Slumrat Wrap Up Post (Patreon)

The first chapter of Slumrat Rising posted on Royal Road on March 18 of 2023, or about a year and a quarter ago. Five volumes later, the Slumrat has risen.

There is... so much to unpack. About the story. About what it has meant to me. The difference in mentality that comes with being able to say you are a published author rather than someone who enjoys writing as a hobby or side hustle. About the things I learned researching this book. About so many things.

Part of telling a story is knowing when to stop. And, at least for now, this is the place. We leave Truth in a garden, loved, and loving himself. He still has things to do in the world. He has a whole rest of his life to live. Truth's only about twenty six at this point, and he's only lived twenty one of those years. But this was a story about a terribly broken, traumatized young man who fought his fate, fought the very world, and cultivated himself in the process. Let's give him his flowers, and the time to enjoy them.

One of the odder things about this story, one that people used to kvetch about, is that it is tagged "satire" on RR. Why? Well, since you are Patreon readers, you are obviously smarter than the common masses! But for the people reading this on a pirate site, I'll spell it out.

I love Xianxia books. They are really fun, and they play with tropes that, when I first found them, were totally new and alien to me. Cultivation? Meditate your way to power, but juice the process with natural treasures and alchemy? Awesome! But... these are all set in fantasy China, and while my distant relations had some connections to the China trade, I am in no way Chinese. Also, these webnovels do Daoism dirty. They are copying each other without referencing the source materials. At this point, the photocopy problem is severe.

So I made a satire. I took the bones of a Xanxia but used western mysticism and escoterica to build the world. Xianxia books are all about 'persuing the dao to become a god,' (a program actual daoists would savagely disagre with) which is the kind of religious take that won't get you in trouble on the mainland.

Well, if those books are about pursuing the Dao, which is to say a study of the world via philosophy, as a way of accumulating a fundimentally religious power, can I do the same with my book?

Yeah. I can. Because the difference between religion, magic, science and philosophy was marginal for most of the last six thousand years or so. Or longer. And if we look at the original sources (or, being honest here, scholarly discussions of those documents and artifiacts by subject matter specialists who know infinately more than I do about the subject,) we can find absolute wonders.

This has been one of the most fun years of my life. I'll discuss what's coming next in another post. I just wanted to say thank you all so much for all your support. I hope you can stick around and see what is coming next.

I know most of you subscribe for Slumrat, so I'm not asking you to stick around as paying patrons. However, I do hope you will remain free members, so you can be the first in the know about new projects. I'm also looking to set up a group chat here on Patreon, a sort of AMA, which is, I THINK, possible through the community tab. Must investigate further.

Thank you all so, so much.

Warby