Woo. I’m done! (If you want to skip all the stuff about RFTD, then the part about the next work is at the bottom of this document)
This has been a long journey, certainly far longer than I had anticipated. I started writing this story around summertime last year, reaching 30 chapters (some days out of the tutorial) when I stopped, realising it was plainly bad. I planned to revisit it and make it cleaner, but that didn’t happen in the following months. At the time, the main character had been a man named Logan Wycliffe, a bodyguard who had just cheated on his girlfriend with the pop singer he was working with. He gets teleported to the tutorial during a drunken haze where he’s heavily regretting his action, dreading the time when his girlfriend will return.
When I eventually returned to it at about March-ish time 2020, I had been away long enough to see that this wasn’t what I wanted to write. So, I started writing the same theme and setting with completely different characters, something you guys would vaguely recognise as RFTD, although it was actually only the second draft. I wrote 42 chapters from scrap here before starting a massive editing process, which basically became the third draft (the current one) since it was different enough from its predecessor for the distinction.
Apart from general editing stuff, there were also differences such as Iris being Silas’s love interest, and other characters that I eventually scrapped. So I can totally understand why some people say those two first arcs were far better edited than the rest since I spent a lot more hours on them.
I started posting publicly in June, basically a full year after I started the first draft. The rest is history I share with you guys, so I won’t expand on it. Instead, I’ll give my thoughts (with very little structure) on different things of RFTD.
Thoughts
Foreshadowing: probably the biggest quirk of RFTD that I liked, although it wasn’t half as successful as I had wished. I still stick to my guns that foreshadowing is brilliant, mainly because I love reading it when it’s done well, but I think there’s quite a lot I’ve got to learn about doing it effectively. In my mind, while my execution could definitely use work, I reckon the bigger issue was the format of RFTD. Since it’s a web-serial being posted daily, it means there’s significant time-lags between reading an instance of foreshadowing and reaching the actual event itself. There’s much more to say on this, but I’ll end it here since that was the biggest factor of it which I had failed to acknowledge until posting like 30ish chapters.
Sporadic schedule: you’re all aware how in recent months, my posting schedule has been all over the place. While it may appear it got worse, the truth is it’s been quite constant throughout, just at the start I had about 10 buffer chapters that I could post if I failed to write that day. I wish I had kept them as buffer chapters instead of posting them, though, as that buffer was valuable in giving me some forward vision over the current release, and I lost that in the later months of RFTD where I was writing hours before releasing the chapter the same day.
Clothes: absolutely a thing I’ve learnt from this series is to give more focus to clothes. I never particularly cared about reading people’s clothes in other books, so I never gave much consideration to it until a reviewer pointed it out. Since then, I’ve given more focus to it, and I’m pleased I learnt that during RFTD’s run.
Cut characters: I don’t know if you guys remember, but there were characters like Montigo (junkie Seer in New Derby), Olivia (Silas’s old friend from New Derby), Harlan (captain of 3rd elite platoon in New Derby), Meera (the Huntress who was controlled by Raven), Brigette (the Bladesinger from Valrun’s Keep), Diego Garcia (the Supay Summoner from Riverside), and etc who were introduced and made to appear like they would have longer arcs before being faded out. That’s just a quirk of web-serial writing, though, as I can have ideas on how to use characters, but those usually change massively as I write the parts themselves, meaning this can happen.
Large cast: related to the last point, a big reason why I had to cut characters out of the story was because of the constant inflow of characters that I was introducing, meaning I’d either have to spread words thin amongst them or focus on particular ones and go with them. RFTD certainly had the biggest cast of any book I’ve written, and although there are many many improvements I could have made (firstly by going with a more manageable cast), I’m glad I tried this as it’s given me a lot of experience with large casts to take into future works.
Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.
Increasing chapter word count from 1500 to 2000: this might not seem like much, but it was quite big. Since I typically write over 2 hours, this meant a 33% increase in writing speed. That was a struggle at first, especially when I started on 2k since it meant I had to forgo detail that would take longer to craft, instead just forcing words out. But I eventually got the hang of it, maybe around chapter 110, although I still wish I had stuck to the 1500 word count per writing session since a lot of detail was missed due to this decision.
Overall thoughts: that’s all the specific thoughts that I can think of on the top of my head, so I’ll just write my concluding thoughts on RFTD here. Although this 300k book has many ways in which it could be improved, it has all the same been a valuable practice tool for me, and I hope it’s been an enjoyable story for you guys too. I pretty much achieved everything I had planned for this story, namely a zero-to-hero theme, a light LitRPG theme with more focus on characters than setting, a large cast, and a LitRPG Apocalypse story where the MC is not some OP dude who got super lucky but rather a totally average person clawing their way up, making flawed steps all along the way.
And that probably was the biggest criticism that I came across most regularly, that Silas was a mostly inactive MC just reacting to other people’s actions with not many quirks making him interesting. That another character as MC would have made the story far more enjoyable. To respond to this, I’d say yeah, Silas was meant to be inactive at the start as he’s merely struggling into a position of power at those times, only growing into a suit of confidence and bravery later on in the story when he takes far more initiative.
However, let’s be real, just because I deliberately planned it that way doesn’t make it anymore enjoyable to read, nor does it change the fact that someone like Lucian or Kuraim or really any of the other Sovereigns would have been far more interesting to follow. So I’m totally cool if people found Silas boring or et cetera since I can see where you’re coming from, but not that this changes the fact that I’m really happy that I ultimately picked him as the MC. He was exactly the MC I wanted to write at the time, so there’s that, I guess.
Furthermore, I wrote all the scenes I had been excited about. There was Silas’s first truly courageous move when he fought Grace in revenge for Lazzaro, the congress scene in Brightmoor, having a blue whale as an OP character, the great war between Silas, Lucian, and Kuraim, and of course Dahlia’s various scrumptious scenes. I also wrote a multicultural cast since it had never made sense to me how if the whole world is going through a game-like apocalypse, why there were certain regions doing better than others when surely all regions would have similar variance in their population. With that said, though, I did neglect South America and Africa more so than the other regions, mainly being the site I use for names (Reedsy name generator) didn’t have generators in African languages or South American ones, causing me to forget about them until a user commented on a chapter about it, I think.
And of course, I would like to thank all of you for reading RFTD. There were several frustrating points in the book where many people left, and I’m both glad and honoured that you guys braced through those parts to reach the end. I certainly wouldn’t have written up till here if it hadn’t been for the general support you guys gave, whether it be through reads, comments, hearts, or financial support on Patreon. I truly hope that this has given you some form of entertainment over the period.
All in all, I wrote exactly the story I wanted to write to the best of my ability at the time. Easy to say this or that would have improved it or made it more popular, but either artistic direction or authorial incompetence prevented most of those. Anyway, I’m very proud of Rising from the Depths, and it’s certainly the first book I’ve written that I can look back on and will smile upon.
New Story
Right, onto the exciting stuff. So, around 80 chapters into RFTD, my focus started to drift from RFTD to a plot I had been thinking of for a while. It devoured my attention and made me really badly want to write it, and I would have dropped RFTD there if it weren’t for your guys’ support. I didn’t want to disappoint you guys, so I wrote till the original ending I had in mind, making sure not to axe it or something since I’d much rather have a proper complete novel than a cut one.
Anyway, the story I’ll go onto next is a time-loop one. After finishing Mother of Learning, I had played with the idea but never gotten far before scrapping it. But since then I came across many, many inspirations that eventually formed a complete plot with an intimate cast. I plan to start on this ASAP, but the thing is that I’ll first write 40 chapters, edit that all, and see where to go from there. Whatever the case, I imagine the earliest release date would be around March next year, and if not then I’ll at least post an update message to explain my situation.
Either way, if you in any way enjoyed RFTD, I’m willing to bet my bottom dollar that you’ll love the time-loop story since it’ll be better in every way. I’ll take all my lessons from here and apply them, so look forward to it!
That’s all from me. Thank you ever so much for sticking with me on this journey, and all the best to you lads and lassies :)