The unfortunate thing about life is that anything that’s good can be gotten used to. I remember being a kid, before the times I dated, before I got married, and watching guys who had girlfriends for whom it was just normal. I was mystified by it. As a very, very young guy, it was hard for me to imagine someone having something like that as boring.

Writing is not boring for me, at all, but it has in some ways become normal. I no longer wake up in the morning trying to figure out if writing things is a dream that I get to live or just a really realistic dream I had the night before. It feels real! It feels like my job in a way I don’t then feel compelled to tell every person I end up in a momentary conversation with. It’s normal!

At the same time, it’s also not. Some things, like wondering how it could possibly be that someone would choose to read words you had written or wanting to do right by those people, don’t (or at least shouldn’t) change. There’s still a lot of “Why is it me that gets to do this when so many people would like to and don’t get to?” in the mix for me, a sort of imposter syndrome that never really goes away.

All this put together makes some things hard. One of the biggest ones is assessing my own stuff for quality. You write twenty-ish books in a few years, and you get very, very used to your own writing. It’s normal. There are a lot of things that I used to have to think about hard to do right. Now they are all muscle memory. There’s a proverb related to the game of Go that says that only the people playing a game truly understand what went down, and things being more routine has almost the same effect. I don’t always know how good or bad something I’ve written is in the same way I would when it was hard.

So when I get done with books, I review. I go over what I’ve written, I think about what I was thinking when I wrote it, and I try to reverse-engineer the sometimes automatic. I try to think about if I was doing it over and the things I would change or try to find things I really liked to keep in my big folder of things I kind of know how to do for later.

And then, at the end of every book, I write a note like this going over what I was thinking when I wrote it. I figure some writer out there might get some use out if it, even if they disagree with some choice or think they could do it better. Hell, I hope I help them do it better, even if it’s just by giving them some standard to surpass. Good writing is good for us all. Rising tides lift all boats, and that.

What follows is a breakdown of the changes in the world, the characters, and the story since the last book. I hope you enjoy it. For anyone whose bag this isn’t, don’t worry. I’ll be back with another book soon enough, so there will be more for you sooner than you think

THE WORLD

THE INNER SEAS

We don’t see much of the inner seas this episode. Mostly, that’s because we were just in an inner sea for so long that there wasn’t much left to cover in relation to how strong the crew was. The deal with the inner seas is that they are more or less civilized places, less dangerous than the outer seas, and much more geared for normal people than potential heroes of an age.

When Marco was coming up, that was fine. There was plenty of texture in terms of power levels for him to be threatened by. It was interesting because he was working his way out from the protective covering of a loving parent to the cold, hard world of adulthood, both figuratively and geographically, as he got further and further from home.

By the time we get very far into book two, Marco is so strong that probably nobody in the world outside of Frisk could pose much of a threat to him back in his home inner sea. He’s a big, bad fighter with a big, bad ship and plenty of new tricks. That means that the kinds of risk that make books like these exciting is harder to balance. It’s not that nothing can threaten him or that there aren’t interesting things to happen, but they are more nuanced.

In some ways, all those things hit harder if Marco goes home so strong that nothing in that area as he knows it could possibly stand against him. That puts him in a different power dynamic with that world, one where he was once kicked around but now might be the only hope. When he goes back, expect something like that to be the case - that he’s big and strong and that the risks of going home are of an entirely different type that take more than overwhelming combat strength to face.

THE OUTER SEA ZONES I AND II

Marco crosses over two outer sea zones in this book. The first was a smaller place, an island owned by a lonely survivor with nothing of interest on it but a temple. The power that Marco gets out of it is so limited that it’s almost forgotten as soon as he gets it. Some temples, it’s implied, are like that. They rule over little, if anything, and provide a small bump.

The next temple is different. When they go to the next zone, they are heading into a populated territory. It’s not just Quillton, either. There are ships, there are outposts, there are crafting communities, and there are floating traders. Here is a place with a temple that rules over kind of a lot, the book says. And the person who controls the temple controls it all, at least to some extent.

I wanted that contrast to be pretty clear for people who cared about that kind of thing. In later books, there might be chapters where I say something like, “The next five temples weren’t much. Marco scooped them up, glad for the small bump they all gave him” and he just moved on. Other zones are different and take big parts of a book to resolve and come with payoffs that, if not huge and world-changing mechanically, at least feel more important.

POPULATION

There’s a trope in movies where someone from the city ends up in some backwater part of the world, and there’s a guy living there who ends up being the romantic lead of the movie, or at least the main character in a lot of ways. Captain Ron is like this. Romancing the Stone is like this. Crocodile Dundee, I think, is like this.

When I was a kid, I’d watch these movies and go, “Wait, what? They just LIVE out there? How? How does one end up all the way out there?” And yet if you go to almost any place in the world, however remote and inhospitable, you’ll find there are people who settle it. It’s not necessarily a planned thing, either. They just end up in that spot and stay, sometimes, and generations later you check back and there’s a small civilization growing.

I think when I was grappling with the problem of how to make the outer seas have things besides other overpowered pirates, that’s how I envisioned this all working. Ships would sink, survivors would make it to land, and they’d build huts. They might be carpenters, but they were carpenters of the type that found their way out to elite waters anyway, and thus had the stuff needed to survive.

In the inner seas, we saw this in the form of floating bars and that kind of thing. In the outer seas, we see retired adventurers, traders who are just very good at not getting noticed (i.e. they have travel skills, if not combat skills per se), and communities that have adapted to living on the edge of things.

In the outer seas, living is hard, but that makes harder people. Because system resources are better the more dangerous the environment (which is a pretty universal LitRPG thing), even crafters are going to be higher level. And as Riv’s class draws out, even non-combat-oriented classes can be reasonably tough. So long as they don’t go looking for trouble, settlements of high-level crafters can exist.

And, importantly, they have to. A book can’t JUST be about people going and fighting. They have to have places they spend their money. They have to take breaks. They have to be humans. They need a place to do that.

The idea of adventurers retiring is similar, but different. When you set up an endless ocean that becomes more challenging the more you explore it, you either have a situation where everyone eventually dies or sometimes people give up. Which leads us to…

THE ELEPHANT

The concept of seeing the elephant is actually sort of a confusing one. It’s a real phrase from real life, and it’s often a negative one. Someone “sees the elephant” when they have an experience that costs them a lot more than it gains them or “sees the elephant” when they have an experience that is not all it's cracked up to be.

When I first encountered the term, it was something related to American settlers heading west, that they would “see” the elephant in the form of a big storm or a high, high mountain, be daunted, and either stop and turn back.

But, importantly, it was also a positive term once. People saw the elephant, and it was just a good time where they had an experience that was special and worth having. The words have meant all of these things.

Here, seeing the elephant was something that people did before they got to Quill’s, in one confused telling of why Quill’s settlement was so successful. They had become scared, quit, and never wanted to take risks again.

Later on, when we find out this is a Quill-driven misunderstanding of the reality of things, some of those people go out searching for more experiences, more elephants to see.

Marco, however, has now been introduced to the thought that one day this all might turn out to be too much for him, that he’ll see something that shows him he’s gone as far as he should go, and that he should turn back. What was once a limitless ocean now might feel limited to him should he run into something even his own substantial bravery can’t handle.

I think the reason I left this in the book even though it’s a phrase nobody really knows is that I wanted to reinforce this idea that people like Marco are pressing out into what might be an endless space, but that it can’t really keep going forever. When Marco leaves Quill’s former territory, he leaves it much closer to being a civilized, built-up area than it was before. By the time Marco would otherwise pass from old age, it’s going to have had a few generations worth of positive influence from his temple ownership on top of a good start of excellent craftsmen and mostly decent sailors controlling its waters.

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From that new settled world, more Marco’s will spring. Even if he sees the elephant, they might go further and find more. And slowly but surely, civilization will spread.

TEMPLES

Temples continue to be a mystery in this book. They are system-related, but not system-built. Someone slapped them up at some point, but it doesn’t seem to be the case that they are connected to human or elvish history, exactly. There’s an implied third party or race doing this, but we still don’t know who they are.

I never wanted temples to be an all-powerful thing, though certainly in Quill’s case they represented a very strong addition to his overall skill set. To Marco and his crew, they are an add-on, something that gives them a goal in addition to just exploring, when exploring would still be enough for any of them to get by on.

Right now, Marco and his crew are heading out into the unknown, and for the first time they aren’t clearly headed towards a temple. This is still okay for them, and honestly I think if anything they’d be relieved about it if you asked them. It doesn’t mean that temples are out of the picture, but it does give me some freedom in deciding whether or not the next book is actually about them.

Overall, I have a choice on the temples, which is how much of the mystery about them gets solved, and how soon. Luckily that’s a shelf-stable problem; I don’t really have to solve it right away to still have them play into the plot at various points.

CHARACTERS

MARCO

Marco has come into his own, more or less.

His current build is two almost-complete classes that reinforce each other. When he takes down a human threat of sufficient power, the consumption elements of his class make him stronger via equipment, while natural threats tend to make his ship stronger and more capable. His difficulties, to the extent he has them, have to do with keeping both of those elements even.

The best way to show that is when his crew either boards a ship or is boarded by hostiles from another ship. He needs both elements of his class - both the shipside and personal-combat sides - to be strong enough to let him survive both the equipment and human threats he’s facing. If he is too weak in terms of ship navigation, he’ll be sunk before he can either sink or reach the enemy. If he’s too weak in terms of personal combat, he’ll be killed by the other ship’s crew unless he can fully sink their ship before it’s an issue.

The good news is that he can also get stronger in the ways other people do. He can upgrade his ship, he can change out equipment provided it checks off all the boxes on a fairly large list of requirements, and he can level. Temples are then another buff on top of that. Given all of that, he’s growing at a much faster, more consistent pace than other captains and classers generally do.

The trick to balancing the fact that Marco is overpowered is to give him either more dangerous threats or threats that are particularly good counters for what he can do. This book had a lot of large, heavily-crewed ships built for battle and nothing else because those are what a ship like The Foolish Endeavor has the most trouble dealing with. He has to match overwhelming force with versatility, which is always a dicey sort of thing.

On top of that, his crew isn’t really (honestly) all that great at fighting. Riv is a tank with a couple of near-suicide moves that mean he can sometimes turn the tides of a fight, and Elisa can hardly fight at all outside of making the ship’s weaponry much better. Aethe is the only real combat class, but she’s competent at what she does. In all cases where someone has to go above and beyond to save the day, it ends up being Marco’s job to do that.

In terms of personal growth, Marco doesn’t really change a ton in this book. Mostly he’s just being himself, bravely marching into danger and from one task to the next without too much thought about the risk. To the extent he’s careful, it’s because Elisa and Aethe moderate him. That said, he’s not stupid. He doesn’t dive into death’s mouth on purpose.

His relationship with Aethe is continuing, but at an odd pace. They are so often so close to other people or in so much danger that though they are each other’s person, right now that’s still very much dominated by a “living life together” dynamic. In a way, it’s moving slowly for the reason the relationships of very career-oriented people sometimes move slowly. Neither of them minds this, so it’s not a problem.

ELISA

Elisa is the weakest character on the team, but ends up saving the day as often as anyone. Part of this is because of her weird, growing relationship with artillery. To the extent that The Foolish Endeavor can punch above its own weight class right now, it’s because she allows it to by adding some versatility beyond pure damage-dealing to the cannons, and later on, the Arbalest.

The rest of it is assembled around her strategizing, which really didn’t get enough play in this book. We see bits and pieces of it here and there, but I’m going to be spending more time in subsequent books giving her better and more useful things to do.

Her relationship with Riv continues to be non-romantic, and there has not yet been a time in the plot where it made sense to change her single status much. She’s mostly still just devoted to Marco on a friendship-only level, and that’s still more than enough reason for her to explore and research in dangerous places instead of relatively safe ones.

RIV

Riv is not dumb, but he’s the next thing over - he doesn’t love thinking. Just like Marco. When he has to, he can figure out good choices as well as anyone else. Mostly, though, he likes swinging a club and making a mess of things, and focuses on being tough enough to absorb the damage that kind of tactic encourages.

I’m very glad I gave Riv the Tyrant Club in this novel. Without that, he’d be as outpaced as Elisa is, mechanically. With it, he’s able to do big, fight-changing things, which gives him a sort of bunker-buster role in the party. If he could do what he does all the time, he’d be an invincible, devastating force. The fact that his weapon is more likely to miss than hit and that a single ill-placed use of his amplification could leave him helpless means the rest of the party is often just setting Riv up to do some big, flashy attack in a way that can actually end things.

I think several books ago, I would have had a bigger problem with someone besides the main character delivering a coup de grace to a big, bad, evil guy. With this cast, I have no problem with combinations like Riv alone or Riv and Elisa doing it. It puts Marco in a position of doing a ton of the party’s work but allows for situations where he doesn’t always have 100% of what it takes to actually resolve every problem.

If Riv ever wants to leave the crew, it’s not going to be because he doesn’t like the others, or because he’s homesick. Right now, I feel the biggest potential problems with Riv’s story continuing have to do with him finding a place to be that feels like a better fit than The Foolish Endeavor does. If he ever meets a girl or finds some other form of family on land, it might be a serious thing that drives serious decisions.

QUILL

I wanted Quill to be a normal person who didn’t fit in within his community, found some level of power there, and immediately used it to escape that. In this I was sort of inspired by the unhealthy version of someone leaving their hometown for the big city, thinking it will make them happier without ever really considering that they might have problems of their own to solve.

Quill is the maximally evil version of that. He never really hunts in his own hometown, but that's not because of any lingering affection for anyone there; he’s just waiting for the right time and enough power to do the job right, leaving nobody alive once he’s finished. He builds a new home of his own, but it’s an entirely abusive, exploitative kind of place. He doesn’t love or even like anyone there, either. It’s just another thing for him to make use of in an entirely self-centered way.

Quill is always maximally careful about Marco and the crew, and that comes down to a couple of things: first, he’s never sure that Marco and his friends aren’t secret, tricky powerhouses, and his initial attempts to figure out just how much Marco has gotten from temples are thwarted by the crew doing just a little bit better at destroying his traps than he’d like. If they had died or even gotten into serious trouble, he would have known they were beneath him. Since they won, it was always possible they were his equal right up until the point they were.

The second is that Quill is a mastermind, planning type of character, not so much a direct combat type. When we do see him in direct combat, it’s a relatively uninspired performance, something that should have worked better than it did. That’s what happens, I think, when you spend a lot of time plotting and not a lot of time fighting. You end up great at plots, but getting your ass handed to you by a team of lower-level fighters with good enough coordination and the ability to hit you with your own house.

THATCH

Thatch was originally a character designed for the first book who had been shipwrecked on an island. The original thought was that Marco wouldn’t start out on Gulf Isle, but might be either an Isekai character or just someone young who got shipwrecked with Thatch and eventually rescued him.

The idea was that Thatch would hang around, old and useless, for a long time, sort of as a banter/comic relief character. When that version of the story (which involved an ever-evolving ghost ship) didn’t happen, neither did Thatch, for a while. He got new life here as a result, ghost ship and all, even if the ghost ship wasn’t something Marco could claim.

Unfortunately for Thatch, the story was no longer built to allow for an old man father figure type, so he couldn’t live very long. Rest in peace, old man.

VARIOUS ISLAND INHABITANTS

I don’t think there are many great momentary characters in this book. We meet some friendlies, and they help, but for the most part the story revolves around Quill and the team, with a few “not everyone is bad” encounters sprinkled along the way. I think this was necessary given the fact that the cast is already a pretty good size even without supporting characters.

In the mix, we got:

1. Two generally intelligent thugs who were always going to be trouble and who weren’t smart enough or stupid enough to really be interesting beyond that

2. A very nice lady who helps the kids on a shopping trip, misses her dead husband, and who is generally helpful

3. A logger-slash-mayor who is good at what he does on both counts and helpful

4. A bunch of people around the periphery of that.

There’s a writing theory that says that sometimes the setting should be a character, that it should develop and grow as human characters would. Sometimes, though, it goes the other way, and characters become the setting. In essence, this was a book about the crew and Quill, and the characters that existed alongside them were just big enough to do the necessary things that helped me tell the story.

CONCLUSION

That’s really it for this one. It’s a simple extension to a story about exploration, and the cast hasn’t changed a lot; in some ways, the first part of the story has become normal, and that just continued on into a longer story. I think in the next story, there’s a good chance we at least see the characters reacting to another inner sea - a built-up, civilized, but more or less foreign land that they have difficulty navigating for new and different reasons.

Until then, though, I hope that this note finds you well, happy, and entertained. As always, thank you for being part of this adventure. I couldn’t do it without you.

RC