Hello, readers.

Let's start things off with what most of you are probably here for: Within Our Nation, a Pokémon fanfic starring a villainous Team Rocket grunt, is live. In comparison to The Salt & The Sky, it will feature a little less violence and a little more sexual content, though nothing explicit.

If you want to tap out now, I completely understand; some people don't feel the need to know how the sausage gets made, and that's fine. See you when I see you.

Still here? Well then, let's perform an autopsy.

PART ONE: BEFORE THE NOVEL

The setting that would eventually become TS&TS began as LISA: The Painful fanfiction. No, I'm not joking. The song Red Like Roses off the RWBY OST was also involved.

Unfortunately the next bit won't make a lot of sense if you aren't aware of the game, so feel free to skip ahead to "It got weirder" and go from there.

I don't remember the exact catalyst, but shortly after playing the game I imagined an AU where each character was replaced by a doppelganger of similar situation, but opposite personality.

Brad was replaced by Junk Dog, a extremely cowardly man with ambitions to rule the world. His daughter became Junk Jog Junior, a bubbly, childish girl of incredible strength. Rando became Maximum the Golden, an egotistical warlord who nonetheless provided order to the wasteland, and rather than Big Lincoln there was Big Joseph, a fat murderous giant who held the title of world's strongest.

Pretty much immediately, it turned into an original setting. The womanless Olathe became something even closer to Mad Max and DBZ; a world or travelling martial artists, blasting each other with energy beams and mystic nonsense. Joy mutants became people who had 'gone away,' twisted under their own power to become monstrous and strange, though still with a spark of humanity.

It got weirder as I refined it. The inhabitants went from fantasy humans to orcs to a theoretical 'last fantasy race,' the product of dwarves and orcs and elves homogenizing over thousands of years until there was only one sapient species, with the powerful magical traits of all their myriad ancestors stacked together.

Then they turned into bug people, which is mostly where they stayed.

At that point, I actually started a project with the setting. Law of Consumption was a forum Quest, or Illustrated Suggestion Adventure, or whatever other name you want to put to a forum thing where the author draws a picture, and the commenters tell that picture what to do next. There were a few last-minute changes there, too: Junk Dog became Dev, the previous name turning into a title he had to work for.

If you head over there, you'll notice that the prologue to that story is recycled in the final epilogue to this one. More on that in Part Three.

The Quest didn't get very far; while things were going swimmingly, I got the insanely foolish idea to do a big animated sequence to show off what the power system of the setting could do. This made me spiral into procrastination, and before I knew it a month had passed. I fell into the trap of thinking well I can't just do a normal update now, it has to be worth the wait!

Pro tip: if you ever notice yourself thinking this, slap yourself in the face. But don't actually. But maybe do. Just post the mediocre normal version of whatever big setpiece you wanted to do, and move on.

Anyway, Law of Consumption died without much fanfare. And then, four months later, I decided to try again, with something that didn't require art.

PART TWO: THE ACTUAL GOD DAMNED NOVEL

I didn't have a concrete plan when I started, not really. The setting was fleshed out, the power system nearly complete in my head, and I had a bunch of characters pre-made and ready to use, but not much of a plot – I'd already decided that I didn't want to tell the same story, of a man named Dev, or sometimes Junk Dog, stamping his name into the world one act of conquest at a time, wielding stronger men as hammers.

So I decided to go back to basics: genre fiction, with just a bit of a twist. A story I was really fond of was The Essence of Cultivation, a story about a fantasy wizard getting isekai'd into a cultivation setting. The idea seemed really novel to me, I loved it; you got all the good isekai shit of a foreigner in a strange land, the reader getting drip-fed the setting through the eyes of a protagonist seeing it along with them for the first time, but also it was its own weird bullshit, two systems meshing together with rules that needed to be discovered.

So I decided to steal the idea, slightly modifying it: now it was a cultivator, falling into the weird post-apocalypse desertpunk world of Salt.

The cultivation setting was pretty bare in my head, because at that point the story was meant to end when the protagonist stepped through the portal, completing his journey home. Speaking of the protagonist, I wanted someone blandish to contrast with the wacky setting, but not actually boring. Someone with neurosis and depths under the milquetoast surface, who could play both the straight man and wise guy, as the situation necessitated.

Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

So I asked myself: what theme am I going for? I'm not really a themes guy, or a character guy for that matter – I consider myself a power systems guy, if anything – so I wanted it to be something simple. Something that fit with the cultivation setting, while presenting something fresh.

I settled on ambition: what it meant to have ambitions, or to not have them, and whether that was a good thing, whether people's ambitions brought them joy, or fulfillment, or misery. I crafted a classic Those Two Guys pair, a flamboyant dandy and his macho companion, characters who would usually be extras, hanging around in the background, commenting on what the actual protagonists are doing. One got ambition; an all-consuming lust for revenge and power. The other got none; complacency and contentment with his lot in life.

Lu and Bull were born, and I instantly loved both of them. I loaded them up with character flaws, and started writing the second prologue – the first had been written before I actually crafted the protagonist, which sounds weird in hindsight but ended up working out pretty well, in my personal opinion.

And so then, the story happened. Lu tried to get home, dragged around by forces above his ability to influence, getting his hits in where he could and being an anxious wreck the whole way through. He eventually managed it through a combination of his own cunning and the work of his society back on Earth, which was another thing I wanted to portray: a cultivation society that wasn't made entirely of violent assholes.

I wanted to do that for a few different reasons; first of all, I did it to distance the way humans did things with how warriors did them. The Salt & The Sky is a lot of things, and one of those things is a study of humanity through the lens of a different species – it isn't a large part of the story, mostly it goes the other way, but it's a part I really enjoyed writing. I love xenofiction, and the warriors of Salt were a way to indulge that love.

I also did it to stand out from the pack. Cultivation stories often follow a set of conventions pretty closely, and the way cultivator society is structured is one of those conventions. And I think it's important to break a few conventions as an author – not too many, or you end up with a soup of disconnected ideas that are impossible to read, but at least a few. Both to be unique, and just to experiment.

And finally, I did it because I think it makes logical, material sense for the setting. Call me overly optimistic, but I really do think cooperation wins out over competition in the long run. Sure, some people are violent assholes, but even violent assholes like living in a world where they can go out and just buy a frozen pizza, rather than having to grow the plants and raise the animals necessary to make one themselves. Even the warriors operate this way, within the bounds imposed by their reproductive biology.

So the story was chugging along, coming up near the end… but the Writathon is happening. And I really like competing in the Writathon, it fills me with energy and frenzy.

Up to this point, the plan was to end the story there, do something else, and then come back after another novel or two to write a sequel. I threw that plan in the trash, and kept writing the "sequel" without pausing.

Again, it sounds weird in hindsight, but it worked out. We go back to Earth, and the second arc unfolds. Bull is kidnapped, Lu rescues him, I'm painting over a hell of a lot of words but it's a pretty simple plot when you lay it out.

And I think a simple central plot is important. You can add complexity in the details, espionage and betrayal, clasping hands with your enemies while planning their downfall, the unfolding plots of higher powers, but in the end a strong, easily understood narrative really ties it all together. Man goes to scary place, he wants to go home. Man's friend in kidnapped, he wants to rescue him. Man's home is threatened, he wants to protect it – or at least to survive the rising tide.

I think this is where authors are supposed to put some kind of self-critique, noting what they could do better or what didn't go as well as they'd hoped but… maybe I'm just inexperienced, but it kind of blew all my predictions out of the water?

Like, broad strokes, there isn't really anything I think I would change? Little bits here and there, sure – and on that note Book One is available to pre-order on Amazon, eBook releasing together with the paperback version on the first of July, with corrected continuity errors, fixed spelling mistakes, and a dash of extra content – but there isn't actually anything I feel unsatisfied with.

So, lets skip to the next section.

PART THREE: INNUMERABLE DEADWORLDS

As I mentioned earlier, the setting began as fanfic for a video game, then turned into a forum game, before finally pupating into the beautiful work of prose that exists now. I'd done other projects before – but this was my first book. I wrote it almost entirely by the seat of my pants, and that means it could have gone in any number of different directions.

In the first draft, Lu killed Sulphur Grip in order to steal a vehicle while they were out in the desert, leading Ded and Cobo to go hunting for him in what would have been the sequel novel. That didn't happen.

In an early version of the third arc, Ded would have found Lu earlier in the story. They would have fought, and Lu would have killed him. That didn't happen.

Also in an early version of the third arc, the plan Hidden Moon and Oldest Bones crafted to betray the angels went through: the Rotting Sun was brought to Heaven, resurrected, and a much longer, drawn-out war ensued. That didn't happen.

These are dead futures, fed to nourish the single surviving sibling, the version of TS&TS that actually managed to be born. I don't regret killing them; I think the version I wrote was better than those half-formed ideas, but they could have happened.

In the final epilogue, we meet Devour-The-Enemy-As-They-Lie-Sleeping, son of Cobo. He happens to be the protagonist of Law of Consumption, that forum game I linked above.

When I started TS&TS, I didn't want to tell the story of Dev. That story was fine for a Quest, where most of the engagement comes from telling the characters what to do, but as a novel it would be too Mary Sue-ish; Maximum was simply too powerful, fun to wield as a player but not to watch being wielded.

So I turned back the clock eight hundred or so years, to a time when Fatty G was just at the beginning of his rein, rather than the dwindling end of it. Where Junk Dog was a clminor clan with big ambition, rather than a lumbering behemoth ready for an infusion of fresh blood. The setting expanded with the inclusion of the multiple realities, and changed further in myriad ways as I bent some details to fit a narrative.

The end of the novel doesn't slide smoothly into the beginning of the forum Quest – there's no way Cobo waited eight hundred years to challenge Junk Dog, that would be silly – but in the end, the bones remain untouched, buried deep under the sands of detail.

Maybe one day, those bones will spring to life; maybe one day, I'll write more in the setting. I have an idea for a different cultivation story; maybe that one will mutate, twisted under the weight of my immense power, until it fits into Nui and Dev's conjoined words. Who can say what the future will bring?

To everyone reading this, whether you started twenty months ago or just saw this afterward on the front page and it piqued your interest, I'll leave off with this:

Thank you for reading The Salt & The Sky. I hope to see you again.

(Actually no, that's too sappy. I'll actually leave off with this: go leave a review on Amazon! I need to sell books so I can pay rent! Consume! Consume forever, and ever, in an endless spiral of hunger!

Goodbye!)