Holy crap, it's finished!
I hope you all enjoyed Volume 1. I want to thank absolutely everyone who read my story, whether you have an account or not, whether you commented or lurked, whether you rated or reviewed or didn't do either. I came into this with tempered expectations, but you blew them out of the water. Truly, you're all great, and I hope you enjoy the next Volume just as much as this one. I also want to add a line here for anyone reading on an aggregator site (as I know there are a few scraping this) saying that Violent Solutions is primarily posted on Royal Road so if you want to comment or get ahold of me, you've gotta do it there.
If this story were a LitRPG, we would be at the end of what I'd call the "tutorial". Volume 2 will be a more cross-country trip across mainland Uwriy with a lot more backstory built in and a new major character who I hope you'll like. If you don't want to read a big, rambling post-volume author brain dump feel free to just skip to the poll at the bottom (remember to vote though!). Otherwise, well... I'll see you next week with the start of Volume 2!
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What went well
Personally, I think most of Volume 1 went pretty well. While I'm a bit off-genre for RR and thus attracting attention is harder than if I was writing a LitRPG or something, a lot of people still read and liked the story. I think the general plot and character introductions were good, I think I managed to engage people in the setting and story, most of my setups went well, I have people asking the right questions about some stuff, and I've successfully made you all forget about the things that are only going to pop up later as a surprise. This section is short because there isn't much else to say besides "95% of the volume went well".
I'm also very pleasantly surprised at the lack of faux-outrage at things like Yehpweyl getting brutalized or a whole building of people getting the chemical warfare treatment. I suppose I did tag this appropriately, but still, I was expecting someone to try to make an issue out of it. Thanks everyone.
What didn't go well
In five words: Yuwniht's backstory and plot pacing. Also some exposition/events but adding that makes too many words for the previous sentence to sound succinct.
Violent Solutions Volume 1 was written as a big novel-like piece of literature then divided into ~2k word chunks, proofread, and test-read in that state. There's a big difference in pacing between a piece of writing that you read all at once, and a piece of writing released serially. Some parts of the story seemed a lot slower than others because of this, and some chapters didn't feel like they had much of a point on release (Chapter 85 in particular strikes me as the least consequential). Part of this is also the release schedule, which might change (as per the poll at the bottom of this retrospective). Either way, in Volume 2 I think I've done better with this, and if I spot parts that are overly slow coming up I may accelerate the releases to keep pace.
This leads us to Yuwniht's backstory and characterization. While it may have gone well in novel form with all of the story available on demand, the fact is that (partially) because of the serial release cycle it didn't get communicated as well as it should have. The other problem was that it was just way too subtle. If you paid attention to every little detail of the story it was somewhat clear why he acts the way he does, and why he's maybe not as effective in this setting as he might have been in his native setting, but you really needed to be paying attention to see it. I think what ended up happening was that I left a little too much of it up to the reader to put together and didn't explain enough outright.
> For example: Yuwniht is used to working with field support, equipment, pre-made plans, general intel, etc. He is, in no way, a solo assassin, except in that he's the only physical thing sent in to do a job that had the equivalent of thousands of man-hours put into it. You can put this together if you remember how he reacts to being told he wouldn't have those things in chapter one, and then analyze his weaknesses with planning and tendency to assume his assumptions are correct because he's used to working with reliable intel. However, if you miss the hints about this or misread them, he can easily come off as being stupid rather than out of his element.
I wrote the prelude specifically to help with this issue because, after talking to a few people and reading recent reviews, I realized that it wasn't just a few people not getting it but it was a flaw with the way the information was conveyed.
As for the exposition/events, the main thing I'm referring to here is Suwlahtk and the resulting massacre (Chapters 15 through 37). While, in story, the details of exactly why certain characters acted the way they did and what they expected to happen is going to be explained, that isn't for a while yet. Thus some of the stuff that happens seems like people just become stupid for a while, or do something very risky for no reason. There were reasons for every action (as explained in the author's notes) but most weren't hinted at at all because Yuwniht's perspective didn't care about them. That was a mistake, in retrospect, for the same reason that the pacing was a mistake.
The events around the merchant who gets killed (Ch18-20) also need a bit more tuning. It isn't fully clear at the point in the story where it happens that the reason he's so confident is because he (correctly) thinks it's nearly impossible to kill someone barehanded and he doesn't expect to be disarmed and killed in an instant because that's very hard to pull off. As well, the following fight was very, VERY close, but it comes off like it's a curbstomp because of how our main character sees things from his own perspective. This gives some people the wrong impression of his power level, when in reality he pretty much got lucky with the element of surprise. All of this can be fixed without the need for word of god/author's notes, and it will be at a later date.
In fact, one could say that the necessity of author's notes to facilitate first-level understanding at all is a flaw. Stories should stand up on their own, with the content of the text being all that is needed to convey the story itself in a pleasing way. Normally, in web fiction, things aren't planned too far ahead and many times chapters are released very soon after they're written. The setting is evolving constantly, being added to as the author sees fit and thus foreshadowing isn't used as much as it is in Violent Solutions. In my case, however, I have the entire story from beginning to end planned out and had ~70% of it outlined into chapters before I ever started writing. This had advantages, but also meant that I failed to adequately communicate some things because they weren't new or surprising to me at the time of writing and I also made the text to appear subtle to me, rather than to a reader. The result was overly cryptic hints rather than actual subtlety, and sometimes near-outright missing characterization or information (since I also try my damnedest to avoid infodumps).
I have edits planned for the Suwlahtk chapters to address the lack of adequate explanation about the political situation, as well other edits in later chapters to help with a few other scenes that didn't come across as planned. It doesn't matter much for people who read along as it released and needed my chapter notes, but it will help new readers. As I mentioned at the start, this is sort of a "second draft" of the story, and you guys are my final layer of proofreaders, so your input is helping with this kind of thing. Volume 2 also has subtlety to it, but I'm hoping that I did it better than I did in Volume 1, and since I'm doing the behind the scenes stuff differently for 2 to allow for more "agile" edits, I can fix anything I spot better than in 1.
I'll still add author's notes, of course, just know that technically you don't have to read them if you don't want to. They're for lore, additional tidbits, or just my own comments on the story. I'm also always happy to explain stuff in the comments as well, and comments asking about details are one of the best ways for me to start getting a feeling of "Hmm, maybe I should make things more obvious when editing" so please do ask.
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Oh and for the record, I can't be arsed to try to actually rate comments on a rep system for perceived effort or something like I was doing at the start. It also isn't fair if I give, say, +3 to one person and +4 to another for similar comments. As you can tell, I'm really bad with multi-upvote systems. So, from now on, the rep I give out will be:
+2 For "Thanks for the Chapter" comments.
+5 For anything else, whether I reply or not. I try to reply to everyone, but sometimes the comments are just so perfect that they don't even really warrant one.
This is to encourage you all to post comments and start discussions and stuff. I'll also try to be a bit more restrained on the spoilers, even when using tags. It might be frustrating to see a DrakanZip emote or hear "Can't say anything :^)" but understand that I have a tendency to be a bit too chatty and wordy and reveal too much. Could you tell from this retrospective that I like to talk? No? Well, we're not even half done yet. I'm sure you'll get it by the end :^)
Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.
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Some meta backstory and context and rambling about a previously attempted story
Violent Solutions is the first piece of writing I've ever published. Before writing it, I made four attempts at writing a novel called Nemiza, a sci-fi first contact story. The first attempt died very quickly because it was actually done from the "human" perspective. In a lot of ways it was like Terra Formars, which is funny because I hadn't yet seen that show or read the manga when I wrote it. This version barely broke 20k words before being dropped (10 chapters of VS is over 20k words, for reference). After the failure, I opted to make the perspective change to one of the aliens.
The next version (Verison 2) was much more complete, but still extremely rough. The character of Mihmanshuh Shizhuh, the protagonist, was originally a reporter for a trashy magazine-like publication who was sent to a small town to investigate a supposed comet sighting, and whose absolutely irrational curiosity ends up sending her deep into a series of conspiracies when the local man who owns the only inn in town with his niece is murdered. The problem was that Mihmanshuh's motivation was poor. At the end of the day, there was absolutely no rational reason for her not to just duck out and leave, especially when things got dangerous. As well, it came to the point where there was no reason for the human characters not to just cruise missile the town into a smoking crater and set up a FOB, then begin the process of wiping out the local population. It also had some very cliché plotlines about a sort of pseudo-romance between the protagonist and another character that didn't work nearly as well as I had wanted. This version ended up getting to 213k words before I stopped, and the world should be thankful I knew to stop and never posted it. I shudder to think of the levels of cringe it would have created.
Version 3 was set in the same world with the same general characters, but nearly two hundred years earlier technologically. Version 2's world had electrical technology courtesy of naturally occurring voltaic piles on the world, but Version 3 did not, as the inhabitants hadn't quite figured out how to truly harness that power yet. Version 3 also had no human characters, as they were all made to be dead, and Mihmanshuh became a small-town cop instead of a reporter. She now had a reason to do what she was doing, but there were still other problems. The character Jojesri, a sort of secondary protagonist but also a murder suspect, was just way more interesting than the main character. I didn't even get to the big reveal of the sci-fi elements in Version 3 because the protagonist was boring to the point that I became disillusioned with my own story. She was like a plank of wood, her change from reporter to cop had robbed her of any personality or agency. This version reached 140k words before being dropped, only because I found the mystery compelling to write.
Version 4 was the most complete and, were it not for the fact that I don't believe I'm skilled enough to finish it in a satisfying way, would have been what I posted on RR instead of Violent Solutions. Mihmanshuh now had a character that worked. She was innocent with a sense of justice, but was socially awkward and became disillusioned with the world in a way that made her very relatable. Her backstory was fleshed out and her morals were both strong and in conflict with the world around her, creating a very classic "character versus world" conflict. Jojesri was still the real star in my opinion, but there was no way he couldn't be when he was so vital to the story and its themes. The plot was planned from beginning to end to avoid any potential issues, and the entire story flowed beautifully.
It was only due to my own failings that I stopped writing it, and the primary one was the writing pace. I wrote 2000 words every single day including weekends, while working, for several months, with multiple partial rewrites done during the process. While I had an outline, it was not nearly sufficient to keep me on track and the complexity of the story ended up constantly increasing. It didn't so much collapse as get to the point where adding to it became too arduous, so I dropped it. It was 260k words.
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Why did I just subject you to all of that? Well...
I bring this up because all of these things informed my planning process and writing for Violent Solutions, and because the two stories actually share a world to some extent. Post-apocalyptic Earth is largely the same in both, though the outcome of the war between the warbreed and AI is different. Both stories strongly feature an AI of a very human-like variety, Nemiza's being even more human than Yuwniht in Violent Solutions, though similarly skilled in combat with a military background. Both stories also share similar themes about their content, but they express them in different ways, and the best way to show that is with the AI character.
> Nemiza's main AI character was a very reluctant person. It was racked with guilt over its past actions, because it didn't truly understand what it was doing or why it was bad until it had already committed a plethora of gleeful atrocities. It wanted to die, even though it didn't really express it that way, but it couldn't die because of what it was. Well, it could, but so long as a copy remained there would always be one of it sitting around that was ready to be brought back to life. So it was stuck, placed in a position where its only goal was unachievable, and thus its only purpose was to exist and do as it was told.
>
> Yuwniht is a more powerful, centered character. Yuwniht is what the people who created Nemiza's AI wanted him to be: an absolutely ruthless murderer with just enough humanity to convince humans that he's one of them before he slips the knife in their backs or poisons their water or blows up their compound. Yuwniht certainly follows orders, but he isn't capable of guilt on the level of a human. I don't want to say too much about him here because his journey and development are part of this story, but I will say that he is far from static, he is just changing very slowly.
Tonally, this difference manifests in that Violent Solutions has a much more action-oriented focus than Nemiza, and it isn't as openly introspective. To put it another way that might please a certain person I've been PMing with, it's a lot less emo.
The other big difference is that I planned Violent Solutions extensively using Tiddlywiki, a tool I would highly recommend to everyone thinking about writing a web novel. I not only planned out the setting but also the plot to the point where I knew from the start that Volume 1 would be very close to 100 chapters. I wrote backstories for every major character, outlining exactly why they are what they are and why they behave the way they do, without ever planning to reveal them if the plot didn't demand it. I designed the magic system down to an absurd level of detail, then elected not to reveal most of it unless it came up at some point. If Nemiza Version 4 was flying a biplane by eye, Violent Solutions Volume 1 was flying a fighter jet with every possible sensor device attached. I still went off the trail, particularly near the initial Suwlahtk chapters and past chapter 80 or so, but when I went off I knew where I was getting back on.
Volume 2 hasn't gone entirely to plan either (for the better, in my opinion), but I am confident that I have executed it at least as well as I did Volume 1 because, unlike Nemiza, Violent Solutions is a fundamentally simple story with layers of complexity plastered on top, not a fundamentally complex story being simplified by the viewpoint of the main character. Unlike Nemiza, Violent Solutions has characters that are digestible and mostly relatable, even if they are bad people, instead of bundles of dysfunction and pain. Unlike Nemiza, Violent Solutions wasn't made as an idealized "perfect story" back before I knew anything about writing, instead it was made as a "I want to read a webnovel like this, and not enough exist so I'm going to make one." Unlike when writing Nemiza, I now have some experience, perspective, and feedback to help me, and I'm trying to write something I'm capable of writing, not an art piece. Most importantly: unlike Nemiza, I know I can finish this story because I planned the ending from the start.
Why yes, that was me giving myself a pep-talk in text form and I did decide to not erase it. It's my retrospective, I can do that. Was it cringe? Yes. But you still read it.
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Conclusion and Closing
If you actually read all of that, congrats. I really do like reading about other authors' writing process and failed projects, as well as how they've used those things to become better over time. I believe those stories helped me not to give up and approach failure from a perspective of learning and growing, therefore I hope mine is useful to somebody else as well, or at least entertaining.
I'm not the best writer, I know that, I'd rate myself as "middling to average" if I were to try to assess myself objectively. However I am getting better, partly because of feedback and partly just because of experience. I'm fine with not being super amazing and perfect, because it's not possible to be good at a skill instantly. Being bad is just the first step to being good. When I read the first drafts of Volume 1 now, I cringe at some of the stuff I wrote down in them, even though they looked fine to me back in March before I did any editing. This is a good thing. It means I'm getting better and recognizing more flaws. I'm sure that at the end of Volume 2's post cycle, I'll look back the same way, and I can't wait.
And now I reserve the right to preach a bit, since I wish someone would have said this to me years and years ago: if you, the reader, want to write something, write it. Even if you know it's going to suck, still write it. You don't have to post everything you write, and in fact I'd advise you don't post everything because your first writing will generally be awful. However, when you write something you feel confident enough to post, don't let reception get you down. Far too many people ragequit over criticism, and when they do they end up potentially never coming back to writing and testing to see what they can really do.
The ability to turn non-constructive criticism into constructive criticism is vital, and the most important thing you can learn how to do when doing anything where people will be reviewing and responding to you. When I see people posting a hot take that I might initially react to with "Yo, dude, did you even read this chapter? How dumb are you?" I take five minutes, walk around my apartment, then come back and read it again. 9/10 times it turns out that my initial gut reaction was just my ego being defensive, and by reading between the lines just a little that comment that made me a bit mad can be turned into a clear and understandable criticism with real ways to address it. I can't always address all of them, but they all help.
So thanks for reading this far, and I hope you follow along until the end. Thanks for the comments, thanks for the follows, thanks for the engagement, thanks even if you didn't like the story much and complained about it, thanks even if you just lurked and read. All the good and the bad, taken together, is what makes posting up stories worth it. I write stuff I want to read, but the visceral satisfaction of knowing that something written by me to my own taste is enjoyed by others is incredible. I'm glad to have had this experience, and I look forward to it continuing in the future.
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If you thought that ramble was long, just wait until the next one, then the final one. I'll have to write a whole fourth volume for the end-of-story retrospective, I'm sure.