23 Apr 2021

I started this piece as perhaps many authors do. They've seen something they like, then they get bored and decide to do it themselves.

So it was with what I'll call the serial reincarnator genre—e.g., In Loki's Honor, Reboot Reality, The Many Lives of Cadence Lee, Three Lifetimes, The Ascendant: Endless Reincarnation—where the protagonist reincarnates many times within the scope of the story.

(Before I proceed any further, I want to distinguish books about serial reincarnation from books about a serial reincarnator. In the latter, the protagonist is a serial reincarnator, however the plot of the book you are reading only concerns itself with one particular life. This includes e.g., each of the works in Andur's corpus, Power Overwhelming, The Deathseeker, and Divine Bladesmith.

And while it should be obvious, I will point out that this genre is not about a time loop like Mother of Learning, The Menocht Loop, Endless Cage, or Re: Monarch. Nor is it isekai, whether of the baby-born or child/teen/adult body-possession types. The former are reincarnation stories, but "serial" has no meaning there. And while the later potentially involves a reincarnation, the story emphasis is on the otherworldliness, not the reincarnation.)

I found myself enraptured by the concept, though it's hard for me to articulate why. Suffice it to say though, while there was only a small sample size, it seemed like it must be a very difficult genre to write in. Three Lifetimes completed, but it limited itself to three. The Ascendant was abandoned in the first life. Many Lives is on indefinite hiatus at Chapter 44 (which I feel was about a half dozen lives in, but the protagonist was really only coming to grips with how to live her lives). Reboot Reality appears to be heading towards indefinite hiatus.

And then we have In Loki's Honor. So much has been written about that story—it's very controversial in the reviews, with proponents and detractors going to great lengths—I won't add much here. I like it. I liked it enough that I read it a second time, which I had never done on Royal Road before. But otherwise, I can't say it much better than one reviewer did: "This web novel is such a good litRPG, I kind of want a new genre based on it! The idea of having the character cursed to 100 reincarnations on the same planet spread out by a few centuries is genius!" I hope that reader finds this fiction.

Then In Loki's Honor hit a speedbump and went on hiatus for a few months, which was when I found myself re-reading it, and appreciating the difficulties that this genre could pose. At the time, it was at about 1900 pages, and we had gotten through 27 lives, but because 15+ of them were stillbirths, we ended up with several lives that were book length. While I've enjoyed every minute reading it, I realize that such lengthy lives are a potentially problematic habit for the larger story (which nominally will go on for one hundred lives), though I will concede that perhaps it is something inherent in the genre, rather than a particular issue with In Loki’s Honor.

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So, bored, and with metaphorical pen to metaphorical paper, I pushed to the other (very stupid) extreme: One chapter per life. However long you have one. And, having come off a long few months of careful and delicate brainstorming other ideas, I was more than happy to fly by the seat of my pants for a little experiment. And so I just started writing, like, with almost no other planning.

You saw how it turned out. And with very few exceptions, I agree with a lot of what you had to say.

So, what have we learned? Well, first of all, this story is not great, or even good, literature. I fully acknowledge that. At best, this should be understood as an experimental writing piece at one extreme of a particular genre. That said, having gotten around to actually reading it front to back (I never did that before pushing it to Royal Road), it’s a fun read if you’re into the genre.

And, I loved writing it too. Winging it was so refreshing compared to my last fiction. And playing with the System was far more amusing than I had imagined.

Of course, I learned something about the bounds of the difficulties of writing in this genre. Namely, each life really does beg for its own story. And if you’re going to have dozens of lives, you need to keep certain ground rules the same throughout all of them and develop conventions for shorthanding the less interesting parts. Early on you can rely on the protagonist being challenged just living his/her/its lives. And, indeed, the challenge of such early lives allow you to establish certain conventions about how the protagonist deals with the mundane, thus allowing you to take future lives almost immediately from the mundane to the extraordinary (i.e., spend a few lifetimes on childhood, and then you can timeskip it later with almost no complaint).

Further, the one chapter per life thing is a bit extreme. Most importantly, it really hamstrings your ability to engage in multi-life arcs. Heck, sometimes there wasn’t room within a life for a full arc. As to how far you need to loosen it to make it work… I think it’s clear there’s no hard rules here and, if you want to keep it tight, you just have to keep disciplined on the matter.

Finally, while playing with the litRPG System was oodles of fun, the hardest part of litRPG by far is tracking stuff (and possibly writing full descriptions for Skills and Traits). And even if you’re going to wing a lot of it, at least try and have a robust system up front for tracking the System (because trying to fix that after the fact is a PITA).

So, what’s next? Well, for starters, I have marked Candlelit Lives as “Complete.” There is a complete volume here which resembles a complete story. And if the fiction ended here, it would be a bit of a lukewarm, but it would have an ending.

That said, will I continue? Yes. As mentioned, I just read through the whole thing for the first time and I loved it. And, with just a touch of thought, it becomes very obvious to me where the story should go. And so with volume 1 definitely, definitely done this time, I am off to work on the next volume(s).

In any event, I hope you enjoyed this wild ride as much as I did.

See you around,

luda305