I’ve made brief reference to it both on my Bluesky and in my previous writing about Tourney of Tyranny on this blog, but this series of light novels really, truly contains some of the writing I’m most proud of so far in my career as a longform writer. I’ll prove it later on with a lengthy excerpt from the recently-released second book in the series (Tourney of Tyranny Part 2: A Conquest Claimed), but before I get to that I thought it’d be nice to write a little about how enjoyable the process of working on ToT is for me.
When you’re working on games with a lot of writing in them (like ours have), not only are you DOING a lot of writing, you’re REVISITING that writing over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and so on, again and again, until everything you’ve written, no matter how clever or funny or hot it might’ve been when you first wrote it, starts to look like grey mush. You stare at what you’ve gotten down on an unfinished script while you’re attempting to cudgel your brain into producing the remainder of it. You read it over and over while doing your own edit pass, and then over and over again after your editor gets back to you with notes. You read the whole thing through while you’re implementing every single sentence in the game’s code, and you’d BETTER read every single sentence over again while you’re testing, lest you made a mistake or twenty. By the time a game gets in front of an audience, reading what I’ve written makes me want to puke.
This is not to say there isn’t quite a lot of re-reading for me to do in the process of creating Tourney of Tyranny – quite the opposite, in fact. There’s plenty of going over paragraphs during the writing process, and plenty of re-reading during the edits, and then plenty more when I’m planning out a given book’s illustrations for Blueparikeet, and then even more still when all the illustrations are completed and it’s time to format everything together. But the really crazy thing is that in spite of all that necessary re-reading, I’ve nevertheless found myself rereading both books… for fun? As in, I genuinely enjoy it? I find myself reading through them and smiling and laughing and even thinking “man, I can’t wait until there’s another one of these”. I know that this likely sounds nauseatingly self-congratulatory, but it’s the truth!
The process of writing them has also been straight-up Fun, too. Another thing about making games is that it takes FOREVER for the things you write to appear in their proper context, so working in a medium where you can just have something On The Page is so quick and easy that it basically feels like cheating. What’s interesting is that I had no great ambitions towards literary excellence when I started the Tourney of Tyranny project. It all began as a way of scratching a certain itch, kink-wise, and giving myself an excuse to contract the services of one of my favorite artists. The quality of the writing was always meant as an afterthought. However, something strange happened when I was working on the draft for Tourney of Tyranny Part 1: A Champion Chosen, and it basically hasn’t stopped happening since: I was surprising myself with how good I thought it was. I wasn’t even TRYING and yet this stupid goofy completely-unserious erotic kinky science-fiction dreck was making me feel as though I was Becky Chambers or Terry Pratchett (I’d never dream of going so far as to favorably compare myself to Sir Terry, but (as I mention in the Opportunity Retrospective), his is the ghost I’m most obsessed with chasing in my work. Sidenote: direct comparison like this is another privilege of the novel format. In games, which so often have writers’ distinct authorial voices sanded down flat by multiple revisions and notes from a dozen different stakeholders, it can be tough (not to mention unproductive) to try to compare one’s writing to well-known works).
However, I know that all of this is just me talking. If you’d like me to back up my words with, uh, words, you can go ahead and download the free safe-for-work PDF previews of Part 1 and Part 2 on Itch. But maybe you’re in a bit of a hurry, or you’re on a work device, or you just don’t want to make any extra clicks. I get you. Below is a nice chunky excerpt from Tourney of Tyranny Part 2: A Conquest Claimed. Here’s everything you need to know going in:
- Our protagonist, Lilith Lacrimosa, was plucked from her dead-end system administrator job by Goblinoid aliens and made their Champion in a proxy tournament in which she is tasked with fucking crazy-style with more frequency and creativity than a number of far more attractive and charismatic humans. Lilith thinks they’re crazy but went along with it because the consolation prize for losing is more money than she’s ever seen in her life.
- As part of her induction as Champion, Lilith was injected with a tiny tracking implant.
- Unbeknownst to Lilith, the Goblinoids are cheating and have modified Lilith’s implant so that it makes her hornier, more sexually-proficient, and most crucially, makes it so that whenever Lilith makes eye contact with someone while she’s sexually-aroused, that person will become overwhelmingly sexually-attracted to Lilith.
- Again, this is important: Lilith DOES NOT KNOW that she has been fitted with a mind-whammy sex implant.
That’s it! Happy reading!
Continue reading “Tourney of Tyranny Is Some Of My Best Writing Yet”
