Update (Week of 9-22-2023) (Patreon)

Wow, I remembered to do an update this week.

Alright, so since the last time I updated I fleshed out some things for the story I ran a poll for. I got a better feel for the main character, the area he's going to be in, and the conflict he will face. I'm pretty sure I have settled on a tone that is more cozy than N&D, but this fiction will likely have antagonists and some form of combat.

A key difference I want to highlight is the cast. N&D has a massive cast of characters. Seriously, there's at least 20 main cast members that can make things a bit overwhelming. Poor Perg hasn't had time on the page since like book 2. So, I learned a thing or two about inflating the cast of a book so it becomes easier to track.

This leads me to an observation about N&D as a crafting story. If EVERYTHING can be made into a potion, there's a lot of potions. Yeah, some real insightful stuff. If you're planning to write a crafting fiction, I have some advice. Before you get too deep into the story, write out some progression on your items. Design a level 1 item, then a level 10, and so on. Then consider how those items fit into individual character progression in your world. This relates to the speed at which an item is made, as well as the speed at which the public would consume the item.

Is it believable that Theo can make so many potions where others cannot? Nope, so we have to write some stuff to explain that. Because I can't plan well? I don't wanna talk about it.

(the answer is yes)

My item doc for N&D is now 12,000 words. I have entries for every version of the following type of potion: tier 1, tier 1 aligned, tier 1 aligned modified, every other tier with the same suffixes, tier 2 aligned cultivated modified, tier 2 aligned cultivated modified suffuse... and so on. This makes things devilishly hard to track. But if you're going into writing a new crafting novel, how would you fix it?

First, I'd put at most 2 properties on reagents. Then I would limit the amount of reagents Theo had access to. Next, I would gate all progress behind finding new reagents. There are pros and cons to the approach I took, though.

Pros:

• Progress on every page. Reader gets to see something new VERY often.
• The mystery of "what is next?" This is one of the biggest driving factors for me when reading the genre. I just GOTTA see what this dude crafts next. Time to stay up all night.

Cons:

• Once town and people management was introduced, the page is now crowded with other things.
• Alchemy process can be complicated, and low-tier processes get forgotten.
• The writer forgets what some reagents do, or what reagents the crafting MC has on  hand. (This is mainly a function of being VERY verbose with quantities at the start of the story)

I'll talk some about reagent qty here for a sec. Yeah. Bad freaking idea, man. If you're writing a new crafter fic, don't tell your reader that your MC just collected exactly 12 bear asses. Do not tell your reader that they were paid exactly 12 copper coins for something. Keep it vague but meaningful. "A handful of bear asses", "a scatter of copper coins." There are going to be exceptions to both concepts, but that's my takeaway. I have far less complaints about money, reagent quantities, and so on now that I don't mention them.

So that's kind of a retrospective on writing N&D. I've said this elsewhere, but I started writing the story because of another story I wrote with crafting. I can fill an entire book with someone doing something relatively mundane, and that has to be a skill. Right?

These posts are tagged "rambling" for a reason, though. Cause I'm going to ramble some more.

In the first few test chapters for the new idea, I tried to flex that concept of minimalism with crafting ingredients. There's some amount of blacksmithing in the fiction, as a function of the artifice work he does. Right? He builds a reciprocating saw at one point, and needs to do some smithing to get all the parts together. But I never explain how much iron he has on hand. It's always enough to move the story forward, and only too little for the same purpose. The exact quantities are meaningless.

As the writer, I know about how much stuff the character has on hand. But a reader might be coming back in from taking a long break. I think it's more important to do quick check-ins. There's a part where the MC is running out of firewood, which is meant to push a plot point forward. If a reader were to drop into any part of the story, they wouldn't need to know the exact amount of split wood he has. They just need to know if he has enough for another day, or not.

One more rambling bit of text. I promise. You're still reading? No? Skimmed then skipped to the end? No worries. Me too.

Summon the Great Spirits really doesn't feel like it holds a place in my heart. Ethan is a character who is literally my indecision towards writing a morally dark or morally just character. I think I'll start a side-project with a character aligned closer to "evil" just to get some of that out of me. But I'll just say that any projects I came up with are far down the line at this point. And I'm not releasing any second story again without having an entire book's worth of content ready.

This is the longest rambling post I've done in a while. I've had a few thoughts lately, and wanted somewhere to write them. You might be surprised that I don't talk to many *cough cough* any other writers. I'm a hermit. Living in my little hermit crab shell.

*pinch pinch*

Thanks for all the support, everyone. Everyone here is awesome.