Thresholder, Post Mortem (Patreon)

One of my rules for myself is that I don't speak poorly about any of my work. It's not an ironclad rule, but I think it's a good general approach: if something is bad, other people will be sure to talk about it. If you're my particular stripe of creative, the act of creation is one that always comes with doubts and pessimism, and that's part of what helps make a work good, but venting that dissatisfaction into the outside world is a terrible idea. I see some authors start a chapter with an author's note that says "sorry, this is a bad chapter" and I think this is madness. I'm also prone to anxiety and depression, and often when I'm in the middle of something it's difficult to see the forest for the trees. Telling readers something is bad when you're focused on one specific wart or in a bad headspace is not good practice. So I have my rule.

I'm going to take a little break from that rule for this post mortem.

Spoilers for Thresholder follow, though I tried not to spoil anything past the public release.

I started Thresholder after hearing about jumpchains and thinking "that would be cool, actually". Some of the first book was a NaNo project, a "bash it out and see what it's like" kind of thing in November of 2022. I was also writing This Used to be About Dungeons at the time, and after November was done I put Thresholder on the back burner for a bit to see what I thought about it and let it marinate. Proper work on it began around March of 2023, when new chapters started being posted concurrently with This Used to be About Dungeons. Until June of 2023, when This Used to be About Dungeons concluded, I was running the two serials simultaneously.

Jumpchain stories, of which Thresholder is a non-standard example, suffer from a few problems by their nature. If the protagonist is going from world to world, then there's no recurring cast and little continuing plot. It means that a certain sort of reader thinks "well, why do I care about this person if they're going to vanish at the end of the book" and resists immersion and investment. I knew this was a problem, and just didn't do enough about it: Perry has Marchand, his AI companion, who grows in capabilities and personality as the story goes on but is never quite enough to anchor it.

I suppose I thought that it might just be fine, that if you write the characters well enough people will like the story anyhow, and if a book was going to be 200K words or so, then of course they'll get invested in the story and have fun reading it.

The big critical misstep with that plan was Perry.

Perry isn't quite a self-insert, but many of his worst thoughts and instincts are ones that I see in myself. He's lacking in convictions, he likes to argue, he's possessed with this need to feel special and a desire to inflict violence as a part of that, he pushes down his emotions and decouples from what he's feeling, he prefers to talk about practical things and is very ready to push away people … not all of this is really part of the core of the book, but these are things that I was thinking about when writing him, ways in which he's got a realistically ugly personality, a mercenary chameleon quality to him that makes him seem like he could slip into any civilization by virtue of not really having much of an ethos. I don't really think that's true of me, but it's true of the worst parts of me, I guess, or it's the way that I think I might act if I were in situations where I was tested.

This doesn't make for a character that most people would want to read. It's the single biggest thing that kept the book from being well-liked. People do like Thresholder, I want to make sure I say that, but when people bounce off it, they often cite Perry as the reason. And if you're going to have someone that people hate, you want them to be hateable in a way that inspires something, in a way that's fun, a way that they say "oh, that utter bastard" or "can't wait to see when he gets what's coming to him". This never really happens for Perry, who mostly keeps on winning, and is generally not even that thrilled about his victories. He's a very human character in that way, which is one of the things I liked most about him. After November, it was one of the reasons I was eager to keep writing him. One of my rules for him was "no introspection", which I found fun, though I broke that rule a few times.

He is, however, the singular character that needed to carry a million words. I don't think he did that.

(As an aside, he states that his driving motivation is to resurrect his girlfriend Richter, who he met in his first world and who built Marchand for him, and I loved so much that this was a weak motivation for him, something that didn't actually consume or drive him. He was a guy trying to feel righteous about what he was doing, trying to keep this flame going because it would feel good, and he's failing at it. He's like a hero who sets out on a revenge story and halfway through is like "eh, I'm not actually feeling it that much, but I said I would get revenge, and I've already taken all these steps". You don't see that often because it's terrible storytelling, but it was novel to me, and continued to tickle me, though I don't think it ever justifies how reader-hostile it is. And I think even the readers who like this kind of novelty would want to see it brought center stage, to be a big explosive thing, a cascading realization rather than something more soft, subtle, and open to interpretation.)

The series ends up grim and gritty, and not in a sexy way. Perry is constantly put in moral traps without good answers, constantly hurting people who don't actually deserve it. It's fairly rare that he gets clean, unambiguous wins. In the first book, he ends by helping to set up a mind control tower for vampires. In the second book, he is forced into killing people he wasn't planning on killing twice, then spends a bunch of time with Worm Gate, who are pretty clearly the more evil of the two sects in the valley. I think I dialed this back slightly in the third book, though my recollection might be failing me. The fourth book has Perry watching an execution take place. The fifth book maybe has a bit too much about colonialism and whether Perry actually does care about anything but the fighting. There's a lot peppered through the five books, and some of it I endorse, but I have to imagine that it gets tiresome. I was definitely tired.

Probably because of these two things, Thresholder was not all that popular, at least by the standards of what I think I'm capable of writing, or the heights I've hit in the past. And this is also something that impacts the work itself, because when I start to get a critical eye it's difficult for that not to feed back into the work itself. It's also one of those things that impacts productivity, unfortunately, and Thresholder was plagued by more than one creative block. I think a good, professional writer can produce excellent text even when they're not really feeling it, and maybe I'm just not as good or professional as I'd like to be. I definitely feel it when I'm writing and putting things out there and it feels like there's no enthusiasm from the audience.

I think I was in the middle of book four when I started thinking that Thresholder was mid, that it just didn't have "the sauce", that I was spending an appreciable fraction of my working career on this thing that was … fine. There are definitely some high notes of the series for me, things that I thought worked well, pieces that in isolation were great. There are moments that had been rattling around my head forever, and when I put them in, I got that thrill of committing the idea to the page, almost always happy with the execution. The "Worlds of" chapters were a choice I made early on, and I loved writing those, and think that they hold up well. But my overall feeling was "I can do better than this, I can be more fresh, compelling, original, more honest, more human". I don't know, looking back, whether I endorse this, but it's how I was feeling, which is not a good place to be creatively.

There's a world in which I never wrote a fifth book, and I think that would maybe be a better world, but I wanted to finish the story (for a certain level of "finish"). I don't like to leave things off, to say "good enough" and wander away when anyone who sees the work will know that corners were cut. And in the end, I think I did cut some corners, and I think maybe it shows, and that thought eats at me. But I made it to the end, and if it's a little wonky, I can at least live with that.

The writing of the fifth book gave me some of the worst creative constipation of my life. I was only sporadically having fun, so it was easy to get off track on other projects, or engage in dopamine-seeking behavior like endlessly scrolling through socials or playing idiotic videogames. It was a terrible time for me, extremely demotivating insofar as I lost confidence in my ability to actually be a productive writer period. I got through it, with a lot of struggle, and now we're here today, but I'd consider myself shaken. I think during the last push on Thresholder I was having fun again, and I'm not sure when I had the idea for the structure of the final ~5 chapters, but it made everything click for me. The ending has been pretty well received, at least by patrons, though I expect it to be much more poorly received on RoyalRoad.

What lessons can be learned from Thresholder, now that it's over?

1. Plan more. No, even more than that. Make sure you see the narrative traps and know how you're going to avoid them. Saying "well I'll just write good" is a nice mindset to have but cannot make up for overall deficiencies in the plan. Writing a book means committing hard to things that you cannot easily change. Even for a non-serial book, major rewrites are enormous effort.

2. Listen to feedback. After the NaNo portion of Thresholder was done, people said they didn't really like (or get) Perry, and the thing I liked about Perry was that he was mercurial and mercenary, hard to pin down. But I should definitely have gone all the way back to the drawing board, rather than trying to haphazardly fix what was there through compromise. I kept in things that I liked that other people didn't like, and just failed to sell most readers on my vision.

3. Marchand got a lot better with more personality, allowing humor and interplay. That should have been more present from the start, as Marchand starts pretty dumb and flat in the first book, with the interesting bits poking up from his limitations. I still think some of those bits are funny and worthwhile, but we could have accelerated into a better March faster.

4. Variety is great. For all that a completely new location can be bad for the narrative, Thresholder did a pretty good job of refreshing itself, and I think a lesser version of that could work really well in my next long web serial. Change it up! See new sights!

5. I think I did a better job of managing growing complexity than in either of Worth the Candle or This Used to be About Dungeons, though I'm not confident that this came without losses in cool factor. I was also more willing to jettison things whose complexity wasn't justified by their coolness, though it would be a lot better to decide ahead of time not to have those things.

6. Perry spends most of his time without a clear goal, and I liked that about him, but not enough to justify it, and I'm not doing it again. A goal gives you stakes, and stakes give you tension, and without that you get a very realistic "well, fuck, the world is huge and varied, and I don't know how to feel about it, but I have to do something or I'm just sitting here watching it pass by and shouldn't I be exerting agency" feeling.

7. The "worlds of" chapters were a highlight, and part of what I liked about them was that they were a chance to throw ideas at the wall. I think this is difficult but not impossible to incorporate into other works, but the mechanism for doing it will necessarily be different. One impetus for this was to have enemies give their backstories, something that was a course correction from a perceived deficiency of Worth the Candle. But it was also a chance to get creative and have fun with things without necessarily having to write a full story.

8. Book 4 was a mess and should have been two books/worlds. This is something that could have been solved with better planning, but I think the lesson is that packing too many things in makes each of them weaker and has a good chance of killing pacing. A book should have a singular focus, a lone guiding star. In the same way you circle a statue to see it from every angle, the thing to strive for is to circle some theme, concept, character, etc. and see it in different ways. (In practice, this is very difficult and probably overkill, but I think you get better results if you properly aim for it. Not something I learned in book 4, necessarily, but something the deficiencies of that book highlighted.)

9. People are extremely sensitive to genre. I had people tell me they stopped at Book 2 because they don't like xianxia. I had people just not read Book 1 because it was "urban fantasy". I get it, I guess, but this means that for a series like this, people will just say "nah" and move on. So, pick genre extremely carefully, because even dedicated fans will just not show up if the wrong keyword is present, and it doesn't matter what you're doing in that space or how outside the norm it might be.

10. When burnout or creative blocks rear their head, there are likely better routes than dopamine-seeking behavior. Installing a website blocking app really helped to actually be productive, and if a break is needed, there are much better methods for rejuvenation than sitting down to play with cheaply made toys.

11. The additional content added to Book 1 really did make it a lot better. I think, looking back, I don't endorse the in media res aspect of the original version, and only partially endorse what's effectively a flashforward opening to the new Book 1. I wouldn't rewrite a book that intensively again though, not unless it hadn't been published.

12. Maya and Jeff were both stand-out characters, and I think the lesson from them is that I can go much further than I've been going in terms of ramping up character traits and viewpoints. Go more flamboyant, more extreme, more emotional. Fight the desire for clinical viewpoints or modulation. Have a character be bold and exaggerated (by my standards, which is still more restrained than most, I guess).

13. I'm extremely mixed on the introduction of the Farfinder. I think it introduced some interesting tensions, but maybe we'd have been better off with five books that stuck to "formula" and had their own self-contained stories. Maybe if I wanted grander scope, I could have done it in some other, better way. I think it's fun to break up the formula, but I'm not sure it was worth the fun of formula-breaking alone, and I wish I had done it differently.

14. March was another high point, though I'm not sure how I could replicate him in a way that wouldn't feel repetitious, and I think by the end he was wearing thin for me. The lesson is ... have someone for the main character to perpetually bounce back and forth with? Add elements of humor, even if it's dry humor?

Overall my feelings on Thresholder are very mixed. Maybe the world where I just said "so long" or "maybe later" at the end of the third book would have been creatively better for me, resulting in better books than the fourth and fifth entries, which are where I started running into problems, though I don't actually think those problems are because of these being "extra" books.

I think some of my hesitance about the next project is the idea of locking myself into a creative endeavor for a year or two, and how restraining that feels when I just finished being locked into this one, so I think I'll take it slowly before committing. The plan is for some time off where I do writing on whatever I feel like writing, releasing that to patrons as some kind of finished project, wrap up a few loose threads, and then pick something that I know I can go hard on without letting up.

There's still an epilogue coming, and possibly more than one, but today was reflection day. I'll also have a roadmap post once I'm satisfied with epilogues. Thoughts and comments are welcome below, so maybe don't post full spoilers for the final ~13 chapters (as those thoughts and comments probably belong on those chapters). If you're a public access reader, think carefully about whether you want to take a risk on the comments, as you've hopefully thought carefully on whether you wanted to take a risk on this post mortem.