One of my favorite things about writing is trying to anticipate how various people will react to what I’m writing. In part, this is just part of the job description; if I don’t think a sad part is going to make you feel a little sad, I need to rewrite it. If someone is supposed to be a jerk and you don’t hate him, I need to go back to the drawing board. When every single part of the book is aimed at making you feel something (and it is, even for “filler” chapters), that means I end up thinking about you-the-reader quite a bit.

Writing is also a bit like magic. You all experience the book at different times and in slightly different versions and formats. Right now, there’s a relatively small group of readers who get to read before everyone else, and serve as a sort of typo-and-stuff-that-I-forgot honor guard. After the good edits they suggest and a slight delay, a much larger group of readers gets to it, suggest more edits, give me more opinions, and the work changes a bit from there.

Those two groups are reading really, really soon after I’ve written them, sometimes only after a few days from when the first word hits the paper. But eventually, I think there will probably be readers who encounter these stories published as volumes instead of as serially released chapters, or as audio instead of text. Some will see them after I find things that need to be fixed, and some before.

Part of the magic of writing is that you, as the reader, get to peer into my thoughts whether you’re reading this today, tomorrow, or one year from now.

But no matter when people find my words, as the author, the feeling of “I just wrote this” disappears pretty quickly. Right now, it’s Sunday night, and even though I just finished the third novel on Friday, things are already starting to fade.

So if I want to give you the actual truth about why I wrote Deadworld Isekai the way I did (such as it is), now is my big chance. Anything I’d write later would be partially a lie, whether I want it to be or not. It’s just how memory works. Things get fuzzy, and there’s a tendency to reimagine them in a way that makes you feel better.

As always, I’m not going to ask my editor-and-friend dotblue to revise this, partially because it’s a hard sort of thing to edit, and partially because I do really want it to be a real conversation I’m having with you, warts and all.

So here, at the end of a novel that extends the series to at least a trilogy, are my thoughts.

Dotblue note: To give you guys a spoiler up front. Our current plan is to begin work on a new novel and hit the pause button on Deadworld Isekai.

We’ve always thought of the series as a trilogy or, if the stars aligned, a tetralogy. Now that we’re at the end of book 3, we realized that we had brought Matt to life. He’s survived, he’s thrived, and he’s even helped other people thrive.

As a result, while we’ve thought about turning this into an epic saga where we battle with the main system across different planets, the reality is that Matt’s a complete person now. He has room to grow, but maybe not enough for a full book yet. And so, it makes sense for us to take a break here and work on other things as new challenges and growth bubbles up to the surface for Matt.

All in all, I hope to see you guys in our next book, and thanks again for reading. It’s been an amazing ride.

THE FEELINGS

Somewhere, I think, maybe in the last author’s note, I said something to the effect of the three novels being about something like, in order:

1. Broken worlds, broken promises, and learning to survive

2. Recovery, regrowth, and learning to do okay

3. Thriving, being strong, and moving on to help people

And something I’ll share, even though it isn’t super relevant for a lot of you, is that I was incredibly depressed when I started writing the first book. I didn’t realize until later that the reason I wanted to write a story about a lonely, sad man barely surviving in an empty world was that I was more than a little sad.

And then things got a little bit better. Not a whole lot, not an incredible amount, but a little tiny bit. Like a lot of people who are depressed but doing a tiny bit better, I told myself I was doing a LOT better. Since I had by then realized what the first book was about, I wrote the second book that was a little happier, with a larger, more defined triumph and with characters who were experiencing much more growth.

Which brings us to the third book, which is about a person who is now strong enough to go out and help other people, who is still improving by leaps and bounds, and who is finally getting to live out the dreams he was both promised by other people and that he promised to himself.

If I’m being really, really honest, the third book is in some respects a bit of a lie. I’m still not doing all that well. I’m not ready to go out and save worlds. If I’m telling the truth, I’m still somewhere like where Matt was at the beginning of the second book. I’ve learned to survive. I’m going to make it. But I’m miles from transforming worlds besides mine for the better.

In another respect, it’s not a lie at all. Because in a very true way, book three is where I want to be. It’s what I’m working towards. And for the worriers among us, I really do think I’ll get there, and that I’m a bit closer to that every day.

I think the reason I’m telling you all this is to give you, as vulnerably as I can, two pieces of advice:

1. If you want to make something, don’t be afraid to put some of the sadness you carry around into it. Don’t wallow in it, don’t use it as an excuse to let the sadness drown you like Artax, but don’t be afraid to let it into the work.

Writing is, at its best, a sort of artful kind of lying. But doing it right means you're trying to make the words as little of a lie as possible. Having something true behind the characters and world anchors them, even if the weight of that is only clearly visible to you.

2. You might use that sadness as a tool for your art or you might not, but you still have to live through it and with it either way. And in the case of both your art and your life, you can’t forget that things recover. Things regrow. And not only do you still have things you can do to help others, but you also have things you can do to help yourself.

And listen: you might not be able to see the bright, kind, and growing place from where you are. But whether you’re writing about it or not, you can imagine that place. And you can still work towards it.

THE CHARACTERS

Matt and Lucy

Matt is, for better or worse, the same guy he’s always been. He’s not particularly smart, he’s not incredibly talented, and to the extent he has become strong, it’s because he’s had to, not because he was incredibly ambitious or driven.

But going to Ra’Zor, despite being basically necessary, is a step out of that zone for him. If he had been more or less on a straight and narrow path in Gaia, he now finds himself in a world where his path forward is a lot less clear. To the extent he has a mandate, it’s more like “fuck shit up” than it is “complete these quests”. The system instance doesn’t care if he builds the humans up, or burns them down. So long as he stays within reasonable limits, everyone is happy and he will walk away with loot.

I don’t know how much it shows, but Matt was actually okay with that arrangement. Right until he visits the plinths, he’s actually pretty content to get some awesome new armor, kill a reasonable number of demons, and find a way to warp home. He’s not married to the idea of killing another system instance, upsetting the entire status quo, or taking over the world.

Everything changes once he visits the plinths, which he puts off for as long as possible. While we as writers and readers know that he’s not going to let the Church take Lucy, and while Matt himself knows it, I think it’s important to note that Lucy doesn’t know that. In fact, if there was more time, she might have even tried to convince him that it was okay - that she’d be willing to spend a bit of time in prison to keep him safe.

Matt had been doing pretty well up to that point, but from his perspective, there wasn’t much of a chance that his future plans would have worked. It was fuzzy, and relied on a lot of mechanical system-things that might have ended up not working like that. Demon hearts, buying an organization. There was no guide for those things. To even check how things worked, he would have had to kill a centuries-old demon lord, one that nobody had ever been able to kill. He walks into that situation knowing he’s either going to get very lucky AND execute everything perfectly, or he’s going to die.

He does it. That’s his superpower. If anything makes him a good character, it’s that he knows he broadly sucks enough that he’s underpowered for almost everything he has to do. But still, he does it anyway because he doesn’t think of himself as more important than Lucy, thousands of Gaians, or tons and tons of Ra’Zorian humans.

In the meantime, Lucy plays a very, very small role in this book compared to books 1 and 2. Because Matt now has other company and has to coordinate with real-life humans, and because the two of them don’t and can’t have any great, developed system of etiquette for dealing with that. She’s around, she’s still Lucy, and she still gives her unwavering support for Matt, even if it means she gets ignored a little, and even if that makes her worry.

I think in the future, Matt and Lucy will eventually go somewhere where she takes more of a front seat - where he’s supporting her while she accomplishes something. I haven’t quite figured out how. But what I like about that, however it happens, is that we basically know they will both be there for each other. For them, it’s okay if one person has to help the other without getting a lot out of it for a period of time, or even if they have to give a lot of themselves to the other.

They do this because they are friends, and they love each other (platonically).

The Ra’Zorian Heroes

There is no way to explain how excited I was to have other people for Matt to talk to, and other components I could bring into fights to make them a bit more complex. Having other people there, specifically other combat-competent people, made fight scenes a lot easier and I think a bit more interesting.

Brennan goes through the least amount of development of any of them, at least that we see. But Brennan is, for better or worse, already a pretty good guy when the story starts. He likes people, he wants to get along with them, and generally doesn’t have a single chip on his shoulder about anything. At the same time, he’s responsible and trustworthy. It’s useful that he has long, hard experience with the Church, and that he’s seen firsthand how much they like control.

Derek is similar, while having a bit more development. Since we’ve known him, he has been working to get stronger, at first for himself and later because it’s the right thing to do. It’s that “right thing to do” that helps him save the story, keeping Matt from either dying at the hands of the heroes or killing them. Since he’s had time to think about things, he’s realized how shitty it was that he was going to try to kill Matt without knowing anything about him. It’s this that makes him take a risk to do an astounding thing: to make sure that things don’t go wrong again.

And because of that, when the latter half of the book hits, and it becomes clear he’s now comparably strong to Brennan and the others, both us and him hardly notice. The big deal wasn’t that he was strong, it was that he was now a good guy.

Artemis had the biggest choice to make of anyone on the team. Brennan and Derek are, for better or worse, outsiders as compared to born-and-bred Ra’Zorians. They have context most Ra’Zorians don’t have. They think of themselves as heroes, people there to do good. Artemis also thinks of herself that way, but breaking away from the concept of “good is whatever the church commands” would have been a much, much bigger deal for her.

I think that the two things that help her make what we think of as the right decision in that moment are: she loves Brennan, and she’s one of the few people on the planet that has, via Brennan, noticed how wrong the eternal stalemate with the demons feels. When she finds out the stalemate isn’t just because of the system and the demons, it’s just enough that she follows along.

The old man

I like the old man. I think he intuitively makes sense to anyone who reads this kind of fiction. He’s a big, rough, violent death machine who, for reasons that are only somewhat clear, has gotten out of that business. Now spends most of his time helping other people do the same kind of work he used to do.

At the same time, we get the impression his decision isn’t just because he loves crafting so much, or because he’s tired. He owns system-blocking dust. He says things and does things that indicate that he has at least some kind of feeling that things are very wrong, and doesn’t have a good way to fix it.

And so he trains Derek, and when Matt shows up and looks weird and balance-breaker-ish, he instantly moves mountains to do everything possible to help him. When Matt takes his biggest combat buff away, he doesn’t even blink. When Matt needs help, he abandons everything instantly to go with the others, getting back into action immediately.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

In terms of who he is as a character, it’s logical to ask “how could he just sit back on his laurels if he’s that strong? Why would they let him?”. And the answer we learn is because nothing he does matters, and both he and the Church both know that. But when there’s a chance to do something that might actually make a difference, he immediately gets on his feet and puts his hammer into some heads.

High Counsellor Alder

High Counsellor Alder was always fun for me to think about. He’s a Ra’Zorian native, and most Ra’Zorian natives aren’t all that strong. To the extent he was going to be an individual danger, and to the extent he had a class that made him deadly, it made a lot of sense that it was going to be tied to the fact that he was the fantasy-world-pope.

With a class like “Pope”, it would make sense that most of his power would be organizational. Both in the sense that he was in command of this big, powerful thing, and that he would get stats from how well that organization was doing.

We don’t know a lot about him as a person, but I don’t think we need to. The fact that he’s the kind of person who would imprison guardians just to make reincarnators easier to control and that he only wants to control them so he can maintain an eternal, cynically considered war, makes him bad enough that nobody feels bad when Matt deflates his power-base.

The Demon Lord

In the background of this story and a lot of others is this idea that Earth is an important breeding ground for heroes, that we make the best blank-slate, system-less souls to transmigrate to other places. But once we’ve established that the system doesn’t really care if they help or hurt the worlds they go to, the possibilities become endless. And once we know that invasions are a thing, we get the idea of someone who has defeated aging, accumulated a lot of stats, and gotten the absolute most they can out of the system to the point where they are essentially invincible.

I wanted someone who was from Earth, but had spent a long time in a fantasy world, either though weird Narnian time mechanics or just by arriving at an extremely early time. I also wanted someone who was basically the opposite of being violently insane. The demon lord’s Placid Mind skill is adjustable, and at some point he turned it up to 11, making him not mind the passage of time or really anything that wasn’t a direct threat to his life. He’s evil in the sense that he does evil things, but more importantly, he’s evil in that he has taken active steps to make sure nothing like a conscience will ever get in the way of his life.

Worse, he’s reliable. The system instance knows he’s trustworthy in the sense that the system instance cares about that kind of thing, so it gives him power. In terms of personal power, he’s invincible in basically every sense. It takes a combination of Matt’s outside-the-system powers and turning the demon lord’s own substantial powers around on him to take him down.

Mechanically, I also wanted the demon lord to be a kind of dark-side version of Matt’s own estate powers. In other books, I mentioned that Matt has the ability to, say, make all the barracks on his land work better, or to make all the warriors a little stronger. Matt decides to improve the soil because that’s who he is. The demon lord spends his time and similar powers using the land to generate a subservient warrior-race to kill people with. He cares so little about anything else that the land itself gets drained by the process, and he ends up a blood-colored wasteland.

When he dies, nobody, except the system instance, feels very bad.

The System Instance

The Gaian system instance was alone, afraid, and slightly insane. It had diverged. There was, starting this book, a question of what the Ra’Zorian system instance would be like. It couldn’t be good, of course, since the system that built it was a bad guy. It had to be selfish. It had to be a parasite. It had to be a murderer.

It also had to seem nice. Because nobody is fooled by the bloodthirsty, “please die for me” system instance messages, it had to offer power, seem friendly, and convince everyone it was actually trying to help.

Nothing made me more happy than when initial readers said, “oh, this system instance seems really nice!”

The downfall of the system instance is really just that, deep down, he’s a bad type of person. He works for the main system, but he’s also a limited clone of it and carries the same personality traits. To the extent he’s obedient, it’s because he gets paid and because he’s afraid of his boss. But when his boss backs him into a corner, then that nastiness shows and he lashes out.

If he was a moral, principled person, he could be honest and forthright with the main system from the beginning, start resisting Matt earlier, fight him harder throughout, and keep him on Ra’Zor long enough for the main system to come back and help take him down. He could point the main system back to Gaia, maybe. He could do a lot of things that Matt wouldn’t like, and just generally win.

But he’s not a good person because the main system itself isn’t, so both he and the main system lose. At least for now.

RA’ZOR, LAND OF SOUP AND BLEEDING

The idea I always had for Ra’Zor, at least after it grew to anything beyond a throwaway joke, is that it had a kind of cursed stability. The demons were for the most part supposed to be individually weak but numerous, and thus could launch attacks. Individual humans would be strong, but few. So the demons would control a lot of territory and launch attacks on a relatively small amount of ground that humans defended tooth-and-nail.

When Matt ends up in Ra’Zor, he sees the demon parts first. And he finds that, in a lot of ways, it’s a bit like most of Gaia. It’s a wasteland. There’s nothing beautiful. He sees plants, but they are dead. He sees animals, but they are dangerous and vicious. What he doesn’t find, anywhere, is beauty. Everything is, for lack of a better word, pokey. There’s no art, there’s no fun unless it’s in training to hurt people, and even the little we see demons interacting with each other, they seem to take whatever pleasure they get out of a kind of nasty one-upmanship.

And then he sees the human parts, and they seem wonderful. And in some ways, they genuinely are. There are nice people, there’s good food, and an economy that seems to mostly run on building things worth protecting and then keeping them safe.

And, like a lot of things, it’s more complex than that. Like in the real world, the leaders knowing the truth about are playing their own games and, however they play, their focus is to advance their own goals.

I think there’s going to be a kind of reader who, reasonably, sees Matt go to war with the demons and wonders why doesn’t he try to reform the human side of things as a demon. And I think they will wonder that despite mostly not seeing the same conflict for, say, Brennan, Derek, and Artemis. I can’t exactly explain that, but I feel a bit of the same thing. It’s something that makes sense, but isn’t as satisfying as it should be.

I think for me, that’s because it isn’t just one thing. The demons don’t pursue beauty. The only way humans and them can coexist is through continuous death. The demons are, for better or worse, now in a position to exterminate humanity completely, and they have immediately moved on that.

And, for better or worse, every friend that Matt makes lives on the green side of the border. And so he chooses a side. I think it’s to his credit that the path he cuts is pretty narrow; he’s looking to destroy the demon lord because the demon lord is making tactical nukes and because taking him down will let him take down the bad parts of humanity as well. When the rest of the demons go with him, it’s not something he anticipated.

AUTHORITY AND LIMITED REWARDS

At the end of the Ra’Zor arc, Matt’s basically had the most successful run he could have. He kills the demon lord, unseats the corrupt human government, and generally wins as hard as it was possible to win. But from the beginning, I didn’t want it to be the case that this meant, for instance, that he was able to kill the system instance, or somehow catapult him into the metaphoric space that the main system lives in and stab it to death. There had to be limits.

When Matt gets back to Gaia, he’s going to have a lot of rewards that are specifically for Gaia. Because he has a whole planet to rebuild on that side of the portal, those can end up being big, powerful rewards. They can restore Gaian fauna, they can siphon mana from Ra’Zor, whatever. But on the Ra’Zorian side of things, I had to be at least a little careful not to resolve all the problems Ra’Zor could possibly have forever. He needed friends, not a pocket army that was waiting at his beck and call for anything he might need in the future.

The best solution I could come up with for this was to take the fight out of the hands of the corrupt current leadership, but to leave Ra’Zor with plenty of fighting still to do. That meant that the organizational power of the human government went to Artemis (because she’s the only person who we know of who is both responsible and capable enough to handle it). But, the authority got split between the old man and Brennan. Since neither of them really want it, and since they have to get the other one to agree if they want to do anything TOO huge with it, Matt is hoping that’s enough of a built-in safety that will keep things from getting too out of hand.

But more importantly, it means that Ra’Zor’s problems are Ra’Zor’s, again. Matt changed everything around, but when the main system comes back and notices that things have gone to shit, they are going to have a fight on their hands. Ideally, they unify, resist the system, get every living sentient being on Ra’Zor on board with the resistance, and evict his ass straight back to where he came from. But it’s still going to be a long, dangerous job that might not go well.

Matt, at best, was an interloper. He was like a guy going over to a friend’s very, very messy house and helping them get it to a manageable, cleaner place. He gave them a big lead on their problems, but he can’t live there and make sure everything stays tidy. It’s their house, and he has to hope they have what it takes to keep it in order.

DEUS EX MACHINA

The idea behind Matt’s build was always, all the way up to the end of the second book, that he was essentially a pretty weak, less-than-talented guy who lived on a resource-drained planet and who constantly had to deal with the kind of limitations that flowed out of that. So, for instance, the only good piece of equipment he’s ever had was the shovel. Everything else was what amounted to starter equipment, or slightly improved intermediate equipment at best.

In addition to that, he has a class that levels in a weird way, one that unreliably assigns stats based on him almost dying. And that created a conflict because he’s a guy who can only get massively strong by taking constant life-and-death risks, but can only survive by either careful planning or getting lucky. That turned out to be really, really tricky to write, and sometimes readers have had complaints about that.

With the careful planning part of things, most of the difficulty revolved around the fact that Matt was reliant on traps at the same time he was in a resource-poor world. So if Matt picked up shards of metal, you knew he was either going to use them as caltrops or shrapnel. If he picked up a spike, it had to be stabbed into something at some point. And since I respect the readers enough to know that they know this, I then had to try my hardest to make monsters fall into traps in a way that was still interesting, surprising, and fun to read.

The way I handled this was to show you Matt acquiring the various resources he’d end up using to get out of various life-and-death situations, but to rarely show him actually setting up the traps. The idea was that you’d get the payoff all at once; that when Matt fought the Scourge, you’d see the various items you had seen him collect all come into play, but still get a little interest out of the exact details of how they were used.

The exact amount people liked this varied wildly. For some people, it was clever, wacky rapid-fire-fun. For other people, it felt like a cheat, like he always had exactly the right stuff on him to survive basically anything. Since you can’t please everyone (not an excuse, you just literally can’t) and since the alternative was basically having the reader always know exactly want was going to happen in almost any fight, I did my best with it.

And then, sometimes, he’d just get lucky. He’d find the only really, really important shovel in the whole universe. He’d find a box of food (which, for the record, is a little less unlikely than you’d think. There were once thousands and thousands of those boxes lying around). Or, I think at the most lucky, a worm would jump up and get caught in some rocks, and he could just BBQ it at his leisure.

Now, because it’s relevant, here’s a story:

A long time ago, I had a very, very good cat. He was friendly, he was affectionate, he was the first cat me and my wife got after we were married. And, as is sometimes the way with cats you really love, he was hit by a car and died.

A few years later, we decided to get another cat. And somehow, I found some people who fostered cats online, and they had a cat that looked just like the other cat. Now, if you really want a great cat, the best way to do it is to go to find a cat that, regardless of how it looks, is friendly and seems to want to be adopted. One that needs you, and knows it.

But this cat looked like the other cat I liked. So when I saw pictures of it, I said, “that one.” And I ignored what it probably meant when the people said, “he will take a while to warm up to you.” I also ignored the fact that they poured him from the cat carrier he was in to my cat carrier while being very, very careful not to let him get in biting-and-scratching range.

On the way home, I hit some sort of bump and the cat carrier revealed it wasn’t closed very well by popping open and releasing the cat. The animal proceeded to burn rubber on the inside of the cab of my work truck, panicking and yowling and just generally trying to get me in a car crash. So I parked and then, in a moment of very poor judgement, put my hand on the cat to calm it.

It almost put me in the hospital. It bit through my thumbnail down to the bone, and then using that as leverage, proceeded to rake the hell out of my arm with its back paws, shredding the skin much deeper than you’d imagine a cat could while it continued to bite my thumb in different parts. By the time I got out of the truck, I had a steady stream of blood dripping from my fingers, the cat had taken up residence in the dashboard of my car, and I had learned a very important lesson.

A sufficiently motivated house cat could kill the average human. Animals, when hostile, are balls of unstoppable death.

If that story seems irrelevant, consider that we read a genre of literature where confused, isolated humans routinely blood their weapons for the first time by killing full-grown, stat-enhanced wolves.

The secret thing, something that, if you know the truth of things, you try very hard as a writer to hide, is that almost every Isekai/LitRPG is writing a story about a character who in a realistic world would be dead within the first couple of days. If not that, circumstances would eventually conspire to kill them within a few weeks. We are, all of us, cladding our main characters in ten-foot-thick plot armor, adding some old-fashioned power of friendship, and then doing our best to hide that fact.

A DIFFERENT KIND OF DEUS EX MACHINA

When Matt goes to Ra’Zor, a lot of things suddenly change. Suddenly, he’s revealed as someone who has acquired an awful lot of stats, who has a god-tier weapon, and who has a system-around-a-system that enhances what he can do in versatile, powerful ways. And as part of that, his combat style finally shifts from planning-and-scheming to incredible feats of strength and combat. Everything becomes much, much more direct, at least as far as combat is concerned.

And what’s interesting about that to me, as a writer, is that from the writer’s perspective it’s really not all that different. When Matt swings his shovel at a head, it could either explode like a watermelon or be completely unaffected. When someone stabs him, it could either kill him or damage his shoulder in a way that makes things more exciting, but doesn’t actually put him in any real danger.

And, realistically, what we are all doing as a writer/reader team is agreeing to ignore that we all sort of know that. When you watch an episode of Black Clover, you are basically aware that Aska isn’t going to die. Good writing, even where it works, can’t change that. What it can do is just make everything make sense, and give you enough room to pretend fiction isn’t that way.

FINAL THOUGHTS

In early July, the extent of my writing experience was, I think, a single short story. Maybe a few if I’m not remembering well, but it wasn’t much in any case. Now I have a trilogy under my belt.

From here, I’ll be moving on to other stories, both in Matt’s universe and outside of it. I’m unbelievably glad this story went well, but I’m even more glad to have learned so much about writing doing it. I am, I think, better at fiction now. I can make better plans, and I hope I can build better characters and stories.

I literally couldn’t have done that without readers. There’s no way I could have written 300k+ words in four months without the support and encouragement of people who enjoyed it.

I’m really, really looking forward to what comes next. Thank you all, and see you soon.