Hello there! I’ve divided this Afterword into sections so people can easily read the parts they’re interested in knowing. If you read nothing else, I suggest taking a look at the Future Series and Future of Fiends For Hire segments for announcements.
THE USUAL FARE
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First, I want to get the expected out of the way. Thank you so much for reading Fiends For Hire. It’s my first time writing anything—likely obvious from the quality in the earlier volumes, but hopefully it has improved as the series went on. If you’re reading this, odds are you read the series all the way through, so I’m deeply grateful to you for giving it a chance. I hope it lived up to your expectations.
If you haven’t already, please consider leaving a rating or review, and I’d especially love to hear from people who have read the story in its entirety. And if you know someone who might enjoy the series, perhaps pass along a recommendation. But if you don’t want to do any of that, it’s perfectly fine! Just reading the series is all the support I could ask for.
I do want to give a special shoutout to all those who left comments along the way, both on the series and through discussions on Discord. It was amazing seeing your reactions, reading/judging your theories and speculations, and also incorporating the ideas many of you had for plots, monsters, Fiends, and everything else. It’s also always nice to be thanked for the chapter.
If you do have any lingering questions about the series, or parts that weren’t quite clear, feel free to ask anything either in the comments, through a DM, or on Discord. I’d be happy to answer any and all of them.
I know one a few people have asked about was Itsy’s Curse. There’s a reason it didn’t get activated in this series, but since it remained dormant, someone will claim it for themselves and use it in a later series—more on that later. However, I know that not everyone will read my later series or have the patience to wait for whenever that may be, so I will reveal the details of her Curse in the Author’s Note at the end of this in a spoiler box.
But let's get to some more specifics
HOW IT STARTED & INFLUENCES
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So the idea for Fiends For Hire was one I’ve been thinking about for a really long time. Originally, believe it or not, it started as a concept for a RWBY fanfic titled ‘JAID’. But as the ideas kept coming, it steadily evolved into its own series with virtually no ties to the original premise. However, you will still see a lot of influence from RWBY throughout the series specifically in monster and weapon designs. But basically all that survived from the original concept were the names Drim and Jaid, along with one weapon that was given to Kada.
Another large influence for the series was Konosuba, more specifically the light novels. Obviously, a lot of the humor and more slice-of-life nature is prevalent throughout the series, but really left an impact on me was how the fight scenes were written. They were exciting and flashy but in a way that didn’t take itself too seriously. And I found that really interesting and aimed to model my own in a similar way.
However, what probably had the biggest specific influence in the series creation was the movie Kingsman. I was really enthralled by how they handled the recruitment part of that movie, and that was where the wheels really began to turn for me, where that shoddy fanfic started to develop into its own story. It also mixed in some influence from Fairy Tail since I wanted that feeling of camaraderie of the guilds in that series.
And actually, the recruiting/interview section of Volume 3 was the first properly developed idea I had, where the rest of the series blossomed from in both directions. So in a way Volumes 1 & 2 were actually all just prequels to the series I was envisioning, something to get it to that point.
The interview section was also quite different than how I’d initially envisioned it at the start. Originally, anyone who failed to be recruited by the Fiends For Hire were going to be killed on the spot. But imagine my surprise when I got to writing that point and the tone of the story was wildly different from that dark idea. Also, I had written the characters in such a way that they would never perform such heinous acts—well, maybe Phon.
One more influence worth mentioning is Assassin's Creed Syndicate. I loved the sibling dynamic in that game which is why I wanted sibling main characters. And also the mission in the game where they steal the printing plates for making money is what spawned the bank robbing arc in Volume 2.
But back to how it began. The idea for the series was constantly writing and rewriting itself in my head, bothering me for literal years. I was losing so much sleep, haunted by new ideas nonstop when laying in bed. Eventually, it got to the point that I just needed to get it out of my head. However, as someone who hated writing all through school, my original hopes were never a book.
I wanted to make an anime or tv series, but I had no budget, connections, or well, anything. Then I scaled back the vision to wanting to make a manga or comic, but… I couldn’t draw. However, even if I was bad at it, I could at the very least write the idea, even if I was no good at it, just to get it out of my head and onto paper. So some insomnia riddled night in December of 2017 at 2 am, I opened a word document and just had at it.
Then I proceeded to write the entire first volume over the course of four months, a few hours each sleepless night. It was great to finally clear out all those ideas. And while that first draft was bad—and I mean bad bad—I had far more fun writing than I expected. But then I took a big break there, toyed with editing a bit, but not much progress was made.
Over the next few years, I wrote on and off, eventually making it through the second volume and into the beginning of the third. But I didn't delve far into it because of work and life. Still, though, I had a series I’d come to love so much and wanted to share it with people, so I finally got the motivation to post it on some sites in September 2022.
Of course, it didn’t blow up like every new author hopes. But hey, people were reading it, even if just a few, That was all I needed to keep posting. And I got some great feedback that allowed me to retune some aspects I’d struggled with. And eventually the series did get some traction, mostly thanks to shoutouts from other authors. Then I suddenly found myself with regular readers and all their expectations that came along with it.
The chapters had to keep flowing, because that was the nature of the websites. Like it or not, I was a Serial Web Novel Author now and didn’t want to disappoint the few fans I had. So that became my motivation. I began writing regularly, pumping out more words a week than I thought possible. And over the course of about 2 years, I finished the series, adding roughly a million worlds to the original set. So though the bulk was completed during that time, the series was worked on over the span of 8ish years.
MORE SERIES TRIVIA
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I thought it would be fun to share a bit more trivia about the series since I’ve already mentioned a few other tidbits. These are just off the top of my head while writing this.
1. The confrontation at the end of Volume 1 between the Fiends and the Police wasn’t in my original draft. Originally, they just got on the train in Constead peacefully and moved back to Bisomote with no issues. Tusmon didn’t try to stop them, and he wasn’t set up to be a recurring antagonist, and Drim never faced off against Nachi in the city square. But I got feedback from my sister that the ending of the first volume wasn’t climactic enough, especially after the chapter before with the failure against the Beehexoth. She was totally right, and the added conflict both improved the first book immensely and completely changed the course of the series.
2. Rathe is actually an anagram of Earth. Some of you may think that’s stupidly obvious, while others probably never picked on it. Truth is, I was just lazy, and didn’t want to think of something better. But I promise I will never be that horrendously terrible with a planet name again. (Says the guy who named the only other planet in the series ‘P2’ or ‘Planet 2’. It makes sense in the story, okay!)
3. Speaking of names, I’m terrible at them! Since the beginning 8 years ago until now, I’ve always been horrible at coming up with names. People, places, objects, any proper noun—you name it, because I can’t! So I end up having two major methods of coming up with names if nothing instantly comes to mind.
The first is to take a main facet of a character or their theming, run it through a thesaurus, and derive something from that. A prime example of this is Kada’s last name ‘Susten’. Since she has water theming, I looked up water in a thesaurus, found ‘sustenance’ and shortened it to ‘Susten’. Bam, name done. Another example is Mallea. Since she could learn anything, she was very malleable. There are many others like this I’m sure.
The second method is to look around my room, or office, or whatever, pick two items, and shove them together to make a name. Or will also do this after the previous thesaurus method. An example of this is… huh, I can’t think of any. I know I’ve done it a bunch of times, but I guess I mixed the names well enough that it’s too difficult to recognize their origin now.
So please, if you want a character, place, anything named after you in the future, let me know and save me from some name-making agony! Also, here’s a few more name trivia below:
1. Drim comes from my online handle ‘Drimphed’ that I’ve used basically everywhere for nearly two decades, which people would always shorten to just ‘Drim’. This was a huge mistake on my part. When people talk about the character, Drim, it always feels weird to me, Drim the author. Definitely will never name another character that for as long as I live.
2. Phon is frankly just as bad. It goes back to the video game Borderlands 2, where I named each character something with Drim in it. So one of them was Drimphony, cus it sounded like symphony. I won’t claim it was good or clever in any capacity, but that is where ‘Phon’ came from, which I ultimately do love as a name.
3. Drazah is Hazard spelled backwards. My creativity frightens me sometimes.
4. Xard Randex is a direct reference to Xander Drax from the movie The Phantom. It’s basically the name backwards, but with the E and A switched. ‘Begins and ends with the letter X’.
If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.
5. Ahvra’s full name, Ahvra Metissa Zalksin, is a reference to Raven’s incantation from Teen Titans, ‘Azarath Metrion Zinthos’
6. Deborah, and the rest of the bureaucrats in the series, such as Keith, were the only ones allowed to have ‘normal’ names because they are boring people. A stupid rule I imposed on myself was every other character had to have a unique name by my dumb naming conventions. Because I felt that if any prevalent characters had regular names, that’d make them stand out in a bad way.
7. Tize comes from Armatize, which is a Tales of Zestiria reference. For the longest time I thought I’d gotten it from digimon, but apparently not.
8. Savs Valen is named after my best friend. She is very similar to the character in both the best and worst ways.
9. Roque is short for Baroque, partially because of the definition, but mostly because of Baroque Works from One Piece.
4. Speaking of Roque, he was never supposed to exist! The man was nowhere to be found in the Fiends I had planned for the series, but when it came to the interview section, I felt that I was specifically lacking on male Fiends that would become prevalent characters. So I spent literal days racking my brain on someone who would be good. I knew I wanted them to have some sort of power related to item possession, but it took a while to finetune it. But what came out is easily one of my most favorite characters, in personality, power, and just to write.
5. Pox was supposed to originally be a Panda Fox. But my sister mentioned that it was basically just a Red Panda, so I changed it to a Koala Fox which I ended up loving more. That’s where the name comes from too, shortened and combined like the rest of the monsters, and I liked it so I decided to transfer it over.
6. I had a few rules for writing the powers in this series, to hopefully make them feel different from a lot of what you had seen before.
1. The powers had to be in some way entirely unique from anything I’d personally seen. For example, Drim’s plant powers are obviously fairly common, but I’d never seen it used before where other plants had to first be absorbed and recycled. And that mindset extends to every Curse in the series.
2. Something can’t be created from nothing. It’s a big reason why there’s no real elemental powers in the series, except for the one-off ice-Fiend Kantan. But they couldn’t make fireballs or rocks or water or anything of the like. There’s 2 that bend the line, though. Xard having rings with infinite energy, but those had to be crafted at least. And Jaid’s clones, but the caveat there is that they’re a part of her, and if they get hurt, so does she.
3. No power could be completely unbeatable. If it’s too strong, there had to be some form of counter for it, and every character had to be possibly beatable by another character. Ahvra is the main one that comes to mind for this. With her Curse, she could instantly defeat anyone. So I had to give her an extremely high energy usage cost while she herself had a very weak constitution. This meant her power could only be used a few times in quick succession, allowing for the group as a whole to beat her.
PERSONAL PLANS & FUTURE SERIES
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Now that the series is done, the first thing I plan to do is read it! After all, it’s ultimately why I wrote the Cosdamned thing. No one else was going to write it, so if I wanted to read it, I had to do it myself. I’ll also be doing some editing along the way and updating the wiki until it’s complete.
But after that, I do hope to relax a bit. Catch up on some games, maybe do a bit of reading myself. If you think there are any series I or other readers might like similar to FFH, feel free to leave a comment below.
However, all that said, I doubt I’ll be away from writing for too long. I have too many series that I want to write, that I want to share with anyone who will read them. So many that I fear I won’t be able to get to them all in my lifetime. But now that I’ve gotten used to serialization writing, the hope is that I’ll be able to get through each series a lot quicker—not 8 years next time.
I don’t know exactly when the next series will start to release. I haven’t written anything as of yet, so it’ll be a bit at least. And I am hoping to do a proper Patreon next time which will require a significant backlog upfront. But hopefully it will be months and not years. My patience in holding back from release also might give out since feedback from readers is a lot of my motivation to write.
Of course, when the next one is released, I will announce it on this series page, so feel free to stay followed if you want the update, or you can follow me on my profile page for notifications for any and all new releases. I’ll also likely post regular updates on my Discord if you’re interested. On that note, the purpose of the Discord as of today will change from just Fiends For Hire to all future series I write and it will receive a relevant name change soon, to whatever the shared universe name for the books I write becomes.
Which leads me to mention that all series I write going forward will be part of a shared literary universe, though it’s likely none will take place on the same planet as Fiends For Hire. However, there will be a shared connection through them all, being the gods and demigods, and the various universes under their rule. They will be a recurring theme in each series. Some will be very relevant and front-facing to the plot, but others will be little more than passing mention and part of the bigger lore. As for the name of this shared literary universe, I’m currently leaning towards 'Fiendish Fables', but feel free to leave your suggestions!
I do believe I’ve settled on which of my many ideas I’ll write next. And while I can’t share too many details, I can give a general overview. It will be a satirical school life story, covering both high school and college, with a heavier emphasis on comedy and interesting scenarios. The cast will likely be much smaller and focused, and the feeling will be closer to the earlier volumes of FFH before it exploded to a much larger scale.
However, there will also still be plenty of action and unique powers that you’ve come to expect from me. They will always be a big part of everything I write. Odds are, if you enjoyed Fiends For Hire, there’s a good chance you’ll enjoy the next one too. From there, the stories may branch out a bit in genres, but the feeling and style will likely remain the same. And I can share who the divine being for the next story would be: ‘Title, Demigod of Stories and Archives’
I don’t want to give too much away, so that’s all I can share for now. Hopefully you’ll give it a chance when it comes out!
THE FUTURE OF FIENDS FOR HIRE
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Ever since I started posting this series, I’ve always been dreading its end. Not just because it would be hard to let go, but because the idea of dealing with self-publishing has always been a bit of a nightmare for me. It’s part of why I haven’t stubbed it yet. The other part being that I wanted the full series to be completed and readable from beginning to end before I did so. Meaning that anyone who wanted to read it for free had the opportunity.
Ultimately, I just want to write stories that I love. Writing to appease a market or dealing with the hassle of amazon is frankly a part of it I have no interest in. Which is why I’m extremely pleased to announce that I’ve signed the series with a publisher!
Fiends For Hire has been licensed to Mango Media Publishing! It will be coming to digital, paperback, and Kindle Unlimited in the near future—professionally edited and with new art. I don’t have the timeline just yet, but will definitely be sharing the details as they come.
I’m super excited to work with this publisher since it seems they specifically cater to longer series that are a bit more casual and character centric, which is likely what I’ll be writing for the foreseeable future. They’ve published such works as Beneath the Dragon Eye Moons, Dead Tired, Soul Guardian, Metaworld Chronicles, and many many more. I’m including a link to the Mango Media Discord as well if you want to see their full catalogue or chat with other readers who enjoy similar stories.
And I’d be delighted if you consider picking up the series in any form when it becomes available, or possibly spread the word to any potentially interested parties when it does. Of course, I won’t pressure you all for any of that, and I hope that you continue to read any of the free series I post here in the future, ideally released all the way to the end in full before they go to Amazon. But if you were considering donating some money to either me or the series, I’d rather you do it through the amazon releases so that you also get something out of it too rather than just giving me money directly.
The only real downside to this is I’ll be stubbing the series sooner than I anticipated. I wanted to enjoy that completed tag for a good while. Additionally, you'll see chapter names and numbers changed over the next few weeks since I'll me updating them to match the book releases.
As for other content relating to the Fiends For Hire, I can say now that several characters will be returning in future series as well. Of course, I won't name them all here, you’ll just have to be on the lookout. But I did confirm in my Discord a while ago that Pox will return in the future. Also, from the last epilogue, it should be obvious that Start Hand Guy will return as well.
Feel free to leave any ideas for who you’d want to see and how you’d want to see them. Roque gets Isekai’d. Drimini grows her own planet. (Note: These are just examples.) Anything is possible, either in their own dedicated series or part of another. Hopefully there will be plenty of references as well for readers of this series to catch in my future works
WRAPUP
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So that’s it for now. It honestly still hasn’t really hit me yet that this series is actually complete. Feels like I should be waking up early tomorrow to write some more. And while I could have written about these goofball delinquents forever, I do understand that it’s time to let them rest and move onto something new.
Just the usual spiel one more time. Rate, review, favorite, tell a friend, re-read when it’s on kindle unlimited, possibly buy a copy when it’s out in the future—fix every wobbly table in your house. And I’ll plug the Discord for the 22nd time (I didn’t actually count). Feel free to join if you want to discuss the series, ask any questions, get the latest updates on amazon releases and future series, just hang out, zjikpost with some memes, or lurk forever and forget it exists.
You guys were my first set of readers, so I’ll never forget each and every one of you! It’s been a blast! Hope to see you all on a new series in the future!
-Drim, the author, not the character, that would be weird.