like Edge of the Woods than Salaris from the War of Broken Mirrors, doesn’t it?
That’s because of some aforementioned cynicism.
When I wrote The War of Broken Mirrors, I’d failed to publish several previous books through traditional publishers. And, given the time frame, I was growing increasingly convinced that a portion of that failure was because I was writing too traditional of a story.
People had, it seemed, grown tired of stories of faeries, elves, and knights in shining armor. People wanted darker and grittier narratives. Less Lord of the Rings or Dragonlance, more Game of Thrones or The Blade Itself.
So, when I wrote the War of Broken Mirrors, I wrote it with more of Jonan’s flavor of mindset. Salaris still existed, but his background was changed to be more “realistic”. And while he still tried to be a classic white knight in many respects, the setting didn’t support it.
A part of my internal pitch for Forging Divinity was, “The overpowered Hero shows up, and everyone realizes who he is. Before he can find his mentor, several forces decide to play the Hero against one another.”
This actually isn’t a bad premise for a story. It just isn’t how that story turned out, largely because I didn’t have the narrative skill level necessary to execute it, and because I wasn’t really invested in the right parts of the story.
As a result, the story is weaker than it could have been. Salaris feels inconsistent as a character, largely because I’d made changes to his background, but only went half-way on leaning into them.
As time passed, and my writing abilities and genre knowledge advanced, I began to regret both some of the weaker elements of how I’d written that book — and that I’d compromised on the background of my setting at all.
Keras in Arcane Ascension is a much better execution of the War of Broken Mirrors version of the character — heroic and friendly, but easily manipulated by his inability to turn away from someone in trouble. We see this exploited in his very first scene in AA, where he clearly could have escaped the prison if he’d been on his own, but the small chance that he’d harm someone else by triggering the traps keeps him in check.
That is a much better-executed idea that I’d been going for in Forging Divinity. I’m much happier with how Keras was executed there, as well as in Weapons & Wielders, where we get to see him growing from the War of Broken Mirrors version into his eventual Arcane Ascension future.
He still, however, isn’t the boy who grew up among the fae. I’d written them out of the story — and with them, a great deal of who he was.
As anyone who has been following me for a while knows, I’m constantly tinkering with other works. I have five full unfinished novels from before the War of Broken Mirrors, but that’s only a fraction of the number of the ones I’ve worked on that haven’t been finished, both from before that era and after.
After wrapping up the War of Broken Mirrors and launching Weapons & Wielders, I was in a pretty good place with the setting and toying with other things I wanted to work on while working on both Diamantine and The Torch that Ignites the Stars.
I worked on several books in that general time period — some that eventually were finished (like How to Defeat a Demon King in Ten Easy Steps), but many more that still haven’t been. Some other LitRPGs, one of which still has one my personal favorite opening lines (“I shook the Chosen One’s hand just before she destroyed the world.”) and some others in my usual setting I’ve talked about before, like Carefully Worded Wishes (Wrynn Jaden’s backstory) and, more importantly for this long-wind tale, Harmony of Steel.
Harmony of Steel was probably going to be Aendaryn’s backstory. It was also going to be my take on being a truly sword-focused character, something I didn’t feel that I’d done enough with when writing Salaris. At the same time, I was also tinkering with the idea of writing something about a younger Salaris, during his Thornguard training with characters like Taer’vys and Res’vaye.
But that latter idea didn’t really satisfy me — because it was doubling down on something I wasn’t really satisfied with in the first place. And as I worked on Harmony of Steel, while I liked certain elements of it a great deal (such as the Smiling Sword Saint), I didn’t think an origin story for a character that hadn’t really been explored through the “main” timeline of the narrative yet was compelling.
Simultaneously, I wanted to move forward with my Fall of Velthryn narrative arc — one of the most important arcs in my overall meta-story — and to jump back into using my War of Broken Mirrors cast. But I wasn’t ready for that with my other books. Narratively, the Fall of Velthryn book probably shouldn’t happen until a very specific part in Weapons & Wielders…which I still haven’t reached.
And thus, that wasn’t the right thing to work on, either.
And so, with a desire to work with my War of Broken Mirrors cast, write a sword-focused protagonist with an iconic mentor like the Smiling Sword Saint, and play with Salaris’ backstory in a way that I found more satisfying, I merged the concepts together — and thus, Edge of the Woods.
So, narratively, what is Edge of the Woods in relationship to Salaris as a character? Is it a retcon of his backstory? A reboot?
No. Absolutely not.
Edge of the Woods’ protagonist and the Salaris from the War of Broken Mirrors have a complicated relationship, one that astute readers have already put together correctly from hints within the book, as well as some major hints in previous ones. I didn’t pull this concept out of nowhere: there are other story elements that make it work in the narrative, with the clearest of those elements present in Stealing Sorcery, but I left some hints to this possibility even back in Forging Divinity. (This is not to say that I planned to write this specific book ahead of time, but rather that “someone who is like Sal but isn’t him” was planned from the start, and that element existed even in my tabletops and LARPs.)
I’m not going to give everything away in regards to their relationship right here — that’s for future books to reveal.
And that segues into a big part of what I’m here to talk about: my habit to leave vague hints of things for later books to explore is, I suspect, one of main reasons why Edge of the Woods had a much weaker launch than I’d hoped.
Many of my readers have reached mystery fatigue.
When I wrote the initial books for the setting, my goal was to treat it like my tabletop and LARP campaign setting — something individual characters could explore small portions of, but that would feel vast and encompassing enough that numerous other stories could be told. It wasn’t built around a single narrative arc or one “big bad” to stop — there were numerous plot hooks and antagonists to deal with. My cast would explore the world, learning more about the local cultures and threats, but wouldn’t solve all of them. A random stranger showing up and completely solving whatever was going on with the local scene would feel a little dismissive of the whole political climate and power levels of the locals, which I didn’t like.
So, we’d get things like Salaris showing up on another continent, the local gods saying, “This guy is a threat, let’s throw some side quests at him to keep him distracted”, he’d do some good in small ways, and he’d move on.
That, it turns out, is not what a lot of people are looking for in a novel series.
This isn’t some new revelation, of course. I’ve spent many years trading beta reads with Will Wight, for example, who writes in a much more plot-focused style and repeatedly advocates for my own narratives to be more plot-focused and self-contained.
But I’ve remained stubborn — not just because I want to maintain my original idea, but because I want the fans that do enjoy my more unusual style to be able to continue to do so. And, beyond that, because I’m writing what I enjoy and want there to be more of in the world.
After seeing the launch of Edge of the Woods, I’ve realized that I might need to work a little harder to find a middle ground.
This isn’t because Edge of the Woods was badly reviewed. At the moment, it has a higher goodreads average than Sufficiently Advanced Magic does, albeit at a much smaller sample size. The specific problems in the reviews are a factor, especially the concerns that the first half of the story is too slow, but even that isn’t the main reason I’m considering adjusting my strategy.
The main reason is that people didn’t come out in droves to buy Edge of the Woods the way they did with Six Sacred Swords — and I think that’s largely because many of my readers, even fans, are tired of feeling like I’m introducing too many story elements without wrapping the original ones up.
There are other factors that I think went into the story having a weaker-than-desired launch, too.
Some of those, which I’ll include largely for those of you who are other writers or thinking about the business, are:
I didn’t reach out to many influencers or ARC readers for this series. This is a growing factor in book marketing, and I was simply too focused on getting back into writing AA and working on the launch of the second Shattered Legacy book (which came out the following month) to do much with it.
Similarly, I didn’t market to Facebook groups the way I typically do for W&W and AA titles. It’s hard to say how much of this was a factor.
I didn’t do launch giveaways, largely due to the change to this one being published through Podium, rather than being self-published. Podium did do some, though.
My main marketing platform is reddit, which seems to be declining in general use since the API changes. The promotion policies on the largest subreddit for fantasy (r/fantasy) have also changed, making promotion there much more limited and challenging. This limited my effectiveness of promotion on that platform, and while I do advertise to a limited degree elsewhere, I don’t have any presence on some more modern platforms. This is almost definitely a factor.
The launch window happened right around the start of the school year, which limited time and purchasing ability for students. College students in particular are one of my target audiences, so this may be a factor.
Given that the sales were weak even in the lead-up to launch, I don’t think the content of the book itself is the main issue here, but I also want to address the fact there were some common points of criticism that I feel are worth talking about.
(WARNING: MAJOR SPOILERS Edge of the Woods ahead. You probably want to skip this if you haven’t read the book.)
The first half of the book is slow. This was intended that way, with more time to explore who Lien is as a person and the magic system, but I think the latter component especially was a bit too much.
I went hard on the magic system in this one both out of love for the system and because I was, in many respects, overcorrecting for the way Corin comes across in Sufficiently Advanced Magic.
Corin in SAM feels like he’s a little too clueless about the magic of a society that he’s grown up in. Edge is designed to be the opposite — he grew up raised by a scholar (“…the scholar?…) and knows a ton about it.
He’s also talking to an audience (Scribe) that is excited about the local magic and wants to learn all about it. This is an area where I think it’s actually significantly improved from SAM — I think the clear frame story helps a lot with making it obvious why Edge is going into so much detail about things, but it’s still overkill for a lot of readers.
I did move some of the magic system stuff to the Appendices during the beta reader phase, but I ran out of time, and didn’t do enough of that. I think I could have done a lot more if I’d pushed back on my deadlines, but that would have created other issues, given that Podium was the one publishing this story in all formats, and they’d already scheduled the recording time.
There isn’t enough action, especially early on.
This is, I think, a genuine issue.
In earlier drafts of the story, I’d planned to show Edge run through Ana’s dungeon without the memory erasure component. This would have, I think, helped the pacing of the story significantly — an early dungeon crawl would have been a great way to get some action in there and potentially show some of the magic system stuff in ways that felt more organic, much like the Judgement opening in SAM.
I chose not to do this for a couple reasons.
I thought that Edge fighting through the dungeon and learning about it each time, but with the rooms changing small ways, was going to feel too much like the mid-terms in AA1&2, which would reduce the impact when and if he ever succeeds.
Part of what worked with the Judgment opening of AA is that Corin largely succeeds, even if it goes way off the rails (and, in part, because it goes way off the rails). For Edge of the Woods to work, he has to fail, and he has to fail pretty badly. With a progression fantasy audience, failing badly early in the story can be a deal killer, especially when it’s the first major action in the narrative. While I could have spun this as a partial success (e.g. “Edge gets the treasure map before he fails”), executing this in a way that didn’t scare off a good number readers would have been a challenge.
Action scenes are less impactful when you know that the stakes are low. I already knew that Edge wasn’t going to succeed anywhere close to this early, but that he also couldn’t be permanently crippled or otherwise severely set back so early in the story.
Honestly, I was also just burned out on writing dungeon crawls in general. I think the dungeon crawl at the end of the book benefitted from letting myself take a chance to rest and not writing one earlier in the book.
With all that being said, I think I probably should have done the early story dungeon crawl anyway, even if it required changing other narrative elements to make it work.
There are, of course, other ways I could have improved the pacing — largely through trimming other scenes that felt slow. In particular, I enjoyed writing the segments where Edge is figuring out how he can live up at the sword school, working on things like figuring out food, water, and shelter — but that isn’t really what most of the target audience is interested in. (Apologies to my fellow Wilderness Survival Merit Badge enthusiasts.) This is one of those areas where telling, rather than showing, might have been okay: it would have cut down on immersion, but in ways that I don’t think would have hurt the reader experience for the majority of readers.
The final major complaint is that there isn’t enough character interaction at certain parts of the story. This is largely by design — it’s intended to have more of a solo protagonist style to contrast with my usual work — and this one is an area where I don’t think I’d do too much differently. It’s just a different style of story.
I’m still setting up plotlines and questions more quickly than I’m answering them.
This is a valid concern. One that I wouldn’t really change for this specific book — it’s the first in a series, and this is by design — but something that I need to be more careful about with other books.
(END OF MAJOR SPOILERS.)
So, what are my non-spoiler takeaways from all this?
My readers need some real answers. I was already leaning toward doing more of this (and I’ve mentioned this in previous blogs), but I’m going to prioritize it more.
This means I’m going to be answering some questions a little earlier than expected. This means readers will get some answers to big long-term questions in Arcane Ascension 5, Weapons & Wielders 4, and The Lost Edge 2, rather than having to wait for the resolutions of those series.
There’s a large portion of my readership that doesn’t want to have to read a bunch of interconnected books to get resolutions to things. These readers deserve more direct plot resolution within any given series.
It’s always been the intention to wrap up certain major character-specific plots in any given series, but from a reader perspective, it might be tough to see what those plotlines are. I haven’t made it clear enough what the “main” focus of any given series is. This needs to be handled better and these plots need clearer focus and resolution.
I’m still going to have plot threads that connect series to each other, but I’m going to try to go back to making these feel more like fun things for people who are invested in the whole of the setting, rather than being mandatory reading for everyone. This is easier said than done, but I’ll see what I can do to ease the experience.
Honestly, I need to look at doing more with marketing on other platforms and get back to prioritizing certain types of marketing I didn’t utilize for Edge of the Woods. This is a boring answer, but it’s a major factor in getting people to read my books.
I also need to be cognizant of the fact that a large part of my target audience is reading through Royal Road, rather than Amazon, and that I’m not on that platform at all. This is something I might need to consider changing my approach to in the future, which could in turn mean that I need to write something in a different style to suit that platform at some point in the future.
I am, in all likelihood, simply spreading myself too thin.
Over the next couple years, I will be dedicating more effort toward wrapping up Arcane Ascension. I need to be cautious not to burn myself out — the last thing I want to do is burnout and write a bad finale — but it’s my intent to try to get AA6 out with a shorter gap than the releases between AA4 and 5. We’ll see if works that way in reality.
I’m looking into handing off more work (e.g. marketing) to other people. This may require a change in my business model and strategy.
I’m also considering doing more in regards to handing off continuity editing to others. This is difficult, particularly in regards to continuity, since I can’t expect a freelance editor to be familiar with a dozen other books in the same setting, and I don’t have a permanent editor for the franchise as a whole. This is something I still need to evaluate further.
I’m also considering doing some things to help wrap up W&W further, and to take some of my unfinished projects and hand them off to others, but it’s still too soon to talk about this in too much detail. I hope to provide more clarity on this soon.
I hope to launch the tabletop RPG next year. Once that’s done, I don’t plan to go back to it to any significant degree for a while — it takes up too much time that I could be using to write more books.
For future collaborations and adaptations, I hope to tap other people to handle continuity, rather than doing it myself like I did with Tapas.
My hope is that within a couple years, I’ll be able to offload enough of the non-writing work to get myself back into focusing more directly on writing full-time. Realistically, I don’t know if this will actually work out that way in practice — I’ve said things like this before, and making process changes takes time that I don’t always have to spend — but it’s a goal.
In terms of my current status, I don’t have much more to update readers on compared to last month. Arcane Ascension 5 was my focus for the month, with very few breaks. (I spent one day on Edge of the Woods 2, one day on artwork, one day on an earlier blog update, and three days on the tabletop. Everything else was AA5.) In terms of word count progress, it was an average month.
My current trajectory is still to wrap up the first draft of AA5 in the next few months, then do my beta reading and editing, with a release on Kindle around the middle of the year. This would mean an audio release closer to the end of the year.
My hope is to get Edge of the Woods 2 out next year as well, but that’ll be tricky. Presuming that I’m done with my draft of AA5 around March or April, getting a draft of Edge of the Woods 2 done before the end of the year is doable…but I’d really need to get it done by around mid-year if I want Podium to release it before the end of the year, since they do their Kindle and Audio launches at the same time.
This means that I’d basically have to finish Edge of the Woods 2 roughly during the same time span I’m doing the beta reading and editing for Arcane Ascension 5. That isn’t realistic. If I finish it within a couple months after that, maybe we’ll be able to get a 2024 launch, but my leaning is that it probably won’t make it in that time frame, and it’ll probably bleed into 2025.
We’ll also likely get Shattered Legacy 3 next year, which will take some time on my part, but hopefully it won’t take too long.
Getting the AA tabletop game out is more likely than Edge of the Woods 2, since that doesn’t require any sort of wait on audio. I imagine that will be a small release for a niche audience, but I’ll be very happy if I can finally get it out to the world.
In terms of other projects, I’m still in talks with a couple companies for other forms of media. My plan is, as noted above, to try to hand off as much of that as possible to other people to handle if I do end up making any deals. I would plan to be more heavily involved if I get a major high-profile adaptation of some kind, but that’s less likely to happen within the next year.
Whew. I think that’s it…?
Thanks for reading. I appreciate all of you, and I hope that you have a great rest of 2023 and an even better start to the new year.
Andrew Rowe 