How My First Novels Have Influenced My Next Ones

Starting this week, I'll be posting early-access chapters for my work-in-progress litRPG cyberpunk novel, Permanent Midnight.

In 2012, I ran a successful Kickstarter for my novel Birthright, and through stretch goals, the rest of the series, Lineage and Legacy. As I did so, I went on a sort of blog tour, touting that I was basing the setting, party dynamics, and that sort of thing on video games and MMOs.

I wanted to include things like stats, upgrades, loot, magic items, achievements, and all the stuff that was part and parcel of MMO (and general RPG) gameplay. But at the time, I didn’t think anyone would want that as an explicit part of the book itself.

After all, I’ve seen denigrating remarks on so many fantasy novels that they seemed like the author just converted their D&D campaign into a book.

I even had a cool name for it: gamerpunk.

In the end, however, I went the more traditional route with the series, only taking game-inspired concepts, and not the concepts themselves. The world was built around the effects of those kinds of things, but they were all behind the scenes and not any kind of game-based system with actual numbers, levels, etc.

And The Series Was a Success!

It did great, I got excellent feedback on the books, and I’m really proud of what I made and the story I told.

The books each earned a lot more than what the standard advance for traditionally published books was at the time and got me a full, active SFWA membership.

In all regards and by all metrics, The Technomage Archive was a success.

But I always did hate that I never got to have Ceril, Damien, and the others play around with loot boxes, character sheets, and achievements.

Little Did I Know…

…that the collection of genre conventions that I was referring to as gamerpunk was getting ready to explode under the terms GameLit and litRPG during the same period I was publishing my trilogy.

Turns out, people love the exact thing that I decided to cut out of the Birthright and the other technomage books. They love seeing narratives of characters going through the kind of progression in game-like worlds. There are whole sites dedicated to it like Royal Road.

There are major series with dozens of books based around the characters progressing in just the way I had intended in my 2012 series. The Kindle app tells me that I’ve read 43 of them from May-December 2024.

So far, I’ve read every book available in the following series: Dungeon Crawler Carl, Mistrunner, The Tower of Somnus, The City of Artem, Mimic & Me, Cyber Dreams, Victor of Tucson, and probably others I’m forgetting off the top of my head.

Having read so much of it this year has made me kind of excited to revisit some of the stories that I wanted to over a decade ago, but thought that no one would want to hear.

Revisiting “Gamerpunk”

I still like the term gamerpunk, so it’s likely going to be in the series title of my current WIP (work in progress) series. You know, like Gamerpunk Chronicles but less cliche and cheesy.

Right now, I’m writing a cyberpunk-fantasy novel titled Permanent Midnight. The cybernetic mods, weapons, armor, etc. are what boost stats and levels and that kind of thing.

It lines up well with my actual game design for TTRPGs, too, since I’ll be doing the same kind of work for real-world players as well as fictional ones.

It’s really cool. I’m excited. I hope you are, too.

I will be posting early-access chapters here for paid subscribers to read and give feedback on starting later this week.