Dear Readers,

Kurt Spacer here. Kind of. It’s complicated. For those of you who didn’t follow up on the author note at the end of Chapter 50, this book was written as a part of Reddit Serials’s publishing derby. As such, it will be going up on Amazon on the 16th of November - with the revisions I’ve made thanks in part to all of your wonderful feedback. I can’t thank you all enough for your questions, comments, and reactions. You’ve all made the book measurably better.

That said, Amazon says if I want the final version of the book available to audiences through Kindle Unlimited - one of the chief avenues for lovers of this genre - the book can’t be available in any other venue, including Royal Road. And so, with great reluctance, on Friday the 13th, I have to remove chapters 5 through 50. It’s important to me that you all know that before it happens, hence this commentary chapter. To try and make it up to you all, I’m gonna pitch a little extra content at you: an author’s commentary on the story.

Those of you reading this on November 14th or later right after reading chapter four, be warned: spoilers ahead for a book you can still find and read elsewhere.

If you’ve been following along with the comments section, you know I like to leave things up to reader interpretation. Your own imagination is a better writer than I could ever be. Your own conclusions are always going to be a closer match to your expectations and needs as a reader as anything I could set in stone. If I tell you that God was actually that big of an asshole about spiders, then readers looking for a little chuckle at the expense of organized religion are happy, but everyone looking for deeper meaning and purpose to James’s quest are disappointed. And visa-versa if I tell you James’s soul was cosmic drano to clear out Lani’s obstruction. So I don’t want to destroy too much of the mystique.

That said, I can’t just update with an author’s note about the status of this book with zero content, and I want to thank all of you for your support and appreciation on the way to this point. So I will approach a few topics that I think deserve some discussion.

Stephen Arc

Stephen’s arc was originally the only arc in the story. This was going to be a much shorter story, where Stephen gave him the information James needed, and James just got what he needed and did the thing. But then I started actually plotting and realized there was a lot more to do before throwing my main character at a literal titan. It was a matter of power creep: I’d presented my hero with a challenge that required him to power up a lot. Simple solutions where he just goes and gets the items required would have been unsatisfying for the scale of the problem.

This was also the first taste of James’s abilities. It really sold that he’s charismatic, but with shitty people skills. He makes really bad choices when talking to people, to the point where he provokes Stephen to gut punch him inside of a minute. But Stephen still finds himself drawn into James’s bullshit plans. The same happens with Bernard and Alex. Even Lani takes him seriously even though it’s painfully obvious from talking to him for five minutes that he’s an enormous idiot.

Dealing with Stephen’s colossus also established what James was capable of in other arenas. It established his dominant physical characteristic being his endurance. His ability to just keep going despite all attempts to stop him was - obviously - also established as an aspect of his gift. This was pretty vital to establish early, since he was going to push through basically whatever obstacle was put before him. It needed to be known that stubborn resilience was his specialty, and shrugging off debilitating effects was his gift, or it would have felt like he just turned on god mode out of nowhere if his first real challenge didn’t come until halfway through the book.

And then the final skill reveal once Stephen made good on his end of the deal: the planning toolkit Alice left him with. This laid the groundwork for everything to follow, both directly - by James laying out his needs and plans - and indirectly - by me laying out how James approaches his problems. Or, rather, how Alice approaches their problems.

Alice herself presents an interesting writing challenge. At the end of the day, she doesn’t really appear in this book. There are some stories shared, a half-dream, and her appearance at the end, but anything more than that would crush the pacing of the story. I can’t commit to a full flashback without screeching James’s momentum to a halt. And the opening to chapter 14 was painful enough for James to wake up alone without a vivid dream of her at his side again. A major component of the efficacy of this story is in the breakneck pace. Taking time to properly introduce Alice would interrupt that.

And so, Alice is known to the reader as a silhouette. You get to know her based on James’s idealized version of her - his thoughts and feelings about her - but you can probably determine who she is for real based on getting to know James. Together, they’re a great team. James expresses often that she’s his missing piece in this story. You know that Alice is a thoughtful planner. That she’s smart. But he doesn’t touch on her flaws - which she definitely has, he’s just blind to them from how well he covered for them in their life together. To Alice, James is her own other half. James is driven and persistent. He refuses to be stopped or turned from a course. Alice, meanwhile, is indecisive. She’s flighty and distractible. She’s the sort of person who would have a hundred unfinished projects in her garage, and a to-do list a mile long with new ideas. James was the one who knuckled down and kept things moving forward in accordance to her plans. If James had gone to Heaven, and Alice to Purgatory, this is a much different story, and her overthinking everything might have caused her to fall into Lani’s web.

Bernard Arc

Bernard is an interesting challenge, from a narration perspective. Stephen didn’t want to help James until after James did something for him. Bernard wants to help James from the start, but has a confused perspective of what helping James entails. If James had met Bernard when he was newer to the world, he may have just handed over the climbing gear for free. But at the point where they meet, Bernard has been poisoned by Lani’s philosophy. He determines that the best way to help James is to get to know him, and gauge if he’s capable of doing the impossible before giving him the tools to try. Bernard doesn’t care about the deal. That’s why he gives up the climbing gear without ever overcoming his phobia.

Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

But, of course, with the story being from James’s perspective, I can’t tell you that. Bernard gives up the objective he’s voiced - with a flimsy excuse - without James really holding up his end of the bargain. A major theme of the story is social transactions. James has to make deals with people to get what he wants. He also has to deal with the guilt associated with those transactions. The guilt of using Stephen’s friendship for his own ends. The guilt of not explicitly meeting the conditions he agreed to with Bernard. The guilt of outright failing Alex, but still walking away with his reward. The guilt of leaving the whole town behind to sort out their own solution to Lani after he kicked up the hornet’s nest. This guilt comes into play more at the end of the book, with Alex’s arc - and James’s own - but Bernard’s covert secondary goal is the first brush with that. With Stephen, James felt like the brush with death - and damnation - was a worthy effort to earn his loyalty. With Bernard, though, he feels like he didn’t earn it.

Then again, there were other favors he didn’t earn, but took anyway.

Alex Arc

This is the part of the story I - personally - feel the worst about. Alex’s death is one of those moments where my desires as a reader and my needs as a writer are at war. On the one hand, Alex didn’t deserve hell. As a writer, I feel like I’ve done him wrong by literally damning him as a victim of circumstance. As a reader, though, actions have consequences. If every one of James’s stupid plans goes off without a hitch, it feels unearned. We’ve talked about the stakes of failure, but it just seems so distant and unlikely. Alex had to die so that the stakes existed, even if he very much didn’t deserve it.

If James just bullies his way through Alex’s colossus, then suddenly the question is raised for how much of a threat the monsters really are. If a total idiot like James can outsmart them, why can’t everyone? Alex was already letting people use his sword for construction projects. It was a well-known implement in the community. Shouldn’t the sword have been strong enough to auto-win against most normal-sized monsters? The stakes needed to be reinforced, as sad as I am about the outcome. The end victory only has value if failure is possible. The best way to express how close and real failure really is is to have it happen catastrophically.

Additionally, Glauco is the only character who wasn’t specifically named in my plotting. Just “some guy” blundered into the encounter with Stephen’s colossus to fuck up a precarious position, and then “some guy” walked into the fight with Alex’s colossus and got Alex killed. In the original outline, the second “some guy” was actively malicious in their attempt to kill Alex to foul James’s plan. But when I got to the day of writing, Glauco asserted himself as a colossal fucking idiot. He was also a great source of exposition to set up Lani’s arc, which, honestly, needed all the help it could get.

Lani Arc

Lani’s arc is my least favorite in the story. The arc itself was the last thing that I added; originally she wasn’t a villain at all, but while plotting, I needed a secondary conflict. The story felt naked and meandering without Lani being an actual antagonist and really trying to stop James.

I do, however, feel strongly about Lani as a moral character. A lot of people disagree with her, and poke holes in her philosophy, but her side of the story holds up in my eyes. She is the ultimate pragmatist. Ideologically, she would rather have a messy solution that works over a clean one that doesn’t. She also had a lot of time to trial and error her strategy off-screen, before even Stephen arrived in this world. She probably tried a calmer approach. She probably also tried an even more draconian one. It’s possible that James isn’t the first James who came in and wrecked her plans by succeeding and inspiring everyone else to run off and take the plunge. Lani just did the math. She’s killed - or ordered the deaths of - maybe a dozen people, in exchange for the hundred or so still in Purgatory. That’s a way better deal than over a hundred going to Hell with five - or fewer - actually overcoming their colossus and getting into Heaven. Lani is a good person, I promise. She’s just in a situation for which there is no good solution.

The downside, of course, is that I can’t tell you that. She is a dishonest character, and James isn’t that insightful. The problem with writing from the point of view of a character with major flaws - especially intellectually - is that some stuff just can’t be conveyed. Good character writing involves having their own individual goals, motivations, and conflicts, and some character just don’t wear that stuff on their sleeves.

James Arc

At the end of the book, James’s arc is the culmination of all the themes I’ve discussed above. He opens up to Stephen about how he feels incomplete without Alice. He faces the most direct confrontation with the guilt associated with his social transactions made throughout the story when, at the end of everything, he is left by himself with his own thoughts. He has to confront and accept his shortcomings - his sins, if you will - and accept them.

Of course, then he has to also fight a giant monster.

A lot of people have expressed that this feels kinda boring. The rules presented at the beginning of the book were never undermined or waived. James didn’t need to learn to be a good person, or do good deeds, or anything. He needed to literally engage in a purely physical confrontation. It really undermines a lot of the idea of purgatory as a redemption arc. The James that gets into paradise is the same James that arrived in Purgatory. He didn’t grow. He didn’t change. He half-cobbled together a functional internal dialogue to stand in for Alice’s guidance. He didn’t learn shit.

But this isn’t a story about growth. The Guy says so at the end - Purgatory isn’t about separating the innocent from the guilty, or the worthy from the unworthy. Everyone who goes to purgatory is on the edge between deserving heaven and deserving hell. Growth is unnecessary. He was already a good enough person to get into Heaven. He just had one more obstacle put in front of him.

Oh, and I mentioned this several times in comments, but for those of you not following along with those: originally, the ending of this book was going to be the colossus falling, and Metatron showing up and telling James that he did a great job, but now he has to defeat a colossus made up of all his other sins and point to an even larger monster. The last line was going to be: “James was beginning to doubt that this was actually Purgatory after all.” After writing the opening to chapter 14, though, I couldn’t do that to James. It also would have introduced a lot of plot holes with the rest of the book. All the worldbuilding suddenly becomes lies, and that feels like me stabbing you all in the back. As much as I couldn’t put James through that, I couldn’t put you through that either, dear reader. You deserve a proper ending just as much as James does.

And at the end of it all, The Guy himself. Nobody asked why The Guy didn’t need Metatron to speak for him. I really had an answer for that and was disappointed that I didn’t get to run it out. Metatron is unnecessary. Gods can appear in forms that can speak normally and be heard without harm if they so choose - they are gods, after all. The God of the Dead was just a drama queen.

Questions? Comments? Objections? I’ll be here to answer them. Or just read them, if you're gonna be a fuckin' asshole about it. If you’re looking for the book, it - and the other Publishing Derby entries - will be available here 11/16:

https://www.inkfortpress.com/derby-2020

So long, and thanks for all the fish,

-K. L. Spacer