Chapter 31: Post-Mortem

PART ONE: INTRODUCTION

So, November is over, and ANKOG is finished, at the arbitrary-ish 30 chapters mark. I'm mostly pleased with my work, but well aware that there's a lot of stuff that warrants editing. Thankfully, from the beginning I had the idea that I would be cutting this story into three books, expanding each one out some more, and being left with a perfectly serviceable series of smutty LitRPGs that I could put on KindleUnlimited because I'm a sellout. Because the books would be heavily edited and expanded, I'm pretty sure that would mean the ANKOG y'all just read can just stay up, because it legitimately isn't the product I'm publishing on KindleUnlimited? But that's something I'll have to find out later on. One thing's for sure, it'll stay up until at least the end of 2022, and probably longer.

Anyhow. Those are my plans: do some editing and rewriting and turn a single hastily-written largely-unedited 75k word smutRPG into three 60k books of carefully-edited and patiently-written smutRPG that I can confidently charge money for. But, this is a post-mortem, so I should start talking about the things that have gone wrong and what I'll do differently next time.

 

PART TWO: FIRST PASS POST-MORTEM (NOVEMBER 16TH)

There were a lot of things I put in that ended up being largely unused, and which should either be expanded upon in rewrites or cut out entirely.

 

First and foremost of these unused elements was the Incubus/Succubus class. When I was envisioning it in LitRPG contexts in my sexy daydreams for the past few years, it was as a cheat skill; have a bunch of sex and build up a small harem/polycule to kickstart the classes to the point you can give two of your bottoms dicks with no refractory period and ever-full balls, then have them sixty-nine and be locked in a constant feedback loop of cumming in each other's mouths, producing effectively infinite cum that could then be used in place of XP for other parts of the LitRPG system- there was the cheat, getting XP without actually doing anything to earn it.

The problem is, the Incubus/Succubus thing was originally meant for LitRPG systems that I hadn't designed. ANKOG's system was something I'd designed. And... well, I'd already designed it around rapid progress, with my explanation for why nobody got higher than Level 15 being "oh, there just aren't any dungeons of a level higher than 13!" And so, Roxy's ascent to Level 20 Everything was more down to her clever exploitation of contracts and Ranch Familiars and the Extra Class Slot Trait, none of which were novel or unique to her, than it was to her use of the Incubus class, which was novel and unique to her.

Now, on the one hand, the Incubus class was the inspiration for sex-based grinding, and is something of an impetus for Roxy and the gang to start delving Sex Dungeons- which constitutes Act 2 of ANKOG's 3 Acts. It was also why I started writing ANKOG in the first place, and cutting it out for the rewrites would be a shame.

But on the other hand, I'd have to do a lot of rewriting to make the Incubus class integral to the plot once more, and part of that is going to involve figuring out what the fuck it even does that Roxy would consider helpful. Maybe keep the whole "cum becomes XP" bit, and merge that with "XP requirements go up by one or two orders of magnitude every level"? And honestly, the way things are currently set up, with "Roxy uses contracts and Ranch Familiars to automate delving on a ridiculous scale," that is still fairly workable, it just requires perhaps a bit more setup to explain why she's the first one to try this.

Now, for some elements that are... less central to the original plans, which nonetheless didn't get much screentime:

 

Lucy and Volex, the Level 14 Sex Dungeon Bosses turned Familiars, kinda dropped out of the narrative after Roxy became a Rancher, which is something of a problem, because she gets that Slotless Rancher Class Unlock from them. I need to either cut them out or write them back in.

 

The Quick Learner and System Knowledge Traits ended up amounting to nothing. Remove them.

 

The takeover of Vega was rushed, and I knew it even when I was writing it. That single chapter is going to become like ten times longer and make up the back half of the revised Book 3, because good fucking god is that not good.

There are, also, some things that need to be established earlier on:

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XP-manipulating contracts need to explicitly be a new thing that are either coincidentally coming about at the same time as Ariel Ironborn's mentorship program reducing injuries and fatalities or are in fact a direct result of that, coming from some Wizard or other who wouldn't have gotten that far without the mentorship.

General roadblocks explaining precisely why a normal same-level party of four without outside assistance wouldn't be able to reach Level 14 in Dorn at the same age Roxy managed. Maybe delving every day or every weekday was an aspiration rather than a realistic goal, because learning by doing is trial and error, and error in an on-level dungeon means spending a week on your back recovering from a serious injury. Delving every day requires that you be good at delving, and that requires either long experience and natural talent, or actual training from someone who already has it, and up until recently, training just wasn't an option. Maybe Basic Training is new, and instituted specifically to provide that training to everyone. 

 

Part Two-B, Conclusion.

So, that's my first pass impression of stuff that needs to be improved. Greatly expand or completely excise the Incubus stuff. Better and earlier worldbuilding and exposition so that the constraints of the system are more clear early on, and answer some generally important LitRPG questions, like "why is this a new strategy?" or "what advantages and disadvantages does this new strategy have relative to the old one?" or "what are the constraints these people are operating under that they have to concern themselves with?" And maybe establish some characters and names earlier on, so that there's less "oh yeah the author just came up with this" syndrome going on. I don't know how obvious it is to you, but it's obvious to me. I'll come back to this document around... oh, November 30th? After a full re-read, of course. 

 

PART THREE: SECOND PASS POST-MORTEM (NOVEMBER 30TH)

 

So, I went through and reread ANKOG from beginning to end. And I enjoyed myself, and I'm glad I've put this out into the world, but I do feel like it's a seriously flawed work with a lot of issues. Most of which boil down to one simple fact: I was basically making shit up as I went along and I did not plan things out very much.

Which, honestly? That's fine for NaNo. It's called a rough draft. It's just that rough drafts aren't really great reading experiences, and the point of a rough draft is that you then refine and revise it. You start over and write from the beginning, knowing this time around what the full shape of things is.

One issue I've noticed is that my plan of "oh yeah I can expand this out into three 60k word books, more than doubling the wordcount" is less "haha progression fantasy is really long and takes forever to get anywhere" and more "wow ANKOG covered an unreasonable amount of ground in whats honestly not that long of a wordcount." Because, well, ANKOG as it stands really is just very rushed and compressed-feeling. I mean, okay, there's plenty of slow bits where we just relax and marinate in the interplay between Nicky and Roxy, but there are also a lot of moments where I frown and say "that didn't get nearly enough attention," and then go and make a note in my document- yes I did have a document for taking notes. I mostly didn't have any notes for the all-porn chapters, because somehow my porn managed to not incorporate dodgy worldbuilding I ended up retconning.

Well. Mostly. We're going to have to talk about that again.

The Incubus class is something I hyped up and then just... did nothing with. I couldn't think of anything for it to actually do, see. And then I added in the Book of Gears as an afterthought in Chapter 28 and now, today, when I was reading that, I wrote down in my notes document that the Book of Gears was a dumb idea and everything it did should've just been some weird high-level synergy for Incubus. And that maybe, instead of this Legendary Lost Elf Subspecies That Is Also Supremely Fuckable being the key to Roxy's apotheosis, the key to her apotheosis should've been... you know... Incubus. The whole reason this story is named A New Kind Of Grind. The original premise when I first came up with this fic, a month and two days ago.

Another observation I had this time that's somewhat new, in that I didn't have it last time I wrote in this document, is that... we really just do not see a lot of Roxy's interiority or history. She exposits about the world and how things work all the time, but we don't see what she did before the story started, or who her friends were, or really any of that. And I'm hoping that, with more room to breathe in the rewrite, there'll be room to explore that a little more. And, y'know, maybe introduce the Ironborn Cougars before the final third of the whole story, where suddenly Roxy just randomly has three MILF haremettes in her basement for no reason.

There's also some more minor stuff I wanna tweak. I want to try playing with the XP curve some more and rejiggering it some, to make the curve look more like an actual curve, and less like "if you're between Levels 6 and 13 in Dorn, that basically means you're a Delver in your early 20s," with everyone else living in tight clusters on either side of that range. Of course, this is not actually minor, because "what is necessary to level up" is Kinda Important To A LitRPG, which ANKOG still is, even though it's arguably more about the sublime beauty of T4T lesbian buttsex than it is about Number Go Up. So, y'know. I'm going to have to spend more time carefully considering the system for the next iteration, in the event I decide to change it. As it stands, the current system does work, it just feels unsatisfyingly clunky to me.

I've also got some ideas for new subplots to fill in some gaps. Ideas that will get iteration and drafting before being sprung upon my audience, even! Which means y'all aren't going to see these subplots until I've actually written and revised the rewrite. I'm not going to commit to anything in particular here, due to starting a new job recently and having a lot less time than I'd like. But, hopefully, if you've subscribed to my Patreon because of Noctoseismology and/or Threads of Industry, I'll be able to make "Early Access ANKOG" into a value-add for you. And if you haven't... well, I'll post an update to this fic here on SHub when each book is up on Patreon, in case you feel like buying access to an improved and expanded version of ANKOG.

Anyway. Thank you for reading this. I hope you enjoyed yourself; I know I did. And I hope that ANKOG doesn't end here.

See you around.

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