At this moment, I’m looking down at the work of about ten months and seeing that I’ve written eight novels, by most publisher’s standards of length. Eight. If you put my novels edge to edge, you could make an octagon for tiny UFC fighters to punch each other in. And they’d do it too. They get antsy.
This particular book also marks the end of my second trilogy. The first was Deadworld Isekai, which outside of a few short stories was the first fiction I ever really worked on. It got bigger than I expected, which gave me the room to write this series, and then this series did at least all right, which let me write Demon World Boba Shop.
So far, I’ve been able to get just enough momentum with every novel to let me keep writing more. There have been just enough Amazon reviews, purchases, Patreon subs and general support to keep the lights on, and I’ve never been happier with the way I feed my family.
But it is, in the end, also kind of hard.
So a fun thing about writing: It’s always your fault if it’s bad, but there’s not always something to fix the problem. On an average day, I write 2-3 chapters, each about 2000 words long. My personal philosophy on that is that every 2000 words should have something real, substantial, and interesting in it. That means every day, I get up and pray that I can have 2-3 interesting, fun ideas that I then will put into the forge, pound on the word-anvil, and turn into content for you.
Some days this is really, really easy. The end of this book, for instance, was ten-ish chapters that I had been thinking about for months, and whose shape and form was already determined before I wrote a word of them. Some days, I’ll wake up, take a shower, drink coffee, and then sit in front of my computer for two hours staring at absolutely nothing before my brain catches on something I can actually write.
Over time, this has gotten a bit harder. Not impossible, just harder. It’s like drawing water out of a well, in that the more you do it, the deeper you have to dig and the more effort you have to put in to getting a bucket of liquid out of it. There’s still water down there, somewhere. It just takes more to get.
I tell you this so I can talk about two other things. The first is that this particular author’s note is going to talk about the series as a whole. I’ll talk about the book itself, of course, but I want to focus a bit on the journey it took to actually finish the trilogy, and that will take the focus a bit off the nuts-and-bolts side. I think it’s the most interesting way to talk about the books in terms of what I can write today, so that’s what you’ll get. A little different, and hopefully a little better.
The second is that, if you’ve read this far, you probably enjoyed the book, at least a little. And that doesn’t mean you owe me (quite the other way around), but it does mean you are the person I can ask to go do a review. You are the most likely demographic to tell a friend, or to post about the book in a Facebook group or something. If you can, and it won’t hurt you, please do so for our published Amazon books.
That’s what lets me keep writing, and I love to write.
As always, this note is minimally edited and optimized for flow-of-consciousness rather than strict grammatical accuracy. Caveat emptor and all that.
THE THREE BOOKS
The first HTS book was conceptualized, partially, as a way to make fun of one of my friends. He’s a big ginger teacher, a good guy, and deserved to get razzed on a bigger, brighter stage.
Fun fact: This is why sometimes you will see stereotypes about the redheaded in the book that do not, in fact, exist in real life, like the idea that they are, as a people, bad at cardio. There’s no evidence for this that I’m aware of. There were a lot of stereotypes that didn’t make it into the book, like the idea that people with reddish hair can’t see fruit, or that they have a higher frequency of polydactylies.
After that conceptualization was covered, I decided I wanted the book to be several more things besides a way to give my buddy a bit of fun, including:
1. I wanted it to be a system-invasion story where the main character missed the fun, easy beginning parts.
2. I wanted him to wake up having missed almost all of the important bits and way behind the curve of what it actually took to survive in that world.
3. I wanted his class to be non-conventional, to have something to do with shanks and improvised weaponry, and to not be very good.
4. I wanted Earth to have mismanaged the apocalypse so badly that they stood to get very little out of it.
The title itself came out of a fifth thing. In the Dune novels and a lot of others, there are little excerpts at the heads of chapters that are only slightly related to the story at that specific point, that help with world building, and often are in a very different style than the story being told. It’s a fun way to do exposition, and it allows for “breaks” in the writing rhythm where I then would get to stretch out, take a deep breath, and return to the normal stuff fresh.
I wanted to do those in a style not that far off from how the exposition/narration in Hitchhiker’s Guide is done. The idea was that they’d always be amusing and informative, if not entirely necessary or relevant to what was about to happen.
And then, on that framework, I built the first book. I’m a seat-of-the-pants writer, so anything else you got (trash golems, forest dragons, wacky system dialogues, etc.) was invented on the fly as a way to get from point A to point B in a fun, efficient way.
Book one had a lot of foundation to build on, and it was easy to write. I cranked the whole thing out in just a bit over a month, was satisfied with what it was, and life was good.
And then book two came along and was a nightmare. I can admit this to you here because we are all friends: Book two is the weakest book in the series, and the only book I’ve written so far that I’m not thrilled about. I mean, it works. There’s some fun stuff. Any particular moment in it is basically fine, and it got me from where I started at the beginning to where I wanted to be to launch the next.
But was it a great masterpiece, a generational work of genius that will echo across history? Probably not. It’s fine. I tried to do a bit too much in too few words, didn’t get everything I wanted out of it, but it’s fine.
It might sound a bit silly, but this “just fine” status almost broke me. I had to take a break from the series, write something different (the ultra-calm slice-of-life that is Demon World Boba Shop), spend a month or so calming down, then spend another month getting to where I was okay that I didn’t absolutely love my own book.
And then, finally, I could move on to book three. Which, thank providence, I actually like.
Now, do other people like book two? I know at least some of them do. Some of them actually like it a lot. But it was still hard to keep the nose to the grindstone.
Which brings me back to the least satisfying writing advice in existence, but the only writing advice that is consistently true. You have to keep writing. That’s the trick. That’s the magic. You have to actually get up, every day, and type.
You have to ignore all your fragile artist components creaking and groaning at you, pretend you are a bricklayer, and just build some freaking walls. If you do that, eventually everything will turn out all right. If you don’t do that, nothing can save you.
THE THREE SETTINGS
Apocalypse Earth was always supposed to be survivable. Not safe, not sane, but survivable if you played your cards right. To accomplish this, I imagined an apocalypse that had unfolded in stages. Sure, there were world-ending threats here and there, but there were also starter dungeons that didn’t get used all that often. Sure, the main character was a weak baby, but there were leveled hunters and fighters to grease the skids just enough to keep him viable.
It was always supposed to feel possible for Sean to grind rats forever and do reasonably well. When he ended up getting stronger faster, it was because he was willing to take some risks to do better, and because he got unlucky and had to fight some stuff he didn’t want to fight. With most of humanity playing it safe around him and a class that relied on outlier-results to be viable but overperformed with Sean’s weirdness, he was able to work through that world.
Now stop real quick and think about what I did to myself here. I had spent all this time building a world and then introducing you to it. But with Book 2, I shoved the main character down a hole, arriving in an entirely different one. I accrued zero interest on Book 1. I had to start all over. The lentil salespeople and food stands were all for naught. He never saw a single city outside of his spawn zone. He cleared exactly zero S-Class dungeons in the Marianas trench. I left all of that on the table, and moved on.
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
Was it a bad decision? I don’t think so, but it definitely wasn’t one I made with self-preservation in mind.
The second world was always meant to be temporary. I think originally the plan was to spend two or three books there in that village, moving farther and farther out into different zones, different challenges, and different settings that were one and all part of the crack challenge world.
And then I didn’t do that either. I decided it would be more interesting if Sean rushed the pace, foiled the system’s intentions for that period of time, and forced his enemies into a confrontation before they were truly ready for it. Did this have upsides? Absolutely. It kept him from being overpowered in the challenge, for one, which was huge. But I once again binned all the work it took to make a new world, and moved out to a greater universe.
It was important to me that the third universe was boring, at least in places. People lived there and had been living there for generations. In my mind, that means a lot of things would have settled down in a lot of places. Sean initially ends up in a very boring town doing semi-boring day labor, and we get the impression he’s been there for months.
Do dungeons exist in the greater universe? Sure, but we barely see them. Are there natural, beautiful wonders? Of course, but Sean is not able to see them because he’s at work. He has stuff to do, and no time to actually enjoy anything yet. And so he spends the entire novel trying to get to the only place in the universe where he has a chance of getting substantial help, but does it by going to barren planets, more junkyards, and markets.
What I wanted was a situation where Sean would meet enough people and go through enough things that his plans would change, but absolutely not one where he’d stumble on a storehouse of nuclear bombs and solve his issues that way. I wanted it to be about people, stress, and development, not strength as such. The strength he did have was only there to make his survival plausible.
THE TWO GOALS
Sean wants, more than anything else, to save the world.
But like a lot of people who want a lot of things, he hasn’t necessarily thought that through. In Book 1, he’s so far from reaching that goal that the exact way he saves the world and what exact definition of “it” he uses hardly matters.
In Book 2, he’s still on those same rails, but at the end of the book he has the chance to ask for something. And, vaguely, he asks for something too close to “whatever I can get that will help bring the world back” and the system tosses an artifact at him.
At that point, if you looked at everything Sean’s done, you would realize something that he hadn’t yet. Which is that the Earth he wanted to save died a long time ago. Besides Jeff, every human he ever knew from his own era is dead. The governments are all gone. Pei Wei is closed, and it’s never serving a single pad thai ever again. It’s what he thinks he wants, but it’s never coming back. It can’t.
Eventually, he starts running into more humans, and he finds that they aren’t doing so well. This forces him to actually confront what he can really do for the Earth as it exists in the present day. He’s still headed the same place physically, but it’s now pursuing saving an entirely different place.
STRESS
In all the books, Sean basically never gets to stop moving unless he’s actively trapped at a complete standstill. These are his two modes, movement or rest, and he never gets to escape one except through the other.
But most of the time? He’s almost getting killed. When he escapes his normal boring prison life in the current day, he’s immediately attacked by lizards, then escapes what will later become the Shanktuary to get attacked by Zeuses, then gets trapped in a forest of fairy tale death. By the time we reach the end of Book 3, he’s barely holding it together.
I think the standard author-move in that situation is to make someone force the main character to take a break. MC naps for a few hours, gets up feeling refreshed, and kicks ass. I don’t hate that, but there just wasn’t a great time for that to happen. How many weeks would Sean need to actually recover from, say, being chased by ninjas? From nearly getting killed by a giant armor snake? From having to kill someone who until a few minutes ago was an ally?
Luckily, this wasn’t a book about thriving. It was about surviving. So he gets the bare minimum amount of sleep, does what he has to do, and powers through. It’s absolutely not sustainable, but it’s that or dying. So he does what he has to do, swims towards the surface and accepts that he won’t get a breath until he breaks through to the surface.
CHARACTERS
The Old Crew: Jason, Brennan, and Estesia
Jason and Brennan made a choice in Book 2. Adventure called, danger beckoned, and they faltered. When Sean finds them in Book 3, they need rescuing, and it’s clear they can’t do it themselves. They had their chance to be heroes, balked, and now they’re relegated to the sidelines.
I think that’s fair. I couldn’t exclude them from the books entirely, since there’s no reason they wouldn’t survive long enough for Sean to find them. But they don’t get to be a big part of the story anymore, and it’s clear why. Sean can’t trust them to keep going when the going gets tough.
Estesia is a different thing entirely. She never failed Sean. She didn’t get into the challenge stage, but she’s always been reliable. Still, she wasn’t a great fit for the rest of the story. She existed partially to be surpassed by Sean, and once he did that, she didn’t have a great functional space to fill on the team.
She’s in the third book partially to tie up a loose end. When I introduced Estesia, there were a lot of communications about here that were worried she’d inevitably be a romantic character, someone who distracted from the story.
Estesia herself was never unclear about not wanting that. She wanted to work, hunt, and then go back home to her boyfriend. When she shows up in Book 3 pregnant and still with him? Well, man, that’s how life works. Sometimes people maintain happy relationships. Good job, Estesia. I hope someone buys you a cute ranger cloak for the baby post-haste.
The New Guard: Itto, Aggi, and Old Man Guido
Itto was an effort to make a really, really short character, then write him in such a way that you forgot that about him. He’s not a great combatant, but he does have a talent for ships and is essentially the best bus driver Sean could have possibly met up with.
Initially, Itto is along for the ride because he owes Jeff for some life-saving acts that are never made explicit. Later, he begins to understand that Sean is on a fast-track to something big, and stays around to have a chance to get a piece of whatever pie Sean ends up baking.
That in and of itself would be a little far fetched by itself, but he’s also a man who is living in the shadow of his dad, looking to surpass him. “Chain oneself to a rising star who might end up owning a planet” is about the bare minimum you need to do that, in his mind.
Aggi joins up because she needs a ride, and stays because she’s mildly attracted to Sean, and because wherever he goes has a lot of people to stab. It’s not that much more complex than that for her. If she stays around, she can get levels and a fun time. Anything else is a bonus. “But RC,” you might say, “isn’t it dangerous?” Well, sure. But she’s an assassin. She doesn’t care.
Guido wasn’t all that necessary for the story, but I thought it would be nice to hook Sean up with someone who could really take the academic side of the garbage game to the next level, augmenting Sean’s practical use of the same materials. He’s Old Man Guido despite being young for reasons that remained unexplained in the books, but you can consider as being broadly related to being an academic collector type.
The Dragons
Cedarhelm was the dragon we knew, but we also were always aware he was from a planet with more of them. They were all built to follow a few rules:
1. The names would all be a combination of a tree name and a piece of martial equipment.
2. They would all be essentially polite people despite being aware of their own immense might and their forest-protective nature.
3. They’d all be ancient and wise, but only as wise as someone can get while spending all their time in a uniform ocean of trees with limited outside stimulus.
The idea that they’ve been guarding the trees for something was the world’s most boring twist, in my book. I think the average fantasy reader would accept “they like trees and grow a bunch of them” without any more elaboration. Instead, in Book 3, they feel they have a debt to the person who helped them stop being mindless murder machines. The trees only sort of make sense for paying that debt, but it’s the best idea they can actually follow up on, so they do as much of it as possible.
As for betting on Sean, it’s mostly a factor of him being a highly successful human who seems nice. They aren’t dumb people, so they know this is a risk, but it’s also the only risk they’ve been allowed to take in centuries and centuries. It’s the best bet they’ll ever have at repaying their own debt, and they jump at it.
Jeff
Jeff is Jeff. He’s a guy who can do anything, and chooses to fix things until it’s time to blow them up. He’s really good at that, too. Better yet, he never doubted he would be. Jeff is a perfectly confident man, one who had everything he wanted back on old-Earth and knows he can get it again in a new era.
If Jeff were the protagonist, the story wouldn’t interesting. Not because Jeff wouldn’t be up to the challenge, but because everything would have been solved in a week. Sean is the protagonist instead, and Jeff is 0% threatened by that. He settles into doing everything he can to help him, skidding around time, destroying anything that might get in his friend's way.
He does this because he loves Sean. He can do this because he’s Jeff Greco, and because he’s magnificent.
CONCLUSION
This story is about, in part, finding significance. Sean isn’t sad at the beginning of the trilogy because he doesn’t make enough money. He’s sad because he knows he can do big things, and nobody will let him.
At the end of the book, he’s accomplished those big things, and the same jobs he had before don’t seem as bad to him now. He fixes stuff with Jeff, happy as can be. The job was never the problem. He just wanted to feel justified in who he was.
I spent a lot of time in jobs that underutilized me. I did stuff I hated, worked schedules meant to devour me, and the whole time I was suspicious I could do more. And that thought killed me. The things that kept me alive through that time were all meaning that I found elsewhere. I had a good family. I had good friends. And eventually, after enough time, I managed to get into a job that made use of what I was good at, and the difference was night and day.
This story was kind of about making fun of a good friend, but it’s also about finally being allowed to make a difference. As always, I thank all of you for supporting me being able to do it, and I hope for all of you that you find as much significance in your life as I’ve been allowed to find in mine.
Thank you.