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Book 5 Author’s Note
🕑 Added 2024-11-09 23:43:45 +0000 UTCI always try to write an author’s note. If you’ve read my other stuff, you know that. Sometimes, the point of the note is to tell you what I was thinking when I wrote the book, to give you some insight into how I see the story and what I think it means. I know the death of the author is a thing, but I think it still helps to know where a writer was coming from, even if you disagree on where they ended up.
And I suspect that at least some of you, even if you like how this series ended, can imagine other endings that would have suited you better. You thought of different ways the relationships could have changed and grown. You imagined characters who could have existed. You probably even mentally plotted out a direction for Arthur to go in that might be completely new.
First, let me tell you this: that’s fine. I hope that you know that when you read a book, there are ways the characters become just as much yours as the author’s, and that the way you see them becomes more important to you than how anyone else might interpret them. If it makes sense for you to dream ways for this story to go that are a better fit, that makes you more happy than you otherwise would have been, then do that.
From the first book I wrote in this series to the last, I wanted each word I chose to be the one that led to you being the happiest. I wanted to create a spot you could shrink back into that was warm, secure, and comforting. I wanted to build a world where stress was replaced by purpose, and toil was replaced by capital W work in that productive, fulfilling sense.
If you have to tailor the world a little to get that perfect fit, please do.
And on that note, do feel free to write fanfiction of Demon World Boba Shop. We’ve had a few people reach out to us about that, but here we’re extending everyone an invitation. Feel free to reach out to us at deadworldisekai@gmail.com if you write something!
Sometimes, the author’s note serves a different purpose altogether. Usually, that’s me telling you how I go about writing in general. I want you to be able to take the humble lessons I’ve learned from writing these books, steal them, and get to use them for free. I want you to be able to disagree with my mindset and to build preferences of your own.
And let me be real clear here: I’m not the only writing advice you should read. Believe me when I say that nobody knows the flaws in my writing better than me. My goal is, like Ash, to be the very best. Like no one ever was. But I’m very aware that in some ways I’m much less Ketchum and much more Brock. I’m doing my best with the tools I have, swimming in the destiny I’ve got.
But holy hell, guys. I’ve written about 1,100,000 words in the last year, give or take a month. And while I might not be right about every single thing, I’ve sure noticed a whole hell of a lot of stuff.
This note might end up being a little longer than others. If you like the notes, consider that a reward for getting this far, a present celebrating you walking with me this many miles. If you don’t like the notes, no worries. You have my full and complete permission to stop reading here, if that’s what makes you the most happy.
But you also have my thanks, note or not. I’m glad you are here.
The Long, Rambling Everything About Demon World Boba Shop
I was, as you have already heard, once in a Boba shop with my editor Dotblue, who was asking me what I’d work on next. My answer was half planned, and half bullshitting on the spot. The half that was planned was that I needed to write something calm and nice that had virtually no stress in it. The unplanned half was that it would center around boba.
It might surprise some people to learn boba isn’t my very favorite drink. I like it well enough, but it’s a pretty heavy drink to have all the time if you don’t have a demon’s constitution and spend all of your time walking. I have one about six times a year, like it a lot when I do, and then promptly go back to drinking a lot of iced tea and coffee, which don’t make me much bigger than I already am.
I wasn’t that worried, though, since the drink itself isn’t very complex and the story was never going to be just about that anyway.
Here’s a not-so-secret secret about both reading and writing: Most of the time, neither are nearly so much about setting and story concept as we like to think they are. Those things matter, especially becuase they are often why we pick up the books in the first place. But after that, most of us are there for the character and the way the writer draws the picture.
To put it another way, you’ve probably read a book that wasn’t exactly your normal cup of tea and enjoyed it because the author’s writing was good enough to make that not matter. But you’d be a lot more likely to drop a book with bad writing, even if on paper it was exactly the concept you usually like.
The drink could have been boba, or it could have been a soda shop, or it could have been tea, or he could have opened a bakery. All those would have worked just fine, because in the end the book isn’t about any of those things.
It’s about family.
I really think that anyone who is five books into this series knows that already. You aren’t here for the shop. You are here for Arthur’s sibling relationship with MIlo, or his quasi-fatherhood to Lily. You are there to see Mizu like him for reasons that he’ll never fully understand, and for him to like Mizu for reasons she doesn’t entirely get either (though she gets much closer.)
You are there to see Ella feed and nourish people, and not just with food. You are there to see Karbo break stuff, and for everyone to pretend they are upset while knowing he contributes so much to their would he just couldn’t break enough stuff to tilt the scales of who he is over to a net-bad.
You are there to spend time in a place where rent is easy to pay, good food is cheap, and everyone agrees that the best life is one where everyone works to make sure there’s plenty to go around.
But there’s also, you know, the setting. The story. The things those things are hung on. And they mattered, too.
Here’s a bit about that.
The Setting
DWBS started in a single room, in a house I’ve always imagined was on the beach, with the light of an overcast day barely leaking through the windows and hot tea ready to drink on a side table. From there, things expanded a bit.
The first thing we learned about after that room was not so much about the city Arthur landed in, but how it runs. Right away, we saw that it was a friendly enough place that even a known alien (in the not-from-this-world sense) was immediately fed, housed, and helped. It was a place so good at helping people find their purpose that someone working in a job they don’t mostly love is an oddity, and all that capability for good was focused entirely on Arthur just because he was there.
The city was about that. It was about introducing a society that was that way all the way from the level of any given individual, to the neighborhood level, to the municipal (think: mayoral, city-wide) level, and then worldwide.
Once we knew there was no place to go that wasn’t nice, we branched out to see what nice looked like in rural areas and less developed places. And we saw more about how the demons handle a world that periodically sends disasters that level all but the best defended locations.
Which was all, in the end, to set up Arthur for quite the shock. While everyone in the world he was in was nice, and while everything was almost always perfect, almost always is not actually always. And when all those rural settings and frontier expansions threatened to take away most of the people he loved, we saw just a hint of what the demons had worked together to overcome.
Because once, that thing where families were getting separated and scattered to the four corners was not as nice as what Arthur’s getting. The demons had to work to make these permanent places of safety. They sort of had to fight for them.
And then, once it was clear that Arthur could go with his friends rather than lose them, we saw what it was like to build a new place in the Demon world. And in some ways that was very easy, since it’s a world of magic, skills, and plenty.
But it was still not easy.
That was the path that Arthur took in books 1-4, and by the end of those books, he was established in his own town, with the people he loved. But the entire series, there was another place that had loomed over the story but had never actually been seen. That place was the Capital.
The Capital is about what you’d except from a manga-city. It’s really big. It’s circular, which is normal for both manga cities and DWBS towns of almost any size. It has an economy that dwarves everything else in the story, it has the best food (on average), it has the most entertainment, and if it wasn’t for Arthur Stuff would also have the most advancements in culture and science.
But it is, from the first time we see it, not the right place for Arthur. Right away, when he arrives, we learn that he’s on a schedule. In the capital, they have those. He has places he’d rather not be that he’s expected to go to and things that aren’t his favorite to do that he’s going to have to suck it up and do.
It’s not that the capital is bad, exactly, but if you read the book you find that there’s never any part of it Arthur is particularly excited to go. That’s because the capital is a place that’s about having plenty to do, and that’s not who Arthur is at all. He’s about having the people he loves close, which is much easier in a place like Coldbrook.
Arthur, as a character, is very much the kind of guy who doesn’t really understand what he’s feeling until after everyone else does, and the capital is a terrible place for people like that. Because when it’s noticed that he has the power to improve a lot of lives, he doesn’t fully understand how much he’d hate living in the capital to do it until almost the very end of the book. You’ll notice he almost always frames it as being away from Coldbrook, which is really bad for him, but almost never frames it as being in a place that doesn’t fit, which is just as much of a problem.
Once it’s realized by people besides Arthur how very, very much he doesn’t like the idea of living there, any chance he will sort of evaporates. For any observer who grew up in Demon World culture, Arthur must kind of want to do this, and he’s just torn between that and another equally good option. If it wasn’t like that, he’d say so, because everyone in this world knows you aren’t supposed to be unhappy.
And then he gets to go home, and the setting changes wildly again.
The Future
I’ll talk about the sort of emotional side of the ending for me a bit later, but there was one and only one thing I wanted to show about the setting when I wrote the future: That Coldbrook was thriving, in the sense that everything that Coldbrook was built to be was working.
And we see that. Arthur has a shop, one that’s even smaller than what he had before, aimed at serving a few favorite customers and anyone that wanders by, but that leaves plenty of room for up-and-coming restauranteurs to grow. Coldbrook is developed, its children are becoming adults (as we see even in Lily’s growth), and it’s basically grown as far as Arthur and company could make it grow.
And now it’s time for something different to happen. Because all that growth was for one purpose. Like everything in the Demon World, it was meant to equip a generation to help the next, to make sure the niceness was maintained, and to give people their best chance to find happiness.
When the newcomer comes to town and needs help, we find that the entire culture has been shipping him around from one sage to another trying to get him settled since he got there. Expense isn’t an issue, and neither is his attitude, his standing, or anyone’s effort. They just want him to be happy, and everyone is going to work and work until they figure out how to make that work.
And I hope, I really do, that that part helped people know that if they knocked on any door at all in the demon world, they’d find someone who would help them find what they needed.
Writing Characters
Where do characters come from? I get asked that a lot. For people who have not yet sat down and churned out an entire story, I think it looks impossible. I remember being that person. It wasn’t that long ago. I remember looking at the work of the better writers I knew of, seeing these characters who were fully fleshed people in most of the ways that mattered, and wondering how they did that - how they sat down and imagined an entire person.
Now I’ve done a bit of that work, and even if I’m no Lois McMaster Bujold, I think I have a better handle on it. For my money, I think there are three answers to the question of where characters come from. In no particular order and perhaps repeating stuff I’ve said in other notes, here they are.
Necessity
Some characters are who they are because they simply have to exist that way for the story to work. I think the easiest place to see this, like a lot of simple writing things, is Disney movies. Take Jafar, for instance. For the story he’s in to work, it has to make sense that Aladdin finds his way to a long-hidden cave of wonders, and then in some way or another ends up enemies with the thing that got him there.
When you start to think about who would be able to get a poor orphan into a magic cave, yet not deserve the things he was hiring that orphan to find, you come up with Jafar. He’s a bad trickster wizard, and basically nothing else. As soon as you give him a bad-guy mustache and stupid clothes, he’s ready to go.
Some of your characters are going to be like that. This is especially true of smaller characters who won’t reappear in the story that much. If you need a person to be angry with the main character after a car crash, it’s okay if that’s all they are. You don’t have to know how many kids Dave McCrashvictim has, or what he does for a living. You just have to know he’s yelling and whatever else is needed for the scene.
T-1000 is a great character, not because we understand his motivations (he doesn’t have any), but because we know his purpose (killing 90’s kids) and because he fulfills that purpose and nothing else. He has a job, and he’s a great character as soon as he does it.
Not every character is entirely necessity. Most aren’t. But the best characters have clear jobs to do, even if that’s only clear to you as the writer. When they have a purpose like that, they tend to get a lot of the other stuff characters need automatically (personality, development) because it’s so much easier for you to understand your character if you start out understanding what they are for.
Chaos
Sometimes, not always but often enough, you’ll find a character that exists entirely to rock the boat. Moving back to Disney, the most prominent chaos character I can think of in any of their movies is Gaston. He doesn’t need to be in the story until Belle and The Beast are almost happy. Then he’s absolutely vital because he’s the only person in position to mess up that potential happiness up in a way we don’t have to blame on either of our romantic leads.
I think of chaos characters as people who exist not to build up the story in a particular direction, but to alter the course of a story that’s otherwise on rails. They come in and break the story that’s currently happening. If you do this right, they are like a pair of shears cutting through all the ropes of a parachute at once. They have the potential to create a sudden, drastic difference in the feel and trajectory of a story.
Karbo is a chaos character, at least after he takes Arthur into combat in book one. Corbin is almost entirely a chaos character in a really noticeable way, since he literally pops in and out of the story carrying trouble and solutions on his back.
Like a lot of things, the difference between a necessity character and a chaos character can be paper-thin; one is the creative yin to the other’s destructive yang, or whatever. There’s a lot of mix and match in these categories, something I’ll talk about just as soon as we finish up our last category of character.
Love
Some characters aren’t necessary at all. You know who doesn’t do much of anything in the books he’s in? Skal. You can remove him from almost any scene he’s in and keep things going in the same direction. He doesn’t create chaos, and he’s not the load-bearing enabler of plot progression in every instance I can think of.
He’s there because I like him. I wanted one very old man in the town, not for plot reasons, but because I simply like grandpa characters. I wanted him to not get in the way. I wanted him to have already achieved every last thing he dreamt of, and to now have the security to do whatever he wanted, whether it was useful or not.
And I got it. To the extent Skal affects the story, it’s because I held the door open for him until he caught up. It’s because I built little Skal-shaped holes to keep my Skal in.
This is, I want to stress, not only big-O big-K OK, but sometimes necessary so you can write a book at all. You know that thing where people tell you to write what you know? The best version of that advice is, I think, not only to write what you know, but to write what you like. Because when you are writing what you like, a story you actually enjoy, you get flow. You get things happening because you can see them happening to the characters you actually care about.
You know what would be a good thing to happen to them, and what would be bad. There’s a writer named Lois McMaster Bujold I mentioned up above, who says that the best question you can ask about a character is “what’s the worst thing that I could do to him now?”To know that, you have to be dealing with someone you understand and care about.
You don’t have to like every character. But you have to like some of them. If you don’t, why are you writing about them?
Putting the Three Together
Let’s talk about mixing and matching a bit. One time, I had an idea for a scene about a place between worlds that, in the sense that Isekai stories sometimes do, had an attendant in it. My idea was that this attendant wouldn’t be particularly good at their job. They’d do just enough work to sort-of-kind-of wing it, and then they’d do a mediocre job even with the prep work they had done.
This character ended up being The Truck in Deadworld Isekai. The idea of ending up in the exact wrong reincarnation scenario flowed out of that (and some other stuff; creation is complex) and we got an entire story.
But it didn’t end there because now this character I had built for Chaos had to do actual work. And because the cast of Deadworld was always so spare, he had to do a lot of work. Over time, that character revealed more and more of himself, and we learned that he was bad at making plans because he was lazy and greedy, and that his laziness and greediness often created problems that he then tried to get rid of in the lowest effort, lowest cost way he could.
If this sound evil already, know that the Deadworld System is the most evil character I think I’ve ever written.
Now let’s talk about a pretty extreme, pure Love character. The Old Man Between Places (Sam, now) was based on a concept that’s popular in various religions of an immediate end to pain when someone dies, of an immediate comfort that wipes away all the bad you’ve ever felt. The Old Man Between Places is a person who facilitates that. For me, he’s not just the person. He’s also the room. He’s waking up in bed with nowhere to be except home. He’s the exact food or drink you want at an exact moment.
So I wrote his scene, and with absolutely no other use for the character, based an entire series off the judgement of someone who facilitates the Feeling of Clean Sheets and Just The Right Amount of Light to Wake Up To.
And he’s also a chaos character, believe it or not. He’s not a necessity character. I could have done everything he does with the System, or just with a disembodied window and a vague sense that everything was going to be okay. But one day, if this series continues in some form or another, he’s the guy who will come in, throw the switch, and change the entire direction the train runs in.
Or we could talk about chaos or necessity characters that became love characters. Ella was a necessity character. I needed someone who could cook and wouldn’t stress Arthur out even a little. I decided the best way to do that was to create a turbo-mom who would immediately feed and adopt any hungry-slash-homeless children who happened to fall into her personal affection gravity well.
After that, I didn’t really need her. But you’d be insane to think I wasn’t going to make room in the story for her. Entire storylines (Minos) exist because I needed her to have a home in the story.
That’s a lot of words to say a single thing. You should make sure a character is either there to build a story, to break it, or because you really truly love them and are willing to do the work it takes to build them a home. If you have any one of those three, you can often tack on one or both of the other purposes. But you have to start from one.
If you ever find yourself writing a character who doesn’t build your story, break it, or make you fall in love with it, kill them. They shouldn’t have been there in the first place.
Creating a World
Let’s keep this section short because I only know the answers to half of the questions that someone might ask about creating a world.
Some people (Frank Herbert, George Martin) create worlds because they love creating worlds, and they only then try to make characters that make sense to inhabit them. When George Martin introduces Ned Stark as a character, it’s not to introduce you to Ned Stark. It’s to, by killing him, show that people like Ned Stark (good people) are incompatible with the world he’s built. From that point, you know it’s a bad world filled with bad people, full stop. It’s a world of pain.
Some people work from that direction. They build a place, then populate it. I work the other way. I build a few characters I like, then build a place for them to live that - this is important - makes sense for them, and the kind of story I want to tell with them.
Everything I add from that point, whether it’s characters, majicka mechanics, or new kinds of plants, is me building a world around those characters.
I think you can do either. I very obviously can’t do the Martin version of world building, so I can’t tell you much about it, except that all those pieces really need to fit together.
Telling the Story You Have to Tell
There’s something fundamentally ugly about, as a reader/watcher/listener/enjoyer-of-things, hearing that someone wrote a book, made a movie, or otherwise produced art because they needed money. It feels very counter to what art is supposed to be, and carries all sorts of warnings with it that the piece of art they made out of practical necessity might not be the good art they could have made if they had their choice in the matter.
The dirty, horrible truth is that once you start writing for money, you make a lot of choices that are aimed at making sure you have the resources to continue writing. Unless you are a runaway success, you have to keep having successes in those filthy practical ways or your rent doesn’t end up paid.
Quick aside: If you are five books in and enjoyed them, please do talk about this series somewhere. As above, success lets me write more stuff like this. Five books in, I’m confident when I say we both seem to want that.
The way I think this applies to you as a writer is to acknowledge you might not always have the resources to write the exact thing you want to write. But you should always walk into a new project hoping you do, and planning on changing just enough during the process to keep your work alive while giving it as much room to grow into what it’s supposed to be as you can.
I think that, for most people, that means starting out with enough idea to write one very good book. Whether or not you want a series, you should plan on writing a story that, even if there wasn’t a series of books after it, would be enough.
Into that book, you put enough of a world that it could live on in someone’s mind even without more building. You put enough characters that, for the reader, it’s populated. You include enough story that your customer thinks of you as having told them a complete story.
You know who does this great? Old detective shows. Columbo is amazing at telling self-contained stories that lend themselves to a greater series, but that live on their own. Ditto Murder She Wrote, or even Father Brown. Bujold, who I mentioned above, tries to write each of her stories in a way where if you encountered them out of order in the wild and read them in whatever order they presented themselves, you’d still end up pretty okay with the experience.
I’m not sure I get this part of things exactly right just yet. It’s something I’m working on. But I think if you write a chapter that doesn’t stand on its own two feet, or especially a novel that can’t exist by itself, it’s a big warning sign that you might have written a chunk of story that doesn’t actually have any story in it.
So if I have advice here, it’s this: figure out what story you are telling. Do it every chapter, every section of beginning-middle-and-end, and every novel you write. And then do what it takes to tell that story in a way where it can support its own weight and live independently both as a piece of art and as a memory your readers end up carrying around for the rest of their lives.
Surviving the Process
The heading of this section is melodramatic. I fully admit it. I’ve had manual labor jobs that sent me home in pain every day. Writing is better than those. I’ve had super-stressful, mile-a-minute overloaded-with-stress-24-7 jobs. Writing is better than those. I fully admit that what I do is only work in a way where you sort of have to squint your eyes, tilt your head, and take it in at odd angles to call it that without feeling ashamed of yourself.
But it is still work.
I’ve written about eleven novels in the past year, all of which were at least fairly well received. People liked them. Not too many people hated them. Very few people called me a hack, and most of the people who did call me a hack were nice about it.
It’s the easiest, most fulfilling job I’ve ever had. Do not ever get me wrong about that.
And still, about once a week, my editor-and-friend Dotblue will check in on me to make sure I’m not killing myself by doing this. He doesn’t say it that way, exactly. But he is, in a nice way, trying to make sure I’m not outputting so hard that I’m going to hurt myself.
Words are a well that runs dry. My output level is way, way above the norm, but there’s still a limit. And once the aquifer of story is tapped, you can only get more out of your wells by jumping in and sacrificing muscle and sinew to digging the well deeper.
I’m lucky enough to do this full-time, but not everyone has that advantage. I know people who come home from full-time jobs, then sit down and try to squeeze out some words before they fall asleep at their desks. I know people who are sad who are spending their lifeblood on writing happy characters, or people who are happy who are dragging themselves down by writing things that are sad.
I want to say this very carefully. I think that writing a book should hurt. If a character you love gets hurt, it should hurt you a little, too. If you write a love scene, it should be a little embarrassing. If you write an argument, it should make you a bit angry. All those things should cost you something. If they don’t, they came cheaply, and I think most of the reader can tell if that’s the case.
But writing should not hurt you, in the sense that you should lose family over it. It shouldn’t hurt you in a sense that leaves you homeless, or in a bad mental health place, or abusing substances, or anything like that.
Let it cost you something. I really mean that. But don’t let it cost you everything. Manage your time. Manage your rest. Take the breaks you need. Make sure you get enough sleep. Exercise a bit. Watch some TV, or play video games, or whatever cheap junk-food entertainment lets you feel good without much effort. Give yourself enough to keep going on with.
And, as Hemingway said, if you can manage it, you should leave just a little bit in the well every day, just a small handle on the next bit of story, and a small assurance that you have more left to write that you can take with you to bed every time you go to sleep, to play, or to otherwise rest so you are ready and able to come back to your art in a healthy way.
How I Feel About The End
I ended this book in an odd way. I think it was the right way, but it’s certainly not normal to end things with a seven-chapter flash-forward epilogue. It’s not that weird, either, but I can see some people walking away wondering why, even if they liked it.
My reason for doing things that way were pretty simple. When I started this out, my idea of Arthur was someone who had not quite found their place on Earth, had dove headfirst into the wrong kind of life, and was now being given the right kind of life for free. And at his core, I think the recurring essence of Arthur is that he doesn’t ever really believe he deserves it.
At some point in book five, I was writing another scene that dealt with that and realized, no, actually, he does get that now. I understood that I was writing the last time I could plausibly claim that Arthur really didn’t feel as if he was at home in this new world.
I ended the book a few chapters after that. I had to. Arthur’s story, for better or worse, was resolved. Everything that came after that was everything he deserved, and everything you expected. He was married. He was having a child. The child he already had was grown. Everyone around him was safe, warm, and happy.
But Arthur’s story was still done.
I don’t know for sure that I’ll ever write another DWBS book. But if I do, I think it’s going to be someone else’s story. I’ll find someone else in the corners of my mind who needs to heal, and bring them in and let them bask in the glow of a place that really, truly is fairly nice.
Enough of you have told me that was important to you that I believe you. Even if didn’t, I would still know it was true for me.
I’m on to other series now, but I hope to see you not only there, but also back here, some day.
As always, thank you so much for reading these. It allows me to live the way I’ve always wanted to, and it makes more of a difference to me and my family than you’ll ever know.
Thanks,
RC
Comments
Miri
I've read a lot of books and loved a lot of books, but it's rare that once i've finished one, I want to hug the book. Thanks for writing such a huggable series of books.
Authorii
This is perhaps one of my favorite stories ever and I didn't expect to be quite so happy when it ended but this was genuinely beautiful
WarStrider72
Thanks boss!
