Vacant Throne Concluding Notes

Hello everyone! Welcome to the end!

First, a quick bit of administrata. The complete epub for Vacant Throne will be available on my Patreon in a few days. February 1st, is my current target date. I am currently, indefinitely, and until further notice suspending monthly payments. However, charge-on-subscribe is currently enabled. That will effectively allow anyone the ability to ‘purchase’ the epubs for however much you want by signing up until I figure out a better store-like solution. The epubs are really nothing special, so don’t feel pressured to do so. None of the text should be different than here or RoyalRoad. I will be updating typo reports as they come in in all three places.

With that out of the way, on to the Vacant Throne thoughts writeup thingy. Postmortem? Something like that.

This is a bit of an Author’s Notes segment. I’m going to be talking a bit about Vacant Throne, maybe writing in general, and quite possibly just rambling a bit. There is also a bit of a talk about future projects waaay down at the bottom. If that doesn’t sound interesting, then feel free to not read this! If it does, read on!

The first thing I wanted to mention was the ending, given it is the most recent thing people have read and the most recent thing I wrote for VT. It’s fresh on the mind. At the risk of sounding like I’m tooting my own horn, I think I did a rather good job on the ending. Void Domain’s ending received a… less than unanimous acclaim. It had a fairly abrupt ending, didn’t examine any of the many characters aside from Eva, and had an ending that was distinctly melancholic without giving readers a real sense of resolution.

I hope Vacant Throne’s ending has come about a bit better. From the reactions of my Patreon supporters, I think I hit it far better. With more than just the epilogue at that. The last few arcs built into a proper climax, I think. Maybe it was a bit out of proportion relative to the rest of the story, being only a few thousand words compared to the near one million of the rest of the story, but things were moving quickly. And, frankly, I tend to find climaxes that last too long to be exhausting. But what did you think?

As for the epilogue itself, I think that went pretty well. A comment on my Patreon did point out that Brakkt and Fela had a distinctly unsatisfying chapter relative to the other characters, especially given their importance in the story as a whole. And, yeah. I agree, especially in retrospect and after reading their full comment. I actually considered rewriting it in the short timeframe between reading that comment and the chapter going live here, but I didn’t in the end. I didn’t think I would be able to make it significantly more satisfying without changing too much, and there was only a week or so to do it in, which is not a lot of time from my perspective.

Outside the topic of the ending, I had a few gripes of my own that developed over the course of the story. Some minor, some a little major. I talked about most of these over 2020 on my Patreon, so I’ve pretty much had a lot of time to think about each.

For example, some readers might notice that Tzheitza kinda just… disappeared from the story aside from the occasional mention now and again. That was completely and totally my own fault. After a few arcs of her, I really started to loathe writing her odd manner of speech. There were a few other problems with her character, mostly in relation to Alyssa, but the thing that actually got her booted was how painful it was to write her dialog. Initially, the idea was that she spoke quickly, dropping ‘non essential’ parts of sentences and slurring words together. All because the backstory lore of alchemist-types having this danger to them, where they would have to communicate extremely quickly to other people in laboratories to prevent accidents. “Don’t add the blue chemical to the red chemical” or “grab that vial before it hits the ground” needed to be condensed into only a second of spoken dialog. Which, over time (in lore), just sort of evolved into a speech pattern that most potioneers share.

I wrote a few weeks ahead of the currently posted chapter throughout the entirety of VT. When Tzheitza first appeared way back at the start of the story, I had written dialog that matched that lore idea. However, upon rereading the chapter before posting it a few weeks after I had written it, I found that I could not even mildly figure out what she was trying to say for half her dialog. The only bits that I could figure out were because of context with Oz and the situation. So I rewrote it, significantly downplaying the unintelligible nature of her speech to the point where readers should have been able to understand most of it. In fact, it mostly came down to simply adding in a few contractions where there wouldn’t normally be any.

Would it have been better had I stuck to my original vision?

No. Absolutely not. She would have been written out of the story the arc after she appeared were that the case. That might have been for the better, but I’ll get to that in a minute when I talk about Alyssa.

Back to Tzheitza for just a moment more: I actually wanted her and Oz to be a big part of the demon-form Taker fight in the city. That was the original plan, anyway. They had a whole shared history with him, having been on the same team while fighting demons. However, Tzheitza was already in the process of being phased out and, while he was still present for several parts of the story after, Oz kind of got phased out along with her. Both, along with the rest of Oz’s crew, were supposed to have been a whole lot more important.

Brakkt and Fela ended up replacing them for the most part. Which is another reason why I’m a little upset about their epilogue chapter.

Anyway, learned something from that at least. Don’t do super exaggerated accents. I should have known better because I remember reading… something. Can’t remember what. But it had a dwarf or something that talked in a manner I found extremely irritating.

There were a few other things throughout the story that I ended up doing nothing with. A lot of which were because I thought up some cool idea related to the world and immediately wrote it into the story as soon as it made sense to, regardless of whether or not I had a plan on how to actually pay off the mentions. Things like the elf blacksmith having a whole chapter where she drops big hints that the elves were going to be up to something, but basically never get mentioned again. Decorous and his implied coup attempt kind of fell into that as well, though I also tried to somewhat resolve that by having him having severe doubts about following through with that in his interlude… along with his brother showing up and saying that their country was changing their stance in respect to monsters.

Feel free to ask about such things down in the comments. I normally avoid even responding to comments that are speculatory in nature because I never know what to say about them. But the story is done, so I’m free to answer both in lore and as a writer, if you want.

Side anecdotes out of the way, on to Alyssa.

I rather liked Alyssa. Generally speaking, I think she was a rather good protagonist. Not to say that I am unaware of her flaws—not character flaws, but flaws as a character. This was another thing that I brought up on my Patreon earlier this year. Alyssa lacks a good motivator. When I started Vacant Throne, I knew I wanted to do better than Void Domain. Eva was a protagonist who was rarely ever proactive, mostly because all she really wanted for the majority of the work was to not make waves and just go to school like a normal person. For Alyssa, I decided that she needed a good, strong goal.

Getting home. That sounds like a great goal. Leave the mixed up world that she wound up in to return home.

Wrong. That’s a terrible goal! Why? Because she can’t work toward it. With the way I had the rules laid out and the knowledge of magic, there was no visible path forward that Alyssa could take realistic steps to follow through with that goal. As such, what should have been a great motivator turned into something that just occasionally got brought up throughout practically the entire story.

That isn’t to say that she lacked goals completely. She had much smaller goals that generally lasted an arc or two. Save the princess, recover Oxart, distract the Astral Authority, close the pit, etc. Those arcs were probably stronger arcs in the series because she had those goals at the time, but there was just nothing overarching to bridge the gaps. I realized that was a problem partway through and tried to bring her efforts to get home (and avoid the problem of angels bothering her) a little to the forefront with things like her experimenting with her connection to Tenebrael and asking Irulon about being a lich and other such things, but none of those paths really aligned with how I had envisioned and planned the ending from practically the start of the series. As such, they just sort of fell away without pomp or ceremony. Which probably made them a whole lot worse than the aforementioned world building stuff that never went anywhere.

Should I have changed the ending? Maybe. I don’t know, honestly. Not sure what exactly I would have changed it to.

But, because of that motivation and a lack of a way to work toward it, the story ended up repeating several mistakes that I had already made in Void Domain. Namely and most notably: Both Eva and Alyssa just kind of follow along with the events happening around them, reacting for pretty much the entire story. There is never that moment where reaction turns to satisfying proactive action.

I brainstormed up a few ways that could have solved that issue without changing the entire story. I think the best one that I came up with was to give Alyssa another goal. Something smaller, maybe not significantly easier to achieve, but one that she could actively work toward alongside everything else that went on. The idea I came up with was to make Alyssa into something of a food-buff. Make her want to bring modern flavor complexity to the masses of a medieval society. There is a lot of food talk already—one of the first things she does is cook up a hamburger for the brothers in Teneville. That could have been expanded a bit. I would probably take out most of her job with Tzheitza and replace that with wanting to start up some food stall. Maybe even using Tzheitza to synthesize some flavors or maybe just having her look up creative and tasty dishes on her phone that she could make with the materials on hand.

There could have been a bit more strife with the gang on the streets of Lyria, a bit of depression over having to leave it for long periods of time during certain parts, maybe an apprentice that could have taken up the mantle when she went to Illuna… And in Illuna, maybe she started another food stall, this one instantly successful because of what she had learned and failed at during the first bit. Most of the main plot points would still have happened, many in the exact same ways, but I feel that would have given some direction and more tangible motivation to Alyssa as a more rounded character with a better arc.

Anyway, there are some other things I had problems with. Villains, especially. I seem to have a problem with villains. There were lots of things I liked as well—I think most of the side characters are much better done here than in Void Domain, Irulon and Kasita especially. But this has already gone on quite long, so I’ll probably stop here as those are the most important things.

I’ll be fielding any and all questions down in the comment section. I normally have a policy of avoiding commenting on speculatory comments, but not now that the story is finished. If you have some question about a plot thread that went nowhere, what a character did after the story, or even just some random symbolism that you noticed, go ahead and drop it in the comments. I’ll at least respond and say that I have no memory of why I added that thing to the story 🙂

As for what is coming next, I have a lot of ideas. I want my main focus to be on the hero and the villain, the dichotomy between them, and having stronger motivation and character arcs for at least the hero to go through. I took most of December off writing, but I’m back at it again now. I’m currently quite enamored with a project that I’m not actually going to talk about at all beyond what I just said. Why? I think I have significant motivation losses toward projects that I talk too much about. Like my brain goes “Oh, you’ve already told everyone this story. No point in writing it now, right?” even if I only mention some general aspects.

So nothing about a future story for the time being. But I’m a pretty quick writer, I think. So when can you all expect to read something from me?

Unfortunately, probably nothing is coming anytime soon. I think I’m going to give up the web serial bit entirely. While I like reading them well enough, I think I would prefer writing shorter, more traditional novels. I’d like to try to break into more traditional publishing as well, though I might have a bit of work to go before I actually hit that point. After I finish the thing I’m currently writing, I might try shopping it around to agents for traditional publishing, or I might try to hire an editor to go over it before I self-publish, probably with a properly commissioned cover art to go with it. It depends on how I feel about it.

That means that there might not be anything for six months, maybe a year. Maybe more if I scrap this project in favor of something else—which I am not planning on at this moment, but I scrapped several projects between Void Domain and Vacant Throne that I thought would be my next series, so who knows. If you click the follow button over on the sidebar on this WordPress, Void Domain, or the preview site, you’ll definitely get an update when something happens. Twitter as well. The preview site might even have some intermittent updates, but not sure about that just yet. I’d like to be more active there, or even on Twitter or some place, but I just often feel like I don’t have much to say outside of writing related things, and I don’t usually share anything about something I’m currently writing. I might try to give it some effort though.

Beyond that… I think that’s it. Thanks for reading all this way. And thanks for reading Vacant Throne as well.

I appreciate all the support you have given me over the years.
Tower Curator