This time around we’ll be interviewing Ivan Kal, with his recent Infinite Realm release, Shirtaloon with He Who Fights with Monsters, and Jacevamor a relatively recent author who is making waves.

The interview questions were formed by me because it’s what I wanted to ask them at that moment, yet I still hope others enjoy their answers nonetheless. The questions and answers were received through email only. The text is transcribed word for word (and spelling/grammar issues) with no alterations.

For the grand finale of interviews, we have Shirtaloon of He Who Fights With Monsters or HWFWM.

The series was first published on March 9th, 2021, and in the two and a half years since, has grown by nine more books. Its audience has watched the protagonist, Jason Asano, move from starting in a world with a collection of concussions, to joining Team Biscuit, and fighting against not only monsters, but any injustice they happen upon in their travels. The novels are filled with a deep dive into mental health, disparaging comments about divinity, and just how slutty Clive’s wife is. There really isn’t anything out there quite like it.

Author’s about me:

In the middle of penning a dry academic paper, Shirtaloon had a revelation: he desperately needed to write something very silly.

To his surprise and delight, he found a warm and welcoming audience in the world of online serialized fiction. Transitioning his work into actual books, he is continually startled at the appetite for his particular blend of high magic, wild adventure and absurd nonsense.

Success has allowed him to fund an excessive board game collection he doesn’t have time to play because he’s always writing. The unplayed games sit on the shelves behind him as he works, silently judging.

Link to Shirtaloon’s last Amazon book release: Link

Link to Shirtaloon’s Royal Road page: Link

1. You are a staple in LitRPG nowadays. When people speak of the genre, there are a few famous names that appear. Zogarth, J.F. Brink, and Shirtaloon among them. But I’m not sure if everyone knows you’re all under one publisher, Aethon Books. Who are they and how did you end up joining them?

There are plenty of fantastic litRPG authors, and while not all of them are under Aethon, they do produce work from a lot of great authors. As for how we all got there, there was something of a litRPG gold rush as the indie publishers realised the untapped potential of Royal Road. I was approached by Podium, who only did audiobooks at the time, so they contracted Aethon for the ebook side of things, and I’m very happy they did.

I don’t want to speak too much for Aethon, but they are an indie publisher founded by a pair of authors who also happen to be great guys. They have always been fantastic about being approachable and guiding new authors, like those coming from Royal Road, through the murky waters of publishing. There are good and bad actors out there, and it’s hard to tell one from the other when you’re some guy writing a free internet story in his bedroom.

2. You will soon get the chance to speak at Dragoncon’s Podium’s Panel in a few short weeks (Aug. 31st-September 4th in Atlanta, Georgia). Do you have a speech written? Bullet points and notes? The buzz shows that quite a few audience members are planning to go. Do you feel any hesitation or nervousness about speaking to a large group of people?

I have nothing whatsoever. Running my mouth for any given length of time has never been a problem for me. This will be my first con of any kind, but public speaking doesn’t really faze me. Somewhere along the way I learned to stop caring that much about what most people think. That might sound a little callous but it’s an attitude well worth developing when you receive a lot of public feedback. I’m also just growing kind of shameless as I get older.

3. In recent articles in the United States, it is being said that English degrees are going the way of the dodo, as in extinct. Now, with the advent of ChatGPT and AI writers on the horizon, there is even greater pressure on authors to have unique stories. Do you have any advice for aspiring writers on how to make their work special enough to gain the kind of attention that allows them to write for a living?

I actually do have an English degree, and while I think they are very much not necessary to become a writer, I have personally found it to be highly valuable. There is no doubt in my mind that the knowledge and experiences of that time helped improve my understanding of narrative and the practical aspects of being a writer. That being said, I still discovered there was so much more to learn once I was out in the world doing it.

In terms of standing out from the crowd, there are really two aspects to that: creative and commercial. Anyone looking at this seriously should do their research on the commercial aspects of the business because it’s an often unpleasant but utterly inescapable reality. I honestly had a lot of good luck when it comes to that side, being in the right place at the right time.

For the creative aspect, that’s a question with as many answers as there are authors. I think one key is finding the things that make your writing your own. Voice, tone, theme, quirks of prose; every aspect of what you write says something about you to the audience, even if neither of you realise how much.

There are many other critical aspects to writing as a career, far too many to list. Professionalism has many aspects. Research to understand your platforms and putting together a release plan for them. Being diligent in keeping up your writing, maintaining a release schedule. Actively engaging your community – without getting in flame wars with your comments section.

As for AI, there are dangers, but it’s not as simple as ‘machines are going to write all the books and scripts now.’ I think soulless machines can only replace soulless writers. If you live and breathe your story, ChatGPT can’t replicate that passion. It’s a predictive algorithm that decides what to say next based on what came before. It can’t reproduce the fire that made you want to write that story in the first place, that kept driving you to push out chapters when it seemed so hard to keep going.

Until it gets a lot better, the danger of AI writing isn’t in replacing the great writers; it’s replacing the mediocre ones. And I don’t mean people who are just starting out and are still developing their prose and their craft. Those people have passion that AI can only mimic, and readers can see right through that. I’m talking about writers that are checking boxes, using the tropes like a colouring book to churn out bland fodder. They aren’t doing all that well, but they’re getting by on a volume game and I think that is a market AI is poised to take over. The genres where that kind of writing can slip through easier because of how heavily they reuse tropes will be the ones most affected. That puts genres like litRPG and romance at the forefront.

The more complicated threat of AI is something the writers strike is rightly concerned about: large-scale studios and publishers using AI to produce soulless crap, then paying writers peanuts to turn that crap into something at least acceptable. Once again, it’s a high-volume, low-quality game, but if it makes money, the people cranking it out won’t care. If a studio makes less money from a prestige drama than they do from people watching that drama on Gogglebox, they’re not going to value the things that people poured their heart and soul into.

4. There is a dab, a hint, a taste, of self-righteousness in Jason Asano’s character. A bucketload some would call it. This has a tendency to push away some readers, while others say they love it. That is quite the polarization in a protagonist. Why did you decide to write them that way, or does it just flow out of you in the moment?

Jason Asano is a flawed character. He has to be. This is a long series, which means he needs a lot of room to grow or I’ll just run out of character to develop. And he was most flawed at the start, as you’d expect. I’ve said many times that a lot of Jason’s flaws I took from myself at that age. I was pretty insufferable as well. That’s not to say that Jason is turning into me as he gets older and learns lessons. We might share a love of board games and nostalgia for Knight Rider but our similarities are superficial and our differences deep.

As for why I decided on this approach, it’s for a couple of reasons. One is that if I was going to use the very overworn isekai trope, I wanted it to mean something. Yes, I wanted to tell jokes that were basically ‘what if Gandalf met Crocodile Dundee,’ and I had a lot of fun with that. But I really wanted to explore what it meant for the sensibilities of two very different worlds to come into conflict. The main way I explore this is through the character development of Jason.

Jason Asano is a very contemporary character, in spite of his love for 80s references. At the beginning, he’s is 23 years old and coming from a fairly privileged upbringing. His family wasn’t crazy rich but he definitely grew up with money in one of the safest and most developed parts of the planet. He had a lot of ideals he had taken from growing up in one of the most media-rich environments that has ever existed.

Jason, like all of us in the modern world, knew more about the world than most people that have ever lived. By far. He didn’t have to fight in a war to get a sense of its horrors. He has more insight into political structures, religious structures, the sociological an anthropological makeup of not just his own society but societies all around the world.

But all of that was at a remove. Like most of us, the vast majority of our perception of the world is shaped by the media we consume more than personal experience. There’s no question that Jason is smug, likes to argue just to argue and, like all of us sometimes, likes to be seen as right a little more than actually being right.

Then Jason comes to another world where people have little to none of that. They learn their lessons the hard way, and they don’t have a world of media to tell them what’s right, what’s wrong and the broader context in which they operate. All they have is the people around them. Jason’s journey is about finding a balance between the two sensibilities of the two worlds that he inhabits. Over the books, we see him veering too far on one side or the other in the search for a harmonious middle. He grows, but he also regresses a lot. He’s a work in progress.

Jason is always going to be some version of who he is. He’s never going to stop being self-righteous. The crux of his development is in understanding when he needs to be, and about refining his ideals so that when he is, it’s for a purpose. His journey has seen him lose his early ideals, and his way, only to realise that maybe some of what he lost was important. And now he’s finding that finding his way back to them is easier said than done.

The other big reason that I took this approach with the protagonist, and with my somewhat specific style of writing, is that I’d rather swing for the fences than make a safe bunt. Did I get that metaphor right? I barely understand cricket, let alone baseball; I have no idea why I attempted it. The point is, Jason’s particular brand of charm/obnoxiousness, depending on who you ask, is loved by some and hated by others. There’s not a lot of ambivalence there, and that’s the same approach I take with writing. If my story is going to be someone’s favourite series, it’s also going to be something that someone hates with a passion. I’m completely okay with that; there’s plenty of other fantastic writers for them to find. I’ll take love and hate over ‘yeah, it was okay,’ every day of the week.

5. I’ve asked this of a progression author, Will Wight, and now I’ll ask it of you, as a representative of LitRPG. There is a common issue or trope found within “Hard Magic” as Brandon Sanderson identifies it. I call it the Power Ranger problem, as each time the protagonist gains strength, the author has to throw them at more and more powerful enemies to quantify their power. How do you combat this as an author, or do you not see this as a problem at all?

I don’t think this is a problem of hard magic, which does not inherently have to get stronger, even though it often does. The issue is the power progression. Obviously, power progression is a core aspect of progression fantasy, like Will Wight’s excellent Cradle series, as well as litRPG like He Who Fights With Monsters (available now on Kindle & Audible, kids. Your mum probably has a credit card in her purse). It’s near-impossible to have progression stories without hard magic systems, especially in litRPG where you have to show your work like it’s a maths assignment.

I don’t think power scaling is a problem, so much as an aspect that can be done well or poorly. It’s an issue that does always have to be addressed, however, because it’s a core aspect of progression stories. It’s baked in. You can’t have a murder-mystery without a murder, the way you can’t have a progression story without progression. That means in protagonists and in the challenges they face. There’s a power fantasy there, which I think is a common point of criticism, but I don’t think that’s something to be ashamed of. What’s wrong with themes of accomplishment? Of hard work paying off? I think one of the wish fulfillment fantasies these stories provide is that there is always a reward for the hard work being put in. There’s a natural justice in that which is as much an escape from the real world as throwing fireballs and riding dragons.

A massive draw of progression stories is seeing those astounding, powerful things out there and looking to the horizon, knowing that some day you’ll get there. It’s what people are showing up for, the way that mystery readers are showing up for a mystery. There isn’t an inherent problem with murder-mysteries all being about solving a murder any more than there’s an inherent problem of progression stories having escalation. The issue determining if a story is good or bad isn’t the concept but how well the concept is executed.

As an author, you have to build a world where the full gamut of your power scale can exist in its entirety, right from the outset. You need challenges to grow into that don’t just come out of nowhere, and power gains that don’t feel cheap or unearned. You need people who have already reached the heights the characters aspire to, and places for them to live out their own stories. The readers need to see it coming, to yearn for those people and places of legend. For the characters to make legends of their own. If your characters are fighting the same orcs in the same way they were ten books ago, but the orcs are blue now and the numbers are higher, you’ve done it wrong. The progression in power has to be matched with progression in character, stakes, challenge and the changes taking place in a living world. Progression stories are inexorably epic. The power involved means that the characters will become increasingly impactful upon the world. The world you build for them has to be able to take it, or they’ll crack it like an egg.

Getting the high-end of the power scale right is a trick. World-building is how we pull it off and make these stories escalate smoothly. Fantasy readers love good world-building, as well they we should. It’s our responsibility as authors to put in that work.

Categories: Abnormal Thoughts Interview Reviews and Interviews

Tagged as: abnormal v average he who fights with monsters Interview shirtaloon

abnormalvaverage

I'm a high school English teacher in Texas. I also hold degrees in radiography and radio and television broadcasting. Though I obtained certain knowledge and skills from my prior degrees, I do not currently use them.