Book 2 - Author's Note

Hi, Everyone!

Most of you know this already, but I do one of these author’s notes every time I finish a novel. The idea behind them is to give you a chance to see what my writing process for the novel was, which is important to some people who write, want to write, or just are interested in what it takes to get 100,000-ish words out of a human brain and on to paper.

Every time I’ve done that before, that’s been very easy, because for the most part the books I’ve written up to this point were easy to write. I had a good idea what I wanted to do that had come to me with almost no effort at all, and the words came to me at a speed that was in the same neighborhood of the speed at which I actually type.

This book was not that. This book was much harder.

I remember a long time ago seeing some author or another talking about why it was taking them a longer time than usual to get their next novel out. This was a situation where the author’s fans were pretty pissed about it, if I remember correctly. And the author said something that went like this:

Writing is really hard. In some ways, it’s the hardest thing you can do. If you write enough, you end up bled dry. Writing is the hardest job in the world, and nobody understands it.

I remember, at the time, deciding this was absolutely bullshit. It didn’t help that the author in question was clearly up his own butt on how much of an artist he was, and how much suffering artists go through. If you write 1000 words a day, I thought, you can write three novels a year. The dude had an hour-a-day job and was saying he had it harder than a ditch digger.

The fact that people didn’t do this - that most big-time authors write a book a year or less - pissed me off. And yet even then I knew I was wrong in at least some ways, because I wasn’t writing novels despite suspecting that I probably could write something that some small amount of people would want to read.

As time has passed, I’ve sort of discovered the many kernels of truth behind the author in question’s beret-wearing representation of himself. Don’t get me wrong. It’s still much, much harder to be a mortgage processor or a claims adjuster than it is to be a writer. But at the same time, there are some ways writing is hard, some unique difficulties that only writing has.

The first thing is that having ideas, good ones, is hard.

I write in 2000 word chunks. The reason I do this is because I used to do some work for a big, well-known comedy website, and they had done a significant amount of research that showed pretty clearly that 1500-2000 words is about what most people can handle reading on a single bathroom break. If you could keep them interested for that entire time, the website decided, there was a good chance they’d leave the tab open and return to it later.

I think about it a little different than they did, but what I took from that is that I need to give you something substantially entertaining about every 2000 words. That could be a new weapon, a new skill, a funny occurrence, a new enemy, or some important conversation. It could be a lot of things, but it needs to be something, or there’s a good chance you get bored. Preventing you from getting bored is my entire job.

Since a novel is about 100,000 words, that means I need about 50 good ideas per novel. And since I write 10-15 chapters a week, that means 10-15 decent ideas a week.

Sometimes, that’s easy. This time, it was really hard.

It also just got harder to write, this time around. The setting was one that was harder for me to play around in, and I had introduced a powder-keg situation that really couldn’t go off for a long a time.

And all in all I sort of get what the dude was saying now, despite disagreeing with him on the particular bits about writing being harder than manual labor or really stressy desk-jobs.

Don’t get me wrong. I like this novel. I think a lot of you liked it too, which I love. But It was a tough one to do. This time around, it was more work.

The Characters

Sean Lawrence

At some point, I needed to count the actual number of days it’s been since Sean came out of time-lock. I really did lose track of this at some point, but I think by the end of book two it’s probably somewhere around a month and a half that he’s spent running, fighting, not knowing exactly what’s going on, and generally trying to get used to a massive, dangerous change in his life.

Over that course of time, he’s had almost no real time off. When we see Sean take a break, it’s never a couple of days lying around in a hammock. He sometimes takes a shower, drinks some water, and goes to bed. He often builds something.  Sometimes he goes shopping. But for the most part, he’s been working 18-hour days since he got to the future.

If that sounds easy, consider how often you’ve found yourself worn out after a particularly busy weekend. By now, Sean is wearing down in some really important ways. He’s a little less happy in this book, most of the time. He’s a little too oriented on the job at hand. And, frankly, he’s a little too pissed off most of the time.

By the end of the book, he’s made a transition from “Mostly friendly guy” to “guy who does guerilla warfare using methods that are probably a violation of the Geneva convention to reduce enemy numbers”. That’s not a small change. But he also hasn’t had a real day off in a month filled with constant life-and-death combat and the stresses that come with it. I don’t think this makes every single thing he does okay, but it does make it kind of understandable. The experience is changing him, not always for the better.

At the same time, he’s coming to value certain things more. Constant, reliable people are at a premium for him. He really, really appreciates Brett. He grows close to the other humans pretty quick, but never quicker than when they prove themselves to be actually on his team. He has started to really, really understand how important a hot, well-prepared meal can be in a pinch.

The thing that interests me most is Sean really is about to get a period of time in which he has breaks. I still have to keep every 2000 words interesting, but the next book isn’t taking place in a time-crunch environment. There will be days, even weeks, where Sean is described as not doing a lot, even if that’s in a single sentence.

When he gets an actual, real chance to sit down and consider everything he’s done, I think it will be interesting to see what he feels about his experiences at the end of earth.

Brett

Brett showed up. That’s the biggest thing to know about him. He seems to have done it on an impulse, but he shows up to what’s probably going to be the most dangerous thing he’s ever done and jumps full-commitment head-first into helping Sean in every way he can.

Brett’s life has to be exceptionally boring most of the time. He’s vulnerable, so he spends most of his time in the relative safety of the shanktuary, doing work. He only knows Sean, here, and Sean is almost always gone. But he committed to this process and doesn’t shirk any of it.

In a weird way, he reminds me of how I think about astronauts. It has to be boring up there, right? You’ve worked your entire life just to get the skills to go up there, and now you are trapped in a room the size of a notecard with a couple other people who are also having a hard time figuring out how to shower. But it’s important, so you make it work.

See also: Navy Seal’s Hell Week.

Brett takes over most of the guidebook-type chapter headings for this novel. I wanted to still have a third party view on what was going on. Since by now everyone is pretty familiar with the setting, so the interesting parts of “what’s going on” are mostly him observing Sean, worrying about him, and generally trying to balance his concern for what’s happening to a younger dude he knows with his desire to see their task-at-hand come out successfully.

Eike

Eike is still a douche. I think I’ve mentioned this in other authors notes or at least in the text of the novel, but Eike is basically supposed to be the monster-form of a bad manager.

Think about it: Eike has goals. He’s come in from another place to win out over people who aren’t very much like him, and that’s all he wants to do. To the extent he’s concerned about those people, it’s only in regards to how much they help or hurt his chances of keeping his performance high and impressing his managers.

And, like most bad managers, he feels justified doing absolutely anything to make that happen. He really doesn’t understand why Sean doesn’t know he should do whatever it is Eike wants at any given time, why he doesn’t get that company needs come first. And, like a bad manager, the first thought in his head when anyone gets in his way is to set them on a crash course for getting fired/murdered/destroyed.

The extent of Eike’s strength is an open question for a lot of the book. When we finally see him fight, we find he uses very few skills. He’s mostly just a very skilled longsword user with very high stats, meaning his fight with Sean is pretty conventional outside of Eike’s clear advantage in terms of equipment. He’s not a tricky fighter. He’s just flat-out better than Sean at most things, which is far scarier to me than if he had a bunch of surprise ace-in-the-hole cards waiting to be played.

Eike’s Crew

Eike’s crew are broadly people who understand Eike just like he wants to be understood. They know he’s strong, and that his family ties outside the competition are dangerous. Knowing that, they obey.

None of them are particularly deep characters outside of that. Mostly, Eike’s crew functions as pieces of Eike’s equipment in that they are threatening to Sean. But outside of being blunt objects Eike can swing at Sean’s head, they aren’t particularly strong or interesting.

Jason, Spike, and Crew

The other humans in the competition answer an important question:

Could it really be true that no humans beat a crack challenge and made it to the competition?

Several people did, and this is them. They didn’t quit, they ran into some interesting circumstances, and somehow made it. But in a global population of something like eight billion, they are the only ones. Most people left the planet, died, or simply gave up on ever getting that far. These are the people who rolled consecutive 20’s on the die and made it this far, and they are pretty strong.

If they don’t seem strong, it’s because Sean is over-performing. He’s winning competition segments and getting loot, and even if he and the others don’t know it, his class is much, much better than theirs. The others would have got to the competition by playing it safe, figuring out what they could handle, and then just handling an awful lot of it. Sean got here by chaotically pinging off a variety of threats, developing an all-rounder skillset, and using that skilset in dangerous, low-probability-of-survival ways.

Even so, Sean would have understood these people to be titans if he had encountered them in the first book.

When they start dying, it’s a bit too much for Sean to handle. He’s exhausted, and he’s just barely starting to make friends with them and feel good about that, then it’s yanked away from him. When the surviving humans leave, it’s entirely understandable, but it breaks him that much more.

I particularly like Jason and Spike. The first thing we know about Jason is that he’s wearing an Alf t-shirt, which more or less pegs him as a nerd of sorts. Spike, on the other hand, is wearing a suit and smoking cigarettes, pretty clearly trying to look cool. The fact that he’s trying to look cool by looking like a particular anime character means he’s probably an even bigger nerd than Jason, in a stealthy way. It makes sense they’d be friends.

The Setting

Tell’s Forest

Initially, I wanted Sean to be alone. I also wanted there to be a reason for the reader to imagine the numbers of people who made it to the village were much, much reduced from the amount who had made it through the crack challenge. Thus Tell’s forest, a poisonous environment filled entirely with ranged weapon users.

Archers, in video game metas, are pretty easy to kill provided you have the tankiness or speed to get to them before they kill you. For Sean, they end up being a lot of trouble. They become even more trouble when the Squid arrives, dragging his Rocky Balboa analogue enemies into the fray behind him.

By the time Sean gets to the village, we can imagine most of everybody is already dead behind the scenes. That’s what the forest was supposed to do, mostly. Outside of that, it really was a warm-up. In the time Sean’s there, he gets used to working with Brett, and gets a better taste for how some of his skills can help him. Once he gets to the village, those things are what allow him to survive.

The Village

The village is supposed to be the System’s understanding of a dead-stock, exactly-average anime village. It has friendly shopkeepers and smiths. It has really good food. It’s safe, most of the time.

In the System’s mind, Sean was supposed to spend months there. By the time they moved on to the final phase of things, the System would have been planning for there to be a small group of perhaps a half-dozen competitors left, all incredibly battle-hardened and ready to go.

Sean ruins that. He kills so many people through rampant voucher-misuse that everything has to move forward a lot faster than the System planned or wanted.

The inspiration for the village, such as it was, was the camps that olympic athletes stay in during competition, which are usually referred to as the Olympic Village. It’s all these world-class runners, jumpers, swimmers and general doers-of-sports-things hanging out, eating food, and generally getting into low-level trouble in an overall friendly social way.

You can see the Apocalypse System wanting that kind of environment, even encouraging it by keeping the size of the village small, putting all the food vendors in a central space, and other things that would usually encourage social interaction. The fact that everyone just wants to kill each other after all is probably disappointing to it, to the extent it can be disappointed.

The Race

The race is supposed to be a lot like the end of the Ducktales NES game - it’s a short, final competition where two people are expected to end the race neck and neck, reaching for a treasure only one of them can have.

By the time Sean and Eike get here, they are both ridiculously overpowered compared to most of the others in the race. The threat that both of them feel is each other, hidden somewhere out of sight, and maybe moving faster or more efficiently through challenges than the other person is.

The Prize

Nobody has ever told Sean that saving the world is a thing that’s actually possible. That’s important. He wants to save it if he can, but even Cedarhelm doesn’t suggest it’s something he could actually do. He’s pushing to try something that nobody ever tries, against the very real possibility that the system is just going to tell him no.

What he gets, after negotiation, is a very slight concession. The system lets him evacuate the Warth, which is comparatively cheap for it to do. It gives him some fairly large stat buffs that, should he survive, will eventually make him much stronger than the average person, even the average person who gained advantages from an Apocalypse.

And then, almost as an afterthought, it agrees to let him have hope. He has the blueprints for a planet on his person, but no guarantee he will ever be able to use them. To counterbalance that, he has to wear it, leaving him vulnerable if anyone ever realizes he has an extremely powerful, balance-breaking growth-type relic.

From the System’s point of view, it’s getting most of what it wants. Sean is carrying the power of Earth out into the greater universe, which is its main goal. Sean gets enough of what he wants that he can’t screw everything up by refusing to play ball, which solves some immediate problems as well.

But the Apocalypse System also isn’t known to lie. If Sean asked for some potential of saving Earth and the System said, “Okay, here”, then there’s at least a chance, however small, that Earth might be restored one day.

Moving forward, Sean has to decide whether or not he’s comfortable making even more long-shot bets in pursuit of that small chance of success. That’s the closest he could get to winning.

Conclusion

Look at me, guys! I’m still writing.

Like I said, this book was hard. I actually had to pull back from interacting socially on the internet to get it done, and there are ways my personal life was tough during this period as well. At some point, I disappeared for a week, sending Dotblue into kind of a soft-panic while I napped endlessly and didn’t write that much.

Things are better now than they were then, but it was hard for a bit. And the thing that let me keep going, doing the thing I want to do, is all of you. Reading, sharing, and interacting with the work.

I appreciate each and every one of you and hope that you enjoyed the novel. Thanks for being here with me.

R.C.