You'll have to forgive me for how messy this afterword is likely to be. I've got a bunch of things I feel like saying about Origin of Evil, but after all this time and effort I just don't have the patience to give it a real structure. However, out of respect for my reader's wishes, I'll go ahead and talk first about the things I expect you to care about the most, and then move on in descending order. If I don't happen to answer your question here then feel free to ask me whatever you'd like in the comments. I'll still be paying very close attention to Origin of Evil for what I expect will be a long time moving forward, so whatever you ask is sure to get an answer.

But before I get into it, I want to offer a very special thanks to Anodyne for being such a consistent and thoughtful commenter. I've said it to you multiple times before, but your comments were very important and incredibly helpful. To be completely honest, I really looked forward to seeing your comment with each new chapter, so thank you very much.

Now, as to the the question, "are you planning to set any more books in this universe?"

My honest answer to that is I'm just not sure at this point. I do have multiple ideas for more content set in this universe, but at the moment I think what's really going to determine whether I go ahead with them or not is reader demand. If in the coming days and weeks I get the impression from you all that interest in that kind of thing is low, I'll probably just move on to the other stuff I have planned. I've already committed a significant amount of time and work to a different novel that has nothing at all to do with this universe (it's science fiction rather than low fantasy). As of right now I fully expect that to be my next project, but who knows! I enjoy the universe of this novel, and you wouldn't have to twist my arm very far to get me to write more about it. The only thing I think I know for sure about this is that Gideon's time as the protagonist is done.

Moving on. I'll talk in a general sense about the second draft, and the changes I'll be making to the story.

The first thing on my mind about this is the age gap between the male and female leads. When I was planning these characters out, I settled for an age gap of five years for a couple reasons that have mostly to do with their roles in the story. At the time, I decided to make Gideon twenty-five because that age is generally when men hit their physical peak in terms of strength and endurance. In that way I felt that it would help make the more difficult fights he gets into and survives slightly more believable. Also, I felt very strongly that he needed to be at least a few years older than Surelin in order to maintain credibility as the mentor figure in the first half of the novel. I still believe that if I'd made them the exact—or very close to—the same age, it would've detrimentally impacted the believability of their situation overall.

In Surelin's case, I decided she needed to be young but not-too-young for the sake of selling her naivete. It's one thing to tell the reader, "well she's a princess, she doesn't know about all this stuff we peasants are used to," but it's another thing entirely to actually see her demonstrating inexperience. Also, and it must be said, I think readers would find her slightly harder to identify with if she were older. To be honest, I fully expected readers to identify more with her than with Gideon, simply because his life and way of living is fairly unnatural to what most of us are used to. Also, and I think at this point it's okay to directly state this, Surelin is the hero of Origin of Evil. In that respect, it's very important that the reader is able to identify with her. Gideon is the protagonist, sure, and he does interact with the various themes of heroism that are present throughout the novel, but he's definitely no hero. He's the hero's mentor/love interest. That's the role I intended for him, at least.

Looking back, I think you mostly forget about the five year age gap between them as the novel moves along. But after thinking it over for a long, long time, I've decided for the second draft to bring Surelin's age up by one year and Gideon's down by two. I think twenty-one and twenty-three will feel a bit more comfortable in terms of the initial power dynamic between them, while also maintaining the things I initially intended with their ages. It might be one thing if Gideon were thirty and Surelin were twenty-five, but with all this time to think about it I've come to feel slightly uncomfortable with the current gap as it stands.

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Obviously since a full year passes in the novel, by the end Gideon and Surelin have both had a birthday that simply doesn't come up in the narration because there's other, more important stuff happening, but still. This way will be better, I think.

Moving on, I'll talk a bit about the changes I'm planning to make to their relationship in the first part of the novel. I should probably preface this part by saying that I'm pretty unhappy with the overall quality of the first six or so chapters, so you can expect them to become very different (hopefully much better) in the future. This was my very first long-form creative writing project, and it was a very...educational experience, to put it lightly. Personally, I think there's a visible improvement in my writing starting around chapter twelve, or so. As Anodyne and maybe a few other people can tell you, those first couple of chapters were very rough at first. I've actually dedicated a ton of time just to improving them, but I still think they aren't quite up to snuff.

Getting back to the topic of their relationship. I think something the novel is really lacking in those first chapters after Gideon meets Surelin are stronger hints that they're attracted to one another. Looking back, I think my focus on slowly changing their initial hostile relationship has a detrimental impact on reader expectations. I'm planning on dropping a few more hints here and there that they are at the very least physically attracted to one another, even if they do have a genuine dislike for each other.

Along those lines, I'm also planning to beef up Gideon's stated reasoning behind helping Surelin around this time. By the end of the novel we better understand—or at least I hope we do—why he initially chose to help her, but I think in those early chapters the reader needs a little more justification to latch onto. I fully intended his reasoning behind helping Surelin to be mostly unstated due to it being heavily related to his relationship with Deb, but I do think it's a little too open to interpretation as is. We understand that he's feeling guilty about the things he's done as a mercenary, and that he likes her bravery, but there still just needs to be a little bit more reasoning there. Deb died very bravely while defending Gideon, so in that respect I think it's natural for him to place special value on Surelin's bravery. Something along those lines needs to be added in that area to make it more clear.

I don't really want to dump a ton of word vomit for this, so I think I'll wrap this up by addressing a few changes I'm going to be making to the later chapters. To be completely honest, I think the later chapters are much more solid and require far less work than the first dozen, but there are still a few things that need to be improved. Gideon is a pretty angry guy, and his anger tends to lead him into making some pretty poor decisions. Learning how to make better decisions is a very important aspect of his growth as a character, one that goes hand in hand with his eventual rejection of violence. But I think that from the reader's perspective, it can be very frustrating to see him learning so slowly.

This is a personal (read: entirely subjective) belief of mine, but I think that in general people are unwilling to change anything important about themselves unless something drastic happens that basically forces them into it. The big bad event that occurs in Loso between Gideon and Edwin's cronies is meant to be that kind of drastic incident for him, but at the time I felt that since he ultimately saw his actions as mostly justified, he wouldn't feel overly inclined to make an immediate change. It would come, but later, specifically during the talk with Edea after the council meeting. While I still stand behind that reasoning, I think from the reader's perspective it's not very enjoyable to see him persisting in his stubbornness. I'll make a few changes to that aspect of his character in that area in order to solve that problem.

Okay, last thing, for real. The novel's title was meant to be a direct statement on heroism and how it interacts with the various acts and behaviors that our culture typically identifies as evil. I was perhaps unsuccessful with this, but I meant to demonstrate heroism as something that is directly intertwined with evil. One doesn't exist without the other. But someone pointed out to me that there's a really bad horror movie that came out a few years ago with the name Ouija: Origin of Evil. So, uh...yeah. The name is definitely gonna change at some point, too.

That's all I've got. Again, thank you very much for reading. And please feel free to leave a comment with any questions you still have for me. I'd love to hear from you.

Also, I'm gonna plug this one more time. I'm at the stage now where reader feedback for the novel is absolutely critical. So if you enjoyed this or hated it, please leave me a rating or a review if you haven't already.