Demon World Boba Shop: A Cozy Fantasy Novel

New book but the same old traditions.

After every novel, I try to write a quick note letting you know both the why and how of the novel. When I started doing this, I think my conception was that these notes were mainly a service to the writer and soon-to-be-writer types in the audience, to give them a perspective on how I connected the various nuts, bolts, and lag screws that hold each book together.

It turned out some readers like it too, as a sort of peek-behind-the-curtain thing that lets them know a little bit more about the characters they liked, or the events and plot points that they enjoyed. And if that’s you, great. I’ll try to provide every last little interesting nugget I can wring from my increasingly poor memory in the hopes it lets you enjoy Demon World Boba Shop all just that much more.

As always, this is your disclaimer that these author’s notes are lightly edited, are written in a rapid-fire stream-of-consciousness fashion, and are kept purposefully raw so that I don’t revise history too very much. You don’t want me doing that, by the way. I’ll paint a picture so unrealistically positive of myself that you could sniff out the bullshit even hundreds of miles away.

I’ll be getting into the meat of this note pretty soon, detailing character and setting design for you as well as I can. But first, you get a weird story about formative experiences. I know, I know. But you clicked on the author’s note. This is really your fault if you think about it.

When I was ten or eleven, everyone I knew who loved me had always loved me. I had brothers and sisters, and they pretty much had to love me, whether they liked it not. My parents loved me. My aunts and uncles and some percentage of my grandparents did, too. But everyone who loved me mostly did so because they were supposed to — I was their son, grandson, brother, nephew, etc. It was expected.

At the time, I lived in a house that, I swear to you, had no ground floor. Some guy who owed my dad a bunch of money built the house as a way to pay him back, back when houses were still cheap enough that human beings could buy them with normal salaries. But between building the upstairs and the basement, the dude had run out of money.

So to the extent there was a normal first floor, it was just a small hallway about as big as two twin-sized mattresses laid end to end, with both a staircase up and a staircase down extending from it.

And, at ten or eleven, I was sleeping in my shared-with-three-brothers room when I had a dream. I don’t remember the particulars of the dream besides the one part of it that mattered, which was that there was a girl in it. Probably, I’d imagine, a ten or eleven-year-old girl. And in the dream, we talked for a bit, she explained carefully and slowly that she liked me (I think just as a person, honestly) and was glad we had talked.

I had friends before that, and had even had people who had declined to be my friend before that. The former was good, and the latter hurt. But that dream, for whatever reason, was the first time I think I realized the special value of people who choose to love you, who liked and valued you for you, and didn’t have any particular obligation to do so.

The second theme of this book relates to something entirely different. Skip forward about ten or twelve years, I was receiving help for a problem I had caused entirely for myself from a person who absolutely did not want to be helping me and who, reasonably, was pissed about it. To clarify, there wasn’t anyone forcing them to do it. And I, stupid and young, mentioned that.

At which point, the person explained to me that what I had done was stupid, that they were angry about that, and that while nobody was forcing them to help, they nonetheless lived by a certain self-imposed code that required they help people in certain situations. While I certainly didn’t deserve the help, they said the whole point of having principles in the first place was to force yourself to be better than you felt like being. To be something more than instinct and law, basically.

And it was then that I started to understand the value of people who raised the bar for themselves, who were their own moral bosses in a way that actually meant something. The principles squeezed more good out of them than their own feelings-in-the-moment could have. Later on, that same respect grew to include certain kinds of groups, but you get the picture well enough on the individual level that I think we can leave off there.

I’d be lying if I said that I was thinking about either theme when I started writing this book, but Demon World Boba Shop is sort of about both anyway. It’s about all kinds of love, and what that love motivates people to do. It’s also about how the concept of duties can reinforce and strengthen normal goodwill. And it’s about what the world might feel like after generations of those two forces working very, very well.

The Story’s Backstory

The idea of Demon World Boba Shop was, as you might already know, created in an actual boba shop. Dotblue was on a road trip, we met up, and he asked me what I was thinking of working on next. And, mostly as a joke, I said “probably something slice-of-life. Like a guy opening up a Demon World Boba Shop.” And then, like a lot of spur-of-the-moment ideas, it sounded good enough that I just ran with it.

Now, understand that every part of the story I just told you is true. If someone asked me how it came to be in an interview, that’s what I’d tell them. But at the same time it’s not entirely true, in the sense that any story that incomplete can’t be called the entire truth.

To flesh out that story, we have to start before that particular meet-up, at the point where I had just finished the second installment of How To Survive at the End of The World. At that point, I had written about five honest-to-god full-length novels in about as many months. I was tired. And while I like that book and think it’s generally good, it’s also frankly not the best work I’ve done. The first book in the series was better, and so were all three books of Deadworld Isekai.

And while it was fine, and people liked it, I was vaguely aware that if I wrote the entirety of the next novel right away, it would end up sucking. Like not just by my own standards for myself, but also in a way where it wouldn’t be good for the series.

I needed a break, or else I’d be the “well, he used to be pretty good, but…” guy, and that guy doesn’t usually get to go on to avoid the drudgery of a normal job for very long.

So that left me in a place where I needed to figure out how to do three things:

Take a break while still writing

Entertain people while making their lives a little tiny bit better

Not suck

And the best idea, at least that I had right then, was to do something very nice, italics intended. Something that had very low stakes and a vibe that would be as relaxing to write as it was to read.

If that sounds weird, understand that the weirder bit is that it worked. The rest of this note is about what took place in bits and pieces over the next month or so as I planned and wrote. It’s the characters, the place, and the mechanics of the thing. But the more important half isn’t that stuff, or at least I think it isn’t. I’d argue it’s the part where I needed to calm down a bit, and that put me in a place where I could at least have a decent shot at helping other people calm down a little too.

The World

If you are trying to tell a nice story, it’s a good idea to at least try to have a nice place to tell it in. Are there other options? Probably. You could have a very nice, very strong person arrive in a not-nice place and fix it. But if you have a person who is weak, injured, or otherwise in need of nursing back to health, you need the place itself to be nurturing in some way or another.

Arthur isn’t exactly destroyed by his life on Earth, but he’s not exactly whole either. Worse, his big problem is stress, which is basically a universal bad in almost any world you can imagine. Even worse, stress is interesting. When you’re excited during a fight scene, it’s because there are stakes. It feels like things could go wrong. If you completely remove the stress, you lose all the stakes with it, and there’s no story left to tell.

So what I needed was a planet where there was still stress, but all the stress was either generated by Arthur himself, or was a reasonable, beneficial kind of stress. While that’s possible, that’s hard.

What I settled on was creating a planet that had once had war, strife, bloodshed and murder, but was now mostly over those things. Say some force moved in, corrected the worst of it, set them on the right track, and then the entirety of the population of the world kept on that track for a few centuries, and now things are not only nice but a reinforced, steel-plated, dry-aged kind of nice that stands the test of time. That kind of world was what I wanted.

So when you see hunters in this world, they hunt for materials. When you see weapons, they are for monsters and beasts, not for other people who think and talk. When a city has walls, it’s to keep things and not people out.

Now imagine what people would use a LitRPG system for in that world. Hell, think about what you could do with one here. If you could make yourself artificially better at applying yourself to a full day’s work, or better at painting, or any task like that. As an individual, you’d get rich, or at least do well. As a society, you’d do even better. Goods would be cheap. Food would be delicious. Everything would be just a little better, driven by magic and stats in a way that otherwise wouldn’t be possible.

The Demon World isn’t entirely ahead of us because they’ve never had industrialization (or a reason to have it). But they’re doing just fine. There’s plenty for everyone, provided they contribute to the plenty themselves. To the extent anything is expensive, it’s luxuries. The basics of life are easy to get and maintain.

And because of that, most people spend most of their lives relatively happy. It’s not perfect because nothing is, and there are still problems because there always are. But when people react to Arthur’s chronic stress and anxiety as if it’s an odd state of being, it’s because those emotions are indeed odd to them. In the best way possible, they just don’t get it. It’s that kind of world.

Characters

Arthur

Earth Arthur is like a lot of people. He’s been sold on the idea of working very hard to get ahead, and never managed to actually get ahead OR get off the high-pressure track. Most young people don’t have heart attacks, but some do, and he’s one. Maybe he was born with a weak heart, but it’s the stress that triggers his pre-existing problems.

Arthur’s greatest gift, one he doesn’t mention or question, is probably that his relocation contract states that his memories of Earth will slowly seem less important to him as he accepts the demon world. If that wasn’t so, he might never fully recover. Memories, for better or worse, have a long half life. But given how fast the demon world proves itself to him, it’s a very short transition to him, considering it home.

Arthur’s personality was a weird balance to try and hit. I wanted the average reader to be able to put themselves in his shoes, to imagine themselves going through the same experiences. For some of the readers (I’m looking at you, every woman reader) this is much harder just because he’s a man.

I try to limit those details, so you can feel like you could be Arthur. But if I limit every detail about him, he ends up not all that interesting. So in most ways, I went for relatable rather than completely without characteristics. Arthur doesn’t like freeloading. He doesn’t like stress. He gets tired when he works really hard, and worries about blowing big opportunities.

Morally, he’s what I call “reflexively good.” He’s not pushy, at least not that we ever see. He takes advice from people who seem to know more than him. He tries to pay back favors, and tries to help where he sees the opportunity to do so.

And, importantly, he’s the kind of person who was probably nice on earth, but whose niceness really has room to bloom on the demon world. The niceness he brings to the demon world is earth niceness. It’s noted a few times through the book, quietly, that Arthur tends to be nice proactively, where nothing is owed. And as nice as the demons are, that’s not how they generally do things.

Most of the niceness Arthur experiences from most people are either paying him back for something, or because of the overall societal agreement to be nice in a codified, organized way. Arthur’s habit of being nice to people he doesn’t know very well (or at all) isn’t unheard of from demons, but it’s something that would be above-and-beyond for them.

And off in the distance, seeing all this happen and hearing about it from the conversations of other kids in the park, is Mizu.

Mizu

Originally, I wanted to write Mizu as sort of an Aubrey Plaza type of character. I got about two words into her dialogue before I realized that was flat wrong and a horrible mistake. Don’t misunderstand; I like Plaza just fine. But she’s far from a calming character. She’s a kind of bottled chaos, a monotone wrecking ball. It’s the wrong vibe for the world, and would have ended up driving more comedy rather than genuine heartwarming moments for Mizu and Arthur as a couple.

Instead of going wacky, I went for “quiet, but not actually shy.” Mizu is easy to embarrass, and we see that several times, but we never really see her feeling that awkward around Arthur or anyone else. She’s culturally different, but seems fine with that.

One constant complaint I've heard from quiet people is that loud people often assume that they must be uncomfortable just because they aren’t saying much. The same loud people then try to get them to betray their own quiet natures, which actually does make them more uncomfortable. Mizu is in that realm of folks. She’s a woman of few words, someone who likes to be around other people, participating with her presence rather than sheer volume.

When Arthur cuts off their first conversation when he runs out of things to say, that’s a plus for her. When he manages to shut the hell up and enjoy their first date, he gets even more points. She’s a quiet girl, playing a quiet game, and he can hang. And, considering how obviously he likes her, there’s very little worry on her side about moving things forward.

And move things forward she does. An old guy once told me that women make all the important decisions in the early stages of a relationship, from flirting all the way through to marriage, sometimes. Then, he said, they let the men think they made those decisions themselves. I don’t know how right he was or how universal that is, but it’s true here. Mizu gives Arthur flowers before he would have ever dared even think to give her any.

She completes a manual labor task for him to prove she’s handy. She brings him the best water (in two ways, if you count her too), plans and executes their first date, and generally keeps track of the progression of their relationship for both of them.

There’s still a lot we don’t know about Mizu. She lives alone in a big town, has a close female friend we don’t know that well yet, and has yet to mention a single thing about her past, her family, or where she’s from. But for now, she’s a young woman who likes a certain nervous young boy, and that proved to be more than enough for her in book 1.

Ella

Ella is my favorite character in the book because she’s my favorite kind of person in real life. She’s a person who found out that sometimes people get hungry and dedicated her whole life to feeding them. You might say, “RC, is that really a big deal?” Yes, it is. And it’s not just about the food.

When I started writing the book, I was shuffling through adults pretty fast. Arthur meets two competent, kind men first, but neither of them can help him much. He meets Itela, but she’s both too busy and exists in too professional a setting to feel right. He meets the teacher of the class, but he’s a boring character (and thus we don’t see a ton of him) and doesn’t feel right either.

And then Karbo beats a monster to death with Milo’s dagger, and I was searching for a way for Milo to repay Arthur and get that friendship going. And Ella was born. At first, she was just a source of home cooked food, and then from her first line I knew that she was the missing piece.

Ella is an authoritative, respect-commanding cloud of coercive nurturing who not only thinks she knows best, but actually does. Like most smart, goodhearted people, she’s perceptive. She meets Arthur, realizes he’s a good guy, and immediately decides to adopt him. Note that at this point he’s shown no talent for cooking at all. He’s interesting to her because of who he is morally, not practically.

Throughout the book, there’s almost not a single reaction in which she isn’t looking out for Arthur in some way. When he’s pushing too hard, she makes him slow down. When he’s going down wrong paths, she helps him look for the right ones.

And, most importantly to me, she’s able to force him to seek and receive help.

A story:

One time I was fixing a car and stuck my finger where it didn’t belong, badly injuring myself. I cleaned it, wrapped it up, took some antibiotics I had lying around, and was fully prepared to just tough it out. Was that a bad idea? Yes. Could anybody convince me to go to a doctor? No. And at this point it’s relevant to tell you that I had actual broken bones, tissue damage, and a lot of other things that probably would have spelled bad long-term news if I had stayed on that path.

And then an older (in the sense that she was older than me, not ancient) woman heard about it, found me, yelled at me, and made me go to the doctor. There’s a good chance I got to keep the injured part of my hand because of that.

Ella is important to me because she has that gift. It’s a kind of mom magic, yes, but it’s also just that she’s seen a lot of the world, understood it, dealt with problems, and now knows how to help you with yours.

Arthur gets a lot of help from a lot of people, but none of them are as important as Ella. She’s the first person he really trusts, who he really knows deep down in his heart is trying to help him. He and I both love her for it.

I had a conversation today with Doxis, a guy who does art and has a good understanding of the genre, if anyone needs to hire art talent for covers. He’s good. But I was trying to explain Ella a little better, and realized that if there’s one character I had in mind when I made her, it was a 36-year-old version of the Oracle from the first matrix movie. Just young, wise, and slinging cookies at people like there’s no tomorrow.

Lily

A long, long time ago, I had a dream that my wife was getting home from the store. When I went around the back of the car to unload the groceries, my daughter was standing there. She was in one of her introvert moods where she didn’t want to be bothered, holding a gigantic book, and generally being cute by being incredibly surly.

This was a dream.

In real life, I have two sons and no daughter. And so it was that I woke up from this incredibly realistic dream and was sad for a few days because of the sudden (not actually real) loss.

Lily from DWBS and Lucy from Deadworld Isekai are cut from similar molds, both crafted to fit the general shape of my (still non-existent) daughter. They are sort of angry, voluntary introverts who are being forced to interact with much louder, more social doofus father figures, and trying their best to pretend they hate it.

Lily differs from Lucy in that she’s actually weak and vulnerable. She’s lost people, lost trust, and has suffered not only in the heart from it but also in her actual body and lifestyle. I decided that on some level she’s linked “accepting charity” with admitting to herself that her parents are actually dead and not coming back, and thus won’t do it at all.

One big immediate conflict with that idea is that nobody actually believes the demons would let a child starve or be in danger to any significant degree. The only thing that makes this work is that the demons are, for the most part, pretty socially independent. It’s a norm for them that most people should be able to do most of the things they like most of the time.

So when a child breaks out and refuses to be recaptured and taken care of, they settle on something like, “Well, we'll keep an eye on her.”

When Arthur offers her work, she takes it for two reasons. The first is that Arthur does seem to actually need the help. The job is real, and she can see he’s having trouble keeping up with it. The second is that Arthur himself is in a few specific ways even more of a child than her. He doesn’t seem to understand the world he’s in, right down to the point of not knowing how much things should cost.

For Lily/Lucy characters, that’s a crux characteristic. At their core, they want to correct ignorance and stupidity and are drawn to people who accept those corrections

Later on, she’s adopted by Arthur/Ella/Milo, bringing that family unit to a count of four very different individuals. Ella forces her hand a bit in that decision, but in my head less than you’d think. Lily might have been able to give up the unlimited free food, great people, and constant interesting activity to go back to her hole and starve, but she didn’t really want to. Ella forcing her to just gave her an excuse to be happy without feeling like she was betraying her parents in the process.

Milo

I could write “Milo is Arthur’s best friend and also sort of his older brother” here and be done with it. In fact, I’m basically going to. If you’ve ever had either, Milo makes a lot of sense to you. If not, he’s still a fun ball of energy.

Milo fills a couple different friendship-related gaps for Arthur. He knows more than Arthur and he’s stronger, so he can both tell Arthur about the world and physically force him to accept some aspects of it when Arthur gets rowdy. He has a lot of free time and likes Arthur a lot, so he’s not only immediately a friend, but also broadly available to help.

He often functions as a third arm for Ella when it doesn’t make sense for her to be around, or when she’s just corrected Arthur too much lately.

Milo and Rhodia are having their own romance in the background of the story from the first time we see them, but as they are both no-nonsense sorts, I found it was one of those things that was more fun for me to know about as an author than it was to make it explicit. Even at the end of the book, the fact that they are dating isn’t explicit.

Karbo

The point of Karbo was, initially, to have a guy who looked scary but turned out to be very nice as a way of easing you into that concept. Once that usefulness was exhausted, he became a way to answer the question of what a guy who yelled, “Cannonball!” before firing himself out of an actual cannon would be like.

I really, really don’t like systems where people become smarter when they raise their INT score. I think the book that handle INT better make it so a person thinks faster, or can do mental tasks specifically related to their skills better. But the part where you have a stat that makes all your friends and family more boring to you when you raise it has always been a horror story to me. A high-INT class would eventually only be able to hang out with other high-INT classes; everyone else would seem like children to them.

Whatever Karbo may be, it’s not because of bad stat investments. He’s just like that. He likes to eat lots of food so he has energy to fight things. He tends to go through (or above) things rather than around them when he’s in a hurry. And luckily for anyone in his general vicinity, he’s gentle and doesn’t possess a single mean bone in his gigantic red body.

For the record, his name wasn’t originally supposed to have anything to do with carbohydrates or loading up on them before a workout. It does now because that makes much more sense than whatever weird free association thing I did to get from “fire” to “carbon” to “Karbo”.

Itela

Itela is a cleric. She’s the non-mom career-track version of Ella. If you had to choose between the two of them when getting advice, Itela would be better for almost any complex and boring adult problem. She’s nurturing and kind, but also a little harder-edged than Ella, in a way that reflects her job being harder and sadder than she’d like.

The point of Itela in a character mechanics sense was to have an early female character to mop up after the mess Karbo and Eito made of Arthur’s “waking up in a new world” experience. Later on, the fact that she was a sort of magic-wielding cross between a hospital nurse practitioner and a social counselor meant that she had a bunch of utility for Arthur when he found himself in situations that interacted with those roles.

For me, the high point of her character is seeing Arthur give up on the idea of her helping him find out where Lily disappeared to, reading the worry on his face, and deciding to break a rule. It’s her being kind and using a kind of flexible, wisdom-driven judgement to take a risk that pays off just as it should.

Fun fact:

There’s a James Michener book in which one of the characters, who is a nerdy archaeologist, asks a female colleague why she spends time with a hunky cowboy musician when she’s in town, considering the gulf in their educations. She explains to him, as one might to a child, that the guy in question is kind of hot, as well as being at least reasonably nice to her.

For people who are confused about why Itela and Karbo are a thing, this is sort of the same thing. He’s a big nice guy with 20-pack abs, a flexible work schedule, and a fun one-day-at-a-time approach to life. For someone who often needs to put her work entirely out of mind, what’s not to like?

Eito

I did not use Eito enough in this book. He does some exposition work, sure. But we really don’t get to hang out with him a lot, and I wish we did. Luckily, I can and will write more of these books, so it shouldn’t be a forever thing.

Eito was supposed to be the kind of guy who was born with the mentality and seriousness of a 40-year-old, and who stuck with it his entire life. He has a house. He has his work, which he seems to enjoy and be good at. He gives good advice. But he’s underutilized, and I want to spend more time on him.

I do really like the part where he slowly turns everything around him into trees. The fact that I never actually got him into a real forest might make you angry. I’m with you. I’ll fix it, I promise.

Rhodia

Rhodia falls into a set of characters I think of as “mini-Milos”. She’s a kid about Arthur’s age who spits exposition, can build things he needs, and gives him company and a minor amount of guidance. She has her own voice, but so far, she’s only had minor utility as a character.

Like other mini-Milos, she’s going to be more important in the second book.

Spiky

Another Mini-Milo. Besides being able to do things Milo can’t (like reference librarian tasks), he’s not that interesting or useful yet.

Besides his potential in books to come, I do like that Spiky isn’t his name. It’s a temporary nickname that’s standard in his culture, the same as how some cultures have nicknames for people born on certain days of the week. Given that nobody seems to know his actual first name, it’s probably how he introduces himself.

I think it’s hilarious that one day he’s probably going to say, “Actually, I just turned 18, so my name is Steve now.”

Chuck, Corbin, and any other kid from the class in the park.

More Mini-Milos, to be fleshed out later, except for Corbin. Corbin has, accidentally, my favorite “good mistake” outcome of any character I’ve written.

For context, there are some writers who plan out every single aspect of every character and part of the world before it ever touches part of the story. And because they’re doing this, some of them even know how all those things will eventually interact. So if they show you a gun on a mantle, they not only planned it but know when/into whom it will fire, who will want vengeance for that, and so on.

I don’t do this at all. I have a pretty good idea of how I want the world to feel, a lesser idea of where I want to start and where I want to end in the book, and distressingly little else. So when I wrote Corbin, I basically said, “I need Arthur to have peers; here’s one. He’s a cat that does stealth.”

This was a mistake because Arthur has exactly zero use for stealth as a skill. He works out in the open. If anything, what he needs is advertising, which is the opposite of stealth. So seconds later, when he met Milo and Rhodia, Corbin stopped being interesting in most ways. And at the end of that scene at the park, he presumably (I did not write this) re-stealthed.

Now, Corbin is a stealth class who explains he’s actively working on leveling his stealth skills. And it must be working, at least a little, because we then don’t see Corbin at all until he is yelled at by the commander, de-stealths, and then enters the story again for just a few moments. After which, as far as we know, he stealths again, rolls a crit, and apparently is successful enough that he’s able to stealth out of the story entirely.

I once wrote a story in which there were basically no characters OR objects (Deadworld Isekai). That was hard, but I made it work. I think anyone could probably do something similar if they wanted to. But writing a character who is actively and successfully hiding from the main character yet still in the story? I don’t think I have a solution for that yet.

Anyway, Corbin is getting a side story. Not my fault. Well, my fault, but not my plan.

Onna

In a mechanical sense, Onna exists to say things that Arthur needs to know about Mizu that Mizu won’t say herself, and to let us know that Mizu isn’t lonely. That last part was important to me. If Mizu is lonely, then her affection for Arthur might just be desperation to have friends at all, or relief to be getting any attention. With Onna in play, we can be pretty sure she just likes him.

That aside, I like the little of Onna we see. She likes Mizu a lot, and her early interactions with Arthur reflect that. Once she realizes Arthur’s a decent sort of guy, and she doesn’t need to protect Mizu from him, she shifts into a stance of trying to help speed things along, mainly by letting Arthur know he’s not hallucinating the whole relationship or misreading Mizu’s hints.

The System

The system is a character that is, to the reader, almost entirely invisible. But for me, it was important that she had a personality. Initially, it was just that she felt like a mom to every thinking being on the planet. She wanted them to be happy, healthy, and to thrive. In the world’s warlike past, she would have been unbelievably sad about all the fighting and killing.

The big decision point for her was deciding how much people on the ground knew that. I decided it made the most sense if two things about her were true, the first being that she worked for the people, rather than the other way around. If they wanted war-like skills, they got them, and there was nothing she could do about it. The second was that she couldn’t communicate with people at all outside of a very subtle influence and hidden system-notification messages they wouldn’t consciously remember after reading.

In The Voice and The Bear, we get to meet her for a little while, just long enough to confirm these things for us and to set events in motion that vastly improve the world she serves. In Arthur’s time, she’s presiding over a world that is fully aligned with her peaceful, nurturing tendencies, and it benefits both them and her immensely.

In a writer way, it was important for me to know all that not because I planned on telling you this eventually, but so I could imagine the kind of world that system would build if it could. It’s an “iceberg thing,” the kind of thing that fleshes out the world without being an explicit part of the text.

Last words

I always thank you guys in these, and this time is no exception. You all read, write comments, leave reviews and sometimes even support the work financially. That lets me do what I like to do, which is an incredibly big deal for me.

I know everyone says that kind of thing, whether they believe it or not. But believe it. I needed this nice world, but there wasn’t a moment I was writing this where I wasn’t thinking of the readers and saying, “Is this good enough? Will this make them happy? Is this fun? Will they smile when she says she’s nervous?”

Nothing makes me happier than the fact that it appears to have worked. I love you all, and I look forward to seeing you in book two.