Working on the Isekai again

09 Jul, 2025

This past weekend I had time to think through some road blocks I had with writing the story. I had half of it really well plotted out but as usual my ending wasn't ending. I like to do a simple outline first, like the severe basics. That started out with "Woman gets stuck in old RPG game and has to try and get out." You can't get much simpler.

But when you are writing a story you need to, you know, have a story to tell between point A and point B. A - She gets stuck in game. B - She gets out. You will expect her to get out, she will get out. That's not the story. The story is what happens while she is in there and that's what the reader is reading it for. I started the game, I finished the game. Well, what happened?

So for the first half of the story I wanted it to go like any other isekai where she gets stuck and has to proceed through the game by going through dungeons and battles and leveling up and growing the party and all that. But at the halfway point I wanted something unnerving to happen. I wanted something that the readers wouldn't expect.

That's hard because there are tons of these stories and they all work out similarly. Someone gets put into a game or other world and uses their current knowledge and skills to get ahead in that game or world with such ease and reward that they have no real reason to leave. (That or they died and this is some wild alt universe they are forever stuck in.)

Anyway. I got to thinking about how most of these stories go and I wanted my main character to reach a roadblock. Originally that road block was trying to find out what is going on with herself in the real world. It was going to really mess with her head not knowing if she was dead, in a coma, drugged, etc and unable to do anything about it while trying to kill wolves and bandits.

That turned out to be too much of a brain trap to think about. My character would easily give up on her questline and adventures if she was that concerned about her IRL body. She was going to have a "get in the robot, Shinji" moment with the other party members yelling at her to do her job and having her just give up and walk away from a boss fight because it didn't matter. Nothing was real and she was going to try to figure out a way to wake up or get back.

That was 1. lame. and 2. not emotionally destructive enough for me. Also, having her stop playing along with the game to try and wake up broke the immersion of her character from the beginning. She essentially became a different character to deal with altogether, and not one I cared about writing for anymore. And if she was too boring to write she was going to be too boring to read.

So I pumped the brakes on it and went back to the start to reread what I had and get back to her being the character I originally envisioned. I glossed over her IRL life in the first chapter so I started sprinkling in more of it in the second and third. She recalls more about her life and we learn more about her as a person as the book goes on. Now we have more emotional investment and not just flashbacks of exposition right before a major plot event.

She has flaws in real life, just like everyone else. Those flaws are mostly wiped out in the game because she is given this hero's body and abilities. However, even with these exceptional gifts and changes, she still ends up making mistakes. She still isn't good at what she is supposed to be doing. The other party members bark at her just like her bosses at work, just like her parents, just like real life. Changing who she was didn't change who she is.

Now of course, we don't want her to change who she is we want her to overcome this character vs environment situation we have placed her in. But what we expect is that as she levels up and gains xp and friends and such that she matures as a character and person and everything is fine in the end.

I want her to completely screw up. She is going to end up in just as much of a pile of missed opportunities in the videogame world as she has ended up in the real world. Maybe I'll have her snap and go full renegade and kill off half the party because Wrex deserved it.¹

After finishing FF1 I realized how little of my own choices and personality went into how the game turned out. Mass Effect on the other hand gives you so many choices that you can play through the game with not just your own personality but the ability to play through events in a way you wouldn't or couldn't do in real life. "I'm going to play through this game as a war tyrant!" "I'm going to play through this game as everyone's best friend!" "I'm not going to cheat on any of my alien girlfriends!".

I can't help but also write through the story as myself playing through the story. I think every author self inserts to an extent, and being able to back away as much as possible is the hard part. If things go well I can have a beta-reader-ready draft of the story by fall.

But yeah, I've been back working on that and I might do a little more work on it this Thursday. Tomorrow night I am recording two more episodes of the podcast. They will be "Stealing Music on the Internet" and "The Early Days of Webcomics". I like to record two at once and edit afterwards. Putting them out on a monthly basis is far more achievable than trying to do every two weeks or weekly.