-List of Contents-
1. Introduction
2. How I started Writing (Sinner’s Game)
3. How I (almost never) Wrote Sinner’s Game
4. Software and Helping-Hands
5. About Future Projects
6. The Wrap
1. Introduction
After having finished writing the Novel and sorting out all the necessary stuff for a smooth release, I had enough time to shape some thoughts which I want to share with you here. I never wrote something like this before, so let’s call this a first, huh? Anyways, this will be less scripted than the stuff I usually do, since I want to get more close to my readers with this one. (Yea, I mean you. Get over here.)
If you would have told me at the beginning of the year that I would release a full Novel as well as blow my highest view-goal for the year out of the window, I would most likely have said something like: ‘Yea, sure. Can I have a fried unicorn with that, too?’
Back at the time, 1k reads seemed to be far out of reach. I actually just put it on my goals list as ‘too high to reach goal’, just in case I manage to somehow overshoot my other ones.
And now, I’m sitting here (as I write this) with around 9 Chapters to release left and having overshot that ‘unreachable goal’ by around 200% already… what the actual fuck.
I really don’t want to come across like I want to brag about it or seem desperate to thank you all the time, but I am very very grateful for every single one who dedicates some of their free time to view my content.
That being said, who even am I? Not to have an existential-crisis on page… but I think I should at least give you a short summary of how I actually got to writing ‘Sinner’s Game’
So let’s get into this…
2. How I started Writing (Sinner’s Game)
So, who even is that Niffox guy, and why did he write this train-wreck of a Novel?
Well, good question secondary voice inside my head. Let’s find out!
Telling the whole story would of course be way too long (might tell it another day in the future), so let’s focus on the ‘writing aspect’ for today.
Before I even started ‘writing’ in the classical sense, I consumed all sorts of content which would set me up for who I am now. A huge part of my childhood was about video games, shows, anime, comics and the such. I always loved diving into new and interesting crafts of fiction, as well as drifting in my imagination to build my own worlds and characters there. It was just normal to me, but I didn’t even think about writing it down. I just kept it in my little silly brain back then.
Fast forward some years, and I’m now around 14 years old. This was around the time when I started roleplaying online. I know the term ‘roleplaying’ gets a lot of shit-talk recently, and is mostly associated with cringe by a lot of people, but it was perfect for me back then. But what even is roleplaying?
The concept of (online text based) rping is quite simple: You find a person or a group of people online to rp with, maybe in a forum created for it or something close to it, and set up a setting and some other things like genres, characters and so on. Most of the time there will be a ‘starter’, which starts off the story like, for example, you shipwreck on an island, and from there it’s improvised.
Everyone then writes out of the perspective of their characters, taking turns on writing what they do and so on (It is in a sense very close to playing pen and papers, just without a GM). This can lead to more or less anything to happen, and it is a beautiful way to create worlds and stories which you couldn’t have created by yourself. If you consider learning to write or just want to write for fun, I would highly recommend you try out rping to some extend.
Anyways, where was I? Ah yea… roleplayed for some years, got better (from writing around one line per message to up to multiple paragraphs). Over the years, I more or less quit it (mostly because it got replaced with other writing), but I still play DnD with my friends from time to time.
Fast forward some years again, and I get this idea one day. Since I already spend a lot of time daydreaming and so on, why not create something like ‘one great universe’ which I can expand on any time I want. Around 2 years later now, it’s my main project I am still preparing for, and it is the story I actually started ‘writing’ for. I will give out more information about my main project once the time for it comes.
But why do I tell you all of this? Well, since I wasn’t even close to good enough to start writing my main story, I decided that I should get better at writing first. So after some thinking, I figured I could start off with writing some short stories. I did that, and ‘Sinner’s Game’ actually started off as one of them. And that’s where the story of the Novel begins: Me hovering a text document with the name ‘Sinner’s Game’ over my PC’s trash bin.
3. How I (almost never) Wrote ‘Sinner’s Game’
Like stated earlier, Sinner’s Game started off as another short story idea. The core concept back then was something like: Dude gets trapped in circle of hell because of something bad he has done. It was supposed to be around 4 chapters long, and more or less just being a little foreshadowing here and there and some abstract horror stuff at the end.
And why didn’t it stay that way? Well…
After writing around 3 Chapters worth of content, I reached the scene before shit was about to go down. The clock was about to strike 12 (where I planned the horror stuff to happen) and… well, nothing happened. Don’t get me wrong, I came up with an idea (something along the lines of people in the classroom starting to expand and get longer in a weird body-horror-ish kind of way.) The only problem was that…
Well, it sucked.
Yea, it just wasn’t good. I thought about the story for a few days, put it on the back burner to come up with a way to fix it, but it just felt bad. So one faithful day, I decided to just dump it and start a new one.
I hovered the file over the trash can, ready to throw it into limbo to never be read. But then, I remembered a promise I had made to myself a while ago (kinda cliche I know, but that was really how it happened). I had promised myself to never delete a story again, and instead just put it in a folder as unfinished. I could then return to the old drafts one day once I had better ideas for them.
So that’s what I did.
Yet again, some time passed. I wrote another short-story or two, and some things went down irl (you know, mostly boring adult stuff). Then, one day at work, I got an idea for the story. Then another one. Then another.
I started writing on the core idea of letting my cast of characters go through three stages, but things kept expanding and ideas just kept coming. It always sounds dumb to tell people how I get my ideas like that, but it really just feels like things appear out of thin air, clearly visible in my inner eye. It’s not rare that I sit somewhere random, talk to someone or am doing something unrelated to writing, when suddenly:
‘Hold up, I need to write something down.’
I then usually open up my phone and write a note which will add itself to the dozens upon dozens of other notes stored there (no they are not sorted and you can’t stop me.)
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
So, anyways, the ideas kept coming and I continued noting and outlining some things as well as rewriting the first few Chapters and preparing the first-draft. I started writing and soon realized that it would definitely be much longer than a short story. I didn’t bother with it, since I didn’t have limitations of how long my stories had to be anyways. Around 20k words later, and sitting on a desk cluttered with small notes, it was too late to turn back, and so I decided to go all in and write it as long as it would need to be.
In retrospect, I could have easily made the story a lot longer by fleshing out some environments and slowing down the pacing, but I think it wouldn’t be the same like it is now then. The fast pacing is in my opinion part of the soul of the piece, even though I’m pretty sure some would disagree with me on that note. I don’t really like beating around the bush too much, since everything necessary is in the story, and forcing it to last longer just to have more ‘content’ isn’t really my style.
I also have to note that working on the Novel wasn’t close to easy. I don’t want to play the ‘I have it so hard, please tell me I’m a good boy’ card, but I think this has to be said, especially to new writers (I’m more or less a new writer myself after all). I want to say that writing this project, even though it might sound effortless from an outside perspective, really wasn’t. And as much as you love your craft, as heavy the burden gets you have to carry to put it to life. You have to sit down every day, sometimes successfully sometimes not, putting in time and effort to construct something very important to you. Especially while holding other responsibilities like work and your mental health, you have to keep pushing to get there. And it is a steep climb uphill. But I also have to admit, after finishing all of this and slowly seeing some ‘progress’ in the direction people tend to call success, it was all worth it.
Yea, I know, another cliché. But it really is worth it at the end! And without all the struggle and hard times, it wouldn’t have felt fulfilling anyways. That’s just how humans work. I’m going to stop myself right here before I spiral into too deep themes, since I originally wanted to keep this light. I just felt like addressing this might help one or two people out there.
To conclude this bit… I already see some things and details I could make different now, but that’s just part of the craft. It’s a reflection of myself and how I felt back then. A showcase of how good I was at writing at that moment in time, and I will shape the experiences I made along the way into new wisdom for future projects.
I definitely have to fix my working habits and mental health, since these are the factors which hold me back the most. I have some days where I work hours upon ours without breaking a sweat, and then (most of the) other days, when I can’t even open up my writing program without almost crying manly tears onto my keyboard (which is widely regarded as a bad move).
Now that we spoke about my fragile mental state, lets talk about what software/help I used to write the story. Yay!
4. Software and Helping-Hands
You know these bits in comedy shows where they roll some fake credits and its all just one name?
Yea… Well…
I did more or less everything myself. The only exception would be Canya (linked below), who helped me modify some of the parts of the Cover, and the people who gave me edit recommendations (which I will also write down below). I wrote, edited, created the cover (and Cover art), wrote advertisings as well as ran them, and so on all by myself. Why? Well, mainly because I wanted to learn how all of it works for future projects, and also because I didn’t knew people who could do it for me / I didn’t want to pay a lot of money for these services.
I give you a quick rundown of what I used to do all of that.
Notes: That won’t sound very professional, but like stated earlier, I write a lot of my notes in my note app on the phone. The main reason for it is that I can paste it to PC and that I always have my phone with me (which also leads me to have like unironically ~100 notes in there at all times.)
Also, remember the little square pieces of paper Jack used for his notes? Yea… I do that as well.
Writing Program: I used ‘LibreOffice Writer’, which is a free software for writing. It isn’t the magnum opus of writing programs, but it has everything necessary. (I’m also used to it by now, even though I think about changing to a better alternative like ‘Scrivener’ in the future).
Editing: is hard. Even after writing multiple drafts and proofreading, mistakes happen and slip through your fingers. I used ‘ProWritingAid’ (online) to help me spot some obvious mistakes and also catch some things I might have read over otherwise. The rest was more or less just very careful rereading and, well, editing. I also used ‘Grammarly’ here and there, but it doesn’t work with ‘LibreOffice’ for some reason, which eventually led me to only use ‘ProWritingAid’.
Editing Help (I need somebody): At the time I am writing this, I’m still releasing new Chapters, but I want to at least feature the people who helped me spot mistakes and attributed to improving the clarity of my writing through comments so far. Thanks to:
Canya
CEO of Bread
Derv
Idjit
Superkamimarvin
Mexxor
KittyJingles
Daep
...And everyone who came after them. You really are a great help.
I should also note that music carried a lot of my editing process. Especially the music of Kevin Penkin, Hiroyuki Sawano, and Jack Stauber. They are all worth checking out.
Cover: So the Cover was actually created in three steps. The first step is creating the Cover art. I used ‘MageSpace AI’ to create the (unedited) artwork. After that I used ‘Canva’ to edit the picture as well as add the Text and everything else (like Fonts, Contrasts, and so on). Both of these sites can be used for free by the way (even though they offer a paid premium version). The last step was Canya (Canya is the person, ‘Canva’ is the site, repeat after me kids!), who helped me bring the Cover to life by redrawing some details which made it to what it is now.
Ads: The most of my advertising was copying ads to places where I expected to find viewers (of course only where you are allowed to do so). I used mostly ‘Twitter’ and ‘Discord’. I also created an Ad I edited with ‘Canva’ (again), and am currently running it on ‘Royal Road’ as a Square-Ad. The ‘Royal Road’ ad was the only paid advertisement I did (the smallest one they offer there, it’s 330k impressions for ~50€), but it helped my visibility quite well. (Update: Scored an CTR of 0.88% with it.)
Thanks: I want to say thanks to my friends who supported me, as well as all the people who wrote comments or supported me in any other way.
Special thanks go to Canya, who kept me from mentally breaking down as well as supported me in various ways while I was working on the Novel.
If you have a few clicks to spare, please go check out some of Canya’s art and give them some love. They really deserve it:
https://canyaferox.wordpress.com/
Okay, lets get to the part where I talk about what’s next.
5. About Future Projects
Once all the Chapters of ‘Sinner’s Game’ are out (which is a few weeks in the future for me, and right now for you,) I will most likely (soon) repost some short-stories on ‘Royal Road’. I just want to have my other content on there as well, even if it’s not a lot. Maybe I can do something like a short-story collection, but I need to check out if that is allowed on RR first.
As I am writing this, I am already working on my next big project. It will be another Novel and the last big stand-alone project I will write before I start writing my ‘main project’. I will keep you updated about my progress on Twitter, and you can follow wherever your reading this to get notified once new stuff drops.
But what’s this main project you are talking about all the time, Niffox? Yea well, I won’t talk about any details yet, but I can at least give some information. Like stated in my bio, it will be a long term running project of massive scale, most likely spanning over decades of reallife time. It will be my magnum opus, and therefore it needs a lot of work, which means I need a little bit more practice until I feel ready to make it as good as it deserves to be. I always work on this project in the background, even when I am working on other things or am serializing work (like Sinner’s Game). I update you once I am ready for it, but it most likely will take some more time until you get more concrete information from me about it. Please stay patient, the wait will be worth it.
The new Novel will be in focus for now.
But keep in mind that the Dawn of Imbalance is steadily approaching.
Also, I want to note that I will prioritize my mental health more from here on. At least until I fixed a few bigger problems which make my consistency go down by a huge chunk. I really don’t want to sound dramatic or anything, but I figured you deserve to know. If I want to do this in the long run (and believe me, I will), then I need to get my mental back on track, which also means better and more content for you in the long run :).
6. The Wrap
This is the part where content-creators do their content-creator-thing™, and since this is the last time I get the chance to do so, I want to thank you one more time. It’s been certainly a ride till here and I’m glad that so many people stayed along to read my Novel till the very end. I appreciate every single one of you, and I hope you will return to read more of my content.
If you haven't done so already, please consider following my Twitter (Click here: https://twitter.com/TheRealNiffox ) to get notified whenever I release new content. It is my main platform to share my progress (and reach my readers), and I will always do my best to create quality content worth your time.
Also, since I’m already doing that kinda thing, please also consider using the systems on the site you are reading this on to rate/like/review if you enjoyed the Novel. It helps my visibility a lot and ensures I can grow because of fancy algorithm stuff.
Lastly, if there is anything else you wanna ask or talk about, just use the comment section below to do so. I gladly answer any questions you may have (no matter how unrelated or random they are, lol). Criticism is also welcomed, just keep it constructive so I can use it to become a better writer ^^.
Take care, and see you in the next one.
~Niffox