June 2025 - Dead Stories and living plans

Hey all,

I thought that this time I’d talk about a project that hasn’t gotten off the ground yet. I’ve not thrown it out entirely, but I’ve cannibalised bits of it, themes of it, into my next project and chucked the dying husk aside into the trash.

Okay, that was a little melodramatic, but I’m an author on my own newsletter – forgive me some melodrama here and there. Let me tell you about an abandoned story idea of mine.

I came up with this while working on my first trilogy, which was an isekai, and as you might already know I was a little unhappy with how little I used the isekai premise in the actual story. The re-wite has solved that issue, I think, but at the time I was thinking a lot about how to make the isekai aspect more meaningful in stories in general.

I remember I was out for a run, and the sun was bright in early spring, and the ground was just covered in old, dried leaves. They crackled underfoot, and I was feeling pretentiously poetic. I remembered thinking about how the leaves sounded a little like the crunch of snow underfoot, and then that led me down the rabbit hole of a scene where a broken and tired knight from a grim and post-apocalyptic world could be isekai’d into a bright, beautiful one.

I just loved the imagery of this hopeless and grim knight striding through a beautiful forest, utterly shocked to see the vibrancy, but still somehow being reminded of their frozen homeland by the sound, despite the context of it being completely opposite. So I had my character – a knight from a broken world, whose faith was just as shattered as their battered and broken armour.

I needed a story, and I was drawn to the contrast of knights versus cultivators. I wanted the culture clash (though not in an eastern versus western way) of a sacrificial order of holy knights, very strongly mono-theistic faith-based compared to the somewhat individualistic image of a cultivator and their more naturalist/Daoist faith in the world/enlightenment itself.

The story I settled on was that the protagonist was a member of a knightly order, crusading against the armies of darkness and colonising new lands for the forces of good. Note that I was hoping to play this straight as good vs evil, and have the evil be genuinely demonic, not an allegory for actual colonialism and the crusades. Basically, take the tropes of knights and make them true to their best ideals, not mired in the gross reality that they often represented.

Anyway, everything goes wrong when the protagonist’s god just vanishes one day. The knightly orders were empowered by divine intervention, had armour and weapons that were enchanted with divine power, and basically the entire technological and martial base of the order would have relied on their patron god’s help. When their god disappears, suddenly its all taken away, and the forces of darkness overrun the world. They fight back, and the protagonist and their order spend the next decade fighting a losing battle, retreating from new lands while escorting trains of refugees across the ruins of a shattered country.

In a desperate gambit, one of the protagonist’s friends who would be some sort of divine cleric or something, tries to fix things with a massive ritual to close shut the jaws of hell. It goes wrong, and the world becomes a frozen mess instead. This whole saga has completely ruined the faith of the protagonist, who eventually nearly-dies in some heroic and pointless rearguard action to save a few refugees, knowing that their sacrifice is entirely in vain and cursing their absentee god as they watch the demons descend towards them.

Then they wake up in a new land and BOOM! The story begins. Yes, all of the above would be backstory that you’d discover as the story progresses. The actual story would take place almost entirely in this new world that the protagonist would be isekai’d into.

It’s a standard xianxia cultivation world; squabbling sects, arrogant young masters (AYM^tm), competent bureaucrats and powerful cultivators. Ultimately, the entire world would be ruled by a small number of immortal cultivator-kings who are akin to gods themselves, with the general population being oppressed and not too happy. That would explain why a world with cultivation in isn’t a perfect utopia, though I wouldn’t want it to be awful either. Far better than the broken world the protagonist comes from.

The protagonist is nearly dead on their feet though, having been snatched from the jaws of death by (unbeknownst to them) their absent god and brought to this new world. So they sit down on top of a lovely green hill, look up at the blue sky and wait for a well-earned death. They are met by a classic AYM^tm and sentenced to death, but just before the execution, they hear their god’s voice once more.

Woah, shocker! Turns out their god is very much not a deadbeat and was instead snatched from the protagonist’s reality by the cultivator-kings of this new world to power their immortality. That’s the secret of the ruler’s immortality – they steal power from gods of other realities.

Knowing this, the knight regains their duty and desire to live, and goes on a bit of a quest to rescue their imprisoned god. I envisaged them linking up with a few colourful cultivator characters as they do odd jobs for various sects to grow both in power and get some allies for the eventual prison break. So book 1 would see them as an itinerant knight, fixing problems for various sects and just exploring and getting to know the world.

I envisioned them as still wearing their armour and wielding their enchanted weapon, and they would slowly recover and repair its functions, with the help of the god occasionally whispering in their ear and providing a trickle of power to them. Think body cultivation levels where they can move faster and hit harder because of their armour, and cut through things with their sword, maybe even absorb/defelct hostile spells… but it would be a bit inconsistent due to their broken faith. Eventually, they would discover their god’s prison, but they wouldn’t be powerful enough to break them out. But no worries, their god has gone ahead and isekeid their friend the divine cleric that ruined the world. That’s book 1.

Onto book 2. So now the protagonist heads over to save their old friend, gives them a good dressing down for trying something so stupid but ultimately forgives them, and the two old friends work on a plan to break out their god. This whole journey would obviously bring up a lot of trauma, and I had in mind that the power system once the armour and weapon were fully repaired would be more akin to traditional cultivation, except based on faith. The protagonist would have to accept more of their god’s power, but could only do so after confronting and healing from their past trauma, so you’d get this sort of therapy-like power system to deal with the spiritual growth of the protagonist.

They’d probably have to recruit a bunch of help from some disaffected lcoals, and they then break their god free from whatever magical/spiritual prison they are in. That’s book 2.

Book 3 follows them post-breakout. Their actions obviously put a target on their backs from the cultivator-kings, and they have to go on the run, but now they have the power and help of their actual god, though much diminished from their imprisonment. They go around recruiting the various downtrodden people of power to help them revolt against the cultivator-kings, and I even think perhaps it turns out their god was not the only one stolen, and had been working with other stolen gods. So the protagonist journeys across the world meeting and recruiting other isekai’d heroes until they can challenge the cultivator-kings in an epic final battle.

Just when all hope seems lost, their god opens a massive portal to their homeworld, and their whole knightly order comes through in a big charge of steel and faith, and they win the war. Yay!

….

As you can see, there was a lot that needed working out. But that was the rough plot. I just loved the idea of a no-nonsense knight dealing with the excesses of cultivators, as well as a faith-based therapy power system. I don’t know if it would have worked very well, and I might come back to this idea eventually, though I don’t mind sharing it now because if I do, I’ll definitely be changing a lot of the twists and details.

I even wrote a few scenes of it at the start to get the creative juices flowing, but it didn’t fully grip me once I’d gotten the idea out on paper. Anyway, I hope this was interesting for some of you, and perhaps it gives a bit of a glimpse behind the curtain of how stories can evolve from just a random moment/scene.

Updates

In The Shadow Of Mountains: Still in the re-write currently. Book 1 has been entirely re-written and is currently being edited by my publisher’s editor. We’re hoping to have that finished by August, with an anticipated launch of ~8 months from then to allow time for audio production.

On top of that, book 2 is fully edited/re-written by me, and will go into professional edits once book 1 is finished. I’ll begin working on Book 3 shortly, and plan to add a fair few chapters to the end to actually have Lamb explore the Ashkanian Ruin a little. This will obviously change the shape of the final battle somewhat, but I won’t know exactly how until I’m in the middle of it. I expect to be handing book 3 to the editor by end of September if all goes well.

The Amansi Chronicles: This is the working title of the new book series I’m working on. Its going to be set in a fantasy/cultivation world inspired by ancient Egypt, and I’ve been playing around with the worldbuilding and story for a few months already. I have a rough plot worked out, some central characters, and the magic system locked down. I’ve written a very rough draft of the first third of the book and will be working on a real first draft of book 1 soon, to hopefully be finished by End of October.

My current plan is to release that story perhaps in November or December 2025, and climb up rising stars towards the end of the year, so that I can greet 2026 with a thriving patreon and well-growing new story as my first trilogy goes live on amazon in 2026.

We’ll see, but those are the updates and plans!

P.S. Dog Tax