fiction Archives · Joi Massat

5 Things I Regret About “The Demon Lord is Apathetic”

In honor of me finally troubleshooting all the problems out of this paperback edition of The Demon Lord is Apathetic, I have made this post…criticizing it?

Look, I did put a lot of work into this story and I do think it’s enjoyable enough to warrant a spot on the shelf. But I did make some poor decisions with it. So let’s take a look and move from small-scale stuff that possibly nobody but me noticed to the big picture.

You don’t need to have read the story to read this post. Extremely minor spoilers ahead!

Don’t Keep Going for the Easy Win

Lately I’ve fallen into the trap of sacrificing harder creative work for tedious-but-predictable busywork. How to crawl out of the trap?

New Ebook Live (and FREE, for a limited time): The Demon Lord is Apathetic

All members of my Patreon (INCLUDING the free members who are basically just using it like a monthly newsletter) can download the EPUB and PDF of this illustrated action-comedy from now until June 23rd. (Offer now expired, but here’s the page for history’s sake. The ebook, and soon the paperback, can be found for sale here.)

And/or read on. This is a quick little post about a not-so-quick, not-that-little story. Seriously, this PDF is 780 pages and everything had to be finely massaged to fit Amazon’s paperback printing regulations. (It’s still too long for hardback. Needs more massaging. Maybe someday.)

The 5 Secret Rules of Catgirl System

It’s an old rusty crusty maxim by this point that limitation breeds creativity. Well, with Catgirl System, I started out knowing many things I wanted to include, but many many more things I didn’t. I gave myself limitations—on what characters could say, where they could go, and even the thinks I allowed them to think.

Some of them will make immediate sense to you while others seem a little more arbitrary. There are reasons behind them all.

So these are the five heretofore-unwritten laws of the Catgirl universe…!