Newsletter for the week of 12/22/23

News: Happy Holidays to all those who celebrate this time of year! And if you don’t, best wishes to you too. In the US, it is traditional for those who don’t observe Christmas to snag lunch or dinner at a Chinese restaurant. Make of this what you will. Maybe make it a tasty, yet affordable, lunch out with family or friends, or just yourself and a good book.

Speaking of books… Sinister author chuckles. For the week of the 25th, I am going to preview the first five chapters of Project Innsmouth alongside your regularly scheduled Slumrat.

In the course of general bullshittery with other RR authors, random ideas come up. These are usually goofs, making fun of common tropes, coming up with the dumbest or most cursed version of a popular genre, that kind of thing. (Personal fave for sheer surreal glory- Numbah Go Up, a LitRPG where the MC is a stat, and every page is just a blue box with stats.)

One such chat led to two particularly cursed ideas merging in my head. The first was a distinctly dark comedy take on the harem genre via cosmic horror. The other was trying to see how many popular genres I could mash into one book.

I wound up dropping the harem bit. The rest lingered. Mostly because I really, really wanted to write a comedy.

So I started a side project. A couple of pages here, a few paragraphs there, as time and energy permitted. I don’t think it’s going to turn into a long running serial. Probably going to be a stand alone, shortish, novel. Maybe a series if people like it, but probably just a one off.

So. You know. Look forward to that. OH! Did I mention the chapters are between 3k-5k words long? Mostly 5k, making them 250% the length of Slumrat chapters? Even if you don’t want a festive feast, my Patrons are eating good this week.

Behind the Scenes/Weird Rant About Philosophy: Form Follows Function in Worldbuilding

What kind of story do you want to tell? Not “What is your big idea,” or “What is THE story you want to tell,” but what kind of story do you want to tell? The distinction is crucial, because form follows function in the engineered product that is a book.

That last sentence is intensely controversial. Brandon Sanderson would agree 100%. Many would not.

Broadly speaking, authors fall somewhere on a spectrum between “Pantsers” and “Plotters.” “Pantsers” fly by the seat of their pants- no planning, just thinking and writing. “Plotters” outline, have notes, have a… plot… for everything. It’s not weird for people to actually have a little of both in their work process.

I would put myself very solidly on the “Pantser” side of the spectrum. There are a few set pieces I know I want in there, some key plot points, but I don’t have an outline for the whole book. And yet, things hang together. Things in Vol. 3 emerge as logical consequences of facts established in Vol. 1, there is a clear, sensible line of progression, etc. How can I ensure that happens over hundreds of thousands of words?

Because a book is an engineered piece of art, like any other kind of art. Done right, you are looking at the pretty final product, not the engineering under it. Step one of that engineering is determining the kind of story you want to tell. Some buildings are slab on grade. Some get a basement. Others are built on stilts. It depends on the environment, and what you want the final building to look like.

Let's use Slumrat as our case study. I wanted to tell the sort of serial web novel story that is popular on Royal Road, with the hope that it would become a commercial success. (Because I want to do this full time, I love being an author and never want to work in an office other than my own, ever again.)

Alright, that limits my scope of options. If you were going to describe Slumrat in Royal Road tags to someone at least somewhat conversant with progression fantasy or serial webnovels, how would you describe it?

Cultivation.

Dystopian.

Action/Adventure.

There are more, but let’s start with these. Three very popular categories on RR. Not a coincidence, I assure you. Each of those terms comes loaded with metadata.

When you see the word “Cultivation” in this context, you don’t think “Farming,” you think of the novels, originally Chinese, originally very loosely based on Daoist internal alchemy, where a person could, through meditation and cultivation of their inner Qi, create a golden pill and achieve immortality. It also comes loaded with impressions of every book you have read or heard of in the genre, as well as your own thoughts and prejudices about the subject.

One word links to all that. That is a hell of a lot of things. The same kinds of metadata exist for the other terms too. So when you set out to write a genre book, it is going to be in the context of that existing field of metadata. There is already an established shared language for describing things. (For example, meditation, cultivation, elixirs, qi, “fellow Daoist,” flying swords, etc.)

Great, you don’t have to invent everything from scratch! Your web novel already has a foundation to work from. Problem- readers have already read all this. They don’t want to be dropped into Joyce’s Ulysses, or House of Leaves, so you can’t stray too far off the beaten path. But they want something fresh. They are here for a serialized web novel. It should fit with their genre expectations, while being new and different enough to be interesting. So how do you differentiate your book?

Well, let's break down some of that associated language and imagery. Cultivation is usually characterized by levels, often with sub levels. This is great for web novels and progression fantasy generally, as it means that the reader can clearly measure progress. The number goes up. Do those levels have to tie back to Daoist internal alchemy? No. No they do not.

Ok, Qi- that's foundational, right? No, “qi” is mystical bullshit, right up there with “aether” or “mana.” You can slap whatever you like in there. Does the book need to take place in fantasy ancient China? The Chinese don’t think so. They use the concept of cultivation in whatever setting they please.

Sects, scummy, exploitative sects are usually the key organizational body in a lot of these books, providing resources and mentors to the MC. In exchange for labor, the sect provides its own made up currency that sect members can exchange for resources (gathered by your fellow junior sect members) and education/advancement opportunities from the people who are nominally paying you in the first place. What does this sound like?

It sounds like company towns, paying their workers in company script, forcing them to rent houses the company owns and buy only from the company stores which sets prices at exactly what the employees can afford after rent, or a little more. Putting them in debt to the company. Once in, never out. Always a slave. Always making your masters richer.

Decent countries banned this shit a century ago, or more. But then, tag #2 is “dystopian.” So decent countries are not going to be a factor.

Do people want to read about the brutal, grinding, brief life of someone resigned to the inherent unfairness of the system? No. They want drama. Tension. Things need to happen for there to be interest. We need someone who struggles against it all. In a dystopia, such a person would have a violent, unpleasant life. Leading to tag #3, action/adventure.

Alright, we have some fixed points to work with, and know we aren’t handcuffed by genre convention. So how do we fill in the blanks? Well, what are you interested in? For Slumrat, I knew I wanted to move away from the more traditional Daoist flavored stuff and move to more western esoteric stuff. Which is intensely religious. So is Daoism, of course, and the Chinese authors thread a fairly fine needle there. It helps that most of them seem to know very little about the internal alchemy they are inspired by.

Western cultivation then. The sects become exploitative corporations, the magic is informed by everything going back to the Egyptians, up through the Levant, the Greeks, alchemy, Hermeticism, the Abrahamic religions, and most particularly, “Gnosticism.” A term that is, these days, considered quite outdated in scholarly circles, but that’s a tangent for another day.

But wait! How do we get from this to Starbrite and the System Astrologica? Well… what’s the two most popular categories on RR, by a mile?

LitRPG and System novels.

“The System is secretly evil,” is not a remotely new twist. I certainly didn’t invent it. But it fits the tags above. Consider this- what if everyone could cultivate, but not everyone got the System? What if the System was actually monopolized by one party, and they used it to dominate the world?

Sounds pretty dystopian. Sounds like our character would have something interesting to do every chapter. They would have clear goals, and the means to measure their progress towards those goals. Bring in Body Cultivation and the System’s BS stats, and you even get to watch the numbers go up.

Missions from the System, stats, why it sounds like a game! A literary role playing game, if your will. The difference between working for the PMC and taking jobs at the Adventurers Guild is kind of academic, when you think about it.

Can you see the structure rising? See all the engineered bits starting to click together? But before things can go up, that foundation has to be leveled and trash cleared.

Ever wonder why the stat blocks just kind of went away? It’s not because I forgot about them. It’s because, as the System admits, the numbers are bullshit. They are intended to be a little *Ding* that gives humans the dopamine high they so crave.

+12 strength is more than +8, so it must be a huge increase, right? Right?! Says who? A couple of hundred chapters in, and the MC has a Strength stat of over 1,000. 1,000 what, exactly, is not defined. What is the unit of measurement for “strength?” Lift capacity? Load endurance? Nobody knows. But 1,000 is a big number. The MC is clearly very strong.

By acknowledging the inherently fraudulent nature of “stats,” the numbers going up moves from mere set dressing and becomes instead another example of how the System attacks the user at every level. Even their growth, their increased strength, is presented as a gift of the System. Only the System gives you that *Ding,* like a rat pulling a lever and getting a treat. The numbers are meaningless. What the person does has meaning.

Pet peeve. I think you take my point. I made sure the System existed to serve the plot (a young man’s rise from oppressed serf to “the top,”) and even the established language and metadata that came with the tags “LitRPG” and “System” were set up to establish the setting and further that plot in interesting ways.

Form follows function. Establish the story you want to tell, and it all grows from there. Once you have filled in some foundational blanks, you start asking “How did this happen? Then what happened? Why? Who benefited, and who lost out? What must exist for this to be true?” This leads to the most important questions- “What kind of person does this world make? Who does that make our MC? Does this world, this set of axioms, give the MC interesting problems to solve? Does it force them to change and grow?”

Form follows function, yes, but only if the engineer gives a damn about their work. Which is the final point- for all this to work, the author has to genuinely, sincerely, give a fuck about what they are doing.

All of this, all of it, only works if you have seriously thought through your building blocks. If you have read enough and thought enough and learned enough from life to have a reasonable understanding of how people and institutions behave to extrapolate outcomes based on your chosen circumstances.

A novel is a work of fiction. The suspension of disbelief is indispensable- more, you have to make people believe. They must believe that, given the circumstances that you, the author, have created, the characters are acting in ways that feel logical and emotionally reasonable.

A flawed creator, themselves a flawed creation, making a flawed world and watching their creations fight to escape it. Hmmm. Now, where have I heard that idea before…

Next week- A Very Tentative Poke At Answering “Why Gnosticism?”