Hello everyone!

That is a wrap on Fortress Al-Mir. I’m quite proud of this one, quite pleased with how it went. However, this post will probably contain spoilers. If you have not read Fortress Al-Mir and the idea of a fantasy-army building-war story sounds good to you, you would do well to read Fortress Al-Mir first.

If you have already read the story, then read on! I’ll be sharing some of my thoughts about it. Below this section I’ll talk a little about upcoming projects, so you can scroll down to that if it interests you.

As I said earlier, I’m pretty happy with Fortress Al-Mir as a whole. Did it go the way I planned? Well, no. But I’m not much of a planner. In writing, there are generally two types of people. “Growers” and “Planners”. Planners, as suggested by the name, plan out every little detail. They know every major story beat and most minor story beats before they even start the first paragraph. Growers follow a more exploratory approach, figuring things out with the story and characters and allowing things to develop as they come.

Now, everyone is a bit of both, but I definitely lean far heavier on the Grower side of things. I might have a general idea of how things should go or what the ending should look like, but I do not think about all the steps to get there. I can’t say how well it works for other people, but I do think it is an extremely flawed approach for me personally. However, every time I’ve tried to fully plot out a story and actually follow that plot, it has ended in disaster.

Anyway, what does all that have to do with Fortress Al-Mir? Simple: I did not plan for two-thirds of the story to be about a massive war.

Fortress Al-Mir was primarily inspired by Dungeon Keeper Ami (which I highly recommend reading) and Dungeon Keeper (which I highly recommend playing) in general. But I was picturing more of an action and adventure story with some elements of building an empire. I do think I hit most of those quite well, mostly in the first book of the story, but also war story. I was not really prepared for war story.

I don’t think it went poorly. It could probably have been cut down a bit. Even as I was writing, I felt like there were several segments of the war that could have been cut completely if not reduced drastically. But as a whole? I thought it went well and it maintained a steady readership throughout, so I presume most others thought so as well.

I’m not too keen on straight fight scenes, but a war did necessitate a few. I tried to intersperse most of the war with other things going on, plotting for the end of the world, visiting other realms, and so on. Honestly, I think the story could have used more of that, even just more downtime where the characters interacted without something big at stake. It’s probably my one major problem with Fortress Al-Mir.

At least until the ending. Initially, the plan was for the Eternal Empress to escape and come back with a full army, but I had just done that with the Heart of Gold’s avatar, escaping and returning with the Empire in tow. I considered continuing into a fourth book anyway. Prince Cedric could have been more antagonistic, the Holy Light’s avatar could have been more antagonistic, or just the Kingdom of Chernlock in general, but there comes a point where more of the same isn’t a good thing.

So the ending. I do think it is one of my better endings. Certainly more hopeful and optimistic than anything else I’ve written. It was a struggle to write. I had a lot of conflicted thoughts. Was Vezta suddenly acting all cagey good or bad? Was ending with a big ritual a cop out? I mean, it was basically always going to end with some ritual, but was this one earned? I hope so. And then the epilogue? The finale of the series ending with the PoV of a brand new character, talking about other places that had probably been mentioned only a handful of times throughout the rest of the story. I wasn’t sure about that either. At least not while writing it.

I’m pretty happy now that I’ve had some time to sit back and relax, thinking about it all. An “And the adventures continue” sort of ending, just with less “interesting times” to live in.

A fitting ending.

Hopefully. I’m writing this before seeing comments on Royal Road.

Art by Geraldo Prado