I’m writing a free-to-read GameLit serial on Royal Road, posting weekly episodes. Something Smells Flowery is set in the virtual world of Darkentide, a small-time multi-player RPG with a few dozen dedicated players. It has a villain named Seth and someone opposing Seth named Gondra. If this means something to you, then thank you for reading the Head Hoppers series.
Why a Serial?
Publishing a serial puts some of my fiction in front of readers every week. I could do the same thing by publishing a complete short story every week on this blog. But I’d have to think up a complete plot every week if I did that. With the serial, I don’t need to devise an entire story’s plot every week, but only the plot for the next scene of the overall story. I have the vaguest of ideas as to where the story is headed in general, but even that may change before the serial reaches its conclusion.
I have the knowledge of how Seth and Gondra behave in the Head Hoppers series, but I’m not restricting the pair in the serial to behave in accordance with how they are in the series. I don’t want the serial to be a spoiler for the series, and vice versa.
Now that I’m strictly self-employed, I find that posting a chapter on a set schedule helps give structure to my week. I need that at an emotional level.
Why Make the Serial Free to Read?
Posting the serial is primarily about finding my audience and helping them find me. I could have posted a serial on Kindle Vella, and I still might try that eventually. But I don’t know if the kind of readers I’m hoping to reach would find my work there, or if I could sufficiently hook readers to pay to read the rest of the serial after three chapters. My stories tend to either be short bursts of up to a few thousand words, or sagas that not only keep sprouting new branches, but keep sending out new shoots from which spring new trees, so that the end product isn’t reliably represented by the story’s roots in the beginning.
I intend to complete each saga I start, and doing so with the serial will prove to readers that I can. After I finish this particular serial, then I might start one on Kindle Vella and hope to find paying readers for it. Because, yeah, I do need an income. But to get an income, I need more readers to follow my work than what the novels are getting me. It’s all an experiment to help me determine what might work for me.
Why Royal Road?
Royal Road is known to have a good number of readers who enjoy GameLit, my chosen genre for this serial. I’m going where the audience is. I started the serial in response to a prompt given for a contest that ran on Royal Road, and received a bit of assistance from the contest in getting my serial placed before the eyes of potential readers. Any little thing that helps. The stats page for my serial indicates I have over twenty readers following along, with a good number of them reading each new chapter within a couple hours after I post it. I’m assuming the views of the pages are actual readers and not bots. That would be sad. I’m not seeing many comments. I guess that means my chapters are mediocre, not so bad as to garner negative comments, but not good enough to spur readers to give kudos. Okay. I’m in it for the long haul anyway. I just need to keep trying and try harder.
Why GameLit? And What Is GameLit, Anyway?
According to Dustin Tigner, he coined the term GameLit back in 2017. He points to gamelit.org for the definition, which basically merely requires “gaming elements” be “essential” to a story’s “plot” for the story to qualify as GameLit. It doesn’t specify what type of gaming is required. If a story were written from the perspective of a pawn in a game of chess, it sounds like that story would qualify as GameLit. If you write that story, tell me so I can read it.
I’ve played so many table top role-playing games (RPGs) in my life, serving as Game Master (GM) for more games than I participated in as a player, constantly coming up with my own scenarios or modifying store-bought ones. This satisfied my story-telling urge for years, but I also enjoyed the gaming aspect of the experience, either watching characters advance as my own player characters (PCs), as the PCs of other players, or as non-player characters (NPCs). As GM, I created a multitude of NPCs with lives of their own, some traveling with the PCs and some traveling apart from the PCs. I kept character sheets for all NPCs, and advanced them as they earned experience points (XP), even if I had to improvise for some NPCs, such as those not traveling with PCs and thus needing to have XP assigned to them according to what adventures I imagined for them but which were never fully played out.
In 2012, I decided to get serious about trying to write novels, but I struggled to find story lines I felt happy with. I’d read some expert’s advice about not writing stories based on adventures of characters in RPGs. I thought that expert knew better than I did. But some writers out there, including some in Russia, paid no heed to such experts. They wrote stories told from the perspective of a character in an RPG, where the character had the knowledge they were in an RPG. The rules of the game and the advancement of the characters within the game were essential elements to the plot. The early writers referred to their stories as LitRPG—RPG literature—which would have been better represented by the the term RPGLit or RpgLit. But Russian writers came up with the term, from what I understand, and so we have LitRPG, which seems to have stuck. Thankfully, Dustin Tigner didn’t follow the pattern when coining the term GameLit, or I’d be talking about why I write LitGame stories.
Anyway, it all started with LitRPG, but that term took on a more narrow meaning as to what qualified as LitRPG than what some writers started writing in response. So, if a story isn’t hardcore LitRPG with lots of rules explanations, character stats, and other crunchy details, but it still has gaming elements essential to the plot, then the wider umbrella of GameLit covers it. Some people equate the two terms, but I don’t, and neither do a lot of other people.
When I discovered the GameLit/LitRPG genre, I felt I’d found home. Story lines started coming easier that I felt happy with. And I quickly discovered that I could blend GameLit with more traditional science fiction elements. That’s where I see my stories falling. And maybe it’s making it more difficult to find my target audience, because GameLit readers are looking for a heavier concentration of GameLit elements, while traditional science fiction readers are turned off by any mention of GameLit elements. But this is where I want to be, and I’m betting there are others out there enough like me in their reading interests that they’ll find my stories to their liking. I’m basically writing what I want to read, and hoping to find other like-minded readers.
The Blurb for Something Smells Flowery
Here’s the blurb for the serial as posted on Royal Road:
Co-owners and co-developers of the virtual game world, Darkentide, Justine and Alfie are on the verge of introducing new shadow monsters to challenge their few dozen dedicated players. Justine’s part is to program a solar eclipse in Darkentide. Alfie’s part is to design and release the shadow monsters during the eclipse. Justine succeeds with her programming, and then the sun goes out in Darkentide.
But when Alfie enters the shadow monster difficulty level with an extra zero at the end, he unleashes an evil greater than even he could imagine. A hooded figure appears in their office, turning Alfie to ash where he sits. The stranger spares Justine, but imprisons her inside the Darkentide game, to prevent her from interfering with his plans to destroy the real world. He also sends Greta, a dancing nurse he summoned and has high hopes for, to watch over Justine and make doubly sure the female developer won’t do something stupid.
Can Justine figure out a way to escape back to the real world and put a stop to the hooded man’s evil schemes? Can Greta be the female Pinocchio her summoner wants, and become a real girl? And what about poor Alfie? Can he ever amount to anything more than a pile of ashes?
And where is that flowery smell coming from?
It’s a story of good vs evil, creation vs destruction, with its share of lighter moments.
When and Where Can I Read It?
New chapters are posted weekly, sometime between late Sunday night and early Monday morning in the US Eastern time zone where I live.
Check out Something Smells Flowery on Royal Road.