"The final book is bound to be far longer than any of the others"
Let me clarify further: I do expect the last book to be the longest, and I’m prepared to make it as long as it needs to be to wrap up the story, but I don’t know how long that will be exactly.
It COULD be far longer than any of the others. But I haven’t written it yet, so I certainly can’t make any promises about page count.
Why are there so many dense main character?
It’s easier to write.
People tend to overthink the answer to this question. It’s not like authors are going “Hm, you know what I think readers would enjoy? A protagonist who can’t pick up on obvious interpersonal cues.”
In a story with a romantic/relational plot or sub-plot, it’s to extend drama without making him a manipulative douchebag. If the protagonist doesn’t pick up on Love Interest’s obvious attraction, he’s a doofus. If he does pick up on it and strings her along, he’s a scumbag.
I can relate to a doofus, but I don’t want to relate to a scumbag.
In a story where those things don’t play much of a role—like in Japanese light novels, where this kind of protagonist is the standard—it’s to keep relationships from progressing so they don’t eat up too much of the story.
Now he can have flirty banter with everybody without betraying anyone OR spending precious page space on developing a healthy relationship. Maintains the status quo.
And that’s it.
You could say “Well, if you’re not going to have the main character pick up on it, don’t write other characters flirting with them in the first place,” but that can end up being distracting and weird in itself.
Ah, so your main character is a chiseled Adonis regularly dethroning evil gods in defense of the common man, and not a single person is ever attracted to him? I see, I see. Is the most attractive trait in this world bland incompetence?
Because if so, I’d like one isekai ticket, please.
That is probably the best answer to my question. It at least makes a lot of sense from an authors perspective.
After all writing compelling relationships is probably pretty hard in the first place.
I think what I dislike the most about dense main characters is that they don't seem to evolve over time in many stories.
That said bland incompetence seems to be a rather attractive trait if japanese novels are to be believed.
One of my favorite one-shot manga chapters is a guy getting isekai’d to a fantasy world with three beautiful women as party members, and he keeps reacting with frustration to how easily they’re throwing themselves at him.
“We’ve known each other two days! How are you in love with me already? Have you never met any other guys?” etc.
I was disappointed it didn’t get serialized; I would have enjoyed seeing that concept fleshed out.
Will constantly says that he branches off from his original plans all the time.
I really do. I think it’s important that plans should have room to flex, because what looks like a great idea five books out might end up not working once you get there.
The characters could be in a different emotional place than you imagined, for instance, or maybe the scene in your head doesn’t fit the tone of the current book.
So I like to leave flexibility. Even up to writing Reaper, I could have changed my mind about who Eithan was if I had wanted to.
I didn’t, though.
I’m pretty sure that Eithan being Ozriel…wasn’t planned from the beginning.
As I’ve said before, I came up with Eithan’s identity before Lindon’s. He was designed to be the mentor in an older story whose grave formed the foundation for Cradle.
I could just be saying that, though. The real commitment came when I told people.
As early as Soulsmith, I told my family and about half of my beta readers where Ozriel was. So they could read all along with this in mind and help me keep it consistent.
Ultimately it’s up to you whether you believe me or not, but I am telling the truth on this one.
Frankly, if I had changed my mind, I wouldn’t mind saying so. I’m not afraid of deviating from the plan, nor am I ashamed of it. Nothing wrong with scrapping a plan that isn’t working.
This one was the plan all along, though.
I mean obviously Will can't answer this because it's spoilers, but Cradle ending doesn't necessarily mean Lindon's story ends completely, right? Like after ascension their role can expand to future willverse stories and such
Cradle is the story in Cradle. Whether there’s more story after that…who knows? But Cradle the series covers their journey within the world of Cradle.
How close are we to the end of Cradle?
Dreadgod is book 11 out of 12. But after you read Dreadgod, you'll be like "you mean 13 books right?"
No, I'm sure I can do it in 12. At least a solid 40% sure.
Please do cut it in half if you need to
I'll put it this way: I really really want to just do an extra-long 12 rather than a relatively normal-size pair of 12 & 13. If I can make it work, I will.
Honesty I think it'll just be better for the reading experience. I don't want to do Book 12: Part 1 and Book 12: Part 2.
A quick question I've had for a while... the whole 600 billion souls on Cradle thing... is that just the humanoid/sentient species or does that include everything alive including plants, remnants, etc?
Sentient population. It's very large and a much higher percentage of their planet's surface is inhabited.
The gap between these stages of advancement is HUGE! people are trying to scale Lindon and the gang and it seems people think sage/Herald are closer to monarchs than they actually are.
The 8 man empire are the equivalent of one monarch. That's not because any 8 sacred artists at the level of sage/Herald (S/H) are the equivalent of a monarch, they need the help of special magic space armor to combine their significance to reach that level. This fact alone means that without the magic space armor, that I would take over 8 S/H to rival one monarch. The way the story talks about the 8 man empire I would guess it would take many more that 8 S/H to rival a monarch.
Let me take a few minutes to address the 8ME.
A group of 4 Sages and 4 Heralds all fighting a Monarch together could win. And probably would, all other factors being equal.
The disadvantage is that none of them could 1v1 the Monarch, so they’re prone to getting picked off and defeated separately. Are you going to stand there and fight eight guys? No, you run and pick your moment later.
The advantage of the 8ME is that they don’t need to be together to combine powers. And that they can fuse their power to perform Monarch-level feats, which Sages and Heralds can’t normally do.
How does a Monarch beat a Sage? Engage them physically or in a straight-up power fight. How do they beat a Herald? Keep throwing workings at them they can’t match and make them waste willpower and concentration shutting them down.
An 8ME member can draw on the power of the others to remove those weaknesses at will.
How would you defeat the 8ME? Force them to spread out. They have a finite pool of power to draw on, so if three of them (for instance) need to draw on Monarch-level power at once, what does that leave for the rest?
Problem is, no faction has two Monarchs. So let’s say Reigan Shen wanted to take them down. He engages Larian in combat, and he assigns or hires a Sage or Herald for each of the other seven.
How does that actually play out?
They don’t pump Larian up to Monarch-level. She flees and runs and hides and does anything she can to survive with only her own power, and they pump whoever has the weakest opponent.
Suddenly, the person facing down a single Sage has Monarch-level power. The enemy is crushed. Then they move on to the next-weakest enemy, and so on.
Larian might die. Maybe she couldn’t hang on either.
But it’s still WAY faster and easier for the 8ME to pass power between each other than it is for Shen to travel through the Way to face the other members. So, in all likelihood, they become the Six-Man Army but all their non-Monarch opponents are dead.
Then they replace the lost two members and now they’re gunning for Shen.
And that’s the story of why the 8ME still exists.
Lindon fighting Malice amp can reasonably be explained with his with Silent King amp. How about Yerrin? The two have always been able to fight above their weight class but she's still "just" a newborn Herald. In previous books they said they'd need to reach peak Archlord to be a true Herald/Sage so she's not really even a real Herald yet.
In my head I just assume that Malice must be really exhausted from her continuous fights. I'm not totally happy with that explanation but it's all I've got at the moment.
My view of Yerin in this fight is that she’s roughly the equivalent of a normal Herald. She has some unique advantages, but so do many Heralds.
Fury, for instance, could have beaten her.
But she’s at the level of being able to participate in this fight while Lindon puts the lion’s share (tiger’s share?) of the pressure on.
That’s my general thought process, anyway.
So we saw DreadLindon tank a Monarch's blow like it was nothing:
Shadow madra Forged into blades and swept at him, but he weakened them with the Hollow Domain. Then he allowed them to land. They cut his body and his spirit together, but he healed as fast as she damaged him.
Yeah, it was weakened with the Hollow Domain first, but it's still a Monarch's melee-range attack. We've seen that same level of attack obliterate mountains. So clearly Lindon's Iron body is now healing at hyperspeed.
Lindon was also helped here by Malice's own madra and bloodline ability strengthening his healing powers as he was consuming it.
^ This is what I was going to point out.
He can’t tank Monarch hits forever without a source of Monarch-level energy to Consume.
Even with how much he expended healing himself, he did come out ahead in that exchange right?
Like how large an elixer are we talking?
About this big:
\ ___________ /
When I read about the Sand Vipers enslaving people to go into the Transcendent Ruins, I figured that was only happening because it was a lawless area that was only technically in the BFE.
But in Blackflame, Renfei is thinking about her experiences in the Skysworn:
She had fought with the Kotai clan against walking sharks on the beaches of the Trackless Sea, executed exiled criminals trying to sneak in across the eastern border, and returned runaways to the Stonedeep Mines.
There's no such thing as a runaway employee. That's called quitting. Only slaves run away, and the Skysworn's job is to return runaway slaves to the mines.
I've read that line multiple times but it never hit me until my most recent reread that the BFE had institutionalized slavery.
My intention was that these were criminals sentenced to hard labor, since that’s how a lot of these isekai-style stories start.
You have a main character who wakes up inside the body of some frail kid who died working in the mines, or they get sentenced to the mines early on and end up finding some rare gem that gives them magic powers or whatever.
If the BFE had chattel slavery as part of their economy, the gang would have run into some slaves. Also, the Skysworn wouldn’t have been involved with returning runaways, since they’re sacred-artist-police and not a regular police force.
Although it’s not like forcing prisoners to work the mines isn’t still slavery. I don’t see the BFE as particularly socially or culturally advanced.
They tolerate a lot of murder.
[Emriss] may actually be saddened by the state of the world, but I think a certain part of that "sadness" is the mask she's been wearing while she waited for an opportunity like this one. To put it to a whole class of self-absorbed murdering bastards.
”I don’t forget anything,” she said sadly.
I don’t see her sadness as a facade at all. She’s sad because she’s thinking back over everything she remembers from her long history and ruminating on how nothing fundamental has changed.
She doesn’t take Northstrider’s threat to heart at all, because she’s always been conscious of the threat the other Monarchs can pose. Him outright threatening her doesn’t change anything for her.
That is certainly not mutually exclusive with anger.
The gap between these stages of advancement is HUGE! people are trying to scale Lindon and the gang and it seems people think sage/Herald are closer to monarchs than they actually are.
The 8 man empire are the equivalent of one monarch. That's not because any 8 sacred artists at the level of sage/Herald (S/H) are the equivalent of a monarch, they need the help of special magic space armor to combine their significance to reach that level. This fact alone means that without the magic space armor, that I would take over 8 S/H to rival one monarch. The way the story talks about the 8 man empire I would guess it would take many more that 8 S/H to rival a monarch.
Unfortunately I have no idea how to estimate exactly how few S/H it would take to match a monarch.
That being said, the fact that Lindon and Yerin could push back against Malice, with the help of Mercy, is huge. To say Lindon is just a Sage with the raw power of a Herald is a joke. Our boy could spank any Herald or sage level sacred artist low dif.
My view of Yerin in this fight is that she’s roughly the equivalent of a normal Herald. She has some unique advantages, but so do many Heralds.
Fury, for instance, could have beaten her.
But she’s at the level of being able to participate in this fight while Lindon puts the lion’s share (tiger’s share?) of the pressure on.
That’s my general thought process, anyway.
Let me take a few minutes to address the 8ME.
A group of 4 Sages and 4 Heralds all fighting a Monarch together could win. And probably would, all other factors being equal.
The disadvantage is that none of them could 1v1 the Monarch, so they’re prone to getting picked off and defeated separately. Are you going to stand there and fight eight guys? No, you run and pick your moment later.
The advantage of the 8ME is that they don’t need to be together to combine powers. And that they can fuse their power to perform Monarch-level feats, which Sages and Heralds can’t normally do.
How does a Monarch beat a Sage? Engage them physically or in a straight-up power fight. How do they beat a Herald? Keep throwing workings at them they can’t match and make them waste willpower and concentration shutting them down.
An 8ME member can draw on the power of the others to remove those weaknesses at will.
How would you defeat the 8ME? Force them to spread out. They have a finite pool of power to draw on, so if three of them (for instance) need to draw on Monarch-level power at once, what does that leave for the rest?
Problem is, no faction has two Monarchs. So let’s say Reigan Shen wanted to take them down. He engages Larian in combat, and he assigns or hires a Sage or Herald for each of the other seven.
How does that actually play out?
They don’t pump Larian up to Monarch-level. She flees and runs and hides and does anything she can to survive with only her own power, and they pump whoever has the weakest opponent.
Suddenly, the person facing down a single Sage has Monarch-level power. The enemy is crushed. Then they move on to the next-weakest enemy, and so on.
Larian might die. Maybe she couldn’t hang on either.
But it’s still WAY faster and easier for the 8ME to pass power between each other than it is for Shen to travel through the Way to face the other members. So, in all likelihood, they become the Six-Man Army but all their non-Monarch opponents are dead.
Then they replace the lost two members and now they’re gunning for Shen.
And that’s the story of why the 8ME still exists.
I wonder if Will's writing will follow an identical formula for book length and the pacing of the story. With Cradle there's many kinds of scenes he avoided lest they slow things down. Slice of life moments and whatnot. There may be a few but he lets a ton of stuff happen off screen. Wonder if he'll try to develop any of that or just continue to eschew it.
Identical formula? Probably not.
Continue to skip those scenes? Probably.
I’m going to take a long wall of text to talk about why I skip these, even though it’s not directly what you asked.
A story being slow-paced doesn’t mean it wastes time, even by my definition. There are plenty of slow-paced stories that rarely waste time.
But I hate scenes that waste time. I hate them more than anything. I want to tear them out of the manuscript with my teeth.
“It was a rainy summer’s day. The air was thick with the kind of raindrops that—“ Let me stop you right there, because I can already tell this scene isn’t going to matter to my understanding of the character or the story and is just going to kill two minutes.
Not every character-building scene is like that! You need to establish your character for the story to work. NO character-building scene NEEDS to be like that.
WASTE: the scene in Moon Knight where they’re on the ferry talking about their failed marriage.
Why are you repeating exposition to each other? What does this show us about who you are as people? Nothing, it just gives us facts to remember about you.
NOT A WASTE: Tywin Lannister’s introductory scene in Game of Thrones, where he’s cleaning a deer and chastising his son. Fantastic. Shows us who both the characters are, tense, fun to watch, even though it’s just character dialogue.
It’s not like that second scene, storyline, or show is particularly fast-paced, but in this case it certainly didn’t waste time.
TL;DR - Wasted time is what I hate.
I would always rather an author err on the side of “too little” rather than “too much,” because I find the second to be a far more common and egregious mistake.
…and having said all that, I do still prefer a fast pace.
Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.
I still have painful flashbacks from the Wheel of Time starting off all those books describing in detail where the wind is blowing.
Thanks for the response!
Wheel of Time is a big part of how I formed this opinion.
I started thinking about the later books in the series and what they would lose if you cut out entire sub-plots, characters, and tens of thousands of words, and the answer was “nothing.” (At least for me.)
If anything, the story would get better.
Though, admittedly, I now tend to take that to the other extreme.
[Cradle] is sincere but doesn't take itself too seriously
Well said. And thanks!
That’s definitely how I think of it. Sincerity is higher priority to me than taking the world seriously.
On the one hand, I do take the characters seriously and I want them to live meaningful lives and grapple with sincere struggles.
On the other hand, I’m very aware that this is a series about punching Godzilla in the face.
So many series struggle with that concept. Either they have every instant be incredibly dire and epic and they just pound the reader with maximized stakes until they’re numb, or they turn everything into a joke and are unable to stay serious for more than a sentence, which kills the stakes entirely and makes the reader not care about the characters. Will strikes a good balance in Cradle. IMO, his earlier works were too far on the dire side.
Yeah, I feel like a lot of times sincerity is compromised by taking a series too seriously. There’s some integrity in the realization that “At the end of the day, this story is fantastical and ridiculous,” but at the same time, fantastical and ridiculous stories can still have real emotional impact.
IMO, his earlier works were too far on the dire side.
Funny enough, I agree, but I’d say it was for lack of ability, not lack of intention.
Early on, I thought the inflated over-the-top ridiculousness of the setting was enough to signal to the reader “Don’t take this too seriously.”
Simon’s carrying a doll and swinging a sword bigger than he is. Elder Empire is pirates versus ninjas versus Cthulhu.
But within the world, the characters take it seriously because of course they do. It’s not ridiculous to them, it’s real life.
That isn’t enough for someone reading fiction, though, because so often stories DO want you to take them 100% seriously. And I slowly realized that over a few years and adjusted how I presented them.
If I were to re-write my earlier books, basically through Soulsmith, I’d highlight the inherent humor a little more. Not necessarily ramping up the one-liners, but some more beats where I signal to the reader that THEY aren’t supposed to take this as dire and brooding even if the characters do.
Like Simon tripping over his cloak, Shera treating murder missions as the humdrum status quo, and so on.
For one thing, I could have exaggerated how overly stiff and formal Sacred Valley people are compared to outsiders.
That’s so many books lmao, I can’t believe Will signed all of them, must have taken ages
It did. I signed them all. They’re signed, every single one of them. And not just the manuscripts, but the womanuscripts and the childrenuscripts too!
They’re books! And I signed them like books!
(But for real though, idk if all the books pictured in that image are signed. Some of the books are part of the extra printing we’re hoping to get in bookstores, and I only signed the ones actually going to Kickstarter backers. Which was still over 20,000.)
Is the Traveller's Gate fandom dead?
I've been searching around iteration 110 for a while trying to find anything partaining to Indiriel, Simon, Leah, or even Alin. I'll find a morsel occasionally, but is this fandom dead?
The fandom isn’t dead, but Cradle is the ongoing series. I expect to see this question about Cradle a few years after the series is over.
…which might be a little awkward, given that the name of the sub is r/Iteration110Cradle
I’d really like to get back to Traveler’s Gate, but I have to do something new first. I haven’t written in a new world since 2016 and I’m having a lot of fun.
Will the new untitled series fall under the 'progressive fantasy' umbrella?
Progression fantasy? Probably not, but I’ve never cared about strict genre definitions.
I don’t plan on having a defined progression element baked into the magic system and the story doesn’t revolve around the main character getting stronger.
As always, though, whether you consider it progression fantasy or not will be up to you.
