Hey everyone! If you’ve made it this far, you probably already know the drill. At the end of every book I write, I put together an author’s note explaining where I was at and what I was thinking as I wrote it. There are a lot of reasons why.
First, books with more content are better than books with less content, all other things the same. The reader gets more bang for their buck, I get to spend more time on a particular book (which I like), and most algorithms reward length. Long book = good.
But I think if I had to pick one reason above all others to justify sitting down and banging out a couple thousand words on the topic of work I’ve already done, it’s that I hope it helps other people write.
Writing is not hard, and writing is very, very hard. When I write, I’m not wearing out my joints and ruining my back. I’m not sweating or breathing hard. I’m not talking to a customer who wants something they can’t have and is yelling at me because I can’t give it to them. In those senses and a bunch of others, you should be mad at me if you ever see me whining about my job. Being able to write for a living is a dream, one I’m trying to keep alive as long as possible.
At the same time, writing is one of the harder things you can do. Every day, you have to be able to sit down, clear your head of almost everything you could possibly think and focus on a single story. You have to come up with ideas that will keep people interested and entertained. Worst of all, you have to actually write. You can’t just daydream. At some point, you need to take that daydream, lay it down on a butcher’s table, chop it up, and rearrange it into a shape that does the work you need it to do.
For almost a year now, I’ve been writing at a pace of about a novel a month. That means I’m exhausted. My body is rested, I feel no stress, but the word-rearranger parts of my brain are so tired that sometimes I tell my boys to watch out for the “pain flies” and it takes them a while to understand I’m talking about wasps. When I sit down to write my 4-8k words a day, sometimes it’s all I can do to make that happen.
For people who are just starting out on their writing path, they have jobs, stresses, school, and family problems that make it harder for them to get started at their keyboard any given day. And that’s if they can get started at all. Sitting down to start a novel is the first bite in the process of eating an entire 26-inch cheesecake, and the task can look so big that a lot of people can’t face it.
As much as I can, I want these notes to give you a bit of insight into how I’m approaching my writing process so you can get an idea of how you can best approach yours. I want to make it be a little less daunting, if I can.
In that spirit, I want you to keep this in mind as you read this. When I talk about the setting, I had probably less of an idea of what the setting was going to look like when I started. When I talk about a character’s development, I need you to know that some of that happened as I was writing. Not every bit of this is something I planned in advance. More than that, a lot of the stuff I planned didn’t happen because as I wrote, some ideas like “school trip to the capital” and “Milo falls down a well” just didn’t have enough elbow room for the 100 to 120 thousand words of Book 2.
Sometimes the story tells you what to do, and you just have to go do that. No amount of planning can prevent that from happening. The only way to get past it is to write.
Anyway, here’s how that worked out for me. As always, these notes are only lightly edited, and try to capture as much of the stream-of-consciousness feel as they can rather than being absolutely complete and polished in every way.
THE SETTING
In the first book, the setting was not so much the Demon World as it was one particular part of that world. Arthur landed in a city. And he stayed in that city, learning about people and life right there and not a whole hell of a lot else.
Of course, he picked up some things, like the idea that the countryside was not entirely safe, that monsters of non-demon varieties existed, and a few other tidbits like that. But in terms of seeing the world outside the city and understanding it, the novel stayed pretty light.
Whatever else I did when I wrote Book 2, I wanted to expose more of the Demon World to the reader. As I mentioned above, originally this was going to involve what amounted to a senior trip to the capital. That didn’t end up happening, but the eventual trip with Talca and Littal did. The eventual reveal of the world was meant to follow these rules:
* The Demon Empire is built around cities, settlements, and towns that all hide behind walls to some extent. From there, they gather surrounding resources.
* There are always some dangers in the outside world, either in the form of beasts or monsters.
* Outside the specific circumstances of a monster wave, these dangers are pretty manageable.
* When the Demon Empire expands, it does so in a once-every-generation-or-so push that calls on the general populace to provide the resources, supplies, and settlers necessary to build new outposts out on the edge of everything.
I like every single one of those things, but I’d be the first to admit the world building gets a bit fuzzy around the edges. Settlements being somewhat smaller can mean they get missed by more monster waves entirely, which I like, but I couldn’t figure out a way the settlements could generally be entirely safe without being as populated as a city. That was especially true considering that the size of a monster wave wouldn’t be “level adjusted” to the size of a city.
As for the places Arthur visits, I wanted them to be like very small towns I’ve visited before. In those places, not everyone is necessarily friends, but everyone is at least vaguely aware of almost everyone else. On Earth, that I-know-everyone effect tends to get diluted a little by how spread out rural-ish towns tend to be. The Demon World wouldn’t have that problem, since the wall would guarantee closer contact.
The town with the breakfast-master is meant to feel tiny. It’s a few houses and shops behind a wall, serving a much larger mostly-farming-related area. When monsters come through that place, they all just leave to bigger places; there’s nothing there they can’t rebuild and it’s not necessary for them to kill themselves trying to save what they have. In my head-canon, they have one very good scout who gives them plenty of advance warning so they can do impromptu harvests, pack up their important stuff, and split to the protection of a larger city.
In contrast, the quarry-dominated town Minos finds himself healing up in is meant to feel much more secure. It has plenty of rock to make better walls with, harder soil, and more permanent buildings. It’s also larger, and filled with people who work at high-strength occupations. With less area to defend, a better wall, and a tougher, less mercantile population, you can at least imagine them surviving a monster wave all by themselves.
Continuing that small to large pattern, we have cities like Arthur’s, which are almost completely self-sufficient, have excellent supplies of everything they need, and can easily defend themselves against attacks with minimal loss. The biggest of these is the Capital, which we see as having the best of everything but not being so much better that non-Capital demons envy them.
THE TERRITORY EXPANSION AND THE IMPLIED POST-BEAR CONTRACTION
When anyone gets around to explaining to Arthur how the Demon Empire grows, they say that it’s about carving out a new strip of land just a little bit further out than anything they’ve built up to that point. Since the world is dangerous and these settlements are new, the entirety of demon society chips in any way it can. They send food and building materials. They provide transport. And, we eventually see, they set up support communities of heavy hitters who can come in and solve problems if needed.
The natural question for me was this: If you have people like Karbo and Itela hanging out within a day’s drive from settlements that might need them, why not stock those new settlements with those people in the first place? The demons emphasize sending their young and potential-filled juniors, but why not just skip that step and send mature, high-level old folks in the first place?
I tried not to be too definite or heavy-handed on this, but I suspect it’s mostly because the demons see the expansion not just as a land-grab or a way to get new, interesting materials. Instead, I think they value the opportunity to use the expansion as a hedge against cultural stagnation. By sending out the young, they can give them a chance to experiment with new ideas, town architectures, local governments, and just new ways of life in general. I imagine this producing a lot of culture in the form of new games, new music, new cooking styles, and things of that nature. It’s kind of like how, on Earth, young people gravitate towards the cities and then retire to the suburbs later. If we flipped the settings, there’d probably be a lot fewer new things in the world.
So the Demons don’t send out the older folks because they’d just take over, limit that new-ways-of-living effect, and ensure the newer towns were a lot like the old ones. The Demons allow anyone to settle regardless of age, but there’s a clear cultural expectation that it will mostly be the young, especially at first.
One thing I liked thinking about (despite never having any intention of covering it) was how the demon territory ended up being this constricted in the first place. What I eventually settled on was that the demon empire was once much bigger, or at least much more free to move around without worrying about monsters, and that this changed with the coming of The Bear.
Before The Bear, everyone was either a warrior class or necessary personnel for supporting warriors, which means that monster waves wouldn’t have been nearly as big of a deal. With The Bear around, they also didn’t have had to worry about monster waves as much, so long as he could get around to the right place. But at some point, The Bear stopped being actively involved in those kinds of defenses, and left a society dominated by crafters, merchants, artists, and service providers to fend for themselves.
Are there still warriors, and does that still help? Sure. But the idea that demon society retracted behind walls as a necessary side-effect of becoming less militarized overall is interesting to me. It’s a real tradeoff, the biggest cost of their peaceful society.
Characters
ARTHUR
I wanted two things for Arthur in this book.
First, a segment of story where he felt at home and “settled in”, and second that he’d have that taken away in some way or another.
When the story kicks into gear, Arthur is happy, healthy, running his shop, and mostly focused on doing an ever-better job. Things are going great with Mizu, his relationship with Lily is getting closer and closer, and he can see a direct benefit to others from almost everything he does.
That’s a great life, but you can see the difficulty from a writer’s perspective. If things were going to be like that forever, with no wrinkles at all, I might as well have ended the story at the end of Book 1, with maybe a few more chapters showing him happy in the shop for good measure.
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Instead, things get shaken up. First, Arthur finds that he needs to leave town for a while. Twice, actually. This isn’t a bad thing, but it’s a stressful thing to arrange and do. He then spends some time in a small town which is nice enough, but that doesn’t feel at all like home. It’s a place, it’s not a bad place, but it’s also not his place, and when the time comes to go home, he goes as quickly as possible.
But almost as soon as he’s back, he finds there’s this huge societal upheaval on its way, one that almost immediately starts taking his friends away. And then things got pretty tricky to write.
I wanted to make clear at the beginning of this arc that Arthur didn’t handle all of this perfectly. He’s a young guy, one who really values the people he knows, and who is happy for the first time in two lives. And he goes from a “completely perfect lifestyle” to “lots of uncertainty about the future” on a dime.
Luckily, he has Lily on his side. Everyone else is doing their best, but just doesn’t have much in the way of options better than writing Arthur’s overreaction off as another weird Earthling thing. Lily, on the other hand, gets it. It’s weird to her too. That, more than anything, helps Arthur get his bearings back.
The next help comes from understanding that everyone is a little unsettled by this event. The cultural thing for them is to act glad about it, and they really are happy about the expansion. But finding out that everyone is a bit stressed and uncertain about the whole thing makes the entire situation a lot more natural-feeling to Arthur, and makes him understand he’s not so much of an outsider as he thought.
Arthur is concerned about losing Mizu throughout, but I wanted that aspect of things to take a backseat to his relationship to Lily to the extent it could. For me, that was the more interesting story.
Editor note: Another way to think about DWBS is that Book 1 was about Arthur and Mizu. But Book 2 is about Arthur and Lily even though she’s not on the trips with Arthur.
LILY
Lily from DWBS is a similar character to Lucy from Deadworld Isekai. I don’t deny that at all. In fact, I promise that every second or third book I write will have a Lily/Lucy type character in it. I always wanted a daughter, I never got one, and I like thinking about vaguely father/daughter relationships when I write. It’s no coincidence that the two characters share a lot in common because about 50% of what they are (small snarky girl with problems MC can help solve) is absolutely identical.
With that said, they aren’t exactly the same thing.
Lily is a bit softer, a bit nicer, and a bit more empathetic. She’s more genuinely a child in more ways. And while Lucy and Matt’s relationship was forced by the system and grew from there, Lily had a choice of hundreds of people who could have been her family and chose Arthur.
That leads into what I feel the interesting part of Lily and Arthur’s relationship is, and what I want to explore the most in future books. Lily wants to help Arthur. She wants it desperately.
This is half healthy because she wants to help him because she loves him and wants him to be happy. At a different level, this is arguably NOT healthy, at least in the long term. And Arthur, to the extent he can, needs to find ways to confront that.
A story: When I was a kid, my dad owned a pest control company. I loved my dad, and admired what kind of man he was, so I spent a lot of time on that general career track. I learned how to hire people, how to train them, how to sell things, how to maintain equipment, and a bunch of other stuff that was absolutely useless for a guy like me to know given where my career eventually went. When it came time for me to strike out on my own, I promptly ran everything into the ground and ended up floundering for a few years before I found my feet again.
That’s what happens when someone young follows someone else’s mold and it turns out not to be a good fit. My dad loved me, but he never understood me very well, and because of that, both he and I worked really hard to get me into a situation where there was no chance at all I’d succeed. Neither of us saw it until it was too late.
Arthur loves Lily, so he doesn’t want the same kind of thing to happen. He doesn’t want her to build a connection with him that she’s chained to Arthur for her entire life, but he also doesn’t want her to feel abandoned when he pushes her to become her own person.
The biggest problem with this is Lily herself. She has agency, so when she finds out that Arthur is staying behind at the cost of losing a lot of his friends, she doesn’t care that he’s okay with it. She’s not okay with hurting Arthur, and reacts to this by getting into a day-long battle of wills with the system, triumphing over it, and forcing herself into a class.
At the end of book 2, this turns out pretty okay. She keeps Arthur, who in turn can go where he needs to be while still taking care of her. She has a class we’ve seen is highly useful and desirable, and she’s going to one of the best possible settings to develop it. But if things are going to end up happy for her, which I promise they are, we need to make sure she’s pursuing what’s best for her.
MIZU
Mizu is not supposed to be specifically autism-spectrum, although I totally understand if it’s fun for some people to imagine her that way. She’s not explicitly not-that either, so it still works.
What she is supposed to be is a person for whom being talkative, visibly friendly and loud are a second language of sorts. She’s from a subtle body-language sort of people group, and that’s just how she learned to communicate. She’s fully capable of learning a second language, and I never, ever imagined her as someone who stays quiet when they have things to say.
As Book 2 progressed, I had her talking more and more. She’s not always great at communicating, but as she gets more and more practice, she becomes more and more comfortable with talking. We see her talking to Arthur more, but we also see her having longer conversations where she’s interacting with more people at once than before, and doing just fine. She’s learning.
I always to gradually introduce the fact that Mizu is funny, not just because she’s constantly apologizing for war crimes she didn’t commit, but that she tells jokes, laughs at things, finds fun things amusing, and is generally down for a good time. To the extent I could, I tried to make her make big strides in that respect for Book 2.
Mizu and Arthur’s relationship is mostly calm in this book, which I think is great. They don’t have huge problems to deal with and for the most part, just enjoy each other’s company. She works, he works, they get together when they can, and when they can get together, they have a good time. There are a few bumps in the road, but mostly they are a good match for each other.
You know what I love the most about this relationship? It had to take a back seat to a lot of stuff in the book, and that was fine. Mizu has her own work, her own goals, and her own life apart from Arthur, just as he has apart from her. I could say “hey, Arthur has to go on a bunch of trips and have his own issues and moments with other people,” and for the most part, we knew that Mizu would be okay with that. It’s a healthy relationship.
MILO
One of Milo’s roles in the book is as an anti-audience-surrogate. Think about it like this:
* Arthur is you. You see the world through his eyes. Everything that you would find weird, he finds weird too. You get to pretend you are in the Demon World because Arthur notices some of the same things you would if you immigrated there.
* Milo is you if you had grown up there. He finds the entirety of his world normal and familiar, so he can explain stuff to us. We can watch his reactions to see how unusual a situation is. We can count on him to keep us from embarrassing ourselves too bad by explaining the little social things that we might otherwise misunderstand.
When the objectively weird Demon Empire expansion begins, Milo treats it as completely normal. That’s weird to both us and Arthur because moving from your home and starting a new life should be a big, stressful thing even if you were expecting it. Half of this calm is genuine because Milo really is a happy-go-lucky guy who rolls with the punches. Half of it, we later find out, is fake. He’s worried and apprehensive just like anyone else would be, he just hides it.
I tried to have more than a few moments like that in the book. When Milo is first talking to Arthur about visiting his dad, we find he’s slightly desperate for his dad to see his progress, and a bit uncomfortable about that part of himself which craves recognition from someone really important to him. Arthur helps him come to terms with that. When he sees his dad laid up and hurt, he’s very uncomfortable with it, and Arthur helps him with that too.
Milo isn’t just pretending to be strong and comfortable. Most of the time, he is. In the first book, Arthur relied on that stability as he figured out where he fit in the world. But by the end of the second book, we’ve seen the limits of that comfort and strength. That’s going to be very important going into the third book, where both Arthur and Milo find themselves on even footing as they work to tame an environment that’s unfamiliar to both of them.
MINOS
Minos is twelve different kinds of dad, all at once. He’s a giant. He has the coolest job, the most masculine personality of anyone in either book, and seems to be a legitimately good husband and father.
And, for most of the book, he’s not strong enough to walk.
Minos is a cool character and I like him, but his primary function was helping show a part of father-son relationships that I think is interesting. When Milo stresses out about showing his dad all his progress, it’s probably one of the very last times he will do that. When Milo sees his dad hurt and has to grapple with that, it fundamentally changes their relationship as well. Minos is important because he helps us examine what growing up does to the relationships between fathers and sons, how they change and morph when someone is still a son but no longer a child.
I like the character generally, obviously, but that’s the main thing he’s here for. All the other design choices were the direct result of trying to invent someone who deserved Ella.
ELLA
Besides letting us in on the fact that she is still super excited about being married to Minos, we don’t learn that much about Ella in this book. She also doesn’t change much. This is because of one simple fact: Ella is already a perfect character to me. I don’t want to change her at all if I can help it.
She’s following everyone to the frontier for lots of story reasons, but if I’m being completely honest, it’s more because I couldn’t bear to cut her out of the story.
KARBO
Still Karbo. He’s half death incarnate, half theme park ride, and half a senior in high school who is genuinely nice to the freshman. It’s 150%, but that’s who Karbo is. Someone who isn’t just 100% but is always 150%. There’s also a side story about Karbo.
TALCA, LITTAL, AND THE BREAKFAST MASTER
Talca was interesting to me in the sense that he’s one of only a few characters we know about that aren’t particularly affected by how very social the Demon World is. He lives his life mostly alone or with people he only sees during the trip. He appears to have family and friends, but doesn’t seem to see them much. He’s solitary, by choice, and likes it.
We see two exceptions to that rule. The first is Littal, who Talca seems to have a weak telepathic bond with. Talca loves his goat-monster like dime-store cowboys love their horses, considers Littal his closest friend, and isn’t ashamed of it. Littal, in turn, seems to be with Talca voluntarily. It’s not like Pokémon, where he can’t leave; he’s there because he wants to be.
Editor Note: Talca also has some phrases from actual truck drivers. It’s a hard profession, physically, mentally, and even spiritually. Thank you to everyone, whether you’re local or on the road, you guys are great.
The Breakfast Master and Talca’s relationship isn’t particularly fleshed out, but it’s clear they see each other a fair amount and have the kind of friendship where it’s okay to give each other shit constantly. I figure that’s how most of Talca’s friendships work. He knows people who are in places he passes a lot and run his favorite restaurants, hotels, and roadside stands.
I was very, very hungry when I wrote the Breakfast Master character, and I make no apologies for this.
STATIONARY MOM AND DAUGHTER WHOSE NAMES I HAVE FORGOTTEN (JANAM AND LEENA)
These were touchy characters for me to write. The last thing I wanted to do is write an arranged marriage situation, and it took a lot of work to avoid that.
Instead, what I was trying to get across was some of the difficulties of a kid growing up in a not-that-populous place that didn’t have a great outlet for their talents, and what a mother might do to get them to a better place. Janam’s okay with Leena dating Spiky, but that’s far from the reason she sends her daughter home with the guys. She just wants her kid to have opportunity, even if that means sending her somewhere far away to get it.
CONCLUSION
Writing is a weird game in that the amount I can write a certain story isn’t just a function of how much I like writing it. I think that Deadworld Isekai is probably eventually going to have more books. There’s more story to tell there, and once some timing things resolve themselves, I’ll return there. How to Survive at the End of the World will likely never have more than three books. Them’s the breaks, whether I like it or not.
My legitimate, real hope is that Demon World Boba Shop just goes on forever. It’s that I believe, deep down, that I need it. Whatever other projects I work on, DWBS is a calming place to go, have a cup of tea, and think about what life would be like if everyone in it agreed that being nice was the only acceptable default.
Book two, for me, was a setup book for that future. It was a book that expanded the world in a way that gave me enough space to write a dozen more novels, if fate allows that.
And assuming it does, I hope I justify you coming along for the ride with every single paragraph I commit to paper. I wanted to write this, but nothing makes me happier than the fact that people wanted to read it, that they understand what I’m trying to do, and that they get something out of it.
Thank you. Genuinely, thank you. And I’ll see you in Book 3.