I truly wish I could sit here and focus on the brilliant side of that review, but I’m obsessed with the bleh portion. The LitRPG was good, but the rest was just kind of bleh is what that review said. Does that mean that once my family arrived, I’d taken a step back from the adventure of our situation and gone straight into the challenges of a soccer mom? I got this review that said my LitRPG stuff was great but that the family interactions were bleh and that my daughter was intolerable. If you’re reading this on Royal Road, you’ve seen it. It’s the only review at this point.

Here I am trying to get enough author mana to do the impossible, and all I have to look at is that review. I’m supposed to be grateful that it isn’t a trolly half-star review that trashes me completely, but I can’t unsee it. It’s there every time I upload anything, and comments have dropped off. I’m fretting. It’s just who I am. At least our views have jumped up to twenty thousand and our followers are rising. I’ve just got to keep writing and publishing. I should be happy that we’re on Rising Stars, at least in the category of satire, and I am, but even as I’m writing all this, my family is still in the fight. Do I keep saving the mana for the end game or do I throw a god card to help them out?

I hear you, or at least I think I do. What I really need to do is just keep writing about the actual tale instead of pathetically obsessing over a review. I’m supposed to be a grown up, right? Get back to the story. That’s what you’re thinking, right? Alright. I’ll shut up on my neuroses and get back to what was going on. It’s just that I get all distracted by… Nevermind. I got it. I’ll tell you what we did next. It’s just that the fighting got so easy. The engine was really unbalanced. Is it really bleh to the people who kept reading to hear about the family dynamics? Should I be focusing on the fighting instead? We were just so overpowered for these poor priests that we were more focused on the family and making sure we didn’t die.

Imagine that we’re on Survivor. It’s not the challenges that kill you. It’s the personal dynamics that get you voted off. I didn’t want that to happen with us. I mean, seriously, it’s you as the reader who gets to vote us out of your following or favorite list and then, our family as the story is really getting voted off the island. The winners of the million dollars are the ones who didn’t play it too safe but also didn’t get in everyone’s faces. On Survivor, you get voted off for not understanding your fellow islanders. On Royal Road, you’re getting voted down in ratings if you don’t understand your audience (something I’m horrific at, if my mental breakdown and the exodus of followers in chapter 23 is any evidence).

Maybe it’s more like Big Brother than Survivor. You, the audience, are the ones to vote me out or not. I think our counseling session was amusing and I think it was hilarious that we did it around killing off the priesthood that we needed to take out. Then I lay in bed at night and can’t sleep because while Kat and Dom are down there fighting Fizzbarren, I’m out here alone and second-guessing every writing decision I make. That’s me. That’s the me that you started to read with my mouth filled with dirt. And Mr. Bleh is right. That did promise something that changes dramatically when my family shows up, because I, as a person, change dramatically when they are around. I’m still the same person inside, but my family makes me stronger and more able to deal with my neuroses.

What was all that fighting to me? Dom was simply better at wiping out vast swathes of people, and Kat was better at the gaming aspects. I took a back seat on those things once they came along, and I did what I really do best and that is keeping our family emotionally strong enough to do their thing to the fullest. Did I lead you on? Did you expect me to be different? I can assure you that I am different as an author because I’m doing it alone here in Fizzbarren’s workshop. Maybe I shouldn’t have told you that, but according to the books on writing that fill Fizzbarren’s bedroom bookcases, foreshadowing is a good thing. Ugh. Whatever. All those books contradict each other anyway.

Right. I was getting back to it. Just keep reading because, foreshadowing, there’s going to be a button at the end of the book. I think you want to press that button. I know I would want to. I haven’t quite figured out how the dynamic will work for the button, but I’m working on it. So, here. Back to the stuff you want to read. I think. I hope. Whatever. I’m writing it, or rather this stupid Quill is writing all these random thoughts out and you’re doomed to read my mental wrestling, but now I’m going back to the story.

I do wonder if? No, it’s silly, but then again. What would happen if I hooked the button up to the review process? Would the nemesis engine consider Mr. Bleh to be a nemesis if I worded that button just right? Are there more books to be written beyond this? Could that power the future of the nemesis engine? QUILL!! Stop writing this stuff! You’re going to scare them all off! What do you mean, you don’t think so? Enticing? No way! I mean, no way, right?

Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

Could I write a whole book about how Mr. Bleh endured the world? I bet they’d be good at it. I’d have rewired the thing though. More balancing. Mr. Bleh wouldn’t make such a bad guinea pig, right? Now stop. That wouldn’t be any more ethical than Fizzbarren’s use of the engine. I’m a philosophy major, after all, and ethics are very important to me. Yes, pre-med can major in ethics. On the one hand, I could probably shove in a bunch of clap trap about the ends justifying the means but that is a very slippery slope, not that they call it that anymore. Kantian logic could easily justify it, but I’d be lynched by any true philosophy students or professors. After all Kant can be used to justify almost anything just like utilitarianism can. But will they read this at all? Much less get this far in the story? Not likely.

Then I get into the ethics of the corruption of power. Just because I’d have the power of sucking in critics of my work, that doesn’t make it ethical to do so. And maybe I’d be inviting more criticism from people who really want to come into this world. Would I set it up so that that good reviewers would get extra stat or spell boosts while critics would start out with the mouthful of dirt? Ah, the temptation.

I can’t believe I’m contemplating it! That is terrible. On top of being a fan of philosophical ethics, I’m a Christian and I should be above such petty temptation. Dom would try to talk me into dumping Mr. Bleh straight into the gnoblin dungeon with a pickaxe and loincloth. Kat would probably be nice enough to give the person a sword and a torch. Thing is, I don’t dislike the review. They left a review and I’m immensely grateful for that. And they said I was brilliant and that bubbles up my very soul. Then as my eyes are closed and I’m trying to sleep, all I can see is that bleh and my mind races into scenarios that I’m ashamed to admit.

Wait, what? Quill stop! A whole chapter? Are you crazy? I’ll be lynched! There are rules against blackmailing readers into reading your book. We’ll get kicked off Royal Road and then what will we do? I don’t have enough mana… I guess I do have enough mana to simply retire into a mix of Fizzbarren’s house in this world and a bit of adventure in the Nemesis engine’s world. If we get kicked off, it just means that I don’t have any responsibility to give anyone something they may or may not even want.

I need sleep. I’m taking a sleeping pill so I can get to sleep. I could just cast a spell on myself except that I’m stuck out here in this world, writing. Three months of writing out here is only three weeks in the game normally, but because I needed more mana, I slowed it down even more. I’ve been writing and publishing on Royal Road for about three and a half months, but only three and a half days have passed in the engine world. Maybe I should just go back in the world as a super-powered being and be done with it.

Still, there’s you. Just as Mr. Bleh gladdens my heart with brilliance, and sacks my ego with bleh, you lighten the load of writing while making the load itself necessary, or if not necessary, maybe the word I’m looking for is worthy. I know how shy you are. I am too. It’s so hard for me to write comments and reviews because I’m paranoid I’ll say something wrong like Mr. Bleh, right? Then I could get a whole chapter about me. God forbid that I cause some poor writer the same edge of sleep insecurities as I’ve felt.

Oh, Quill just stop the humiliation. Readers don’t want to know this stuff. Didn’t we learn anything from Chapter 23? If we lose another smattering of followers because you posted my humiliating emotional turmoil, I’ll never speak to you again. Autonomy doesn’t mean outright defiance! I know I gave you the vow that you and all the constructs would have no fear of my wrath, but I’m begging you to stop. Please. Delete this whole chapter and let’s just get back to the story. How would you like it if your deepest secret feelings were exposed?

Pontification +40

Exp +400 (3,150,575/5,985,462)

Fizzbarren was fuming during these days of the decimation of the church in the capital. Oh, this is Quill. I thought you might want to know Fizzbarren’s side. There isn’t much, but I’m trying to make up for that exposé that I did on Karma’s thought process. I was hoping that you might see that softer, less professional, side of her and be more sympathetic, but she is rather upset. Perhaps she does deserve a bit of mollification. So, this is an excerpt of what we constructs knew was happening with Fizzie-baby, as Karma calls him.

The other constructs and I were frantically altering the content coming out of the typewriter, but Fizzbarren was clever, and we were still very afraid of him. Luckily, the typewriter was the most clever of us all. What? Hey! I didn’t say that. I didn’t even think it. The typewriter is editing. Ignore any grandiose claims that the typewriter Quill makes. Stop it!

Okay, look. We sped up the time in the game while Fizzbarren slept. It was all the typewriter’s idea. No, it was not! Yes, it was because the typewriter was a genius.

Fizzbarren was mad the next morning after we’d done it and threatened to destroy the bench, who was now Sammi, if they didn’t get Karma to accept her new quest. We tried to tell him that Karma was just doing a quest for the king, who Fizzbarren liked, but Fizzbarren wasn’t an idiot. Hey!

This isn’t going to work, said the mirror.

I’m leaving it in, I protested.

This is why you don’t give constructs the unsupervised power to publish without approval, said Karma.

We were not amused. So, I published it anyway before she took the power awa…